Complicating Heidegger and the Truth of Architecture

TRAVIS T. ANDERSON Complicating Heidegger and the Truth of Architecture According to Martin Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time (hereafter, BT), the everyday world at its most fundamental level is a domain of praxis, a realm of predominantly practical truths shaped by and disclosed to practical tasks and relations. As we will see, in BT, Heidegger identified two main categories of objects belonging to the everyday world: use-objects that are “ready to hand” (clothing, shelter, tools, and materials) and “thingly” (dinglich) objects that are “present to hand” (objects of science, mere things, and natural entities— which I call “elemental objects”). In this article, I argue that as early as 1935–36 in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (hereafter, OWA), this ontological distinction was implicitly complicated in ways that Heidegger did not explicitly acknowledge when he supplemented the ontological schema of BT with a new and definitively different category of beings: works, the creative products of art and architecture. While this additional category of beings altered the architectonics of Heidegger’s ontology in provocative ways, it did not significantly alter the way in which the being of entities within each ontological category is phenomenologically understood to be determined and manifest. That being is in every case a function of the conscious subject’s modally specific intentional relation or comportment toward the object in question. When, for example, that comportment is empirical, scientific, or otherwise attuned just to a thing’s sensually given properties or its natural constitution, the being of the entity is elemental; when that comportment is practical, the being of the entity is equipmental; and when the comportment is artistic or aesthetic, the entity is an artwork. In this regard, Heidegger’s understanding of the temporal and contextual nature of a person’s fluctuating comportments is similar to that of Nelson Goodman, expressed more than thirty-five years later with the declaration, “the real question is not, ‘What objects are (permanently) works of art?’ but ‘When is an object a work of art?’”1 Under certain conditions, for Heidegger, a being’s essence may be that of a mere thing, at other times, an object of utility, and on yet other occasions, a work of art or architecture. In short, the discreet category of being into which an object will fall depends not only on its own physical, natural, or crafted properties, but on the contextual conditions of its perception and use. As I will further argue, although most elemental objects, use-objects, and art objects—including most ordinary buildings—submit themselves without much resistance to Heidegger’s ontological divisions, many architectural works do not. In particular, buildings by architects like Antonio Gaudi, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry overtly unsettle those divisions, along with conventional distinctions between building and ornament, form and function, and even architecture and sculpture. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to investigate how Heidegger’s ontology of objects and actual works of architecture complicate each other. More specifically, after identifying some of the critical questions posed to philosophy by architecture, and then, after considering how the relevant determinations of BT must be reread after OWA and later essays, the present study examines the implications of architecture for Heidegger’s philosophy of art and vice versa. It argues that Heidegger’s own analyses, especially when considered in the light of certain postmodern architectural projects, suggest that comportments toward architecture, as well as toward other forms of artistic creation, should not be understood as detached, c 2011 The American Society for Aesthetics  70 derivative, and deficient modes of praxis (which is how Heidegger understands elemental, scientific, and theoretical comportments, as we will see). But it also argues that Heidegger’s early phenomenological determinations—particularly his distinction between use-objects and artworks, and his tacit assertion that architecture functions ontologically in the same way as do other works of art—are problematic ideas, and that without overtly admitting these problems, Heidegger’s later work nevertheless demonstrates a pronounced concern with resolving them. This study concludes, with and against Heidegger, that artworks in general are ontologically prior to both elemental things and practical things, that the place and truth of architecture is prior still, and that, in consequence of that primordial priority, the truth of architecture, together with all three fundamental divisions of objects in Heidegger’s ontology, should be rethought beginning with their (and our) elemental nature. i One could argue that the twisting columns and undulating soffits of Frank Gehry’s Condé Nast Cafeteria in New York are a matter of pure ornament, no more. After all, this forest of forms is certainly not demanded by the building’s structure or function. And surely the upended F-104 attached to the facade of Gehry’s California Aerospace Museum could be interpreted as a mere decorative supplement to the building proper, and thus, as something that could be eliminated entirely without destroying or even seriously affecting the architecture as such. But what about Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, or even the more restrained Team Disney administration offices in Anaheim, where, in each case, the buildings themselves are a cluster of sculpted forms and thrusting curvilinear shapes? Then again, if we look back with hindsight sharpened by his later, more radical projects, we cannot consider Gehry’s early, constructivist creations, like the chain-link and corrugated metal residences that punctuate the Santa Monica, Venice, and greater Los Angeles landscapes, without recognizing therein the same slippage of building toward sculpture that his more recent works fully embody (a slippage playfully announced in his collaborations with The Aesthetics of Architecture the sculptor Claes Oldenburg, like the prominent binocular entrance to the Chiat-Day Building). Similarly, Libeskind’s fractured globe that serves as building, monument, and movie screen for the Manchester War Museum cannot be perceived in any single, settled way—as a monstrous instance of serviceable equipment, as a revolutionary work of architecture, as an inventive form of visual art, as a philosophical and cultural text, or as a work of high-concept installation