Barnett Newman and Heideggerian Philosophy 1611475201, 9781611475203

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Barnett Newman and Heideggerian Philosophy

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Barnett Newman and Heideggerian Philosophy CLAUDE CERNUSCHI

FAIRLEIGH DICKINSON UNIVERSITY PRESS Madison • Teaneck

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Published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Co-published with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowmanlittlefield.com 10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom Copyright © 2012 by Claude Cernuschi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cernuschi, Claude, 1961– Barnett Newman and Heideggerian philosophy / Claude Cernuschi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61147-519-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61147-520-3 (electronic) 1. Newman, Barnett, 1905–1970—Aesthetics. 2. Newman, Barnett, 1905–1970— Criticism and interpretation. 3. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976—Influence. I. Title. ND237.N475C47 2012 759.13—dc23 2011049673

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

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In memory of Stephen Forster

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A man spends his whole lifetime painting one picture or working on one piece of sculpture. Barnett Newman Every thinker thinks only one thought. Martin Heidegger

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Contents

List of Figures

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Barnett Newman . . . and Martin Heidegger? Beginnings Presence Place: Da-sein The Void Others Freedom Mood Technology Language Time God Epistemology Politics

1 27 57 75 87 111 133 149 165 185 203 235 261 283

Bibliography

309

Index

325

About the Author

333

vii

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List of Figures

Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 2.4 Figure 2.5 Figure 2.6 Figure 2.7 Figure 2.8 Figure 2.9 Figure 2.10 Figure 2.11 Figure 2.12 Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 5.4 Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5 Figure 6.6

Barnett Newman, Black Fire I (1961) John McLaughlin, #7-1966 Barnett Newman, Onement I (1948) Barnett Newman, Genesis—The Break (1946) Barnett Newman, Pagan Void (1946) Barnett Newman, The Beginning (1946) Barnett Newman, Moment (1946) Barnett Newman, Adam (1951, 1952) Philip Guston, The Line (1978) Barnett Newman, Untitled (1960) Barnett Newman, Day Before One (1951) Barnett Newman, Be I (1949) Barnett Newman, The Name II (1950) Barnett Newman, The Voice (1950) Greek (Roman copy), Athlete Staff, Nyamzania, Tanzania Barnett Newman, Here III (1965–1966) Barnett Newman, Not There-Here (1962) Barnett Newman, Right Here (1954) Mark Rothko, Green and Tangerine on Red (1956) Greek, Kouros Rufino Tamayo, Animals (1941) Barnett Newman, Concord (1949) Jackson Pollock, Male and Female (1943) Mark Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944) Barnett Newman, Genetic Moment (1947) Barnett Newman, Here I (To Marcia) (1950) Barnett Newman, The Promise (1949)

8 8 28 33 33 34 34 36 37 39 44 46 48 48 63 63 78 78 91 97 100 102 117 117 118 118 119 120

ix

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x

LIST OF F IG U RES

Figure 6.7 Figure 6.8 Figure 6.9 Figure 6.10 Figure 6.11 Figure 7.1 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2 Figure 8.3 Figure 8.4 Figure 8.5 Figure 9.1 Figure 9.2 Figure 9.3 Figure 9.4 Figure 9.5 Figure 9.6 Figure 9.7 Figure 10.1 Figure 11.1 Figure 11.2 Figure 11.3 Figure 11.4 Figure 11.5 Figure 11.6 Figure 11.7 Figure 11.8 Figure 11.9 Figure 12.1 Figure 12.2 Figure 12.3 Figure 12.4 Figure 12.5 Figure 12.6 Figure 12.7 Figure 12.8

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Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950, 1951) Herbert Ferber, Surrational Zeus II (1947) Louise Bourgeois, Femme volage (1951) Barnett Newman, Achilles (1952) Barnett Newman, Ulysses (1952) Barnett Newman, L’Errance (1953) Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross (1958–1966) Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross (1958–1966) Carl Andre, Lead Copper Plain (1969) Robert Morris, Untitled (Three L-Beams) (1966) Barnett Newman, End of Silence (1949) Barnett Newman, Euclidian Abyss (1946–1947) Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion, Greece Barnett Newman, Gea (1945) Theodoros Stamos, Sounds in the Rock (1946) Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman (1947, 1948 [cast 1949]) Barnett Newman, Death of Euclid (1947) Clyfford Still, 1954 (1954) Barnett Newman, The Word I (1946) Barnett Newman, Horizon Light (1949) Barnett Newman, Abraham (1949) Barnett Newman, Outcry (1958) Barnett Newman, The Wild (1950) Barnett Newman, Eve (1950) Barnett Newman, The Third (1962) Barnett Newman, The Three (1962) Barnett Newman, Yellow Edge (1968) Barnett Newman, Shimmer Bright (1968) Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: First Station (1958) Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Second Station (1958) Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Fourteenth Station (1965–1966) Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Fifth Station (1962) Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Twelfth Station (1965) Barnett Newman, Shining Forth (To George) (1961) Barnett Newman, Covenant (1949) Barnett Newman, Here I (To Marcia) (1950)

121 126 126 127 129 139 151 151 153 155 159 166 171 172 173 175 177 179 187 205 216 217 217 219 220 221 222 223 242 242 243 245 246 247 250 251

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Preface and Acknowledgments

This book owes its origins to a specific event during my senior year at university. While teaching a seminar on religious existentialism, the instructor, Richard Sugarman, exclaimed, in the middle of one of our animated class discussions, “I can’t believe the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century was a Nazi!” The sentence struck me like a thunderbolt. Initially, I was torn between two reactions: on one side, shame at not having read anything by the “greatest philosopher of the twentieth century”; on the other, perplexed by the possibility that any philosopher could have endorsed anything as horrid and reprehensible as Nazi ideology. Although I had decided upon a career in art history, philosophy always represented for me not simply a love of ideas or a quest for knowledge but, even more importantly, as its name indicates, a love of wisdom. This was a perplexing conundrum indeed. I immediately decided upon purchasing a number of Heidegger books and getting to the heart of this matter. Busy with beginning graduate school in art history the following term, I left the Heidegger books unread. Heidegger did not seriously come upon my radar screen until about a decade later. Victor Farias’s notorious book on Heidegger and Nazism had just been translated and was causing a firestorm in the United States. At this juncture, I was a junior faculty in the art and art history department at Duke University when deconstruction was all the rage. Since it was generally assumed that Heidegger was a major inspiration for Jacques Derrida’s philosophy, the scandal also cast a potentially dark shadow on the underlying premises of the Frenchman’s thought. It did not help that, around the same time, it was revealed that Paul de Man, another major figure in the deconstructionist wave, had written collaborationist essays during the war. This was another issue well worth exploring but, in the middle of numerous commitments, I again left the Heidegger books unread. xi

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xii

P REF A C E A ND A C KN OWL EDGMEN T S

Many years later, I came across Rüdiger Safranski’s intellectual biography, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, in a bookstore. Having just completed a research project, and having a little time on my hands, I decided to investigate the problem that had intrigued me since my last year of college. I was not able to answer all of my questions, but, upon reading Safranski’s analysis of Heideggerrian thought, I kept being reminded of statements made by the American Abstract Expressionist artist, Barnett Newman. This was not a relationship that Newman scholars had explored in great detail, and thus offered a perfect opportunity for conducting original research. By the time I finished the book, however, I was invited to participate in another project, so Heidegger, again, would have to wait. In the middle of this commitment, a session calling for papers at the College Art Association Conference that year caught my attention: it was chaired by Richard Shiff and Ann Temkin and devoted entirely to the work of Barnett Newman. They had organized a major retrospective exhibition of Newman’s work and were taking this opportunity to evaluate the state of knowledge and generate new thoughts on the artist. Since I was in the middle of another project, for which a deadline loomed, I was hesitant about interrupting my work and investing the effort required to write a proposal on a topic on which I remained a novice. I was also unsure whether the connections I first noticed would still strike me as interesting upon reading Safranski’s book a second time. I asked my wife and my mother, the two individuals upon whom I rely the most in such matters, and both advised me that it was worth putting my present project to one side and submitting a proposal to the Newman session. I reread Safranski’s book, and the connections I detected with Newman’s work struck me just as much upon my second reading as upon my first. I wrote my proposal, and went back to the project I interrupted. I was delighted that Richard and Ann accepted my paper, which I delivered in February 2003, and offered very positive feedback. Several months after the paper was accepted, but before the conference was to take place, Richard informed me that Newman had delivered a lecture in 1962, one of his topics being the following: “Place—Sein ist da-sein. One creates place.” At that point, I was more convinced than ever that the Heideggerian connection was worth exploring. Had my proposal not been accepted, it goes without saying that I would probably not have taken the idea any further. I therefore express sincere gratitude to Richard Shiff and Ann Temkin for setting me on my way. I would also like to recognize the encouragement of other scholars working in the field—David Anfam, Dore Ashton, Valerie Hellstein, Ellen Landau, Joan Marter, Stephen Polcari, Irving Sandler, Michael Schreyach—and the two anonymous readers chosen by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press for recommending publication and for their constructive suggestions for improving the

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PREFACE AN D ACKN OWL EDGMEN T S

xiii

manuscript. Isabel Stuebe was kind enough to accompany me during a pilgrimage to see the Barnett Newman retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of art, where I benefited from her eagle eye and deep art historical insights. Jessica Langella, my research assistant, also proved invaluable in compiling and tracking down bibliographical sources. Speaking of bibliographical sources, I cannot find adequate words to thank Adeane Bregman, Bapst librarian at Boston College. Ever since I joined the faculty there, she has helped me well beyond the call of duty, and with an eagerness and enthusiasm I could scarcely match myself. For this project in particular, she has played an enormous, if not gargantuan, role, more that of a dedicated research assistant than a librarian. My research is continuously in her debt. I have also greatly benefited from the generosity of the Boston College Office of Sponsored Research and the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. I thank David Quigley, dean of arts and sciences, for his encouragement and support. Our administrative assistant, Joanne Elliott, has proven up to task of dealing with anything I have thrown at her, all with professional competence and good humor. I thank Harry Keyishian, director of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, and Brooke Bascietto, associate editor at the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, for all of their help during the production of this book. For her patience and professionalism, special mention is likewise due to Patricia Stevenson, production editor at Rowman & Littlefield. Gratitude is also expressed to Andrea Frank, Kerry Burke, Christopher Soldt, and Sararith Roeung for their assistance with images, and to Maria Fernanda Meza for hers with reproduction rights. No less worthy of mention is Uta Hoffmann of the Barnett Newman Foundation, for her kindness and generosity. I also warmly acknowledge the continual moral support I have received from close friends: Roy Chatalbash, Marietta Cambareri, David Castriota, Stephen Kett, and my colleagues in the Fine Arts Department at Boston College, who have made my academic tenure there so pleasant and enjoyable, and who have supported me in more ways than I can count. Although the entire department is hereby acknowledged, certain individuals merit special mention: Karl Baden, Pamela Berger, Sheila Blair, Jonathan Bloom, Stoney Conley, Mark Cooper, Kenneth Craig, Sheila Gallagher, Andrzej Herczynski (honorary member), Jeffery Howe, Charles Meyer, John Michalczyk, Michael Mulhern, Katherine Nahum, Nancy Netzer, and Andy Tavarelli. Of course, nothing would have been possible without the affection of my mother, Ursula Cernuschi, and my wife, Suzy Forster. Lastly, I dedicate this book to the memory of my nephew, Stephen Forster (1991–2011), a most wonderful and dear young man who affected everyone around him with his warmth and charm, and who left us much, much too early.

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CHAPTER 1

Barnett Newman . . . and Martin Heidegger?

In 2002, Yve-Alain Bois called Barnett Newman “the most difficult artist I can name,”1 presumably because the concerns Newman frequently voiced—a fascination with beginnings, with human presence, and with establishing a sense of place—are not easily discernable from the reductive austerity of his abstract canvases (figure 1.1). Claiming to explore “metaphysical secrets,”2 but reluctant to “explain” his work, Newman set a daunting challenge to his audience. Daunting, because, absent an interpretive framework whereby divided fields of color may be construed as having “metaphysical” content, communication between artist and audience easily breaks down.3 In fact, the inaccessibility of Newman’s canvases made them especially unpopular among the lay public; they have been vandalized in museums,4 and their purchase for exorbitant prices triggered a violent backlash in the popular press.5 Even some of the painter’s own Abstract Expressionist contemporaries, themselves victims of public hostility over the alleged “incomprehensibility” of their own images, harbored deep-seated suspicions about Newman’s work. So much so, that he occasionally felt ostracized from the very movement with which he is commonly associated. Amid professional art historians, the situation fared no better. Thomas Hess, among the artist’s greatest champions, was originally hostile.6 Harold Rosenberg, no less of a supporter, initially described the work as “partly inaccessible.”7 And, more recently, Jeremy Lewison confessed to finding the paintings “[d]ifficult to understand, difficult to empathize with, difficult to penetrate.”8 As if additional ammunition were required, Lewison cited the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard in his defense. After perusing a Newman work, Lyotard declared, “There is almost nothing to ‘consume,’ or if there is, I do not know what it is.”9 Admittedly, Newman was partly responsible for this predicament.10 Had he made no references to “metaphysical secrets,” his canvases may have proven no more popular than those of Gene Davis or Brice Marden (artists upon whom 1

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Newman exerted a powerful influence11), but they would have been understood as celebrations of shape, color, or composition—thus posing no pressing interpretive conundrums to baffle the likes of Lewison or Lyotard. The artist’s proclivity to assign portentous titles to his canvases, however, such as Abraham, Covenant, or The Stations of the Cross sent some critics into a rage: there was only “so much nonsense” one could bear, John Canaday grumbled.12 Even now, Newman’s production, according to Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, is not doing “quite what Barney meant it to do.”13 The lines of communication between artist and public are so tangled that the artist’s relationship to his audience has been described as a “solo tango.”14 To provide Newman with a dancing partner, as it were, this book will present the argument that though the “difficulty” of reading Newman may never be fully dislodged, it could be mitigated if Martin Heidegger’s philosophy were used as a point of reference to interpret the artist’s canvases.15 This is not to dismiss the importance of other philosophers (Spinoza, Pascal, Kant, Burke, Thoreau, Kropotkin, Nietzsche), or to suggest that Heidegger supplies an exegetical key to Newman’s production in its entirety, but it will be the contention of this book that Newman was aware of, and even inspired by, Heidegger’s philosophy, and that this philosophy, in turn, proves particularly helpful in interpreting certain aspects of the artist’s work. To some, this project may seem preposterous on its face. Newman, after all, was a painter, and Heidegger a philosopher; one American, the other German; one born Catholic, the other a Jew; one an anarchist, and the other a member of the Nazi party. One may even argue that elucidating this most difficult of artists by referencing a philosopher renowned for his own opacity will only compound rather than alleviate the problem, especially as there is no direct evidence Newman ever read Heidegger. (Although Being and Time was in Newman’s library, the work did not appear in translation until 1962, thus too late to have been instrumental in Newman’s formative development.) Yet the possibility of a direct connection cannot be summarily ruled out. Newman could have readily encountered Heidegger’s philosophy in numerous sources.16 As Willem de Kooning conceded, existentialism “was in the air,” and many Abstract Expressionists “were in touch with the mood.”17 In 1946, Hannah Arendt published an essay in Partisan Review—“What Is Existenz Philosophy?”—in which Heidegger looms quite large.18 (Arendt studied under Heidegger at Marburg and, for a time, the two were romantically involved.) As it happens, Newman owned an extensive run of the periodical, including a copy of this very issue, as well as a sixty-three-page pamphlet PR published in 1947 titled What Is Existentialism? Its author, William Barrett, paid inordinate attention to Heidegger, stopping just short of labeling him “the most important of the philosophers” falling under the existentialist rubric.19 Newman was also quite taken with Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, a book replete with Heideg-

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gerian overtones, and whose assessment was not dissimilar. According to Tillich, Heidegger carried “the Existentialist analysis of the courage to be as oneself more fully than anyone else.”20 (Not surprisingly, when Arendt explored the possibility of having Being and Time translated into English, she turned to Tillich for assistance.)21 From 1950 to 1958, moreover, Arendt’s husband, Heinrich Blücher, taught philosophy at the New School for Social Research, an institution where Abstract Expressionist artists occasionally attended lectures.22 Though neither politically innocent nor ignorant of Heidegger’s Nazi connections, Blücher readily confessed his “keenness for Heidegger.”23 The New School even published an extensive essay on Heidegger in 1948 by Karl Löwith, one of the philosopher’s own pupils, who, while outlining the contributions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Karl Jaspers, gave “philosophical priority and significance” to Heidegger.24 Arendt, Barrett, and Blücher also lectured at “The Club,” an organization that functioned as a “focal point of Abstract Expressionist activities.”25 Newman frequently attended its lectures and symposia, and was an occasional panelist himself; in January 1950, the Club threw him a party to celebrate his first oneman show (according to the sculptor Philip Pavia, “The Club loved him”26). In November, Egon Vietta, who had attended Heidegger’s classes in Freiburg, delivered a lecture at the Club on Heidegger and existentialism, which Pavia described as extremely well received (“everyone thought it was the best yet”27), and on December 14, 1951, the abstract artist Hubert Kappel, another regular at the Club, also spoke on Heidegger.28 The playwright Lionel Abel, a friend to many avant-garde artists in New York, even recalled a philosopher named Henzler whose hope was to convert the Abstract Expressionists to Heidegger’s ideas.29 Significantly, in 1949—the very time when Newman was pondering the implications of his newly finished signature image, Onement I (figure 2.1)—an anthology of Heidegger’s writings appeared in English. Compiled by Werner Brock, it included such important essays as “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” “What Is Metaphysics?,” and “On the Essence of Truth,” as well as an extensive overview of Being and Time.30 Whether Newman read or even knew the anthology cannot be verified.31 But the book was reviewed32 and Heidegger’s ideas widely discussed in philosophical journals with which Newman, an undergraduate philosophy major, could have been familiar.33 More to the point, the themes and language of the essays in Brock’s anthology provide such compelling parallels with Newman’s statements that a direct connection is worth exploring. The more so because, in November 1962, coinciding with the translation of Being and Time, Newman delivered a lecture at Hunter College expounding questions critical to his art. Though he did not speak from a prepared text, a onepage outline surviving in the Barnett Newman Foundation Archives indicates that his final topic was to be “Place—Sein ist da-sein. One creates place.”34 The expression set off parenthetically, “Sein ist da-sein,” written in German no less, is

