Abstract
In the wake of the vanity of the postmodern aesthetic in architecture and the vain quality or failure of the postmodern in theory, philosophers have discovered a new preoccupation with the ethics of the scholar. And by thus elevating ethics to the position of first philosophy, we also recuperate the history of metaphysics for the future and effect a return to the phenomenology of the question — not only to phenomenology as problem solving but also to the technical and information and even the natural sciences. Perhaps in the process, the question of art might likewise be restored to the experts — a reasonable strategy for philosophy in the tired wake of Meyer Schapiro’s critical engagement with Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutically informed but art-historically faint reading of a pair of shoes in a famous painting by Van Gogh.
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Notes
This notoriously checkered reference is offered in the context of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 199. See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger on Art” in Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994), 106–153. Pöggeler emphasizes Heidegger’s attention to Van Gogh’s letters, as well as to the paintings of Klee and Cezanne (see here note 18 below). Beyond Pöggeler, Dieter Jähnig has underscored Heidegger’s affinity for the modem sculptural art of Giaocometti and offers a particularly compelling account of Brancusi’s Bird in Flight. See Jähnig, “Die Kunst and der Raum” in G. Neske, ed., Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 131–148.
Martin Heidegger, Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), and in: Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann). “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought ( New York: Harper & Row: 1971 ), 17–81.
Thomas Puttfarken at the beginning of his wonderful art-scholar’s reading of The Invention of Pictorial Composition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) muses that the age of easel art is said to be at an end — a judgment he offers only facetiously, and would mean even less if the circumspection of his scholarly vision had been extended to the museum itself beyond its contents.
Duchamp did not invent this but made it permanently plain to the art theorist’s mind as he gave it a name and associated a conceptual catenna to what was already the reigning convention of the thing that is not only art but the artworld (which has, patently, nothing to do with the world-abundance or world-emptiness of what Heidegger speaks of as the work of art.)
Meyer Schapiro has determined this historical detail not by researching possible candidates for the painting Heidegger could have seen but by the direct expedient of writing to Heidegger and receiving his reply. See Schapiro, “The Still-Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” in M. L. Simmel, cd., The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein (New York: Springer Publishing, 1968), 203–209. Reprinted with an additional essay written in 1994, “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh” in Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: Braziller, 1994), 135–141 and 142–151 respectively. Further references below note this later collection.
Schapiro writes, “They are clearly pictures of the artist’s own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant.” The Reach of the Mind,205. Schapiro modifies the passage in re-printing this essay in 1994. Here he qualifies his claim: “They are more likely pictures of the artist’s own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant.” 136.
This is less a matter of Schapiro’s contention than belied by the mere fact of offering such “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh.” Although Schapiro notes defenses from such sources as Hans-Georg Gadamer (who wrote the preface to the Reclam edition of Heidegger’s essay) and Heidegger’s own marginal corrections, Schapiro re-asserts his original interpretation. To say that he could not however have regarded his first interpretation as his last word on the issue is only to advert to his need to offer a further essay.
The Still-Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,“ 208.
Schapiro reacted powerfully and negatively to precisely this moving account. But it is significant that he was inspired to forget the detail that only fairly recently have shoes come to be purchased ready to wear, whether new or used. Until fairly recently, shoes, like clothes were made for one: that is what cobblers did, even for indigent but still bourgeois artists like Van Gogh.
Vincent van Gogh, letter no. 529, cited in Schapiro, 136.
J. de Rotonchamp, Paul Gauguin 1898–1903 (Paris: C. Cres, 1925), 33 and Paul Gaugin, “Natures mortes,” Essais d’art libre ,1894, 4, 273–275. Cited in Schapiro, 140.
Schapiro, 140.
These are the shoes François Gauzi evidently refers to, in a letter Schapiro translates in his “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh” 146, and which Schapiro confidently maintains as confirming his original view. ‘4 Although, and to be sure, Walter Biemcl’s introductory study of Heidegger (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973), depicts (but offers no commentary directly regarding) another painting of a pair of shoes — currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Schapiro, 139.
For an illuminating array of the same, it is useful to visit the least visited level of the new Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the basement and the research materials of curators and art historians have been brought together to offer a valuable and informative display not only of Van Gogh’s paintings but many of his models and associated tools for the same, including the perspective frame that Patrick Heelan adverts to in his phenomenological analysis of the painted or pictorial space of the artist’s Bedroom at Arles. See also Margolis and Heelan in this same volume.
Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 42. Further references are given in the body of the text. See Robert Bernasconi’s very fine discussion of Dürer (and Heidegger and Schapiro) in “`Ne sutor ultra crepidam:’ Dürer and Erasmus at the Hands of Panofsky and Heidegger” in Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing ( Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993 ), 117–134.
Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 135.
In this context, Heidegger writes, as a prelude to his life-long claim regarding the nuance and complexity proper to philosophy — critics will say, particularly his own, but apologists will say, particularly his own —and in the process underwriting our ordinary respect for expert judgment, “If we were to be shown ... two pictures by Paul Klee, in the original, which he painted in the year of his death — the watercolor, Saints from a Window and Death and Fire,tempera on burlap — we should want to stand before them for a long while — and should abandon any claim that they be immediately intelligible.” Heidegger then adduces the examples of Trakl’s poetry and Heisenberg’s theoretical physics as similar, to make the point that by contrast we tend to expect that philosophy be exactly — and — “immediately intelligible.” Heidegger, On Time and Being,trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
This is the more regrettable of the several problems besetting books like Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (Hew Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), a book showing how analytic philosophy unecumbered by the hermeneutic inconvenience of rigor can add new fits to the political anxieties of the kind (re)inaugurated by Farias and spat out with different degrees of foaming violence by Tom Rockmore and, with somewhat more grace, by Richard Wolin and Co., or of Robert Bambach’s new book, currently still in manuscript but forthcoming on Heidegger’s Greco-German “autochthony.”
I discuss this ineliminable indigence in Babich, “On Malls, Museums, and the Art World: Postmodernism and the Vicissitudes of Consumer Culture.” Art Criticism. IX11 (Fall 1993): 1–16 and, more specifically with respect to Heidegger, “From Nietzsche’s Artist to Heidegger’s World: The Post-Aesthetic Perspective.” Man and World. 22 (1989): 3–23.
The translation of der Riss as rift accords with the conjunction in Heidegger’s text with the Open, but this term, Lichtung is better translated as clearing, and can even be rendered here to good effect as illumination or lighting. I owe a note of thanks to Holger Schmid for constantly reminding me of the dangerous ambiguity of the English “rift,” an ambiguity adding Pythian dimensions to the strife between earth and world.
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Babich, B.E. (2002). Heidegger’s Truth of Art and the Question of Aesthetics. In: Babich, B.E. (eds) Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 225. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0_22
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