art. Are such designs, by virtue of their indeterminacy and the interpretive dilemmas they occasion, somehow less practical or truthful, and thereby less architectural, than their traditional boxy and rectilinear counterparts? And if phenomenology is right in claiming that the essence of objects is not static, but a function of our comportment toward them, then what can one twist free of a building in such cases as these without the building itself ceasing to be a building, and becoming, say, a monumental sculpture—albeit with features that mimic those of a work of architecture? In other words, do conventional distinctions between structure and ornament and between equipment and artwork still apply to such buildings? It is doubtful they apply even to creations like Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House or Eero Saarinen’s Dulles Airport, or to the numerous modern bridges, towers, and other aesthetically engineered structures that inherently appeal to our senses and our aesthetic taste as much as they answer to our practical needs. But works of architecture by Gehry, Libeskind, and a handful of other postmodern designers (as well as by visionary architects of the past, like Gaudi) push the boundaries still further by posing difficult questions not only about the categories typically used to modally distinguish the various arts from each other but about the traits employed to identify art as such. Philosophers have not been troubled by postmodern architecture alone; architecture in general has long frustrated philosophical efforts to understand it as an art by using the same criteria applied to other, less elemental or useful creations. From the age of the Greeks through the Renaissance, art in the West was philosophically understood and evaluated primarily in terms of its power to reveal and communicate truth. And more often than not, beauty was philosophically calibrated to that truth value. The advent of modernism initiated a philosophical crisis for art so conceived, which in comparison to emerging forms of science seemed Anderson Complicating Heidegger capable of expressing and disclosing only trivial, dogmatic, or conspicuous truths. For nonnarrative and nonrepresentational forms of art like architecture, that crisis became acute. In positing an aesthetic role for art and an aesthetic superiority for the fine or beautiful arts of painting, music, poetry, sculpture—and at times, even for architecture—over the mundane ‘arts’ of craft and industry, post-Cartesian thinkers were not just breaking with the classical conception of techné by distinguishing expressive or beautiful forms of creation from various modes of practical production, nor even simply unfolding the implications for art of dualist epistemologies. Instead, they were struggling to establish for art some unassailable sense of legitimacy and importance in the wake of scientific and Enlightenment assaults upon artistic claims to truth. According to some, Martin Heidegger’s remarks in the appendix to OWA should be read in this particular light, as a ringing endorsement of Hegel’s conclusion that the end of art is marked by this seminal transformation in the function and conception of art from that of a revelatory purveyor of truth to a mere catalyst of aesthetic experiences.2 While these readings of the history of art may be warranted in some measure, they require us to understand aesthetic experiences solely in terms of the satisfaction they provide and to disregard any cognitive significance we might attribute to the sensual nature of those experiences or to the elemental properties which awaken them—but Heidegger and others were not so inclined. Moreover, such an aestheticism might simply lack the necessary reach to adequately comprehend architecture. In part, this is because the attribution of beauty to architecture became progressively more difficult as philosophy turned to subjectivist remedies in the wake of various failed attempts to think of beauty objectively. For instance, thinkers in the Hegelian tradition considered true beauty to be not merely a beauty begotten of the mind, as Hume and Kant reconceived it, but a beauty of truth.3 Thus considered, however, architecture as such could never lay much claim to beauty, before or after modernism, since the truth and beauty of architecture even in their brightest fulguration would be but a symbolic truth and a tentative beauty—more “a mere search for portrayal than a capacity for true presentation.”4 As Hegel explained: 71 [Architecture’s] task consists in so manipulating external inorganic nature that, as an external world conformable to art, it becomes cognate to spirit. Its material is matter itself in its immediate externality as a mechanical heavy mass, and its forms remain the forms of inorganic nature, set in order according to relations of the abstract Understanding, i.e., relations of symmetry. In this material and in these forms the Ideal, as concrete spirituality, cannot be realized. . . . Therefore, the fundamental type of the art of building is the symbolic form of art.5 Hence, with reference to the two aspects of art’s functional evolution (the requirements that art present definite and adequate truths, on the one hand, and, on the other, that it carry out those presentations through concrete and sensuous configurations), architecture for Hegel was a defective, inferior art in both form and content; in contrast with the other arts, its meaning and beauty were thereafter understood to be matters of mere symbolism and expressive adornments, respectively. Even for philosophers who staunchly denied retrograde claims that beauty is a function of the determinacy and clarity of truth, the beauty of architecture still seemed to suffer, and to have always suffered, from a brutish, mustang inferiority relative to that of music, poetry, and even arts like sculpture and painting, which share something of architecture’s elemental essence. So, despite whatever beauty philosophers begrudgingly attributed to architecture, that beauty has always remained stubbornly obscure. It has likewise remained a beauty largely unspecified—or in Kant’s case, systematically unspecifiable. In short, the beauty of architecture has simply managed to resist the many philosophical and even artistic efforts that would have clearly articulated it or purged it of its elemental and practical contaminants. Perhaps this resistance is due to architecture’s elemental excesses; maybe architecture is too earthbound, too manifestly material. After all, as Schopenhauer rightly observed, architecture must forever bear the weight of “fundamental