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characteristically, if not unmistakably, Heideggerian. “The foundation of being [Sein],” the philosopher writes, “necessarily embraces the foundation of beingthere [Da-sein].”35 Although Newman’s lecture was tape-recorded, potentially corroborating the soundness of positing a connection between his ideas and those of the philosopher, the tape unfortunately ran out before Newman’s revelatory conclusion. All the same, conflating his own attempt to provide spectators with “a sense of place” and Heidegger’s concept of Da-sein—even if this correlation is an isolated one among the artist’s statements—testifies to Newman’s having discerned a close correspondence between these two ideas. For some, Heidegger’s Nazi membership precludes the possibility of a Jewish intellectual ever being attracted to his thought. But knowledge of Heidegger’s work does not automatically imply knowledge of his National Socialist involvement, an issue raised by Arendt (given her interest in totalitarianism) and Barrett, but skirted in Brock’s anthology. Brock, incidentally, like Arendt, was of Jewish ancestry and also among Heidegger’s pupils. Though this is not the place to review the evidence for Heidegger’s self-serving complicity with the Nazi regime, it is worth mentioning (without exonerating him in the slightest) that, while having voiced anti-Semitic sentiments,36 and having raised no objections to the regime’s racial laws, Heidegger nonetheless helped Brock immigrate to England after the latter was forced to relinquish his post in Germany.37 He also defended the works of Spinoza from attempts to purge Jewish philosophers from German university curricula.38 (Spinoza, incidentally, was one of Newman’s favorite philosophers.39) Likewise, Heidegger showed a distinct appreciation for Van Gogh and Paul Klee, artists labeled degenerate by the Nazis, and he was not above criticizing Nietzsche,40 whose concept of the “will to power” was twisted by National Socialist thinkers (even by Heidegger himself41) to reinforce their own ideology. Some Nazis became increasingly suspicious of Heidegger, explaining his appeal among Jewish intellectuals by labeling his philosophy unGermanic and “talmudist-rabbinic.”42 Whether these attacks betray the thinker’s embroilment in bitter, inter-party politics or a genuine incompatibility between his philosophy and National Socialism is too complex to address here.43 But it should be said that Löwith wrote a 1942 essay comparing and contrasting Heidegger’s ideas to those of a prominent Jewish thinker, Franz Rosenzweig,44 where he also mentioned, without condemnation, Heidegger’s Nazi involvement. Although Löwith’s attitude later turned, justifiably, to censure,45 it remains undeniable that many prominent Jewish philosophers and intellectuals (e.g., Edmund Husserl, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Elie Wiesel) have, though not consistently, held Heidegger’s thought in high esteem.46 Though such admiration hardly absolves him of his support for the Nazi regime, or of his dismaying, unrepentant, postwar attitude about the atrocities that same regime committed,47 it suggests that a Jewish artist may

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have chosen, had he been aware of Heidegger’s Nazi connections, to separate the philosopher’s ideas from the more disturbing details of his biography. This is not to say that such a separation should be made, only that, given the precedents cited above, Newman could have followed suit. Still, Heidegger’s politics cannot be ignored (as W. J. Korab-Karpowicz observed, the distinction between the philosophical and political Heidegger “is no longer tenable”48). If the philosopher described his collaboration with the Nazis as his greatest blunder after World War II,49 prior to 1945, he saw his political engagement as a direct extension of his philosophy.50 Needless to say, Newman, a self-proclaimed anarchist, would have decried even the slightest affinity with the ideas of a philosopher who, despite repudiating Nazi allegiances retrospectively, forged intimate links between those ideas and National Socialism during the time of Hitler. Thus, despite the extent of Newman’s cognizance of Heidegger’s Nazi associations being even murkier than his cognizance of Heidegger’s ideas, any attempt to connect Newman and Heidegger sidesteps those associations at its own peril. The present study will endeavor to resolve this conundrum by relying on an observation already made: that Heideggerian thought is actually riddled with radical tensions—tensions between those very aspects Heidegger himself saw as reinforcing Nazi ideology, and others one may legitimately interpret as antithetical to it.51 Exposing those tensions, in turn, may help demarcate the ideas to which Newman would have been attracted from those he would have rejected. Accordingly, the proposition that Newman read Heidegger seriously enough to have been significantly influenced by, should in no way bespeak an uncritical endorsement of, Heideggerian philosophy. The point is not to present this philosophy as a universal “truth,” or as the most effective way of interpreting abstract art; nor to suggest than Heidegger would have endorsed, let alone appreciated, Newman’s aesthetic production. The point, rather, is more modest: that parallels between Heidegger and Newman’s statements are compelling and numerous enough to hypothesize that one was markedly affected by the other. Even if the issue of a direct relationship cannot be fully resolved (Newman left no word in his published writings to this effect), his use of language and ways of conceptualizing the human condition invite the inference that, direct influence aside, Heidegger’s philosophy provides a useful interpretive framework within which his abstractions could be made more intelligible, or, perhaps, less “difficult.” One says “framework” rather than “methodology” because—unlike, say, Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, or deconstruction—Heideggerian philosophy is less likely to provide a workable methodology to interpret works of art. In fact, Heiddegger’s essay on art will hardly dominate the following pages; this may reflect a personal bias, or the different intellectual cultures governing art history versus philosophical aesthetics, but the focus of Heidegger’s

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essay—uncovering the origin of the work of art, or how truth is manifest (at work) within it—is simply too general and indiscriminate a topic to help interpret the subtleties and nuances of a specific artist’s production.52 What is more, Heidegger evaluates art, not so much on its own terms, but in subordination to the broader tenets of his overall philosophy. Though committed to philosophical questions, Newman, for his part, remained personally indifferent to aesthetics,53 suggesting that what philosophers say about art is not necessarily what artists find most interesting. Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, or the essays on poetry and technology, arguably, supply far more points of intersection between painter and philosopher, points that emerge primarily in the form of overlapping intellectual concerns or thematic interests, and, no less significantly, in the specific ways these concerns and interests are verbally and visually encoded. As such, these concerns require no broader Heideggerian methodology to elucidate and narrowly confine the interpretive scope of this book. The intention is to convince the reader that parallels are frequent and powerful enough to consider the possibility that Newman’s work was informed by Heidegger’s philosophy, irrespective of how the reader feels about that philosophy or about Heidegger the person. In outlining these parallels, it might therefore be best, at least at first, if our reading of Heidegger remains neutral, even a little sympathetic, as continual digressions outlining the many objections launched at Heideggerian thought would distract the reader and take the study too far afield (probing the full philosophical implications of these correlations might require another study altogether, one undertaken, preferably, by a professional philosopher, not an art historian). Still, some of the philosophical objections directed at Heidegger, as well as a discussion of the more disturbing political implications of his philosophy, will be surveyed in the last chapters. In the interim, it is hoped that the affinities proposed will stand or fall on their cogency, without necessarily being bound to a cause-and-effect relationship, or held hostage to the reader’s own ideological predispositions either for or against Heidegger the philosopher, or Heidegger the man. To validate the chosen approach, and lay the appropriate groundwork, it is imperative to underscore how profoundly Newman was personally affected by his study of philosophy.54 While some were professing the autonomy of art, he claimed painting to be “a realm of pure thought”55 or “an expression of the mind first.”56 Only by “placing the artist’s function on its rightful plane, the plane of the philosopher,”57 he maintained, could “the true nature of painting” be grasped.58 (Criticizing the work of Piet Mondrian, he rebuked neither its form nor execution but the “bad philosophy” and “faulty logic” underlying it.59) If only on these grounds, a philosophical approach to Newman’s production may contribute no less to interpretive advances than an exclusively art historical or socio-art historical one. In the spirit of full disclosure, it should also be admitted

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that the decision to view Newman through a Heideggerian lens was based upon detecting similarities between Newman’s statements and Heidegger’s writings, not deduced from a visual analysis of the paintings themselves. Had Newman voiced no concern with providing the spectator with “a sense of place,” correlations between his canvases and Heidegger’s signature concept of Da-sein, or how Heideggerian philosophy could advance an interpretation of Newman’s production, would, arguably, have remained unclear.60 No doubt, some will deem such an approach tantamount to making the object irrelevant—a legitimate concern, to be sure—but Newman often laid out the theory underlying his work prior to its execution. When an artist writes about their work beforehand, Pierre Schneider observed, “it is quite natural, not to say proper, for the critic to read him before seeing it.”61 A valid point; concordantly, scholars have underscored Newman’s practice, as a public school teacher, to have students write about the meaning of art (often for weeks) before ever beginning to draw.62 All of which suggests that, his claims for being an intuitive painter notwithstanding, Newman most likely retrofitted his completed work to conform to preformulated intellectual concerns. Deny it as he might, he did not create works of art ex nihilo, independently of a whole set of preexisting assumptions and attitudes about what his art should be about, even before he took up the brush. It is no less legitimate to assert, moreover, that meaning cannot be deduced exclusively from the visual appearance of material artifacts. Paintings do not declare their meanings transparently; if they did, an unknowing spectator would discern, just by looking at their works, that Newman (figure 1.1) intended to evoke metaphysical ideas while, say, John McLaughlin (figure 1.2) did not (“The painting itself,” McLaughlin declared, “does not represent or symbolize anything”63). These differing agendas, then, do not reside “in” the works, as bricks in mortar, simply to be extracted by observers sensitive to the nuances of formal relations. It is more persuasive to stipulate, conversely, that differentiating abstract artists motivated to stress the importance of formal relations from those motivated to impart a sense of metaphysical sublimity, is contingent less upon the visual appearance of their works than upon our own fore-knowledge of what the artists themselves intended. In other words, we look at Newman’s canvases with a view to discerning philosophical ideas, and McLaughlin’s with a view to appreciating formal relationships, because we already know, or infer, their key concerns in advance. This stipulation does not mean that intentions are necessarily recoverable, immune to misinterpretation, or that fruitful investigations cannot move beyond the scope of an artist’s intentions. On the contrary, inferences about intention may (and often do) miss the mark, and, as such, remain no less open to revision or disagreement than any other form of interpretation. But this stipulation does mean that, whenever we interpret, we are, consciously or not, guessing or conjecturing about the intentions underpinning the objects

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Figure 1.1. Barnett Newman, Black Fire I (1961), oil on exposed canvas, 114  84 inches. Daniel W. Dietrich II Trust © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 1.2. John McLaughlin, #7-1966, oil on canvas, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alan G. Lerner.

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we are interpreting. Barring such inferences, we would hardly be able to negotiate our everyday environments, let alone differentiate Newman’s works from McLaughlin’s. That Newman and the Minimalists misconstrued each other’s work, in spite of their mutual admiration, reinforces the proposition that meaning is not discernable exclusively from the visual appearance of works of art, and inferences about intention, even if indispensable to interpretation, often miss the mark. Despite acknowledging him as a major precursor, after all, the Minimalists rejected Newman’s metaphysics and couched their appreciation in purely formal terms.64 Writing in 1970, Donald Judd cited the artist directly, but avoided any mention of spirituality or metaphysics.65 The look of Newman’s works apparently neither compelled a philosophical reading, nor prevented Judd from recasting Newman to reflect his own—primarily formalist—bias. For his part, Newman derived immense gratification from being admired by a younger generation.66 And inasmuch as Judd elided the issues Newman held most dear, the older artist returned the favor by construing Minimalism from his own, clearly metaphysical, point of view: “[N]o matter how cool everybody sounds, and no matter how disdainful [the Minimalists] are of the old art rhetoric . . . it does not seem to me that it means their work is without spiritual content or concern.”67 As both reframed the other’s intentions to reinforce their own agendas, Newman’s statements fly in the face of Judd’s, as Judd’s fly in the face of Newman’s. Not that these mishaps were malicious; in many ways, the medium’s opacity makes such misunderstandings inescapable—a point that justifies, it is hoped, the decision to interpret Newman from a Heideggerian perspective on the basis of similarities in their respective writings. The artist, in fact, spent nearly a year contemplating the first instance of his signature style—Onement I (figure 2.1)— before its implications became clear to him, a lag that bolsters the premise that form does not compel meaning,68 that meaning cannot simply be “discerned” from color, texture, or composition, and that Newman’s intentions were not immediately transparent, even to him. Only after long periods of post-creative contemplation did these intentions gradually crystallize in his mind; at which point, he began associating meanings with his paintings—not just any meanings, of course, only those that corresponded to his long-held intellectual interests, and which he felt “fit” the overall formal complexion of individual works. Just because works of art do not readily betray their meanings, it does not follow that the construction of meaning is purely arbitrary. The artist will intentionally adjust the forms created to induce the physical sensations that align, as far as is possible, with the meaning intended. A similar process might also take hold of the audience: once Newman’s intentions become clearer to us, or once our inferences about them are placed on a firmer footing, speculation may begin as to how Newman himself thought those same intentions could be communicated

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through the visual properties of his work. Though this may seem like approaching the act of interpretation the wrong way around, it is an inevitable consequence of the ambiguity of the medium. By comparing Newman’s statements to Heidegger’s philosophy, perhaps that medium may be made a little less ambiguous, a little less obscure. In the process, this study will not restrict itself to texts Newman could have come across (e.g., Being and Time or Brock’s 1949 anthology). If particular ideas are elucidated with greater clarity in books whose translations appeared after Newman’s death, these will still be cited, especially if their expositions engender a richer interpretation of the artist’s work. This may cause some discomfort. Some scholars object if material outside an artist’s purview is brought to bear in interpretation, and others, just as vehemently, if interpretation is restricted exclusively to the recovery of authorial intent. Although these waters are difficult to navigate, perhaps a middle course can be set. If parallels emerge in Heidegger’s texts that Newman could have known, then it is hardly unwarranted, given the intricacy of the philosopher’s concepts, to seek clarifications in other sources, even if they were not likely to have fallen in Newman’s hands. Since the ideas expounded are often the same—just more clearly formulated—these references would neither stretch the interpretations beyond credulity, nor abandon the goal of conforming to inferences about the artist’s intent. Along similar lines, commentaries on Heidegger will also be quoted—not to claim that Newman would have known these insights, of course—only to restate the philosopher’s ideas with greater lucidity. In this enterprise, the titles Newman assigned to his work will provide exceptional assistance, as many—Be, Here, Not There-Here, The Moment, Shining Forth, The Voice, End of Silence—resonate powerfully with Heideggerian overtones. Titles were of inordinate importance to Newman,69 and, despite his reluctance to prejudice his audience’s reactions to a painting in advance, titles often do precisely that. A title may encourage (even predetermine) an interpretation in a way another may not and invite the audience to read the formal characteristics of an abstract painting—even if unintelligible by themselves—in certain ways rather than others. A title, as Roelof Louw indicated, directs “attention to the ‘type’ of feeling projected.”70 Choosing them with utmost care, Newman thought titles should “fit” both the visual impact the paintings exercised upon him and the broader meanings he hoped to impart. Those meanings, like Heidegger’s writings, tended to revolve around the same question: the question of existence. Newman’s declarations that the “self, terrible and constant . . . is the subject matter of painting,”71 or “the real issue is the self,”72 echo Heidegger’s assertion that the terms “self” and “selfhood” are employed in philosophical discourse to “characterize the specifically human peculiarity, its particular way of being proper to itself.”73 If Newman titled a

