The divine as it enters into the unconcealed. The daimonion: the look in its silent reception into the appurtenance to Being.
«Sight into the unconcealed transpires first, and only, in the disclosive word. Sight looks, and is the appearing self-showing that it is, only in the disclosive domain of the word and of telling perception. Only if we recognize the original relation between the word and the essence of Being will we be capable of grasping why, for the Greeks and only for them, to the divine (Ï᜞ ÏΔáżÎżÎœ) must correspond the legendary (Ï ÎŒáżŠÏÎżÏ). This correspondence is indeed the primordial essence of all analogy (homology), the word âana-logyâ taken essentially and literally. Insight into this analogy, in which a dictum, a word, a legend, corresponds to Being, i.e., discloses it by speaking of it as the same in a comparison, puts us into a position to finally provide the answer to an earlier question.
In our first elucidation of the essence of ÎŒáżŠÏÎżÏ [the legendary] as the disclosive legend in which and for which Being appears, we asserted that, in accord with the essential dignity of the word, poetizing and thinking had the highest rank for the Greeks. This claim was bound to provoke an objection, and the foregoing elucidations of ΎαÎčÎŒÏÎœÎčÎżÎœ [the demoniac, the extraordinary] and ÏΔáżÎżÎœ [the divine] have lent it still more significance. For the Greeks, beings appear in their Being and in their âessenceâ not only in the âwordâ but equally in sculpture. If indeed the divine in the Greek sense, Ï᜞ ÏΔáżÎżÎœ, is precisely Being itself looking into the ordinary, and if the divine essence appears precisely for the Greeks in the architecture of their temples and in the sculpture of their statues, what happens then to the asserted priority of the word and accordingly to the priority of poetizing and thinking? For the Greeks, are not architecture and sculpture, exactly with regard to the divine, of a higher rank, or at least of the same rank, as poetry and thinking? Is there not a well-justified ground to our readily-adopted procedure of forming our standard âhistoriographical pictureâ of the essence of the Greek world on the basis of architecture and sculpture? Here we will only be able to raise and clarify these far-reaching questions within the limits drawn by our meditation on the essence of the ΎαÎčÎŒÏÎœÎčÎżÎœ [the extraordinary, the demoniac].
It is easy to see that at issue here are the relations among the âclasses of artâ and their rank: architecture, sculpture, poetry. We are thinking of the essence of art here, and indeed not in general and vaguely, and to be sure not as an âexpressionâ of culture or as a âwitnessâ to the creative potential of man. Our focus is how the work of art itself lets Being appear and brings Being into unconcealedness. This kind of questioning is far removed from metaphysical thinking about art, for the latter thinks âaesthetically.â That means the work is considered with regard to its effect on man and on his lived experience. To the extent that the work itself comes to be considered, it is looked upon as the product of a creating, a âcreatingâ which again expresses a âlived urge.â Thus even if the work of art is considered for itself, it is taken as the âobjectâ or âproductâ of a creative or imitative lived experience; that is to say, it is conceived constantly on the basis of human subjective preception (αጎÏÏηÏÎčÏ). The aesthetic consideration of art and of the work of art commences precisely (by essential necessity) with the inception of metaphysics. That means the aesthetic attitude toward art begins at the moment the essence of áŒÎ»ÎźÏΔÎčα [the unconcealed] is transformed into áœÎŒÎżÎŻÏÏÎčÏ [the correspondence], into the conformity and correctness of perceiving, presenting, and representing. This transformation starts in Platoâs metaphysics. In the time before Plato, for essential reasons, a consideration âofâ art did not exist, and so in general all Western considerations of art and all explications of art and historiography of art from Plato to Nietzsche are âaesthetics.â This metaphysical basic fact of the unbroken domination of aesthetics is not changed at all, provided we keep the metaphysical in mind, if instead of a so-called cultivated and snobbish âaesthete,â we have, e.g., a peasant, with his ânaturalâ instinct, âexperienceâ a nude in an art exhibit. The peasant, too, is an âaesthete.â
Thinking about this unshakable fact, the suspicion must arise in us, after all we have been saying, that in our present desire to determine something about the art of the Greeks the obviousness of the aesthetic mode of consideration might in advance be burdering our approach with improper and distorting points of view.
According to the usual opinion, there are different âclassesâ of art. Art itself is the forming and shaping and âcreatingâ of a work out of some matter. Architecture and sculpture use stone, wood, steel, paint; music uses tones, poetry words. One might agree that for the Greeks the poetic presentation of the essence of the gods and of their dominion was certainly essential; yet no less essential and in fact more âimpressive,â because of its visibility, would be the presentation of the gods immediately in statues and temples. Architecture and sculpture use as their matter the relatively stable material of wood, stone, steel. They are independent of the fleeting breath of the quickly fading and, moreover, ambiguous word. Hence through these classes of art, architecture, sculpture, and painting, essential limits are set for poetry. The former do not need the word, while the latter does.
Now, this view is quite erroneous. Indeed architecture and sculpture do not use the word as their matter. But how could there ever be temples or statues, existing for what they are, without the word? Certainly these works have no need for the descriptions of the historiography of art. The Greeks were fortunate in not yet needing historiographers of art, or of literature, music, and philosophy, and their written history is essentially different from modern âhistoriography.â The Greeks had more than enough just with the tasks given them by poetry, thinking, building, and sculpturing.
But the circumstance that in a temple or in a statue of Apollo there are no words as material to be worked upon and âformedâ by no means proves that these âworks,â in what they are and how they are, do not still need the word in an essential way. The essence of the word does not at all consist in its vocal sound, nor in loquacity and noise, and not in its merely technical function in the communication of information. The statue and the temple stand in silent dialogue with man in the unconcealed. If there were not the silent word, then the looking god as sight of the statue and of the features of its figure could never appear. And a temple could never, without standing in the disclosive domain of the word, present itself as the house of a god. The fact that the Greeks did not describe and talk about their âworks of artâ âaestheticallyâ bears witness to the fact that these works stood well secured in the clarity of the word, without which a column would not be a column, a tympanum a tympanum, a frieze a frieze.
In an essentially unique way, through their poetizing and thinking, the Greeks experience Being in the disclosiveness of legend and word. And only therefore do their architecture and sculpture display the nobility of the built and the shaped. These âworksâ exist only in the medium of the word, i.e., in the medium of the essentially telling word, in the realm of the legendary, in the realm of âmyth".»
(via Martin Heidegger, Parmenides)
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
dailybridgerton
ellievsbear
theartofmadeline
discoholicmusic
vaporwave