forces of nature” and thus remain the faithful servant of “necessity and utility.”6 Such forces and needs cannot be easily reasoned away or aesthetically mitigated: a heavy beam requires strong and serviceable columns or we find ourselves buried in the rubble of our aspirations. So, while Hegel was able to claim a degree of beauty for 72 architecture by dialectically distilling from its coarse material beginnings an ideal nectar boasting the ethereal clarity of absolute Spirit, architecture refused this refinement more stubbornly than the other, less elemental arts and thus remained for Hegel a stodgy “pioneer” on the trail to truth rather than a free and adequate determination of it. Even for Schopenhauer and like-minded antiHegelians who judged architecture to be essentially earthbound, forever subordinate to will and utility, architecture was similarly judged to be incapable of all but the “lowest grade” of significance and beauty. Architecture can be somewhat beautiful, Schopenhauer grudgingly admitted, but only thanks to the play of light on its various surfaces, and the “evident and obvious suitability of every part . . . to the stability of the whole.”7 And even then, he added, any real beauty we might attribute to architecture “was already exhausted by the ancients.”8 Whatever the reasons, this ostensible failing, this incapacity of architecture to surrender itself completely to the various appropriative projects of philosophy, may attune us to otherwise silent but always latent possibilities for radically and perhaps more properly reconceiving architecture— and all other arts in its wake. After all, the raw and mute physicality of architecture, that is, its elemental nature, can be considered a liability, only if the truth and beauty of architecture (or of any other art) must indeed be wrestled free of the media and matter that concretely shape and situate both their expression and our apprehension of them. But what if they cannot? What directions might philosophy take were it to hazard a conception of art and architecture as essential expressions of our (and their) elemental nature or as disclosive engagements with forms of truth and beauty originating with that elemental nature? ii For all its obfuscations and detours, Martin Heidegger’s thought blazes the way down just such a series of paths. Heidegger’s insistence in OWA on analyzing art in terms of its dual disclosure of earth and world argues decisively against the possibility of divorcing the meaning or beauty of art from its material substratum. So too does his decision to begin the published version of the essay with an extended discussion of thinglyness and to The Aesthetics of Architecture emphasize both that the one common feature of all artworks is their sensuous, thingly nature, and that it is precisely this material component of art that in actuality is worked by every artist and sensually perceived by every viewer. Furthermore, his work during this period demonstrates a much more pronounced and sustained concern with understanding thinglyness than with understanding art.9 It is also important to note that Heidegger’s attempts at radically reconceiving art and architecture are not limited to his texts of the 1930s. In later essays, his varied points of departure include the convergence of place and space, and the nexus of building, dwelling, and thinking understood as a matrix in which the essence of human being itself primordially unfolds. Yet, before we can begin to follow any of these paths, we must briefly retrace the existential analyses that cleared their way and the later breakthroughs that progressively destabilized Heidegger’s early phenomenological categories. In the second and third chapters of the first division of BT, Heidegger identifies a practical and social “Being-in-the-world” (In-der-Welt-sein) as the basic existential state (Grundverfassung) of Dasein or human being, and he describes “average everydayness” (Alltäglichkeit) as Dasein’s preeminent mode of existing.10 Everydayness, according to Heidegger, is ontologically reducible to a predominantly utilitarian, thoroughly task driven, and relatively global concern (Sorge) for the world and its entities, that is, “producing, manipulating, and the like.”11 This concern necessarily prioritizes useful materials and objects over mere matter and natural things, and it produces the primary ontological distinction that BT draws between objects—a distinction between the equipmental “ready to hand” and the elemental “present at hand.” Truth is phenomenologically conceived by BT in terms of the fundamentally disclosive events that originally open to understanding the everyday world and its practical possibilities, and out of which we subsequently fashion cognitive propositions, laws, facts, and assertive truths about things—including, apparently (at least at this stage of Heidegger’s thought), artistic truths. In sum, the disclosures occasioned by Dasein through its equipmental relations are what establish the primary and pre-ontological ground of all propositional truths and of the knowledge belonging to science and theory. Accordingly, and against an entire tradition wherein knowledge is the vaunted Anderson Complicating Heidegger and supposedly neutral starting point of virtually all conceptions of utility, knowledge is understood by Heidegger neither as an epistemological relation between an immanent subject and some transcendent object nor as a transcendental or existentially orientating given, but as a “dwelling autonomously alongside entities within-theworld,” as the product of a detached regard that is secondary to and derivative of engaged practical relations.12 Said differently, for Heidegger, theoria is grounded on praxis, not the reverse; to know is to become thematically occupied with some explicit aspect of the world that we have always been preoccupied with in a prereflective way. And since average everydayness is essentially reducible to the productive, manipulative involvements characteristic of practical concern, then theoretical knowing requires a suspension of such involvements and a narrowing down of the wider vision of circumspective sight (Umsicht) ordinarily employed in practical relations. Consequently, theoria is not only a derivative mode of praxis, but a privative and partly blind mode. By the time he writes OWA in the mid-1930s, however, Heidegger’s ontology of objects and his phenomenology of truth and knowledge have changed considerably from what he sketched out as a relatively faithful, albeit deeply revisionist Husserlian phenomenologist in 1927’s BT. In OWA, Heidegger differentiates artworks