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number of his works Be, the question upon which Heidegger lavished the most attention—the meaning of Being—should, for Michael Gelven, actually be transcribed as the question of “what it means to be.” In Heideggerian parlance, the term “Being” denotes the state of existence: what it means “to be.”74 This convergence is not simply significant in view of the tenor of Newman’s titles. It is also significant because Heidegger’s focus on the issue of Being transcends how things literally exist (e.g., the way Descartes asked about the existence of the external world), but concerns, rather, the meaning of existence. That meaning ultimately does not pertain to all beings (rocks, plants, or animals), only to the state of existence of the human being—what Newman, from his side, called the “self, terrible and constant.” Of course, human beings literally exist in the same way as rocks, plants, or animals, and insofar as beings exist, they may all be said to exist equally: a rock exists no less than a person. But human beings are privileged because, unlike rocks, they can enter into a meaningful relationship with the fact of their existence; they can interrogate the meaning of their Being.75 As a result, Heidegger is led to affirm that every doctrine of Being is “in itself alone a doctrine of man’s essential nature . . . as soon as I say thoughtfully: Being of beings, the relatedness to man’s nature has been named.”76 No form of metaphysical thinking, he continues, “begins with man’s essential nature and goes on from there to Being, nor in reverse from Being and then back to man. Rather, every way of thinking takes its way already within the total relation of Being and man’s nature.”77 Heidegger thus proves especially relevant to an interpretation of Newman’s canvases, not simply because Newman attempted to raise painting to the level of philosophy, but because the subject of his philosophy coincides with the content of Newman’s work. Newman, moreover, lamented the absence of spirit in late modern art: spirituality “has become a dirty word. . . . ‘[T]he self,’ ‘experience,’ ‘revelation,’ ‘moral crisis,’ ‘anxiety,’ ‘metaphysical terror,’ not to mention ‘God,’ are also repudiated by younger artists.”78 Such concerns are consonant with Heideggerian philosophy, which impugned the modern world’s “repression, and misinterpretation of the spirit.”79 Spirit, the philosopher contends, is “a resolve that is attuned to origins and knowing.”80 The mindset most anathema to Heidegger was nihilism: the view that no special status can be ascribed to the fact of our existence. His underlying premise is that existence matters; the very possibility that Being is meaningless is rejected from the outset.81 He could not have put it any less directly: “Insofar as it is in any way understood, being has a meaning.”82 On this account, a philosophical approach to Newman’s work is highly warranted, not simply because Abstract Expressionism betrays existentialist tendencies, but also because Newman, like Heidegger, was concerned with “fundamental

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human attitudes and deep moral choices.”83 For both men, existence is of concern because existence carries meaning. That meaning, however, is not easily verbalized, and Newman conceded as much: “I know it is impossible to talk about my work,”84 each image entails “separate embodiments of feeling, to be experienced, each picture for itself.”85 Any meaning construed from his art, he added—somewhat unrealistically, given the time it took for him to comprehend his own work—should emerge “from the seeing, not from the talking.”86 Heidegger felt the same: “the poet should create, not talk.”87 Philosophical questions, he maintained, are amenable neither to clear explanation nor deductive reasoning. Just as Newman insisted that a “painting itself speaks for itself,”88 Heidegger felt that gaining access to a work of art requires removing “it from all relations to something other than itself, in order to let it stand on its own for itself alone.”89 The same was true of philosophy, a discipline “grounded only in terms of itself—or else not at all, just as art reveals its truth only through itself.”90 Not surprisingly, the crucial question of Being resists explanation or paraphrase; the “isness” of Being can only be stated tautologically: Sein ist Sein (Being is Being).91 Perhaps this very tolerance of ambiguity contributed to the consternation Newman and Heidegger have generated even among professional art historians and philosophers. George Steiner went so far as to propose that Heidegger avoided being understood in the conventional sense. His discourse does not solicit understanding, he suggests, as much as an acceptance “of felt strangeness.”92 Heidegger would not have disagreed. “[A] kind of thinking has become necessary,” he mused, where, as in the paintings of Paul Klee or the poetry of Georg Trakl, “we should then have to abandon any claim to immediate intelligibility.”93 Predictably, many of Heidegger’s efforts after the 1927 publication of Being and Time revolved around the elucidation of poetry, reminding his readers of “the essential and initial connection” between poetry and philosophy.94 Being philosophically inclined, Newman would have sympathized with any collapse between philosophy and poetry, and with the view that the meanings of works of art are not verbally transcribable. If he took nearly a year to discern the full implications of Onement I, or the completion of four canvases to conceptualize the theme of the Stations of the Cross cycle,95 then the construction of meaning, far from preordained in his mind, fermented over long periods of time. “The verbalized title,” he admitted, “comes after I’ve finished.”96 Since he neither made sketches nor worked from preliminary drawings, his mode of execution qualifies as open-ended, a condition pertaining no less to the artist’s process of ascribing meaning. “Just as I affect the canvas,” Newman conceded, “so does the canvas affect me.”97 During this process of give-and-take, Newman could hardly have anticipated how his works would affect him. No more predictable,

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the discerning of meaning was a delicate operation, one to which the expression “the experience of felt strangeness” seems not altogether inappropriate.98 From this perspective, Newman and Heidegger mirror each other perfectly: as Newman nudged art in the direction of philosophy, Heidegger nudged philosophy in the direction of art. Not that Newman’s work is philosophy any more than Heidegger’s poetry. Though inclined to draw parallels, Heidegger segregated both idioms: even the most rigorous philosophical thought “is never poetic art. Likewise, a poet’s work—like Hölderlin’s hymns—can be thoughtful in the highest degree, and yet it is never philosophy.”99 In respecting the integrity of, yet in eroding the barriers between, disciplines, Newman and Heidegger questioned the autonomy of their respective fields. Admittedly, these realignments came at a price. The present consensus in the humanities is that art is inherently ambiguous, a condition that, if it pertains to art in general, pertains even more so to abstract art. Newman, however, is asking us to interpret abstract art from a philosophical perspective, a perspective where, conventionally speaking, ambiguity is no virtue. One thinks of the letter Newman coauthored with Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, where the three men defended their right as artists to make “the spectator see the art their way not his way.”100 From the other side, by abjuring claims to immediate intelligibility, Heidegger transgresses expectations by relinquishing the very clarity and deductive logic expected from philosophical reasoning. Violating our assumptions about their disciplines, Newman and Heidegger meet in a no-man’s-land that is neither art nor philosophy but a hybrid of both. Again, Steiner’s “felt strangeness” comes to mind. Yet what if a certain pattern could be detected in Heidegger’s tortuous language, a pattern that, if persuasively elucidated, might explain the difficulty of his thought? And could a similar pattern, given the connection Heidegger himself drew between poetry and philosophy, be discernible in the way Newman constructed the meaning of his own canvases? Such a project would, granted, rest on speculative ground, but if such logic could be identified, perhaps the difficulty of reading Heidegger and interpreting Newman may be attributed to similar causes, and resolved in similar ways. In which case, investigating Newman and Heidegger in tandem may hold another advantage; not only will their common interests emerge in sharper focus, but such an investigation may also further our understanding of how both men formulated meaning. The obscurity of Heidegger’s writing, for example, stems from his strong reliance on metaphor. Though hardly surprising given his interests, heavy doses of metaphor impede the clarity of his exposition. How, for example, is one to interpret sentences such as “language is the house of Being,”101 “Man is the shepherd of Being,”102 or “awe clears and enfolds that region of human being within which man endures, as at home, in the enduring?” 103 Instead of using

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concrete examples, Heidegger, as William Lovitt explains, betrays “a poet’s ear for language and often writes in a poetic way.”104 Newman, incidentally, was no less interested in the evocative potential of poetry and metaphor; modern painting, he declared, was “an attempt to change painting into a poetic language, to make the pigment expressive rather than representational.”105 The titles of his works, he interjected, functioned as a “metaphor that describes my feelings when I did the painting.”106 This shared interest partly explains the difficulty of Newman’s and Heidegger’s work. Not that metaphor is incompatible with intellectual rigor; as Steven Pinker put it, “Metaphor is so widespread in language that it’s hard to find expressions for abstract ideas that are not metaphorical.”107 Yet metaphor is often slippery and polyvalent, at the mercy of what its employers have in mind (“metaphorical meaning,” John Searle contends, “is always speaker’s utterance meaning”108). But if a particular logic could be shown to underpin the structure of metaphor, that logic may yet advance the interpretation of both Newman’s and Heidegger’s distinct verbal and pictorial styles. Intriguingly, though metaphor has defied many attempts to comprehend and codify its workings, contemporary cognitive linguists have convincingly argued that predictable patterns do indeed constrain metaphors. Eve Sweetser, for one, postulated that metaphors developed logically from literal to figurative expressions. Verbs such as “to see,” “to grasp,” or “to capture” were first used to describe literal states of affairs in the world: we see a person, we grasp an object, or we capture an animal. As languages became more intricate and sophisticated, these same literal expressions became applicable to the more subjective realms of emotion and psychology. Accordingly, the physical acts of seeing, grasping, or capturing were enlisted to express, if only metaphorically, the more intangible, intellectual acts of expressing or understanding. Consequently, English has developed expressions such as “I see your point,” “I am finally grasping what you are saying,” or “the artist has effectively captured this expression.” Not only may physical activities be appropriated to convey the more abstract realm of emotion or psychology, but this appropriation also imposes certain constraints. In turn, these constraints predetermine whether a particular expression will be successful or not. Although the phrase “I see your point” does not express a literal relationship—seeing is not literally like understanding—the relationship “makes sense” because we derive an inordinate amount of information from our sense of sight. “Seeing,” therefore, strikes us as a more appropriate way of evoking understanding than, say, running or jumping. This process explains why metaphors, though subjective, are not completely arbitrary; English, after all, has developed expressions such as “I see your point” rather than “I run your point,” most likely because running lends itself to different forms of metaphorical mapping: by denoting guided activity and forward momentum,

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it engendered expressions such as “I run a company” or “the president runs the government.” As Sweetser argues, metaphors connect physical with intellectual activities (seeing with understanding, or running with governing) because they can be construed as “equivalent,” or because they have “experiential links” in common. Though these links are hardly literal in any sense of the word, they allow metaphor to function as an intelligible means of communication; in fact, similar patterns are detectable across many languages and cultures, with the use of the physical to evoke the psychological recurring with remarkable frequency. Experiential links, of course, are difficult to define with precision. In accordance with Sweetser’s hypothesis, the linguist Jean Mandler argued that many semantic and syntactic meanings expressed in language “are based on spatial representations.”109 Spatial relationships, she submits, “are particularly important in learning the relational aspects of language, such as the meaning of verbs and grammatical relations.”110 When children are first confronted with an abstract idea such as time, it is easier, Mandler observes, to visualize objects moving along physical paths than to conceptualize time in the abstract. If a child’s conceptual vocabulary is initially spatial, “the easiest way to handle more difficult conceptualizations would be to use the spatial conceptions that have already been formed.”111 These recent hypotheses can be fruitfully applied to the interpretation of both Newman’s paintings and Heidegger’s philosophy. In Heidegger’s case, statements such as “language is the house of Being,” “man is the shepherd of Being,” or “awe clears and enfolds that region of human being within which man endures, as at home, in the enduring,” may, at first, seem completely unintelligible. But these sentences lend themselves to more concrete interpretation against the backdrop of Sweetser’s or Mandler’s analyses. Each phrase employs a spatial situation to convey an abstract idea: language is a house, human existence shepherding, and endurance a physical space. When Heidegger calls language “the house of Being,” he does not mean that language is a physical object with windows and doors. What he means is that since only human beings ponder the question of existence, and since this pondering occurs through language, then language is the conduit through which this question is raised. If we express the nature of our existence within the parameters of language, then those parameters can be said to “house” that question, just as a human being dwells (i.e., is “at home”) within an architectural structure. Notice that “being at home” also provides a perfect example of Sweetser’s argument; in fact, Heidegger made a similar point while interpreting Hölderlin’s poetry: “Here ‘the house’ means the space opened up for a people as a place in which they can be ‘at home.’ . . . What remains preserved, safe and sound, is ‘homelike’ in its essence.”112 Similarly, when Heidegger calls man the “shepherd of Being,” the implication is that since human beings—unlike things, plants, and animals—do not simply exist but, by dint of mindful self-awareness, inter-

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rogate the problem of their own existence, then the responsibility of pondering that fundamental question falls squarely on them. They must accept this task diligently, cognizant of the seriousness of the charge bestowed upon them—just as a shepherd accepts the responsibility of nurturing his flock.113 Finally, in “man endures as at home, in the enduring,” Heidegger is relying on a common tendency to refer to psychological states as if they were physical containers: we often say that someone is “in” a depression, “in” a good mood, has fallen “in” love, is “out” of his mind, has “taken leave” of his senses. Because they have tangible boundaries, and establish inside-versus-outside relations, containers prove amenable to communicate the psychological effects of emotions; likewise, the expression “feeling at home” extends beyond one’s domicile to denote any general feeling of comfort. Thus, when Heidegger contends that man “endures, as at home, in the enduring,” he is suggesting that we endure the difficulty of existence in the same way as we “reside in” an emotional state (such as being “in love” or “in a bad mood”), and, moreover, that this condition can become habitual or routine, so much so that we easily lose sight of its meaning and begin to feel “at home” within it. When he suggests that “awe clears and enfolds that region of human being within which man endures, as at home, in the enduring,” he is proposing that an intense and powerful sense of awe may dispel that complacency and reawaken our sensitivity to the plight of existence. Recent findings from cognitive linguistics thus supply constructive tools in deciphering the logic underlying Heidegger’s particular language. Although Sweetser’s approach provides no guarantee of interpreting the philosopher as he himself intended, it dovetails nicely with Heidegger’s similar cognizance (even if he never explained the phenomenon quite as clearly) of metaphor’s ability to enlist the physical to evoke the psychological. Drawing correlations between thinking and poetry, for example, the philosopher intimated that both belonged to the same “neighborhood,” explaining how the meaning of the term derives from physical relationships: “Neighborliness, dwelling in nearness, receives its definition from nearness.”114 The correlation between the physical and psychological is also crucial to Newman’s way of constructing meaning, especially as the difficulty of interpreting his abstractions is comparable to that of interpreting Heidegger’s philosophy, except in reverse. Instead of translating intellectual ideas into physical relationships, we are now asked to read physical relationships (color and composition) in terms of intellectual ideas. In both cases, using a literal situation, albeit metaphorically, to signify a philosophical condition is remarkably similar.115 If Heidegger referenced a house to communicate the interdependence of language and Being, or shepherding to impart our responsibility to ponder existence, Newman employed extended fields of color punctuated by vertical stripes to convey metaphysical concepts. He even expressed the ability of the physical to evoke the metaphysical in a way that tallies with Sweetser’s: “What

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I’m saying is that my painting is physical and what I’m saying also is that my painting is metaphysical. What I’m also saying is that my life is physical and that my life is also metaphysical.”116 Again, Heidegger voiced a similar thought: man is “the passing from the physical to the non-physical, the supra-physical: thus man is the metaphysical.”117 This duality is further strengthened in the following passage: “Although poets . . . are thus essentially ‘spiritual’ themselves, they must at the same time also remain immersed and captive within what is real.”118 That a painting is physical is, of course, a rather banal observation; as is the proposition that metaphysical ideas (since they are endowed with neither physical shape nor extension) can only be evoked in art if transcribed in some physical way. What is less than obvious is how such a transcription takes place; Sweetser’s analysis of metaphorical projection provides an explanatory framework within which that very transcription can be seen in operation. On this account, the physical relationships Newman composed on canvas served as the literal basis for the metaphysical meanings he later projected onto them: physical space, to his mind, became metaphysical. When pondering the implications of Onement, or when admitting that just as he affected the canvas, the canvas affected him, Newman must have carefully considered, or “weighed,” the physical sensations the canvas elicited in him. These sensations, in turn, prompted his construction of meaning just as the literal expression “to grasp an animal” prompted the metaphorical expression “to grasp a meaning.” If our physical experiences constrain metaphorical projections (permitting certain expressions but not others), Newman must have been similarly constrained when conceptualizing the meanings of his works. In this way, Newman’s and Heidegger’s acts of metaphorical translation echo each other; if Newman insisted upon his works’ physical and metaphysical character, Heidegger insisted that “metaphysics is just as much ‘physics’ as physics is ‘metaphysics.’”119 This very symmetry makes Heidegger, in spite of his difficulty, useful in interpreting Newman, not only because his philosophy addresses similar questions but also because both men also communicated philosophical ideas along metaphorical lines. To put it differently, since both men are interested in similar ideas, and since both express these ideas metaphorically, then assessing how Heidegger verbalizes philosophical points supplies a model to evaluate the formal relationships on Newman’s canvases—specifically, their susceptibility to metaphorical projection and amenability to communicate meaning. It could be said, ironically enough, that Heidegger proves useful in interpreting Newman, not in spite of his difficulty, but because of his difficulty. Were it not for the challenge of reading Heidegger’s prose, investigating the connections between him and Newman might have remained simply on the level of meaning proper, and would have provided scant clues as to how both men encoded that meaning.

