Where would the " essence" apply in the 8,000 Terra Cotta buried
Soldiers in China, obviously made by hundreds of
workers from hundreds of molds which produced differences in each
statue, making each one a unique work of art.?
mando
On Apr 15, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Luc Delannoy wrote:
My apologies, I don't know what happened with my text...
Chris,
Unfortunately I am not familiar with the Tanagra figurines; so I
won't comment about that.
"Truth establishing itself in the work". I would interpret bworkb
as the process and as the phenomenon, not
as the result of the process (the object). A fad would be the focus
on objects.
What is important is not the pair of shoes (the object per se) but
what it reveals;the marks it left on the soil, the marks the
peasant left inside the shoes,
for example. What it evokes. Here essence has to be taken in the
phenomenological sense of eidos; it is not something you can
touch. The
un-veiling of the essence is a process; the "praxis process of art"
is part of the un-veiling of essence. It could be helpful
to complement phenomenology with hermeneutics so you could place
thedescription of the process of un-veiling in a context (Greek
context for example)
Knowing social practices helps us understand the essence of the
Being. This knowledge opens aLichtung (clairiere-clearing)where
things are given to us.
Heidegger was interested in understanding the Being, and the
passage thru art was his way to that understanding.
Reproduction; yes, it is a concern. See the writings by Walter
Benjamin on the subject (and also H. Arendt or even Kant for the
difference/separation between art and craft industry).
But again, I believe we must remember that Heidegger was a
phenomenologist. We cannot deny a certainfascination for the Greek
civilization. We cannot deny that the search for "the" essence has
lead us to wars and intolerance - see the 19th centrury in Europe,
see Wagner's operas.
Luc
www.lucdelannoy.com
----- Original
Message ----
From: Chris Miller <[email protected]>
To:
[email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 8:01:35 AM
Subject: Re: Heidegger and techne
Given every ancient Hellenic artifact
available to us today, did Heidegger
really believe that each and every one
them exemplified "truth establishing
itself in the work"?
Wouldn't some of
them have been reproductions of work that had already been
done -- just as one
peasant shoe is quite likely made from a pattern used many
times before ?
I
happen to be a big fan of what are often called "Tanagra figurines"
-- i.e.
small ceramic figures made in the 4th C. BCE in the region that
includes
Tanagra. (they were first dug up in the late 19th C. and became a
big hit with
European art lovers in the decades that followed. I'm sure that
Malraux, for
example, had something to say about them)
Have you ever seen such things ?
I spent a few happy hours last year going
through several hundred pictures.
They were mass produced from molds, but
more than that, they are often so
similar, that evidently some were made in
imitation of others. I.e. -- I
very much doubt that "truth was establishing
itself" for the first and
only
time in any of one of those figures that I saw.
I happen to have zero
aesthetic interest in about 90% of them -- but whether
the ones I like are
more original than the others - well, who can say ?
A kind of naturalism was
achieved in some ancient Greek sculpture that has
been very important in
several periods of European civilization that followed
- but the Tanagra style
is no more naturalistic than some earlier
Mediterranean styles that preceded
it - or from pieces found elsewhere around
the world: China, Meso-America etc.
Classically educated Europeans of his time shared a Romantic
fascination with
ancient Greece that Heidegger expresses in the quote that Luc has
offered:"In
Greece, at the outset of the destining of the West, the arts soared
to the
supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the
presence
(Gegenwart) of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human
destinings,
to radiance"
Today, we would call such enthusiasm a "fad" - and I'm doubting
that all them
(especially Heidegger) looked carefully at very many examples of
work --
either from Ancient Greece, or from all the other places that produced
similar
things.
***************
Luc wrote:
Techne: may I suggest the reading of The Question Concerning
Technology by
the
same Heidegger, Harper Torchbooks. 1977.
I quote from page 34:
"In
Greece, at the outset of the destining of the West, the arts soared
to the
supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the
presence
(Gegenwart) of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human
destinings,
to radiance. And art was simply called techne. It was a single,
manifold
revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to holding.sway and
the
safekeeping of truth. ....
Why did art bear the modest name techne? Because it
was a revealing that
brought forth, and hither, and therefore belonged within
poiesis."
____________________________________________________________
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