from both tools and rudimentary things, and he observes that “equipment takes an intermediate place between mere thing and [art]work.”13 This observation triggers compelling consequences, since artworks now constitute an entirely new category of objective beings, a category not considered at all by BT. One consequence is that what Heidegger wrote in BT about tools and elemental entities, not to mention the thoroughly practical and project-driven world to which they belong, almost certainly needs some revision. A second consequence is that the entire relation of tools to artworks demands a much more penetrating analysis than Heidegger actually provides in OWA, where his concerns have moved beyond completing an existential analytic of Dasein. Why this demand? Because the introduction of a new category of objects into Heidegger’s ontology entails what he would have earlier called a new form of intentionality, a form which certainly implicates Husserl’s pictorial intention (wherein we perceive an aspect-specific, pictured entity to- 73 gether with its physically present elemental substratum), but which is not reducible to it (since not all artworks are pictorial, among other reasons). Perhaps the most critical question raised by this newly remarked category of objects and its correlative comportment is whether the work proper to art comprises a derivative and deficient mode of everyday being in the world (like contemplative knowledge), whether it is simply a previously unrecognized or unthematized form of praxis (and thus, another form of everyday work), or whether it constitutes a primordial work of being (a work that conditions and shapes the world on a deeper level). If the latter possibility proves true, then that primordiality might implicate the work of art in what Heidegger calls in BT the “horizonal schemata” of time, that is, the temporal ecstasies which make the world possible. But whatever the result, the ontological place and function of architecture in particular depends on the answer to this tripartite question. Let us seek that answer by considering what Heidegger says about ‘making’ and ‘using’ in OWA alongside his claim in BT that knowing is a derivative, privative, detached, and somewhat blind mode of praxis. My guiding question will be this: do the ontological deficiencies Heidegger attributed to ‘knowing’ also apply to ‘creating’ and ‘preserving,’ the two constitutive moments of the experience or event that in OWA Heidegger defines as the work performed by art: “truth setting itself to work” and “the happening of truth in the work”?14 In OWA, when Heidegger explicitly examines the creative process, he says that ‘creating’ and ‘making’ are both ways of ‘bringing forth’: ‘Making’ brings forth useful things; ‘creating’ brings forth artworks. Even though art (Kunst) requires craftsmanship (Handwerk), craftsmanship of itself does not produce works—that is, it does not produce forms or compositions in which the truth is openly at work. This is so, claims Heidegger, even when we think of handicraft in opposition to factory-produced or mass-produced objects. Heidegger observes that the Greeks used the same word (techné) for both art and craft and used a cognate word (technites) for both artist and craftsperson. His point (wrong or right) is that the Greeks conflated these two ways of production—not because the essence of creative work is to be found in craft per se, but because art and craft share a fundamental attunement to being: 74 The word techné denotes rather a mode of knowing. To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend what is present, as such. For Greek thought the essence of knowing consists in alétheia, that is, in the revealing of beings. It supports and guides all comportment toward beings. Techné, as knowledge experienced in the Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings, in that it brings forth what is present as such out of concealment and specifically into the unconcealment of its appearance; techné never signifies the action of making. The artist is a technites not because she is also a craftsman, but because the setting forth of works and the setting forth of equipment occur in a bringing forth that causes beings in the first place to come forward and be present in assuming an outward aspect. . . . What looks like craft in the creation of a work is of a different sort.15 The form of knowing that for Heidegger informs both creating and making is “knowing as seeing in the widest sense” and “apprehending what is present.” This finding provisionally answers the first part of our threefold question: art does not always seem to employ the kind of focused or detached sight which characterizes either Heidegger’s notion of existential interpretation or contemplative knowing, theorizing, and abstract reasoning (though it sometimes might—as in the pictorial reflection on representation artistically carried out by Velasquez in Las Meninas).16 But the second part of our question remains: is the basic apprehension proper to “creating” and “making” an experience of truth identical to or more essential than the engaged, broad, circumspective sight belonging to practical being in the world? In section 44 of BT, Heidegger argues that every conception of truth as a form of correspondence between assertions, ideas, perceptions, and their objects implicitly presupposes a prior, more fundamental disclosure or unconcealment of the being of those objects, which could only be occasioned by the disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) constitutive of Dasein’s being in the world. In “On the Essence of Truth” (an essay written around the same time as OWA), Heidegger defines the essence of this more fundamentally conceived sense of truth as “freedom” or a “disclosive letting beings be”—a resolute attunement to beings as a whole.17 When Heidegger finally reveals in OWA that the difference between “making” and “creating” lies in how a “created” work preserves The Aesthetics of Architecture and presents truth in ways a “crafted” use-object does not, he defines art preservation (not curatorial labor, but “aesthetic” engagement) in much the same way that he earlier defined the work of fundamental unconcealment—as a resolute knowing and willing, a “standing within the openness of beings that happens in the work,” where “knowing,” “willing,” and “standing within” are all forms of “being resolved.”18 Only in this comportment wherein we resolutely let a work do its work does that work actually become a work, says Heidegger: “It is only for such preserving that the work yields itself in its createdness as actual, which