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The polyvalence of metaphor—its ability to enlist the physical to express either the mutability of emotional states or the rigors of intellectual concepts— also allowed Newman and Heidegger to move indiscriminately between both domains. Even as the philosophy of one, or the art of the other, is often described as highly cerebral, neither judged intellectual qualities to be incompatible with the communication of moods and attunements, which, in fact, are guiding principles in Heidegger’s definition of Being. “Only where the intensity is higher,” he declared, “is there depth.”120 His writings are replete with references to intense emotions such as awe, astonishment, dread, terror, and so on. Of course, Heidegger’s view of moods is rather idiosyncratic, even opposed to the conventional view of feelings as psychological concepts. For him, anxiety and awe are not just emotions but ways of Being. The same may be said of Newman. His insistence that “modern art is abstract, intellectual,”121 did not preclude him from asserting, “My concern is with the fullness that comes from emotion. . . . I work only out of high passion.”122 And when he described Peter Kropotkin’s responses to certain events in his life, Newman declared that he was “in them as the existentialist man observing his own drama, not as a narcissistic exercise looking at his self-image. . . . What comes through is a heightened state of ‘being.’”123 Newman even called his art “abstract yet full of feeling, capable of expressing the most abstruse philosophic thought.”124 For both men, emotion and intellect were not incompatible,125 and, in a way, metaphor’s very flexibility served their communicative demands especially well, providing a framework wherein concerns such as beginnings, presence, place, alienation, death, freedom, the oppressiveness of technology, the relationship of Being to time, the tragedy of fate, and humanity’s relationship with God could all be communicated through Heidegger’s poetical verbal prose, or projected upon the stark austerity of Newman’s highly reductive visual vocabulary. Before proceeding, a final note of clarification is needed. Translations of Heidegger’s work in English vary widely. Sometimes Da-sein is translated as “being-there,” and sometimes it is left in the original German. Sometimes Dasein is hyphenated, sometimes not; sometimes Being is capitalized, sometimes not. In this book, following Joan Stambaugh’s more recent translation of Being and Time, the term “Da-sein” will be maintained and hyphenated, and when the term Being will be capitalized, it will distinguish Being (as denoting existence) from being (as denoting a physical entity). Whenever Heidegger will be cited from diverse English translations, however, the spelling will remain unchanged, and, as a result, the reader will encounter many citations where Da-sein is not hyphenated and where Being is not capitalized. These inconsistencies may no doubt confuse the reader, but there was no way to resolve them without adapting the unsatisfactory solution of altering the original citations themselves.

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Notes 1. Yve-Alain Bois, “Here to There and Back,” Artforum 40 (March 2002): 106. 2. Barnett Newman, “The Plasmic Image” (1945), in Richard Shiff (ed.), Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Knopf, 1990), 140. (Hereafter referred to as SWI.) 3. See also Richard Hooker, “Sublimity as Process: Hegel, Newman and Shave,” Art & Design 10 (January–February 1995): 49. 4. See, for example, Susan Tallman, “Tempest over Slashed Newman,” Art in America 80 (February 1992): 27, and also Erik Anderson-Reece, “Who’s Afraid of Corporate Culture: The Barnett Newman Controversy,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51 (Winter 1993): 49–57. 5. See Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbault, and John O’Brian (eds.), Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power, and the State (Toronto: University Of Toronto Press, 1996). 6. See Hess’s early reviews: “Barnett Newman,” ART News 49 (March 1950): 48; and “Barnett Newmann” [sic], ART News 50 (June/August 1951): 47. 7. Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World. Meaning in Abstract Art,” New Yorker 1, January 1972, 46. 8. Jeremy Lewison, Looking at Barnett Newman (London: August Media, 2002), 7. 9. Jean-François Lyotard, “Newman: The Instant,” in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 241–42. 10. See Paul Crowther’s essay “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” Oxford Art Journal 7:2 (1984): 57. 11. See, for example, Elizabeth C. Baker, “Barnett Newman in a New Light,” Art News 69 (February 1969): 38–41, 60–62, 64. 12. John Canaday, “With Pretty Thorough Execution: Newman and Alloway Provide the Rope,” The New York Times, April 23, 1966, 26. For more on the antagonistic relationship between Canaday and Newman, see Sarah Katherine Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, PhD thesis, Yale University, 1999, 195–97. 13. Peter Halley and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “On Barnett Newman,” Parkett 16 (1988): 19. 14. “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango” Critical Inquiry 21 (Spring 1995): 562. Leja’s argument, however, that Newman’s lack of acceptance can be mainly ascribed to his striking a patriarchal stance, and unwillingness to acknowledge psychological pluralism, or accept the female characteristics of his own personality, seems a little overdetermined. 15. I do not want to suggest that Newman and Heidegger have never been mentioned in tandem before. But the connection has barely been explored. In Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 75, Thomas B. Hess mentioned it, almost dismissively, in a footnote. Arthur Danto, in The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2003), 158, drew a connection between Newman’s idea of place and Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, but restricted himself to a single sentence. The most scholars have dedicated to exploring the connection is a paragraph or two: see, for example, Lewison in Looking at Barnett Newman, 19, Ulf Poschardt in

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“Das Erhabene ist jetzt,” Kunsforum International 150 (April/June 2000): 291, and Sarah Katherine Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 326–27. In Au service du sacré: Sauter à l’angle moderne Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Barnett Newman (Mayet: Editions du Grand Est, 2007), Fabrice Midal includes a section on Newman and one on Heidegger, but never thinks to discuss any connection between them. 16. See Martin Woessner, Heidegger in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 17. Willem de Kooning, conversation with Irving Sandler, cited in Sandler’s The Triumph of American Painting (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 98. 18. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Existenz Philosophy?” Partisan Review 13 (Winter 1946): 34–56. 19. William Barrett, What Is Existentialism?, PR Series, Number Two (New York: Partisan Review, 1947), 24. 20. Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), 149. 21. See Woessner, Heidegger in America, 109. 22. See Irving Sandler, “The Club,” Artforum IV (September 1965): 30. 23. Heinrich Blücher letter to Hannah Arendt, January 3, 1950, in Lotte Kohler (ed.), Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936–1968 (New York: Harcourt, 1996), 115. 24. Karl Löwith, “Heidegger: Problem and Background of Existentialism,” Social Research 15 (1948): 346. Intriguingly, Löwith, who was Jewish, had also written another essay comparing Heidegger to Franz Rosenzweig (“M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 [September 1942]: 53–77), and briefly mentioned the possibility of Heidegger’s links to the Nazi regime, but without any condemnation. He reserved his most brutal condemnation in an essay he published in Les Temps modernes in November 1946 titled “Les implications politiques de la philosophie de l’existence chez Heidegger.” For a translation, see Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 167–85. 25. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, 214–15. See also Valerie Hellstein, Grounding the Social Aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism: A New Intellectual History of The Club, PhD diss., Stony Brook University, 2010. 26. Philip Pavia, cited in Natalie Edgar (ed.), Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia (New York: Midmarch Press, 2007), 72. 27. Club Without Walls, 179. 28. Club Without Walls, 138. 29. Lionel Abel, “Scenes from the Cedar Bar,” Commentary 74 (December 1982): 42. 30. Werner Brock (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being (Chicago: Gateway, 1949). 31. In conversation with Sarah Rich, the artist’s widow, Annalee Newman, related that, prior to 1959, as he was making more money as a painter, Newman could not afford to buy books, and relied on the New York Public Library instead. See Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 315.

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32. See, for example, Kurt Reinhardt, “Existence and Being. By Martin Heidegger,” New Scholasticism 25 (1951): 351–57; Robert Cumming, “Existence and Being: Martin Heidegger’s Einfluss auf die Wissenschaften,” Journal of Philosophy 48 (February 15, 1951): 102–6; and Marvin Farber, “Existence and Being,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 12 (June 1952): 580–81. 33. See J. Glenn Gray, “Heidegger’s ‘Being,’” Journal of Philosophy 49 (June 5, 1952): 415–22; Walter H. Cerf, “An Approach to Heidegger’s Ontology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (December 1940): 177–90; Marjorie Glicksman, “A Note on the Philosophy of Heidegger,” Journal of Philosophy 35 (February 17, 1938): 93–104; Guenther Stern (Anders), “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (March 1948): 337–71; and W. H. Werkmeister, “An Introduction to Heidegger’s ‘Existential Philosophy’,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (September 1941): 79–87. Intriguingly, from this early moment on, the responses are remarkably diverse. While Gray and Cerf are very positive, Glicksman and Stern are very negative, and Werkmeister ambivalent. 34. I would like to express my gratitude to Richard Shiff for having brought this fact to my attention. 35. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 174. (Hereafter referred to as IM) 36. Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 113; see also Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (eds.), The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920–1963) (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), 159; Ulrich Sieg, “‘Die Verjudung des deutschen Geistes’: Ein unbekannter Brief Heideggers,” Die Zeit, December 29, 1989, 50; and Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie. Autour des seminaires inédits de 1933–1935 (Paris, Albin Michel, 2005), esp. 57ff and 158ff. In a letter written to Victor Schwoerer in October 1929, Heidegger complained of the “growing Jewish contamination” of “our German spiritual life.” See Manfred Stassen (ed.), Martin Heidegger Philosophical and Political Writings (New York: German Library, 2003), 1. 37. Karl Jaspers, “Letter to the Freiburg University DeNazification Committee,” December 22, 1945, in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 148. Heidegger, however, did not raise objections about Brock’s dismissal. 38. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 256. Admittedly, it is conceivable that, by this remark, Heidegger was attempting to distance Spinoza from Jewish thought. In Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambauch (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 67, Heidegger writes that “we must emphasize that Spinoza’s philosophy cannot be equated with Jewish philosophy. Alone the familiar fact that Spinoza was evicted from the Jewish community is significant. His philosophy is essentially determined by the spirit of the time, Bruno, Descartes, and medieval scholasticism.” 39. See Barbara Cavaliere, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Vir Heroicus Sublimis’: Building the ‘Idea Complex,’” Arts Magazine 55 (January 1981): 145. 40. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 83: “The

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abandonment of being is the ground and thus also the more originary and essential determination of that which Nietzsche recognized for the first time as nihilism. Still, how little he himself and his strength succeeded in forcing Western Dasein to a mindful thinking on nihilism.” For an analysis of Heidegger’s changing views of Nietzsche, see Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 84ff. 41. See Faye, Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, 407ff. 42. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 268. See also Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 254ff. 43. See, for example, Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 288. 44. Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporality and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (September 1942): 53–77. 45. See “Les implications politiques de la philosophie de l’existence chez Heidegger,” Les Temps modernes, November 1946. For a translation, see Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 167–85. 46. To this list, one could also add Hans Jonas, who, like Löwith, Marcuse, and Arendt, were Jewish students of Heidegger. For a penetrating analysis of their relationship to their teacher, see Richard Wolin, Heidegger’s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 47. See, for example, Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 166ff or 204ff. 48. W. J. Korab-Karpowicz, “Heidegger’s Hidden Path: From Philosophy to Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 61 (December 2007): 296. 49. Pierre Bourdieu, “Back to History,” in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 267. 50. Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag, 1986), 57; My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 60; see also de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political (London: Routledge, 1997), 11. 51. See, for example, Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 260. 52. Intriguingly, Béatrice Han-Pile’s recent essay, “Describing Reality or Disclosing Worldhood? Vermeeer and Heidegger,” in Joseph D. Parry (ed.), Art and Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2011), 138–61, also relies on Being and Time and barely on Heidegger’s aesthetics. 53. SWI, 136. 54. See also Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, “En quête de l’infini: Une rencontre imaginaire entre E. Levinas et B. Newman,” Ligeia 21 (January–June 2008): 182–85. 55. SWI, 72. 56. SWI, 147. 57. SWI, 147. 58. SWI, 149. 59. SWI, 141. 60. This is not to say that Newman’s writings are always very clear. As Michael Zakian said of Newman’s essay, “The Sublime is Now,” “Ideas are often introduced without sufficient explanation. Words appear in unusual contexts, without definition. Most vex-

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ing is Newman’s habit of employing a single term to both laud and disparage. He would also make arbitrary distinctions that are not clarified.” See Zakian, “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” Arts Magazine 62 (February 1988): 34. 61. Pierre Schneider, “Flat Forms, Deep Thoughts: Newman on Géricault,” in Melissa Ho (ed.), Reconsidering Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 132. 62. Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1996, xv; Richard Shiff, “To Create Oneself,” in Richard Shiff, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, and Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 32. 63. John McLaughlin, “Statement,” November 20, 1955, Dana Point, California, cited in John McLaughlin (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1956), unpaginated. 64. See Richard Shiff, “Whiteout: The Not-Influence Newman Effect,” in Ann Temkin (ed.), Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 77–111; “A New Way of Drawing,” in Shiff, Mancusi-Ungaro, and Colsman-Freyberger, Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, 70ff; and Sarah Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 37ff. 65. Donald Judd, “Barnett Newman,” Studio International 179 (February 1970): 67–69. 66. See also Sarah K. Rich, “Bridging the Generation Gaps in Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue?” American Art 19 (Fall 2005): 16–39. 67. SWI, 289. 68. Annette Cox put it this way: “As an abstract artist who employed imagery that had no relationship to the objects of the visible world, Newman composed his works without readily accessible clues to their meaning. On their surfaces there lies no hint of the goals that the artist had in mind or that critics . . . imposed on them.” Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant-Garde and Society (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 70. 69. See, for example, Gabriele Schor’s “Barnett Newman’s ‘Here’ Series: A Meditation on Sense of Place, or How Can a Sculpture Say ‘I’?” in Melissa Ho (ed.), Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 152. It should be said, however, that the importance of titles was not fully felt prior, perhaps, to 1946. SWI, 305: “In the beginning, I suppose, I was vague about titles—they did not seem that important to me.” 70. Roelof Louw, “Newman and the Issue of Subject Matter,” Studio International 87 (January 1974): 30. 71. SWI, 187. 72. Barnett Newman interviewed by Joanna and Michael Magloff, August 1963; audiotape, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 73. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 233. (Hereafter referred to as FCM.) 74. Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), 5. 75. In IM, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), Heidegger makes clear that, when asking the question of why there are essents rather

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than nothing, “we mean the essent as a whole, without any special preference. Still, it is noteworthy that in this questioning one kind of essent persists in coming to the fore, namely the men who ask the question.” 76. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 79. 77. What Is Called Thinking?, 79–80. 78. SWI, 288. 79. IM, 45. 80. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 33. 81. Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, 12, 13–14. 82. IM, 84. 83. Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, xvii. 84. SWI, 281. 85. SWI, 178. 86. SWI, 251. 87. FCM, 154. 88. Interview for Brazilian Broadcasting, 1965, audiotape, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 89. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstader, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 39. 90. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 10. Heidegger also wrote that philosophy “can be determined only from out of itself and as itself—comparable with nothing else in terms of which it could be positively determined. In that case philosophy is something that stands on its own, something ultimate” (FCM, 2). 91. George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (London: Penguin Books, 1980), 154. 92. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 11. 93. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 2. 94. IM, 164. 95. See Lawrence Alloway, Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1966), and Jane Dillenberger, “The Stations of the Cross by Barnett Newman,” in Secular Art with Sacred Themes (Nashville: Abingdon Press: 1969), 100. Intriguingly, Newman thought the first two were going to be named Adam and Eve: Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 94ff. 96. SWI, 258. 97. SWI, 189. 98. As Mark Godfrey stated, with respect to Newman’s titles for his Stations of the Cross, it was never “a matter of either form or iconography but of affect.” Godfrey, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross’ and the Memory of the Holocaust,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 49. 99. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 329. 100. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (with the assistance of Barnett Newman), letter to Edward Alden Jewell, art editor, New York Times, June 7, 1943, reprinted in

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Lawrence Alloway and Mary Davis MacNaughton, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective (New York: Arts Publisher, 1981), 169. 101. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in David Farrell Krell, ed. and trans. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 213. 102. “Letter on Humanism,” 221. 103. What is Metaphysics,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 355. 104. William Lovitt, “Introduction,” to Martin Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), xix. 105. SWI, 88. 106. Barnett Newman quoted in T. B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 80. 107. Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2007), 6. 108. John Searle, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 77. 109. Jean M. Mandler, “Preverbal Representation and Language,” in Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garett (eds.), Language and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 365. 110. Jean M. Mandler, “Preverbal Representation and Language,” 375. 111. “Preverbal Representation and Language,” 374. 112. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000), 35, 36. (Hereafter referred to as EHP.) 113. J. Glenn Gray, “Heidegger’s ‘Being,’” Journal of Philosophy 49 (June 5, 1952): 416: “man does not create Being, but he is responsible for it since, without his thinking and remembering, Being has no illumination, no voice, no word.” 114. On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 95. (Hereafter referred to as OWL.) 115. See also The Courage To Be, where Tillich writes, “Ontology speaks analogously. Being as being transcends objectivity as well as subjectivity. But in order to approach it cognitively one must use both. . . . The ontological concepts referred to . . . must be understood not literally but analogously. This does not mean that they have been produced arbitrarily and can easily be replaced by other concepts. Their choice is a matter of experience and thought, and subject to criteria which determine the adequacy or inadequacy of each of them” (25). 116. SWI, 280. 117. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 58. 118. EHP, 86. 119. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 185. Intriguingly, a parallel may be detected here between Heidegger and Schopenhauer. In The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), Vol. II, 175, Schopenhauer writes, “Everything physical is . . . metaphysical also.” 120. FCM, 129. 121. SWI, 67.

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SWI, 248. SWI, 48–49. SWI, 69. SWI, 282.

