By Luke McCusker, 06/18/2019. In his aesthetic writings, Martin Heidegger suggests that art works can make us aware of the nonconceptual, undefined, unmanifest reality out of which all concepts, language, and things in the world manifest themselves. This unmanifest reality Heidegger often refers to as earth; manifestations he refers to as world. Heidegger is not suggesting, like Plato, that reality consists of two planes. He does not mean that the earth is raw, primordial material and that our world is the result of that material taking on form. He is not talking about material in particular; he is talking about epistemology, about comprehensibility. Heidegger is saying that reality in itself is without names, without categories, without definitions, and that the task of naming and categorizing is to make reality graspable, comprehensible, understandable. By differentiating between things and limiting each thing to itself, we are able to hold that thing in our mind as a concept. And out of concepts, we are able to construct a coherent world, one in which we can feel stable and well oriented and, in our best moments, at home. In many cases, poems and works of art participate in this world construction, holding together and making comprehensible the experiences of our lived reality. For Heidegger, though, this worlding has, in modernity, crossed a dangerous line. It no longer makes the world merely comprehensible or inhabitable; rather, it makes the world possessable, conquerable. In its turn toward mastery, modern worlding denies the nonconceptual richness of unmanifest being inherent in each manifestation and instead considers each manifest thing as a mere resource to be exploited in the name of absolute dominance and stability. Though the problem begins with conceptualization, this trajectory of thought and being ends in ecological disaster, colonialism, and systematic injustice. Art works, Heidegger believes, can disrupt this dangerous trajectory. They have the capacity to linger in liminal tension, holding together conceptually while also revealing their own fragility. In their conceptual thinness, they do not merely stand in for language: rather, they can act as poetic signifiers, a sign without a signified, a gesture past stable, well-known concepts and toward the unmanifest space behind conceptualization, the earth out of which the world is brought into being. Art works, for Heidegger, may be a way toward Being in itself; not more poignantly, but perhaps more urgently, they may likewise be a way toward tenderness, toward non-possession, toward a new relationship with instability. They ask the viewer to remain in tension, aware of both a stable world and also, simultaneously, a fluid and undefined non-world beneath it.
These Heideggerian concerns, which are informed by and which inform other major continental thinkers like Nietzsche and Derrida, are at the foundation of my making practice. My pursuit of an MFA in Fine Art is motivated by the hope that the arts, broadly, can disentangle the worst of our modern presuppositions and restore us to a compassionate relationship with one another—a relationship that I believe must be grounded in a more attentive engagement with the roots of instability in our experience of reality.
These Heideggerian concerns likewise motivate my travel to India this July. I believe there are significant overlaps between Heidegger and major Indian philosophers like Adi Shankara, between the nonconceptual earth and the undefined unity of Brahman. And I theorize that, just as Heidegger saw the nonconceptual suggested in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, a study of Indian art will offer tangible evidence of the presence of the nonconceptual in Vedantic thought. Alongside my intention to investigate this theory, however, I want to remain highly suspicious of my own project. Shankara and Heidegger emerge from different worlds and different traditions. Their philosophies do not work as overlays, and they are not analogous to one another. The earth cannot be equated with Brahman. Formal devices well known in Western aesthetic theory should not be read into the art traditions of India. Moreover, India and Indian art remain in a complex relationship to modernity: thoroughly and painfully exploited by the modern colonial project and, at the same time, important contributors to modernity in the arts in spaces like the Shantiniketan School. So I embark on this search with caution, with research, and in dialogue with teachers, thinkers, and philosophers much better informed than myself.
My travels begin on July 15th. The month between now and then I have set aside for deep preliminary research. Another blog entry with the results of that textual inquiry can be expected before my departure.
Nandalal Bose, Konrak Temple, lithograph on paper, 1932. Bose was a central figure of Indian modernism and is an important element in my preparatory studies.