now means, present in the manner of a work. Just as a work cannot be without being created, but is essentially in need of creators, so what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it.”19 Heidegger further explains that the “knowing” proper to “preserving” does not consist in having mere information and notions about art. Neither does it involve “aestheticizing connoisseurship” of an artwork’s formal aspects, qualities, and charms. Rather, it is “being resolved; it is standing within the strife that the work has fitted into the rift.”20 Hence, when BT and OWA are read alongside each other (as Heidegger explicitly indicates they should be), they suggest that the decisive difference between “creating” and “making” is not to be found in what is known or even done by an artist or craftsperson, but in the resolute attunement which animates the creating and preserving disposition (and which discloses thereby the essence of truth)—an attunement to what Heidegger calls truth’s own “impulse toward a work.”21 And the resolute nature of this attunement should be understood, insists Heidegger, “in terms of the basic experience of thinking in Being and Time,” that is, in terms of “the existing human being’s ecstatic entry into the unconcealment of Being.”22 In his introduction to the pivotal third chapter of BT’s second division, Heidegger explains that temporality can be laid bare only when the ontological meaning of care is clarified, and care can be clarified only when the self is existentially determined and temporality is primordially experienced over against Dasein’s being as a whole— which means, in anticipatory resoluteness. Dasein is resolute in recognizing its guilt and taking responsibility for its own choices; Dasein is anticipatory in authentically comporting itself toward its own mortality and in ecstatically (temporally) Anderson Complicating Heidegger “standing out” from the world and its objects so as to disclose both their being and Dasein’s own being. Therefore, understanding artistic work (and the kind of knowing that lies at its core) in terms of the “ecstatic” being of Dasein is nothing less than recognizing art and architecture as being among the few ways that fundamental unconcealment happens and that beings (especially Dasein) are granted the freedom to be disclosed in their essence, unshackled by practical, extraneous (and in the case of Dasein itself, inauthentic) concerns. In the final analysis, then, the determining features that decisively distinguish art and architecture from craft are two objective traits which uniquely occasion, situate, and help maintain the work of fundamental unconcealment. First, an artwork (when functioning as art) is something that expressly sets to work in a figure (Gestalt) the clearing and concealing of earth and world, the presentation and withdrawal from presentation of a work’s elemental, natural, and formal aspects over against (and together with) its contextual, practical, and historical aspects, thereby establishing and manifesting their inherent strife (and unity).23 Second, an artwork presents itself specifically as a created work. This means that the acts of creation and preservation (which are not simply correlative or sequential activities, for the “preserving” that Heidegger describes must already be at work in “creating,” and thus belong to it) as well as the resulting art object all participate in a presentation of the artwork as something that manifests human creativity as an express element.24 These two explicit features imply a third: every artwork highlights the work of presentation itself; art makes present an event or object in such a way as to manifestly call attention to its presentational way of being. All these traits are lacking in handicraft and mere equipment, says Heidegger: “The making of equipment never directly effects the happening of truth. The production of equipment is finished when a material has been so formed as to be ready for use. For equipment to be ready means that it is released beyond itself, to be used up in usefulness. Not so when a work is created.”25 Our second and third questions are nearing an answer. We have determined that creative and preserving engagements entail for Heidegger more basic kinds of knowing and unconcealing than those employed by theory and science, and we have affirmed that artistic creativity is 75 not a form of praxis. But we have yet to discover whether the presentational work of art and architecture still belongs to the everyday world, as a nonpractical work (which would imply a need to divide Heidegger’s work-world according to two different kinds of work, with all the attendant complications for projective understanding and ecstatic existing), or whether it entails a pri-mordial comportment toward being. Moreover, our discussions of praxis, craftsmanship, and the elemental have begun to sound for an attuned ear a discordant note in Heidegger’s analyses, which raises two questions especially pressing for architecture: given the obvious but nonetheless noteworthy fact that the crafted, practical, and elemental aspects of architecture (unlike the beaux arts) are what always predominantly announce themselves in our encounters with buildings, wherein lies architecture’s ostensible claim to artistry? And are the truths and beauties proper to architecture equally fundamental to those of the other less elemental arts, or is architecture the most primordial of our many creations? These are the questions to which we will now turn. iii In spite of our earlier determination that the circumspective vision proper to creativity precludes it always being a privative, founded mode of being in the world, there are certain passages from OWA where it seems otherwise. Heidegger writes, for example: The more solitarily the work, fixed in the figure, stands on its own and the more cleanly it seems to cut all ties to human beings, the more simply does the thrust come into the open that such a work is, and the more essentially is the extraordinary thrust to the surface and what is long-familiar thrust down. But this multiple thrusting is nothing violent, for the more purely the work is itself transported into the openness of beings—an openness opened by itself—the more simply does it transport us into this openness and thus at the same time transport us out of the realm of the ordinary. To submit to this displacement means to transform our accustomed ties to world and earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the work. Only the restraint of this staying lets what is created be the work that it is. This letting the work be a work we call