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CHAPTER 2

Beginnings

If Sweetser’s account of metaphor assists an interpretation of Newman and Heidegger, it is not simply because one employed physical situations, and other formal relationships on a canvas, to express metaphysical ideas; it is also because both engaged in a strikingly similar kind of etymological study. Both investigated the origins of words, parsed their implications, and claimed to discover more profound layers of meaning in their first incarnations, incarnations where, more often than not, physical situations were described literally. To select the most appropriate title for his signature image (figure 2.1), Newman latched on to the term “Onement,” the archaic version of “atonement.” The choice raises two questions. First, if onement signifies atonement, why use the archaic form? Second, how is the state of atonement communicated by a vertical stripe? Thinking along Sweetserian lines, Newman perhaps judged the older version to convey more concretely how atoning for one’s transgressions is predicated upon being in a state of “harmony” and “wholeness.”1 The older term, in effect, underscores more forcibly the connection between the emotional state of atonement and the physical state of being “one.” Individuals “at one” with themselves live in a state of harmony and commit to the task without reservation. By contrast, a person conflicted or shaken by doubt may atone in a hollow and disingenuous way. Genuine atonement thus requires “harmony,” “wholeness,” and “oneness.” Accordingly, the unitary vertical stripe in Onement I, though frayed and fragile, echoes the posture of an upright, resolute, and unconflicted human being. Standing out dramatically against its darker background, it serves, or so Newman reasoned, as an appropriate form upon which he could project his view of the resolve with which one must approach the act of making amends. Relying on an older archaic term is no isolated incident in Newman’s work. Though displaying none of the academic self-consciousness of present-day linguists, Newman also stressed how language enlists physical activities to describe 27

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Figure 2.1. Barnett Newman, Onement I (1948), oil on canvas and oil on masking tape, 27.25  16.25 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

intellectual concepts: “The word ‘critic’ comes from the Greek and it means to separate. In art criticism, I suppose the problem is to separate the good from the bad.”2 Like Sweetser, Newman insinuates that conjuring the intellectual activity of criticism is contingent upon, and was extrapolated from, the physical activity of separating objects from one another. Intriguingly, Heidegger also believed that the etymological origins of words betray more profound meanings, and even mentioned the very same term chosen by Newman: “What does ‘critique’ mean? The word comes from the Greek [for] ‘to separate,’ that is, to set something off from something—in most cases something lower from something higher.”3 Heidegger equally acknowledged that the term “meta-physics” denotes a form of inquiry that goes “trans, beyond—what-is as such. Metaphysics is an enquiry over and above what-is.”4 Such observations are pervasive in Heidegger; William Lovitt remarked how replete his philosophical terminology is with words that convey strong spatial connotations (“into,” “from,” “out of,” “toward,” “forth,” and “hither”).5 Yet Newman and Heidegger were not satisfied with exposing links between physical and intellectual situations in language; to their minds, tracing words back to their first incarnations revealed meanings whose power and profundity were gradually being eroded—what Theodor Adorno called “the silent identification of the archaic with the genuine.”6 We cannot understand the word “to build,” Heidegger claims, without realizing

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that, in Old High German, the word originally meant “to dwell”—namely, “to remain, to stay in place.” The proper meaning, the philosopher professes, is “lost to us.”7 These original implications disclose an order of experience (i.e., dwelling, feeling at home, being comfortable) appropriate to buildings as opposed to other objects, and although all manner of objects exist in space, it is only inside buildings that human beings can legitimately be said to dwell. This is the very kind of originary meaning, lost over time, which Newman’s and Heidegger’s employment of archaic expressions are ostensibly attempting to recover. For Heidegger, losing cognizance of fundamental meanings has a host of unexpectedly dire consequences. “[W]ords are constantly thrown around on the cheap,” he insists, “and in the process are worn out.”8 When the Greek word physis (the existent) is translated as “nature” (from the Latin natura), Heidegger sees the original meaning “thrust aside,” the philosophical force of the Greek word “destroyed.” Far from “harmless,” the mistranslation “marks the first stage in the process by which we cut ourselves off and alienate ourselves from the original essence of Greek philosophy.”9 Greater sensitivity to the earliest meanings would, or so he believed, counteract this alienation and bring us closer to the essence of things. Given Newman’s own references to etymological origins, one suspects that his own employment of “onement” served a similar purpose: to convey steadfastness and resolve more poignantly than “atonement.” Newman also referenced archaic terms while expounding on his architectural designs. A synagogue, he contends, “is more than just a House of Prayer. It is a place, Makom, where each man may be called up to stand before the Torah to read his portion.”10 The purpose of Newman’s art was to create, not just a physical environment, but a place where one knows where one stands and acknowledges one’s responsibilities. How this process comes about is not exactly clear, but notice how rituals transform a synagogue into something more than just a physical location, just as dwelling in a home makes it more than a physical site. Similarly, Newman hoped the reddish, vertical line in Onement, standing dramatically against its dark background, would visualize the unity and resolve necessary to atone, a state of mind comparable to a sense of responsibility—a pledge—before whom one stands. Reading “one’s portion” before a congregation (or before God) also requires clarity of purpose, a sense of conviction comparable to the one with which individuals atone for their sins. The image of a standing human being reciting the Torah, endowed with the harmony and wholeness conveyed by the term “onement,” thus connotes the concentration of a solitary person, standing before all, engaging in a symbolic ritual. On one level, of course, the act of standing simply describes a physical posture (“he stands by the door” or “we stand in line”), but expressions such as “stand up and be counted,” “I stand by what I said,” or “stand for something” identify distinguishing traits of character, traits that separate certain individuals

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from others, no less than objects that “stand out” are distinguished from their surroundings. Newman, it seems, did not simply wish to portray an image of wholeness or oneness, he wanted his spectators to feel whole, to be at one with themselves, just as a person does while atoning or standing before a congregation. As Gottfried Boehm has it, Newman’s work “is an appeal to viewers: they are told to stand up, to hold themselves upright.”11 The image of the human being “standing out” also appears in Heidegger, though the point of reference is not Judaism but Greek philosophy (of which, as we shall see, Newman was equally fond). Newman, in fact, discerned compelling parallels between Greek and Judaic ideas.12 Our tragedy, he wrote, is one “of action in the chaos that is society (it is interesting that this Greek idea is also a Hebraic concept).”13 Although we will encounter the concept of tragedy and the individual’s relationship to society in later chapters, this quote is cited at this point to intimate that Newman would have detected no contradiction between the Jewish idea of Makom and what Heidegger was extrapolating from Greek philosophy. The interconnections between standing, speaking, and emotional togetherness specific to Newman’s description of a person reading the Torah also closely align with Heidegger’s analysis of logos. While the Greek term is mostly associated with verbal expression, Heidegger argues that logos originally did not refer to speech.14 Presenting a rather idiosyncratic reading, and recalling the configuration of Onement, Heidegger insists that logos is actually “the intrinsic togetherness of the essent. . . . Logos characterizes being in a new and yet old respect: that which is, which stands straight and distinct in itself, is at the same time gathered togetherness in itself and by itself, and maintains itself in such togetherness.”15 Words such as “gathering” and “togetherness” are significant for Heidegger because Being maintains “in a common bond the conflicting and that which tends apart.” Instead of allowing things to “fall into haphazard dispersion,” the logos sustains bonds, and “does not let what it holds in its power dissolve into an empty freedom from opposition, but by uniting the opposites maintains the full sharpness of their tension.”16 To apprehend truly, the philosopher continues, means “to let something (namely that which shows itself, which appears) come to one. . . . Unity is the belonging-together of antagonisms. This is original oneness.”17 Heidegger’s account of logos parallels the meanings underlying Onement. Our humanity is apparently keenest when we stand by ourselves, gathered and resolved in unified togetherness. The ancient Greek term for being resolute, for being decided, Heidegger adds, has another meaning as well: “‘de-cision’ means to be without a scission from Being.”18 The implication, then, is that in decided resolution, we come closer to Being, to the meaning of existence. It is important to note, however, that, even if “atonement” bespeaks an act to be approached without reservation, as well as a connection to existence, this hardly implies a

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complete elimination of tension and complexity, only a “belonging-together of antagonisms.” In its original sense, oneness is not complete uniformity, but a unity, even a unity of disparate parts. A sincere act of atonement would be meaningless, after all, if no ethical tension or psychological stress were in need of atonement. Even so, we atone in a more meaningful and authentic way when, despite our conflicts, we achieve the condition of oneness, explaining Newman’s preference for the archaic “onement.” If these were indeed his motivations, his reasoning would not be far from Heidegger’s, a thinker who believed that the abuse of thought is “overcome only by authentic thinking that goes back to the roots—and by nothing else.”19 Heidegger even sharpened his inquiry by turning it on itself. By seeking the origin of the very word “origin,” Heidegger discerned how the physical situations evoked by this term uncovered another layer of meaning. As Steiner observed, in German, the word for “origin” or “source” is Herkunft—“literally the place from which we came, the ‘provenance of our coming.’” Related terms such as zurückgerufen and re-klamiert, according to Steiner, carry a physical edge: “There is a ‘re-vocation,’ a ‘summoning back to’ the place of our inception and insuration.”20 The story does not end there; by unearthing the first meanings of “origin,” and by pondering their literalist implications, Heidegger pressed the claim that “the origin of something is the source of its essence.”21 The first meanings, in effect, do not simply enrich our understanding of certain words or concepts—they betray a primordial kernel of reality no longer accessible to us. This explains Heidegger and Newman’s attention to beginnings. While attending to “the early meaning of a word and its changes,” Heidegger posits, we apprehend “that essential realm as the one in which the matter named through the word moves. Only in this way does the word speak, and speak in the complex of meanings into which the matter that is named by it unfolds throughout the history of poetry and thought.”22 If one accepts this reading, then, in employing “Onement,” Newman is saying that the essence of atonement, and, perhaps, of the human being itself, lies in being “one.” It should be interjected, if only parenthetically, that, in the field of linguistics at least, few contemporary scholars would conflate origins with essences. For Sweetser, etymological research revealed the bodily basis of meaning, not the essence of things; Heidegger and Newman may have taken this connection for granted, but it hardly qualifies as an “objective fact” of linguistic analysis. All the same, this prevented Heidegger neither from putting his own interpretive spin on etymological investigations (i.e., associating origins with essences) nor from claiming these essences to contain hermetic layers of meaning that, lost in modern times, are in urgent need of recovery. To his mind, it followed that investigating how human existence was originally conceptualized would also uncover its essence: “Every doctrine of Being is in itself alone a doctrine of man’s

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essential nature.”23 Newman felt the same way. When he spoke of “man’s birthright, his urge to be exalted,” he described human nature in quasi-Heideggerian terms—namely, as something that “even primitive man understood and which modern man seems to have forgotten.”24 In effect, Heidegger and Newman are implying that, unlike “primitive man,” modern humans have forgotten their own essence. Accordingly, Newman praised pre-Columbian sculpture, and the originary character of non-Western art in general, for employing an “abstract quality of formal relationships” that “tells us more of man’s nature than a naturalistic representation of man’s physical contours.”25 Not simply an attempt to exhume obscure terms (as could be said of “onement,” or of Heidegger’s employment of the archaic Seyn instead of Sein26), the recovery of origins provided a means of grasping essences lost to modern individuals. “Essential thinking,” Heidegger contends, “must always say only the same, the old, the oldest, the beginning, and must say it primordially.”27 Instructively, the connection between origin and essence pertains as much to the actual content of Heidegger’s philosophy and Newman’s art as to the means both men employed to arrest or forestall the erosion of meaning. That content was the birth of things: of language, thought, matter, and humanity itself. Revisiting the competitive analogy between artistic and divine creation voiced by Renaissance artists, Newman evoked the biblical account of the earth’s creation in paintings such as Genesis—The Break (figure 2.2) and Pagan Void (figure 2.3), or of God’s separation of light from darkness in The Beginning (figure 2.4) and Moment (figure 2.5). Neither the imitation of natural forms nor the idealized representation of human beings made in God’s image held any interest for Newman. Instead, he focused on God’s first acts: the emergence out of nothing of light, form, and substance—entities that, by virtue of being somewhat nebulous, required an abstract formal language. Just as Heidegger assumed that the origin of a word betrayed its essence, so did Newman believe that these images—by emulating God’s creative inventions and conveying the first manifestations of light and matter—would, by analogy, evoke the beginnings (and essence) of creativity itself. “In 1940,” he wrote, “some of us woke . . . to find that painting did not really exist. . . . It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration . . . to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed.”28 As late as the 1960s, he still insisted on starting each piece as if he had never painted before.29 Only by wiping the artistic slate clean, as it were, could Newman capture, or so he believed, the essence of art.30 By bringing the artist “back to first principles” and rediscovering “the original impulse,”31 modern art would express “important truths.”32 To transcribe so primordial a subject as Genesis, and make his images appear as if nothing even remotely comparable had hitherto been created, Newman simplified his visual language and ignored artistic precedents. Ironically, as he admitted himself, approximating the “original” impulse mandated a completely

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Figure 2.2. Barnett Newman, Genesis—The Break (1946), oil on canvas, 24  27 1/8 inches. Dia Center for the Arts, New York © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 2.3. Barnett Newman, Pagan Void (1946), oil on canvas, 33  38 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 2.4. Barnett Newman, The Beginning (1946), oil on canvas, 40  29.75 inches. Art Institute of Chicago. Through prior gift of Mr. and Mrs. Carter H. Harrison, 1989 © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 2.5. Barnett Newman, Moment (1946), oil on canvas, 30  16 inches. Tate Gallery, London. Presented by Mrs. Annalee Newman in honor of the directorship of Sir Alan Bowness, 1988 © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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“new” aesthetic. To simulate “the living quality of creation,” Newman reasoned, “new forms and symbols” were required.33 The quest for origins, then, was more a question of inventing original stylistic solutions than the retrieval of something antecedent. Whether Newman noticed this paradox is impossible to say; perhaps he assumed that, just as God’s creations were wholly original, given that they brought the universe into being, his own emulations of God’s actions had to follow suit. If so, his attitude closely follows Heidegger’s view that the very asking of the question of Being means nothing less than recapturing and repeating “the beginning of our historical-spiritual existence, in order to transform it into a new beginning. . . . But we do not repeat a beginning by reducing it to something past and now known, which need merely be imitated; no, the beginning must be begun again, more radically, with all the strangeness, darkness, insecurity that attend a true beginning.”34 The only way to preserve the power of this beginning, Heidegger continues, “is to repeat it, to retrieve it once gain . . . in its original character, in a more originative way.”35 Newman and Heidegger could not be any closer. If the modern artist can conjure “the ordered truth that is the expression of his attitude towards the mystery of life and death, it can be said,” Newman proclaimed, “that the artist [is] like a true creator . . . for the Creator in creating the world began with the same material.”36 By referencing the subject matter of Genesis, the extreme economy of his designs bespeak Newman’s own attempt to repeat the beginning, to recover how God’s act of bringing the world into being conflates the birth of the world with the beginning of creativity. Given his philosophical interests, it would not be long before Newman shifted his attention to God’s most significant creation: humanity. This orientation re-aligned Newman’s work with what he claimed was the subject of his art: the nature of the self and the plight of the human condition. Genesis provides the appropriate reference point: Adam (figure 2.6), and perhaps Onement as well, evokes God’s creation of man out of clay.37 As Newman himself put it, “my work, although it’s abstract . . . is involved in man.”38 And in keeping with his interest in the etymological origins of words, Newman mused, “The first man was called Adam. ‘Adam’ means earth but it also means ‘red.’” 39 Is Newman’s point to represent Adam by a red stripe? Yes. Harold Rosenberg, a friend of the artist, related how the “isolated vertical stands for the self and for the first, for the conferring of meaning and the origin of substance.”40 As Bois has also observed, the stripe, bilaterally symmetrical, refers “directly to our body structure and to the way we, as humans, organize our perception of the world.”41 Such an act of projection, even on so schematic an image, would have been child’s play for Newman. Human beings, after all, frequently project the structure of a human body on inanimate objects (e.g., the “face” of a clock or the “back” of a chair). A Newman canvas, David Sylvester adds, is also “rigorously related to human scale. Thus we mentally measure the distances between

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Figure 2.6. Barnett Newman, Adam (1951, 1952), oil and magna on canvas, 95 5/8  79 7/8 inches. Tate Gallery, London © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

its verticals in terms of the span of our own reach—by stretching out our arms in imagination, in judging how far they have to be stretched out in order to span that interval.”42 The stripe, then, is meant to refer, on a basic level, to God’s creative act: his own decision to differentiate humanity from the inanimate matter of the earth. Interestingly, Philip Guston (figure 2.7) painted a strikingly similar theme, with—presumably—the hand of God breaking from a menacing cloud to delineate a characteristically Newmanesque line on an expanse of earth. Less literal than Guston, Newman omitted the overpowering presence of the Creator altogether, perhaps because he deemed its inclusion too obvious and therefore unnecessary, or perhaps because he wanted to usurp the place of the Creator himself—an “immodest” and un-Jewish ambition, according to Matthew Baigell.43 Indeed, when compared to The Line, Onement gives the impression that the human presence has neither history nor precedents, that it could have emerged ex nihilo, of its own accord, independently, and without the approval, of a divine intercessor. By asserting its autonomy on its own terms, Newman’s line forms a breach, an “irruption” of existence—of Being among beings, as Heidegger would voice it.44 It is also a demarcation point: it is set and sets itself apart; in coming into Being, it announces its difference from its surroundings, implying, in no uncertain terms, that humanity is qualitatively distinct from the

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Figure 2.7. Philip Guston, The Line (1978), oil on canvas, private collection (see McKee Gallery, New York).

rest of creation.45 Newman’s passages cited above—praising non-Western art for employing an abstract quality that “tells us more of man’s nature than a naturalistic representation of man’s physical contours,”46 and criticizing Western art for diluting the reality of “man’s nature” in favor of a shallow and overly sensual illusionism—reinforce a reading of Adam and Onement as representing the essence of humanity as the artist understood it. Heidegger would have concurred; the point of art, he argued, “is not the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be present at any given time; it is, on the contrary, the reproduction of the thing’s general essence.”47 But if the purpose of art is to reproduce man’s essence, what does this essence consist of? If Newman’s own statements provide any indication, that essence is to be a creator. “What was the first man,” he pondered, “was he a hunter, a toolmaker, a farmer, a worker, a priest, or a politician? Undoubtedly the first man was an artist.”48 Newman’s claim, of course, is hyperbolic, even slightly outrageous—a thoroughly “romanticized anthropology” as Charles Harrison put it49—if only because there is no possible way of corroborating its veracity. Perchance the statement was not meant too literally. Inasmuch as Heidegger singles out humanity as the only species that does not simply exist, but questions its existence (intimating, as Newman did in his own domain, that the first man was

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a philosopher), Newman singles out humanity as the only species that creates art. “Just as man’s first speech was poetic before it became utilitarian,” he writes, “so man first built an idol of mud before he fashioned an ax. Man’s hand traced the stick through the mud to make a line before he learned to throw the stick as a javelin. . . . The artistic act is man’s personal birthright.”50 We may be forced to forgive Heidegger and Newman for ascribing priority to their respective fields, but Newman’s statement is not quite as farfetched as it may seem. Present-day evolutionary biologists argue that the physical dexterity necessary to wield a stick and draw a line is a direct consequence of our upright posture; if our hands still had to bear part of our weight (as is the case for chimpanzees or gorillas), this ability would not have evolved. Analogously, while Neanderthals used tools, and lived at the same time as modern humans, they did not create art; nor did they decorate their dead or bury them in complex constructions.51 It is the consensus among present-day anthropologists, moreover, that nearly all cultures create some form of art and music, perhaps the direct outcome of the significant brain differences of modern humans, evolutionary changes that spawned hitherto unseen abilities: to invent, to use language with complex vocabularies, and to symbolize cultural hierarchies in the form of ornaments. If these activities do mark the arrival of a new species, then Newman’s admittedly highfalutin statement is not quite as ridiculous as it sounds. If art and creativity are unique to us, then it stands to reason that these very same abilities help us define and express who we are. From this perspective, Newman’s sentence could conceivably be recast to mean, not that the first man was literally an artist, but the first hominids to create art were modern humans, not Neanderthals.52 Heidegger came to analogous conclusions. “Apes, too, have organs that can grasp,” he observed, “but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.” The human hand, he continues, “receives and welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. . . . The hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. . . . All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.”53 Along these lines, just as God’s creation of the world brought matter and, ipso facto, creativity into existence, the vertical stripe in Adam references both the divine act of creating man out of clay, and the self-definitive human creative act of tracing a line on the earth. The correlation between an image of the first man and the first image created by him, in turn, converge to reinforce Newman’s belief in creativity as humanity’s “personal birthright,” the privileged activity that defines the essential nature of human beings. Hence, drawing a line denotes both humanity’s ability to create something non-utilitarian, and, in the process,

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its urge to depict, and thereby define, itself. It is this assumption, arguably, that underlies Newman’s insistence on non-Western art’s capacity to reveal more of “man’s nature” than other, illusionistic forms of representation. Of course, we cannot verify whether Newman had a rectilinear line in mind (rather than a curve, a zigzag, or a geometrical form) when he exclaimed that man used a stick to draw a line before throwing a javelin. But it is tempting to propose that he envisioned his original Adam tracing a line not unlike those in his own work: clear in its directionality, and vertical in its echo of the human being standing upright and self-aware before the vast immensity of nature.54 The unusually gestural Untitled (figure 2.8) reinforces such a reading, conflating in a quick stroke both the primordial creative act of drawing a line and the upright posture of a human being. Recapitulating humanity’s first foray into creativity was thus no different from tracing the origin of verbal expressions to their most fundamental meanings: in this case, Newman’s work yielded an image both simple and complex, one that would simultaneously visualize primordial humanity’s “oneness” as well as stress how exclusive creativity was to its innermost nature. (Not surprisingly, the verbal expression “a line has been drawn” means making absolute and unbridgeable distinctions.)

Figure 2.8. Barnett Newman, Untitled (1960), brush and ink on paper, 14  10 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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As intrigued with beginnings as Newman, Heidegger wrote that endemic to fields such as ethnology and anthropology is the basic fallacy “that history begins with the primitive. . . . The opposite is true. The beginning is the strangest and mightiest. What comes afterward is not development but the flattening that results from mere spreading out; it is inability to retain the beginning.”55 Consonant with Newman’s ambition to work as if painting never existed before, many of Heidegger’s lectures were published under rubrics that betray his belief in the primary nature of his philosophy: Basic Concepts, Introduction to Metaphysics, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. These texts are not basic in the sense of providing introductory remarks, but in the sense of outlining what Heidegger considers the very ground of these modes of questioning. In Being in Time, he expressed his contention that the most significant question, the meaning of Being, was not simply inadequately formulated; it was utterly “forgotten.” His work represented nothing less than an attempt to redress philosophy’s complete “neglect of the question of being.”56 Even if past philosophers asked crucial questions about the essential nature of the good, of freedom, of truth, and so on, these questions—if recast in the form of what does it mean to be moral, to be free, or to be authentic—reveal, as Michael Gelven succinctly put it, that in all the ways we exist or act, “it is possible to reformulate the question so that the infinitive ‘to be’ becomes the unifying and underlying question.”57 The nature of Being, the philosopher asserts, is the “essential question.”58 Inasmuch as Newman urged modern artists to return to “first principles,”59 Heidegger engaged what he considered the most fundamental, primary problem of philosophy: what does it mean to exist at all? Long before another thinker, he was fascinated with what the meaning of is is. Rescuing this question from oblivion was tantamount, Heidegger believed, as Newman did in his own domain, to creating a “first philosophy.” Both Newman and Heidegger seem to share the view that the meaning of existence is discerned most poignantly at its very beginning, when the distinction and contrast between it and nonexistence is most keenly manifest. Both Genesis—The Break (figure 2.2) and Moment (figure 2.5) visualize such a contrast: when matter suddenly erupts out of chaos, or when intense light abruptly overwhelms the darkness. In the gap between Being and non-Being, Heidegger writes, “the transition from one side to the other is ‘sudden;’ it takes only a moment and is over in a trice.”60 If Being shows itself, it does so “only ‘suddenly’ . . . the way something irrupts into appearance, from non-appearance.”61 The myth of creation, he surmises, “does not tear away from concealment something unconcealed but speaks out of that region from which springs forth the original essential unity of the two, where the beginning is.”62 On one level, of course, Newman’s images refer to the theme of divine creation mentioned above, but in view of his self-proclaimed interest in humanity, the intensity of the moments

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when the distinction between light and dark, form and chaos are at their sharpest—when the essent comes into Being—could also be interpreted as referencing the distinction between self-awareness and lack thereof. A similar metaphor underlies some of Heidegger’s interpretations of poetry. The philosopher reads Hölderlin’s term “homecoming” as a return to “the source.” For Heidegger, “homecoming,” “homeland,” or a “return to the source” have, as will be discussed later, nationalistic connotations; figuratively speaking, they also signify a “nearness to Being.”64 Returning home, in this sense, means returning to the question of existence, or, more accurately, to a state of mind preoccupied with that question. Since Newman’s images focus on moments when entities such as light, matter, and humanity burst into Being, they were meant to function, analogously, as triggers to the contemplation of what it means to exist. By depicting the first manifestations of things, Newman was “returning home” in Heidegger’s sense of the word: he was not simply portraying a schematized, vertical Adam against the formless clay from which he was extracted; he was evoking the spark of self-awareness that overcomes humanity at the very moment it emerges from a state of nonexistence: man, Newman declared, “can be or is sublime in his relation to his sense of being aware.”65 To the same extent that a burst of light appears the sharper at the very moment it dispels the darkness, Newman’s Moment (figure 2.5), arguably, represents an instant of greatest intensity, when self-consciousness all the more powerfully differentiates the human from the nonhuman. Accentuating the contrast between the beam and the field, Newman’s gestural marks insinuate that the background is formless, heterogeneous, and indefinite, in direct opposition to the clarity, homogeneity, and definition characteristic of the central form. By returning to beginnings, we are made self-aware, and come closer to Being. If Newman thought the first man was an artist—or, more precisely, that humanity’s nature lies in being creative—Heidegger thought, as intimated above, that humanity’s nature lies in being thoughtful: “What is man? . . . We do not know. Yet we have seen that in the essence of this mysterious being, philosophy happens.”66 Inasmuch as Newman viewed the artistic act as “man’s personal birthright,” Heidegger viewed philosophizing as “fundamentally belong[ing] to each human being as something proper to them.”67 It is philosophy, according to Heidegger, that lets human existence first “become what it can be . . . philosophizing is something that lies prior to every occupation and constitutes the fundamental occurrence” of human existence.68 Thinking, Heidegger asserts, is “the dowry of our nature.”69 Philosophy happens in man because man is the only being who can interrogate his own existence, just as art, one may argue, is man’s birthright because man is the only creature that creates. Art and philosophy converge not only because Newman sought to raise art to the level of philosophy, and Heidegger philosophy to that of poetry, or

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because both men saw these activities as originary, but also because painter and philosopher connected them to another exclusively human condition: freedom. For Heidegger, affirming one’s existence is inextricable from having freedom of choice: “The affirmation of human existence and hence its essential consummation occurs through freedom of decision.”70 This view dovetails nicely with Newman’s own assertions: first, that “man is sublime only insofar as he is aware”; second, that the artist “is free and insists upon freedom.”71 If recovering the essence of humanity reveals anything for Newman and Heidegger, it is how intimately we are defined by our affirmation of our own existence and our freedom of choice. We shall return to the question of freedom in a later section; for now, it is significant to iterate that, just as freedom of decision stems from self-awareness, it also makes existence burdensome. Newman’s connection of man to the earth (“Adam means earth”), for example, is consistent with Heidegger’s question (“What must man affirm?”) and reply (“That he belongs to the earth. This relationship of belonging consists in the fact that man is heir and learner in all things. But these things are in conflict”).72 The passage is difficult to interpret because Heidegger’s employment of “earth” was seldom consistent. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” he made the distinction between “earth” and “world” (the realm of concealment versus the realm of meaning and unconcealment); in a later essay, “The Thing,” Heidegger made a different, fourfold distinction between “earth” and “sky,” “gods” and “mortals.” In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” the essay from which the above citation about man “belonging to the earth” derives, no such polarities are drawn. Whether Newman could successfully navigate the shifting nuances and subtleties of Heideggerian terminology is impossible to say; regardless, it is likely that he would have appreciated any philosophical position that, with a modicum of tweaking, could be made to reinforce his own. Heidegger’s proposition that man’s belonging to the earth is in conflict with his being heir and learner in all things is echoed in a point Newman made while reviewing the exhibitions of fellow painters Adolph Gottlieb and Rufino Tamayo, although one cannot escape the suspicion that Newman, as is often the case, was actually describing the ideas underlying his own work. Gottlieb and Tamayo, he writes, succeed in expressing man’s “earthly ties and natures. In so bringing us down to earth they confront us with the problems of man’s spirituality.”73 The conflict Heidegger mentions between man’s belonging to the earth and being heir to all things—and Newman between “our earthly ties” and our “spirituality”—recalls the age-old distinction between body and soul. Newman and Heidegger, however, have something altogether different in mind. Heidegger often asserted that self-awareness and freedom of choice define who we are as much as provoke a sense of rivalry with God. By reenacting the primordial creation performed by the gods, the poet enters in proximity and

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competition with the divine.74 Man, according to Heidegger, “has always measured himself with and against something heavenly.”75 This issue resonated with Newman, since he construed the relationship between humanity and the divine as frayed by conflict. Although he showcased art as evidence of humanity’s emulation of things godly, Newman ups the ante by painting God as jealous of this same emulation: “It was inconceivable . . . that Adam, was put on earth to be a toiler, to be a social animal. . . . The fall of man was understood by the writer [of Genesis] and his audience not as a fall from Utopia to struggle. . . . But rather that Adam, by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, sought the creative life to be, like God, a ‘creator of worlds’ . . . and was reduced to the life of toil only as a result of a jealous punishment.”76 Similarly, Heidegger saw the poet as the greatest human pretender to divine status, an intermediary between gods and men. He even refers to the poet as the “demi-god” or as “the pointer.” Above men but below gods, poets and artists cannot assume this standing without being overcome by dangerous feelings of rivalry and jealousy. “All too easily could the demigod,” Heidegger writes, “pushed out above men, not want to endure his inequality to the gods . . . and so at the same time wrongly measure himself by the standard of human beings. Too easily can the demigod . . . be too desirous to become one of them. Thus his own being, carried away by the one (to be a god or to be human), can fall into division and be thrown into doubt.”77 Aspiring to, yet not being able to achieve, divine status, the artist is set apart from the gods as much as from the rest of humanity. Heidegger even posits that gods and men were separated “in polemos, in the conflict which sets (being) apart. It is only such conflict that . . . shows, that brings forth gods and men in their being. We do not learn who man is by learned definitions; we learn it only when man contends with the essent, striving to bring it into its being . . . that is to say when he projects something new (not yet present), when he creates original poetry, when he builds poetically.”78 As new things come into being, Being itself is split apart, bestowing form and shape upon beings. When humanity is creative, something analogous happens: the conflict separating the human from the divine becomes palpable, and humans and gods appear as what they are. It is likely that Newman subscribed to this point of view. Newman’s “first move,” according to Thomas Hess, “is an act of division . . . a gesture of separation . . . a line drawn in the void.”79 Like Heidegger, he cast the desire to create as a distinguishing feature of humanity, no less than its unique level of self-awareness, its possession of freedom of choice, and its proclivity to affirm its existence. Yet both men would have asserted that the very qualities that distinguish human existence also make it oppressive. In making art, we bring something new into the world; we contend, as Heidegger would put it, with the essent: we reflect our creative nature and affirm that we exist. By sparking a collision between human

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and divine wills, however, creativity also tempts humanity—or, rather, the artists and poets—into mistaking their place in the sanctioned order of things. Unable to reconcile these tensions, artists experience their existence as tragic; neither worldly nor godly, they belong nowhere. As Hess reads Newman, our experience is one of separation, as if cast out into a void. Even so, the tragedy we inherit, despite its vicissitudes, is the only form of existence there is. Our responsibility is to affirm it in the most powerful way possible, and art, for both Newman and Heidegger, represents the most emphatic means of doing so. Just as Newman prized experiences that provoke “a heightened sense of ‘being,’”80 the beauty of poetic art, Heidegger proclaimed, evokes “the enduring presence of Being.”81 When Heidegger asked the question, “Who then is man?,” he provided the following answer: “He who must affirm what he is. To affirm means to declare, but at the same time it means: to give in the declaration a guarantee of what is declared. Man is he who is, precisely in the affirmation of his own existence.”82 Thus, if the creation of art, for Newman, distinguishes what is human, for Heidegger, it is the affirmation of existence. If some experiences arouse “a heightened sense” or the “enduring presence” of Being, others betray its absence or oblivion. Newman did not simply paint works such as Moment or Adam, which convey the coming of light or man into existence; he also painted Day Before One (figure 2.9) or Pagan Void (figure

Figure 2.9. Barnett Newman, Day Before One (1951), oil on canvas, 132  50 inches. Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel. Gift of the Swiss National Insurance Company © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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2.3), ostensibly to evoke a moment of limbo, a time prior to the creation of the universe, before humanity understood its own nature and rivaled the divine. From a Heideggerian perspective, these paintings could be interpreted as evincing a state where Being is not yet manifest. This may sound contradictory, but Heidegger’s view of Being is very close to Newman’s of man being sublime only insofar as he is aware. 83 For Heidegger, Being is not an either/or proposition (i.e., one exists or one does not) but a qualitative condition: as different ways of Being exist, there can be more or less Being. When we marshal our spiritual powers, the existent comes into the open: “Where spirit prevails, the essent as such becomes always and at all times more essent.”84 “Beings are more in being the more present they are,” he adds. “Beings come to be more present, the more abidingly they abide.”85 Conversely, if we fail to ponder spiritual questions, we aid and abet the forgetfulness of Being. When human beings understand who they are, their existence becomes more essent.86 At that point, a human being becomes a Da-sein (human existence). Although we will return to and define this concept in a later chapter, for now suffice it to say that Heidegger insisted not only that an understanding of Being belongs to Da-sein but also that this understanding “develops or decays” according to our manner of Being.87 This is why Newman’s phrases, “a heightened sense of ‘being’” or that man is sublime in relation to his “being aware,”88 closely parallel Heidegger’s point of view. As it is incumbent upon humanity to think, thought remains particular and exclusive to us; thinking, in Heideggerian parlance, is “ownmost” to humanity. Yet as only human beings think, only human beings turn away from thought. By indulging our ability to think, we are true to our nature and yet, Heidegger laments, “man flees from what is ownmost to him.”89 Likewise, Newman intimated that human beings are not permanently sublime; if they were, the word would carry no meaning, implying that human beings are mostly oblivious, a charge that Newman launched, conveniently, at anyone who failed to appreciate his worthiness. Having failed to pass a teacher’s qualification exam, he challenged the decision by arguing that the hiring criteria should permit “unusual” and “inspiring” individuals to “train children to become thinking people.”90 Again, the implication is that the majority of human beings are un-thinking, a position that coincides with Heidegger’s proclamation that “what is most thought-provoking” is “that we are still not thinking.”91 “[T]he involvement with thought,” he continues, “is in itself a rare thing, reserved for few people.”92 The condition of Da-sein defines precisely the opposite.93 Heidegger could not have put it more bluntly: man “is the being who is insofar as he thinks.”94 Newman’s connection between sublimity and awareness, and Heidegger’s between Da-sein and awareness of Being, deepen our reading of Newman’s Onement I (figure 2.1) and, arguably, of Be (figure 2.10). To the oneness of human