preserving the work.26 76 Were art not to presuppose practical dealings, were it not to presuppose a prior being at home in the world, it would seemingly make no sense for Heidegger to say that art transports us out of that world or calls upon us to refrain from our usual practical activities. And how could art suspend our everyday practical concerns if creating and preserving did not belong to a derivative mode of disclosure founded on praxis? Then again, Heidegger’s contention that works of art (and architecture) are founding moments of truth, events in which beings are first “nominated” to their being, suggests that poetic or artistic creations are not only different from mere things and equipment but ontologically prior to both. And nominating beings to their being certainly seems prior to either contemplating or using beings—and, for that matter, to representing and commemorating them. Herein lies the problem (and promise) of architecture. In OWA, Heidegger insists that the unconcealment of beings that happens in art “happens here for the first time.”27 And after making his now famous claim that “all art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in essence, poetry,” Heidegger explains that as a form of “projective saying,” poetry names beings “for the first time.”28 Only thus, he concludes, is the essence of poetry “the founding of truth.”29 But this can only mean that artistic comportments, not our everyday practical engagements, are what first make entities accessible to circumspective vision and projective understanding; while praxis is no doubt our most immediate and familiar existential state, it is not our most basic comportment to being (a point Heidegger himself makes in his 1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology”). The projective saying accomplished by works of art and architecture must be prior to the projective possibilities belonging to the practical projects and ecstatic temporality constitutive of care. Put simply, artworks are ontologically prior to use-objects, which are in turn prior to theoretical objects, be they elemental or purely conceptual. Such is the modified ontology that emerges in OWA when it is fully parsed out. Then again, are artworks—and especially works of architecture (and even more specifically certain postmodern works like Gehry’s)—by virtue of their essential and unremitting practicality and craftsmanship, on the one hand, and their pervasive and declarative artistry or work-being, on The Aesthetics of Architecture the other hand, ever such that we can exclusively and discretely comport ourselves toward them either practically, as mere use-objects, or creatively, as works of art? This is a question that Heidegger seems not to ask. And yet, it is a question that must be asked. And if the answer is no (as it seems to be, in particular for architecture), then how might that essential ambiguity further complicate the ontological differences Heidegger has redrawn between mere things, use-objects, and works of art—not to mention between practical and artistic truths? And, lastly, does the disclosure of truth occasioned by architecture constitute an event ontologically equivalent to that of painting and the other arts, or is it a more fundamental event or experience of being even than those events—as seems to be the implication of Heidegger’s 1950 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (hereafter BDT), as we will see? What should surprise us about BT from the perspective of OWA and later texts is that architecture per se receives virtually no attention there. In his BT analysis of environmentality (section 15), he does refer to a room and describes it specifically as “what we encounter closest to us” among all the things which fill up the room.30 But he immediately adds that a room is simply “equipment for residing.” Similarly, he refers, briefly, to “roads, streets, bridges, buildings,” and a “covered railway platform.”31 But again, these references serve only as instances of how equipment makes accessible both the public world and die Umweltnatur, the environmental world of nature. BT seems to pay no attention at all to architecture as such. On the one hand, this apparent oversight is remarkable because works of architecture seem to be the paradigmatic form that equipment takes. Admittedly, all artworks can be put to use. Paintings are used to illustrate books and to decorate rooms. Music is used to score films and manipulate human sentiments in public places. Poems are used to teach children moral maxims and various language skills. While Heidegger would not dispute this, he would nevertheless insist that when we are so disposed toward painting, music, and poetry the truth is no longer at work in them, that under such circumstances they are no longer preserved as works. But while a painting is not generally made in order to serve a practical function, even though it may be put to such a use, a temple or a museum is. Architecture is from the start (and always thereafter) a use-object.32 In fact, Anderson Complicating Heidegger among the use-objects of everyday life that surround us, works of architecture are by far the most prominent. And to regard them purely in terms of their formal qualities or in response to their beauty, or in any other detached, disinterested, or even truth-attentive way, is indeed to suspend an awareness of their uniquely architectural nature. On the other hand, genuine works of architecture are never simply, and perhaps not primarily, useobjects. Cave paintings indicate that not even the most primitive dwellings served merely as shelter from the elements or as religious sanctuaries. And as St. Peter’s Cathedral or Gehry’s Experience Music Project seem to prove, more modern buildings are no different in this regard. Furthermore, while we use tools to erect and fashion buildings, which might suggest (wrongly, even for Aristotle) that the manufacture and use of tools are activities not just ontically prior but ontologically prior to building, building is not just one practical project among others. Along with procuring or producing food, drink, and clothing, building is perhaps the single most immediate and important project we undertake—at least in its most primitive register—since it determines and situates us as human beings, thereby making all our less pressing projects possible, including the manufacture and use of tools, our public and private interaction with others, and the creation of more conventional works of art. In OWA, Heidegger examines in detail an unspecified Van Gogh painting of peasant shoes in order to demonstrate how artistically