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atonement, and to Heidegger’s concept of the unity of Being, one can add the link between Being and apprehension. Where Being prevails, Heidegger insists, apprehension prevails with it: “the two belong together. . . . But if man is to participate in this appearing and apprehension, he must himself be, he must belong to being.” Apprehension, the philosopher concludes, “determines the essence of being-human.”95 Newman’s Be stands as a kind of imperative: “exist.” But, if read through a Heideggerian prism, it also means “think.” For Newman and Heidegger, only a sophisticated kind of awareness—one that transcends conventional knowledge or logic—leads to understanding and reflection.96 And depending on the profundity of this understanding, the manner and quality of our Being increases or decreases. If the beam in Be looks narrow, fragile, frail, and delicate, it compensates for these deficiencies by shining brightly, standing out from its surroundings even more dramatically than its counterpart in Onement. If the overall meaning of both pieces is similar, their effect is different—not in kind but in degree. The beam expands or contracts, brightens or darkens, in keeping with the intensity of our awareness. Works such as Pagan Void (figure 2.3) or Day Before One (figure 2.9), conversely, represent a state of physical chaos, a chaos, when understood metaphorically, analogous to a state of non-Being or non-awareness, or even a state wherein Being is undergoing a pro-

Figure 2.10. Barnett Newman, Be I (1949), oil on canvas, 93 1/8  75 1/8 inches. The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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cess of concealment and forgetfulness. This explains why themes of creation were so important to Newman: they could visualize the coming into existence, not simply of matter, light, or of man as a physical entity, but also the contrast between ignorance, stupor, and oblivion versus awareness, assertion, and sublimity. Since acts of creation also beget acts of naming, Newman’s and Heidegger’s focus on beginnings conflates two issues already mentioned: the use of archaic expressions and the parallel between artistic and divine creativity. For Heidegger, Being is manifest through language; poetry is not imitation, representation, or symbolization, but an act of nomination. By naming, language “brings beings to word and to appearance.”97 Man, Heidegger declares, is “that creature whose being is essentially determined by its ability to speak.”98 That very ability, he asserted elsewhere, “marks man as man.”99 If understanding Being is integral to the human being, expressing what is understood is no less so. Interestingly, Newman employed titles such as The Name (figure 2.11), The Voice (figure 2.12), The Word, or The Command,100 endeavoring to evoke, the artist told T. B. Hess, the “human utterance.”101 In which case, we surmise that Newman, no less than Heidegger, understood language as a declaration of human existence and its drive to create no less than the aesthetic act of drawing a line. His ambition, it seems, was to devise an art form whose references to Genesis might capitalize on this very simultaneity, allowing the beams to stand for a schematic human figure, upright in its stance, affirming its existence in opposition to its surrounding environment, but also for a human utterance, just as we transcribe sound waves and decibels visually in graphs or charts. If so, this conflation comprises another point of intersection between Newman and Heidegger. Being, the philosopher argued, “manifests itself primordially in the word.”102 Language, then, is how humanity responds to Being, and, in turn, how Being discloses itself to humanity. As William Richardson explains, Being “is a process of light. It is aboriginal Utterance, yet never ‘is’ itself a being, hence never can be expressed adequately in the ontic dimension of human language and remains for this reason necessarily unsaid. It shines forth in beings with utter simplicity. It is the One.”103 Analogously, if Newman’s abstract beam represents an aboriginal utterance, its sound does not communicate information, as much as assert that human beings are; it does not compel as much as invite us to ponder the meaning of existence. And unlike transcriptions of sound waves—that oscillate according to different frequencies—Newman’s zips are straight in their orientation and directionality, echoing the gathered collectedness that Heidegger associates with Being. “The word, the name,” the philosopher writes, “restores the emerging entity from the immediate, overpowering surge to its being and maintains it in this openness, delimitation, and permanence. . . . Pristine speech opens up the being of the entity in the structure of its collectedness.”104

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Figure 2.11. Barnett Newman, The Name II (1950), oil and magna on canvas, 104  94.5 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Annalee Newman, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the National Gallery of Art. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 2.12. Barnett Newman, The Voice (1950), egg tempera and oil on canvas, 96 1/8  105.5 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Digital Image © Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York)

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By naming, moreover, humanity establishes a rapport with the entity it names, thereby asserting the existence of both the entity and itself. According to Heidegger, human beings name only those objects with which they establish a relation, by virtue of which they express their concerns and, in turn, aspects of their Being. Without language, he writes, “all essents would be closed to us, the essent that we ourselves are no less than the essent that we are not.”105 The relationships acknowledged through nomination, therefore, reveal humanity’s way of bestowing Being onto an entity and onto ourselves: “It is only the word at our disposal which endows the thing with Being.”106 This does not mean, of course, that Heidegger believes objects in the world only exist upon being named: Whether we ask the question as to why things exist, “the planets move in their orbits, the sap of life flows through plant and animal.”107 Nothing, he insists, is “changed by our questioning. It remains what it is and as it is. Our questioning [or naming] . . . cannot in any way affect the essent itself.”108 Even so, Heidegger proposes, “It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.”109 There is something to what Heidegger is saying. It is easier, after all, to remember objects if we have categories—verbal descriptors—to which we can assign them.110 In that sense, language affects and changes our relationship to objects in the external world. But Heidegger is after something more fundamental. The ancients, he argues, did not learn that physis means the power of the existent to blossom, emerge, and endure “through natural phenomena, but the other way around: it was through a fundamental poetic and intellectual experience of being that they discovered what they had to call physis.”111 It is not, therefore, that a named Beethoven sonata is easier to remember than an opus number, or a plant if one knows its scientific designation; it is as if some underlying primordial poetic knowledge of Being permits us to experience art and nature in the first place. Primordial language holds the power to make the existent manifest.112 For this reason, original names and meanings divulge the nature of our first relationships and underscore humanity’s special status with respect to the question of Being. Regrettably, modern language has distorted and obscured the deeper meanings of original words, meanings that did not simply mutate, but fell into oblivion. Humanity, the philosopher contends, has barely understood, let alone pondered the mystery by whose process language gradually withdraws from man and falls silent. If the first words coined to name an object or idea reveal its essence, then attending to origins reverses this process.113 Again, Heidegger’s investigation relies on the ways in which physical relationships underlie the logic of metaphorical mapping. Returning to one of the examples already mentioned—of building as dwelling—Heidegger insists that so long as we ignore “that all building is in itself a dwelling, we cannot even adequately ask, let alone properly decide, what the building of building might be in its essence.”114 But Heidegger reverses the terms in Sweetser’s linguistic equation. If she argued that

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the physical relationships anteceded and underpinned the philosophical ones (e.g., that the erection of physical buildings later engendered the idea of dwelling), Heidegger posits the opposite view: that the idea of dwelling antecedes and underpins the essence of building. Working under the assumption that original linguistic designations disclose essences, Heidegger reasoned that the earliest designations of the concept most important to him, Being, would disclose its essence. Consequently, he combed the writings of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaximander, pre-Socratic thinkers in whose work he thought a primordial relationship to Being, now obscured, was incisively explored. For him, these peerless thinkers represent the epitome of philosophy. Even in Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger contends, the essence of Being is veiled and disappears.115 This line of thinking is suggestive in view of Newman’s statement, cited above, that non-Western art’s abstract quality tells us more of man’s nature than a naturalistic representation of man’s physical contours. Convinced that Western art abandoned the “abstract quality” of nonWestern and geometric Greek art in favor of “naturalistic representation,” Newman decried illusionism for obfuscating the more profound realities of “man’s nature.” Curiously, Newman’s distrust of classical Greek art’s overt emphasis on beauty and idealization (which he deemed too sensual to convey the reality of the human condition116) did not extend to Greek drama, which he held in the highest esteem. Sharing Heidegger’s admiration for Greek culture, he titled some of his works: Ulysses, Achilles, Prometheus, and Dionysus, perhaps finding in Homer, Sophocles, and Aeschylus what Heidegger found in Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Anaximander. But where, exactly, did Newman’s musings on the reality of man’s nature, and Heidegger’s on the truth of Being, lead? For Heidegger, the question of Being first hinged on clarifying the distinction between Being and beings. The word “being,” when used in the plural form (e.g., individual “beings”), refers to all worldly manifestations: animals, plants, minerals, and so forth. “Being” in the broader sense of signifying existence, and used primarily in the singular form, is not a being and yet it is what all individual “beings” have: although all beings are endowed with Being, Being is not a being in the physical sense (like an animal, vegetable, or mineral). Thus, when Heidegger insists that Being is not a being, he means that Being (existence) is not a physical entity, a forgotten distinction that, if understood primordially, reveals something about the essence of existence. Being thus cannot be apprehended directly. If it could, it would be a being, not Being. A chair “has” height, width, color, texture, and any number of other characteristics, and insofar as we recognize a chair as something that is, it “has” existence; it has Being. But even though it is ridiculously self-evident that, insofar as a being exists, it “has” existence, there is no physical aspect of a chair wherein that same existence can be found. “Nowhere among things,” Heidegger

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writes, “do we find Being.”117 As a result, “we cannot immediately grasp the being of the essent itself, either through the essent—or anywhere else.”118 By having no materiality, Being presents insurmountable obstacles for any would-be investigator. Not surprisingly, Western thought grew insensitive to the dichotomy between Being and beings, a decline, according to Heidegger, that “imparts to Greek thinking the character of a beginning, in that the lighting of the Being of beings, as a lighting is concealed.”119 To rescue Being from its oblivion, to make the primordial aspect of Being manifest—that is, to understand its essence as it was conceived in its original wording—Heidegger will find it in a concept which also held great fascination for Newman: the idea of presence.

Notes 1. Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Walker, 1969), 54. 2. SWI, 132–33. 3. Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols—Conversations—Letters, trans. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), 133. In OWL, 121, Heidegger also made another observation along the same lines; “The ‘sign’ in design (Latin signum) is related to secare, to cut—as in saw, sector, segment. To design is to cut a trace. Most of us know the word ‘sign’ only in its debased meaning— lines on a surface. But we make a design also when we cut a furrow into the soil to open it to seed and grow.” 4. Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 344. See also IM, 17: “In Greek, ‘beyond something’ is expressed by the word meta. Philosophical inquiry into the realm of being as such is meta ta physika; this inquiry goes beyond the essent, it is metaphysics.” 5. “Introduction,” The Question Concerning Technology, xxii. 6. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 50–51. 7. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in David Farrell Krell, ed. and trans. Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 324. 8. What Is Called Thinking?, 127. 9. IM, 13. See also “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 23: “translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.” 10. SWI, 181. 11. Gottfried Boehm, “A New Beginning: Abstraction and the Myth of the ‘Zero Hour,’” in Joan Marter (ed.), Abstract Expressionism: The International Context (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 105.

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12. In “Barnett Newman’s Onement I: ‘The Way Up and Down is One and the Same,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 24, no. 1 (2004): 48, Evan Firestone sees concordances between Judaic ideas and those of Heraclitus, of whom both Newman and Heidegger were fond. 13. SWI, 169. 14. IM, 124. 15. IM, 130–31. 16. IM, 134. 17. IM, 138. 18. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 75. (Hereafter referred to as P.) 19. IM, 122. 20. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 23. 21. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in David Farrell Krell (ed. and trans.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 149. 22. Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Concerning Technology, 159. 23. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, 79. 24. SWI, 287. 25. SWI, 64. 26. See “Translators’ Foreword,” in Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), xxix. 27. P, 77. 28. SWI, 191–92. 29. SWI, 248. 30. For Newman, there was a very literal connotation to the idea of wiping the slate clean, as he destroyed all of his work prior to 1944. See Jeremy Strick, The Sublime Is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman (New York: PaceWildenstein, 1994). 31. SWI, 89. 32. SWI, 67. 33. SWI, 140. 34. IM, 39. 35. IM, 191; the translation quoted here, though, is from Keith Hoeller, “Role of the Early Greeks in Heidegger’s Turning,” Philosophy Today 28 (Spring 1984): 46. 36. SWI, 140. 37. See Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), and Matthew Baigell, “Barnett Newman’s Stripe Paintings and Kabbalah: A Jewish Take,” American Art 8 (Spring 1994): 34. 38. Barnett Newman, interview with Voice of America in São Paulo, 1965; also quoted in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 192. 39. Barnett Newman, interview with Voice of America in São Paulo, 1965; also quoted in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 192. 40. Harold Rosenberg, Barnett Newman (New York: Abrams, 1978), 78. 41. Yve-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 33.

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42. David Sylvester, “Newman—I,” About Modern Art: Critical Essays, 1948–1997 (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 326. 43. “Barnett Newman’s Stripe Paintings and Kabbalah: A Jewish Take,” 35. 44. See William J. Richardson’s discussion in Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), 44ff. 45. In “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” Arts Magazine 62 (February 1988): 38, Michael Zakian writes, “Self-conscious experience is immanently transcendental because our direct participation with the objects around us reveals our superiority to them.” 46. SWI, 64. 47. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 36. 48. SWI, 158. 49. Charles Harrison, “Abstract Art: Reading Barnett Newman’s Eve,” in Jason Geiger (ed.), Frameworks for Modern Art (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 127. 50. SWI, 159. 51. See Nancy Aiken, The Biological Origins of Art (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 169. 52. In all fairness to Neanderthals, it should be said that, in certain rare instances, flute-like objects and ornaments have been found in their burial sites. But this may not necessarily be significant. The function of the items is still in dispute, and the presence of ornaments has been attributed to Neanderthals borrowing from Homo Sapien practices while both lived contemporaneously. 53. What Is Called Thinking?, 16. 54. See also Barbara Reise, “The Stance of Barnett Newman,” Studio International 179 (February 1970): 51; and Michael Zakian, “Barnett Newman: Painting and a Sense of Place,” Arts Magazine 62 (March 1988): 40. 55. IM, 155. 56. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 19. (Hereafter referred to as BT.) 57. Gelven, A Commentary, 9. 58. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 10. 59. SWI, 67. 60. P, 125. 61. P, 149. 62. P, 125. 63. Marin Heidegger, “Remembrance of the Poet,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 258. 64. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in David Farrell Krell (ed. and trans.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 218. 65. SWI, 258. 66. FCM, 7. 67. FCM, 13. 68. FCM, 22. 69. What Is Called Thinking?, 132.

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70. Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 274. 71. SWI, 8. 72. Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 274. 73. SWI, 77. 74. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 145. 75. “Poetically Man Dwells,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 218. 76. SWI, 159; see also Mel Bochner, “Barnett Newman: Writing Painting/Painting Writing,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 25. 77. EHP, 127–28. 78. IM, 144. 79. Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (1971), 56. 80. SWI, 48–49. 81. EHP, 156. 82. Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 274. See also Walter H. Cerf, “An Approach to Heidegger’s Ontology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1 (December 1940): 184: “It is contained in the definition of man as that being who understands himself as being. Man has this outstanding role among all other beings that, as Heidegger says, he is in order to be.” 83. SWI, 258. 84. IM, 50. 85. What Is Called Thinking?, 101. 86. Mindfulness, 5: In knowing-awareness, the philosopher writes, “we are those who are.” 87. BT, 14. 88. SWI, 258. 89. Mindfulness, 118, 119. 90. Barnett Newman, “Teachers’ Exams—What Is Wrong?,” The Answer, January 1936, 23. 91. What Is Called Thinking?, 6. 92. What Is Called Thinking?, 126. 93. IM, 29. 94. What Is Called Thinking?, 31. “[W]e can grow thought-poor or even thought-less only because man at the core of his being has the capacity to think; has ‘spirit and reason’ and is destined to think.” Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 45. 95. IM, 139–40. “Only as a questioning, historical being,” he concludes, “does man come to himself; only as such is he a self” (IM, 143). 96. Gelven, A Commentary, 23. 97. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 71. 98. BT, 26. 99. OWL, 112. FCM, 26: “Man, insofar as he exists as man, has always already spoken out about . . . the prevailing whole to which he himself belongs.”

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100. See also Mel Bochner, “Barnett Newman: Writing Painting/Painting Writing,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 26. 101. T. B. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 55. 102. P, 76. 103. William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 554. 104. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann), Vol. 40, 180–81, cited in Michael Zimmerman, “Ontological Aestheticism: Heidegger, Jünger, and National Socialism,” in The Heidegger Case, 79. 105. IM, 82. 106. OWL, 141. 107. IM, 5. 108. IM, 29. 109. IM, 13. 110. See Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (New York: Viking, 2007), 108ff, and Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 128. 111. IM, 14. 112. Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 275. 113. Intriguingly, Ludwig Wittgenstein expressed a similar opinion, although from another perspective. 114. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in David Farrell Krell (ed. and trans.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 326. 115. Martin Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 18. (Hereafter EGT.) 116. As David J. Glaser put it, “For Newman decorative art does not so much seduce thought toward a dissipation of its critical element as simply fail to provide food for thought.” “Transcendence in the Vision of Barnett Newman,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40 (Summer 1980): 417. See also Michael Zakian, “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” Arts Magazine 62 (February 1988): 35. 117. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 2. 118. IM, 33. 119. EGT, 87.