depicting the shoes uncovers the truth of a worldly, earthbound life in ways that simply using or observing the shoes does not. He then rather shamelessly borrows and amplifies Hegel’s example of a Greek temple, but only to illustrate how a nonrepresentational artwork similarly sets up a world and sets forth the earth. By 1942, however, Heidegger appears to be overtly considering the ways in which buildings set up a world more fundamentally than do paintings or other works of art. And in his lecture course “Hölderlin’s Hymn The Ister,” Heidegger begins decisively rethinking the essence of both art and human being with reference to the poetic “founding” accomplished in a polis and, most determinately, by the architectural hearth— which he there describes as the site which grounds human dwelling, the “homestead,” the “site of all sites.”33 By the early 1950s, in both “Poetically Man Dwells” and BDT, Heidegger begins argu- 77 ing (contrary to OWA) that poetic creation is an outgrowth of building, while building, described as the founding and joining of spaces, is defined as a mode of dwelling. In BDT, and especially in the short 1969 essay “Art and Space,” we really begin to glimpse the distance that Heidegger’s radical reassessment of art and architecture has led him, for there we find him wondering if it might be the landscape itself, understood as a place architecturally and elementally determined, which invites us, or even compels us, to build and dwell there and, in consequence, to discover meanings and worlds hitherto unseen. We make a place our own, according to Heidegger’s later writings, not by appropriating it to our practical projects (as he claimed in BT) but by attuning and submitting ourselves to the way in which nature itself gathers the elements into a landscape, and then by building and cultivating such that the architecture “gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals.”34 These reconceptions of poetic creation and building constitute a third significant advance in Heidegger’s thinking (the second being the addition of artworks as a third essential category of entities), for in BDT he recharacterizes dwelling, after Hölderlin, as the most basic and habitual character of human being on the earth.35 In BT, we recall, this basic character was attributed not to dwelling but to being in the world as care (while dwelling was considered only as a form of beingin). Of course, dwelling entails care in some sense, perhaps even in the sense that Heidegger articulates it in BT, so Heidegger is not necessarily rejecting his earlier analyses outright. Lamentably, however, neither is he systematically addressing the ways in which the complex ontological determinations of BT are necessarily transformed by his later thought. But we can identify at least one decisive difference between care and dwelling, and it lies squarely with the central role played by building—which Heidegger defines in BDT as the cultivation of growing things and the creation of architectural works. To dwell means to remain in a place, to make it one’s own. And to do that, one needs to build—in all the rich and subtle senses of that word and in a relationship to the elemental that transcends all practical, theoretical, or merely aesthetic relationships. It is in this regard that Gehry’s work is perhaps most illuminating. Consider his own chain-link and corrugated-metal Santa Monica House, which 78 perfectly exemplifies a Heideggerian dwelling, disclosively built to a dweller’s own peculiar tastes and needs and attunement to the world, but also constructed with a remarkably sensitive, almost iconoclastic, eye to the truth and beauty of the earth. Furthermore, like all great architecture, Gehry’s buildings attune us to the elemental and natural as such. Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings, for instance, reveal the beauty and truth of brick, stone, concrete, wood, and glass. And Wright’s dwellings in particular situate those elements, refined and unrefined, in such a way as to disclose the elemental beauty and truth of architecture itself and of the landscape to which they belong, be it a Midwest prairie or a Pennsylvania forest. Gehry’s buildings similarly attune us to the sheen of titanium, the plasticity of cement, the translucency of glass, the strength of steel, and the flexibility of chain-link. And they are equally sensitive to and revelatory of the landscape they help compose. Yet, Gehry’s postmodern buildings do something else. While the geometric, cantilevered, and largely rectilinear designs of a typical Wright building laudably direct our perception back to the elemental properties of mass, strength, solidity, and opacity and the formal features of symmetry, harmony, and balance, the sculptural, curvilinear, and dynamic designs of a typical Gehry building go further. They awaken our imagination to the organic, irregular, and fluctuating forms of nature as a living, evolving life-world. And as noted earlier, in addition to straddling the line between truly masterful products of craft and recognized works of art, virtually all Gehry’s buildings complicate established differences between architecture and sculpture (and even forms of painting) in ways that the buildings of few other architects can match. Engaging his colorful Vitra International headquarters in Basel or Indiana Avenue Houses in Venice, California, is like gazing upon Mondrian or Albers color-field paintings in three dimensions. And it is no less difficult to resist walking around (or touching) the Walt Disney Concert Hall than Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, for Gehry’s articulation of space is equally dynamic and plastic, his disclosure of the elemental equally pronounced, and his engagement of our senses equally acute. Lastly, Gehry’s work shows that architecture tears free the elemental from the earth in ways the traditional beaux arts cannot—not just by the The Aesthetics of Architecture size of many buildings but through the sheer scope of the raw matter that all architecture masses together, thrusts into space, and works into forms. Perhaps more significantly, and unlike representational arts, works of architecture attune us to the truth and beauty of the elemental itself, completely undiluted by an image that would divert our attention away from the matter out of which it is composed—and out of which we are ourselves composed. In short, Gehry demonstrates that architecture presents the truth and beauty of the elemental and natural as foundational to our being and our world. iv In the end, then, it may be an elemental invitation to build and cultivate, and the ways in which we architecturally respond to it, that predisposes us toward perceiving something as truthful or beautiful or as useful or theoretical, thus occasioning the happening of truth required by all ontologically subsequent artistic, practical, and theoretical projects. Certainly, the distance traversed by Heidegger’s thought from BT to “Art and Space” has no better measure (not even in the famous Kehre announced in the “Letter on Humanism”) than the reversal indicated by his shift from thinking the truth of building as a practical instance of project-driven care for a resolutely deathbound Dasein, to a resolute yielding of poetic existence to the collaborative gathering power of being at its most elemental. Of course, this all calls for more attention and analysis than is possible here, but in the wake of the thinking that has been traced to this point, might we not minimally venture to conclude the following? First, and in several ways, both the buildings of architects like Frank Gehry and the later writings of Martin Heidegger demonstrate works of architecture to be significantly different from both practical things and other works of art. At the very least, buildings seem to resist any straightforward application of distinctions between use-object and artwork and between practical and artistic comportment—and they seem to do so in ways that other artworks do not. Second, in following the trajectory (if not always the logic) of Heidegger’s own evolving analyses, works of architecture seem to distinguish themselves among the other arts by playing a prior, Anderson Complicating Heidegger foundational role in the disclosure of the earth and the establishment of a world. They thus raise questions as yet unexplored (even by Heidegger) concerning the relationship between art and truth and beauty and, especially, concerning the nature and role of the elemental in opening or establishing that relationship. Unlike other works of art or objects of use, buildings not only surround and shelter us physically but elementally they give place to all other works and projects and, thus, to our self-realization as human beings. And to the degree that Heidegger’s analyses can be sustained or deepened in understanding poetry as the founding of truth, then architecture must be thought—with and against Heidegger—as a form of unconcealment more poetic than poetry itself, as it gives place to the disclosure that Heidegger considered preeminent and constitutive of human being: the pre-ontological disclosure of the meaning of being, which place Da-sein pre-ontologically is.36 TRAVIS T. ANDERSON Department of Philosophy Brigham Young University Provo, Utah 84601 internet: travis [email protected] 1. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1978), pp. 66–67. 2. See, for example, Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 1. 3. G. F. W. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 2. 4. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 76. 5. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, p. 84. 6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vols. 1 and 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), vol. 2, p. 414, and vol. 1, p. 217, respectively. 7. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 214. 8. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, p. 421. 9. See, for instance, Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry, 1967), the text of a 1935–1936 lecture course. 10. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 86. 79 11. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 88. 12. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 89. 13. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 155. 14. Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 165, 167. 15. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 184. 16. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 3–16. Works of art that thematically or even tacitly interpret the world or that employ sensual media to engage a conceptual problem such as the one Foucault argues is pictorially addressed by Velazquez in Las Meninas can perhaps best be understood as “interpretations” or “discoveries” in the sense Heidegger outlined in BT, section 32—that is, as focused developments of our pre-ontological understanding, and thus as modifications of being in the world. But what of a Jackson Pollock painting, for instance, or an architectural ruin? When art (and Dasein) concerns itself with beauty or the elemental as such, something other than either a focused practical engagement with the world or a founded reflection on such engagements seems to be at work. Indeed, it is precisely such an instance that renders questionable even Heidegger’s revolutionary conceptions of truth as concealment and unconcealment, art as the occasion of that strife, and Dasein as its place. If beauty and the elemental as such are not functions of truth conceived in terms of disclosedness, what then? Can there be a truth that is beauty’s own? 17. Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 128–129. 18. Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 192–193. 19. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 191, emphasis added. 20. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 193. 21. Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 185, 187. 22. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 192. 23. Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 74, 180, 185–190. 24. Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 185–189. 25. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 189. 26. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 191. 27. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 190, emphasis added. 28. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 198, emphasis added. 29. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 199, emphasis added. 30. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98. 31. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 98. 32. In this regard, monuments may constitute an exceptional case of architecture, or what in my opinion is perhaps more likely, they may constitute a special class of tools that only resemble architecture. 33. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 105. 34. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 355. 35. Heidegger, Basic Writings, p. 350. 36. This article is a revised and expanded version of two different papers presented at the Northwest Philosophy Conference on October 30, 1998, and the International Association for Philosophy and Literature Conference on May 12, 1999.