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CHAPTER 3

Presence

Their respective ambitions to disclose the reality of “man’s nature” and to divulge a primordial understanding of Being led Newman and Heidegger to the idea of presence. Newman, for one, asserted that looking at a painting should be “a single experience,” one comparable to “the single encounter that one has with a person, a living being,”1 reinforcing the view that the beams in his works stand for a surrogate human presence. Intriguingly, the solitary experience of the creative act was no different: “One is in the presence of a kind of presence: oneself. One feels present at a moment which is very real.”2 Newman thus employed the term “presence” to articulate both his own creative attitude and the one with which a spectator should approach his art. After visiting Indian mounds in Ohio, the artist—obviously deeply moved—remembered, “Looking at the site you feel, Here I am, here . . . and out beyond there there is chaos, nature rivers, landscapes. . . . But here you get a sense of your own presence. . . . I became involved with the idea of making the viewer present: the idea that ‘Man is Present.’”3 Since Newman clarified neither what he meant by the term, nor the sources from which he appropriated it, “presence” remains a nebulous concept in the Newman literature. But presence is a recurrent idea in Heideggerian thought, and it will be among the contentions of this book that, if not clearly indebted to Heidegger, Newman’s employment of this expression is, at least, more intelligible against the background of Heideggerian philosophy. Just as Newman declared, “I’m the subject,”4 “Here I am, here,” 5 Heidegger maintained, “I work concretely and factically out of my ‘I am,’ out of my intellectual and wholly factical origin, milieu, life-contexts, and whatever is available to me from these as a vital experience in which I live.”6 And if Newman compared looking at a painting with confronting another living being, Heidegger described encountering a tree in bloom in a remarkably similar way: “The tree faces us. The tree and we 57

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meet each other, as the tree stands there and we stand face to face with it. As we are in this relation of one to the other and before the other, the tree and we are.”7 The implication is that a sense of one’s own presence does not occur in a vacuum, in absence of some other entity different from the self. In fact, Heidegger construed the feeling of nearness implicit in the term “neighborhood” to mean “face-to-face with one another. . . . [N]ot only with respect to human beings but also with respect to things of the world. Where this prevails, all things are open to one another in their self-concealment; thus one extends itself to the other, and thus all remain ourselves; one is over the other as its guardian watching over the other.”8 A clarification of what Heidegger means by “self-concealment” will have to await later sections; for the moment, suffice it to say that, for both Newman and Heidegger, any meaningful encounter with, makes us both self-aware and open to, another person. The philosopher did not come to this idea arbitrarily. In view of his interest in origins, he extrapolated the concept of presencing from pre-Socratic philosophy, postulating that the most primordial meaning of Being for the early Greeks was “presence.” Discarding the traditional translations of the Greek words for Being, ousia or parousia, Heidegger feels “substance” is too feeble to convey the vital connotations of “homestead, at homeness, a standing in and by itself, a self-enclosedness, and integral presentness or thereness.”9 Parousia, he continues, conveys something that “is present to us. It stands steadily by itself and thus manifests itself. It is. For the Greeks, ‘being’ basically meant this standing presence.”10 Presence, though, does not mean literal existence: “Not everything that in some way is, is present in the same way.”11 For Heidegger, the difference between presence and existence relates to the difference between Being and beings. If there can be more or less Being, then there can also be greater or lesser presence. Perhaps the distinction is best illustrated in Heidegger’s crucial differentiation between the ontic and the ontological. For Heidegger, ontic existence is literal existence—again, the way animals and plants literally exist; ontological existence, on the other hand, is achieved when only one species—namely, humanity—reaches a level of awareness that allows its members to question their own existence. Amid all that exists, only human beings are privileged precisely because they alone are in a position to ponder existence, and they alone experience existence as problematic.12 For Heidegger, we are not only delivered but also answerable to existence. Of all beings, we alone bear this responsibility. The concept of “presence” is thus closely connected to self-awareness; inasmuch as Newman declared that man is sublime in relation to being self-aware, Heidegger wrote, “True self-contemplation can meaningfully be released only if it is present, and it is present only in a strict being-awakened.”13 Taking another step, Heidegger even asserts that Being itself “means presencing. Thought with regard to what presences, presencing shows itself as letting-presence.”14

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Presence thus defines a condition to which only humanity can aspire. “Aspire” is the operative term. Even if only human beings can be “present”—rather than a plant or animal—human beings are not present automatically, only during rare moments of intense self-awareness, moments that, according to Heidegger, began at the dawn of Greek philosophy. It was already mentioned that Being is most intense when contrasted to non-Being, just as light is brightest when breaking the darkness. Similarly, presence is keenest when humanity becomes self-aware. At the dawn of Greek philosophy, Heidegger posits, “man rises up for the first time against the totality of what is and questions it.” In the process, man assumes an “unsheltered standing firm in the midst of the uncertainty of the totality of being.”15 Heidegger’s idea closely resembles Newman’s response to the Ohioan Indian mounds; implicit in his claim—“Here I am, here . . . and out beyond there there is chaos, nature rivers, landscape”—arguably, is the assumption that a sense of one’s own “presence” is provoked by an acute selfawareness of being surrounded by entities that are not (indeed cannot be) present.16 Understanding, Heidegger insists, must be “grasped in the original sense of ‘standing before’: residing before, holding oneself at an equal height with what one finds before oneself, and being strong enough to hold out.”17 For Newman, self-awareness also emerges from sensing the unbridgeable difference between the human and the nonhuman; it was after feeling his separation from nature that he became keenly cognizant of his own “presence.” On a metaphorical level, presence can be likened to breaking a barrier. Think, Heidegger asks, of how stones, animals, or human beings have access to the world. A stone has none; it feels neither how it impacts the world nor how the world impacts it; it cannot even feel its privation. An animal has access because it moves of its own accord, as well as affects and is affected by its environment. An animal feels privation: of food, shelter, sleep, sexual gratification, even affection. But the animal, Heidegger contends, remains in its specific element (e.g., water or air) in such a way as to be oblivious to it, with one notable exception: when the animal is forcibly removed from, and instantly longs to return to, its environment. Throughout its life, in effect, the animal is “immured as it were within a fixed sphere that is incapable of further expansion or contraction.”18 The animal kingdom is also governed by instinct: a praying mantis will eat its mate because its drives dictate its behavior. The human world, conversely, is “far more extensive in its penetrability, constantly extendable not only in its range (we can always bring more and more beings into consideration) but also in respect to the manner in which we can penetrate ever more deeply in this penetrability.”19 To put it another way, although animals can feel the deprivation of food, shelter, and so on, neither animals—nor God, for that matter—can feel the absence of meaning in their lives; only human beings feel this absence.

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Presence, then, extends from humanity’s unique position, by virtue of its self-awareness, to search for meaning, and to do so by aspiring to what animals cannot even aspire to do: to break through the constraints to which they are confined. Heidegger’s view (that only mindful self-awareness allows human beings to transcend ontic existence and enter into an ontological relationship with their own existence) tallies with Newman’s declaration that man is sublime only in his relation to his self-awareness. On this account, only human beings can be “present” in the ontological sense. And only human beings who are cognizant of being “present” may fathom the meaning of their Being (Heidegger), or come closer to understanding the depth of their nature (Newman).20 These parallels notwithstanding, an unanswered question beckons. If Heidegger’s conflation of Being with “presence” was extrapolated from the preSocratics, then Newman, a philosophy major in college,21 could easily have done the same. In which case, Newman’s and Heidegger’s employment of the term “presence” betrays borrowings from similar sources, not a fundamental similarity in outlook, let alone a direct relationship. This assumption, however, is not viable. The majority of scholars concur that Heidegger’s readings of Greek philosophy are remarkably idiosyncratic, if not radically distorted. David Farrell Krell explains, “Although Heidegger takes each word of the fragments [by pre-Socratic thinkers] seriously—rather because he does so—his thinking plies a dangerous, uncharted course which we are at pains to follow. The violence of interpretation is unavoidable; no footnote can ameliorate it.”22 Even Heidegger realized how egregiously his translations and elucidations ran afoul of convention: “Our interpretation of the fragment [by Parmenides] must appear to be an arbitrary distortion. We are accused of reading into it things that an ‘exact interpretation’ can never determine. This is true. In the usual present-day view what has been said here is a mere product of the farfetched and one-sided Heideggerian method of exegesis, which has already become proverbial. But here we may, indeed, we must ask: Which interpretation is the true one.”23 In a way, the philosopher felt that interpretative violence was required to discover hidden truths and dislodge language from its common, ordinary usage. He even asserted that we “must understand the Greeks better than they understand themselves. Only thus shall we actually be in possession of our heritage.”24 Heidegger’s admission is somewhat startling, and though his claim to understand the Greeks better than they understood themselves remains debatable, this admission corroborates the verdicts returned by many philosophers: namely, that his readings of the pre-Socratics are so stretched as to be barely defensible. Defensible or not, Heidegger’s view that the Greeks experienced Being “as the presencing of what is present. . . . What is presently present in unconcealment lingers in unconcealment as in an open expanse,”25 strikes a chord with Newman’s recollection of sensing his own presence while visiting the vast expanses of

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space in Ohio. The upshot, therefore, is that Newman could not have appropriated the idea of Being as presence directly from Greek philosophy, if only because that concept is a purely Heideggerian concoction.26 Of course, the possibility that Newman borrowed the idea from yet another source cannot be ruled out, though, to this author’s knowledge, no such source has yet been proposed. The most likely scenario remains that Newman either appropriated the idea from Heidegger or invented it himself. Given the number of similarities between Newman’s statements and ideas explored in Heidegger’s philosophy, it should hardly surprise the reader if the former hypothesis would be advocated here. Along similar lines, Newman saw art as uncovering hidden or concealed truths, especially if it managed to address the right questions: “The truth is a search for the hidden meanings of life. To practice it, art must become a metaphysical exercise.”27 Heidegger also associated art with truth (“in an art work the truth is set to work”28) and assumed that the nature of truth lies hidden or veiled. He attributed this obfuscation to our own reticence to interrogate the innermost meaning of our existence (which corresponds to the decay of Being mentioned above). But the presencing that results from awareness, conversely, permits truth to be unveiled. Within this framework, presence is intimately associated with truth, and to sharpen this point, Heidegger again calls upon the ancient usage of words, reinterpreting the Greek concept of truth (aletheia), not as an exact correspondence between logical propositions and states of affairs in the world, but rather as taking things “out of their concealment.”29 For the Greeks, the selfmanifestation of phenomena, he contends, was “the unconcealdeness of what is present, its being revealed, its showing itself.”30 Aletheia, then, signifies that “the ‘things themselves,’ that which shows itself,” are manifest as “beings in the how of their discoveredness.”31 Heidegger maintains that, for the ancient Greeks, presence is connected to truth because the presencing of things constitutes the very state in which things emerge un-concealed, so to say, from their concealment. Against this background, Newman’s ambitions to allow art to divulge the “hidden meanings of life” and enable his audience to sense their own presence are in full agreement. Through a Heideggerian prism, the intention to mobilize a beholder’s presence can be construed as synonymous with exposing the truth of his or her own existential condition. By becoming present, spectators come to know themselves and bring the nature of their own predicament out of its concealment. Yet how can abstract art disclose truth or trigger a sense of the spectator’s own presence? Though Newman did not answer this question, there are hints and insinuations in his writings to formulate a working hypothesis. As related above, he praised non-Western art for employing an abstract quality that betrays “more of man’s nature than a naturalistic representation of man’s physical contours.” In the letter to the New York Times he co-authored with Mark Rothko

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and Adolph Gottlieb, one reads, “flat forms . . . destroy illusion and reveal truth.”32 Abstraction, therefore, is not simply an alternative aesthetic choice; it is more truthful than representation. “[W]e need,” Newman argued, “to get rid of, to slough off, the skin of ‘beauty’ in which we have grown up, which has become the cover that we use to include the art works of our world.”33 Given his distrust of idealization, and his use of the word “cover” to describe it, we surmise that, for him, figurative art played the role of concealment that certain forms of phenomena played for Heidegger (who, incidentally, also thought of his work as a destruction of traditional philosophy34 in line with Newman’s attempt to destroy notions of beauty). Heidegger, after all, considered that, to ponder the question of Being, we have to set aside “the familiar and the things that have their place in everyday life.”35 Such realignment was necessary because the question of Being is occluded, not only in routine everyday existence, but even in traditional philosophy. By misunderstanding (and mistranslating) the pre-Socratics, he argued, we have “cut ourselves off and alienated ourselves from the original essence of Greek philosophy.”36 In Newman’s eyes, Western art (figure 3.1) similarly suffers by comparison with “primitive” art (figure 3.2) because its very beauty entails a form of concealment. Newman inveighed against the Greek obsession with perfection—the “love,” as he put it, “of ideal sensations.”37 We should reject, he asserted, “the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend. We are creating images whose reality is self-evident and which are devoid of the props and crutches that evoke associations with outmoded images. . . . We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend . . . that have been the devices of Western European painting. . . . The image we produce is the selfevident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”38 Realism is a crutch, an art of deception, an impediment to truth; abstraction is the opposite—selfevident, and intelligible without intellectual assumptions or preconceived ideas. For Heidegger, grasping the question of Being also requires “no special knowledge in advance, neither scientific nor philosophical. The latter may be useful for other purposes, but here such knowledge would only be a hindrance.”39 We can learn to think, he iterated elsewhere, only if we “unlearn what thinking has been traditionally.”40 This mandate also reverses our expectations about simplicity versus complexity. Even if the grasping of Being may appear to be very simple, the philosopher interjects, this manner of comprehension “is actually very difficult. . . . It is precisely because it is self-evident that it has greatness. And that is why it is so easily and persistently overlooked in favor of what are merely the necessary external trappings.”41 The similarity in outlook between Newman and Heidegger is worth exploring; both point to entities that are selfevidently intelligible, but whose very simplicity is obfuscated behind a veneer

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Figure 3.1. Greek (Roman copy), Athlete, Classical Period, Fifth Century BCE, Pentelic marble, Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Figure 3.2. Staff, Nyamzania, Tanzania, wood, 97.5 cm, private collection.

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of deception. Still, the question remains: how can abstract art itself be concrete and self-evident, especially if, as Newman claimed, it could disseminate the most abstruse metaphysical ideas? Again, Newman provides few clues for interpretive advance,42 yet Heidegger, having faced an analogous conundrum, provides assistance, though a short digression is necessary to see why. While pondering the nature of phenomenology, Heidegger, customarily, became intrigued by the term “phenomenon,” from the Greek phainomenon, meaning that which is manifest, that which shows itself. The word betrays an additional layer of complexity because everything that manifests itself also disguises itself. Self-showing, Heidegger writes, is “‘appearance’ as the emanation of something that makes itself known but conceals itself in the appearance.”43 What Heidegger has in mind here is the way a disease may show itself in terms of symptoms, but whose same symptoms, if wrongly interpreted, actually conceal the actions of the pathogen. The tension between showing and concealing also appears at the heart of Heidegger’s use of the compound term “hermeneutic phenomenology,” a combination many philosophers dismissed as patently contradictory. In philosophy, the term “phenomenology” was extrapolated from the distinction Immanuel Kant made between the real world (the “noumenal”) and the world of our experience (the “phenomenal”). On the strength of this distinction, Kant argued that the categories we employ—time, space, causality—are applicable only to the phenomenal, not to the noumenal world (which is ultimately unknowable). Since the real world lies beyond our understanding, some philosophers turned back to the very world of our experience and spearheaded the study of phenomenology; their battle cry was “to the things themselves!” The term Heidegger chose to couple with phenomenology, however, Hermeneutics, has a completely different, if not opposite, connotation. Hermeneutical investigations do not purport to go back to the things themselves, nor do they pretend that phenomena are comprehensible independently of an interpretive frame of reference; on the contrary, hermeneutics posits all forms of investigations as ideologically mediated and inescapably interpretive. Just as a biblical passage may be obscure because its meaning is neither obvious nor self-declaring, there are no facts construed independently of an interpreter who decides what qualifies as a “fact,” and who approaches those same “facts” from an ideological point of view. Given this tension, it is hardly surprising that pairing hermeneutics with phenomenology may sound oxymoronic. Heidegger’s solution to the dilemma, if not entirely persuasive, was at least rhetorically ingenuous: to dispense with the contradiction by affirming that facts are inseparable from the meanings we attach to them. For example, we tend to gauge the implications of any situation in terms of its potential benefits and drawbacks. But situations are never inherently advantageous or disadvantageous; they are only advantageous or disadvan-

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tageous for someone, and what is advantageous for someone may be (and often is) disadvantageous for someone else. By asserting that facts are never neutral, or construed independently of the meanings we ascribe to them,44 Heidegger hoped to return to the facts themselves, while simultaneously recognizing how these same facts are always mediated by interpretation.45 The same problem applies, mutatis mutandis, to Newman, who, after all, was a kind of hermeneutical phenomenologist himself (Richard Shiff put it differently when he described Newman’s “art as a complex mix of phenomenology and metaphysics”46). How else could he think of his work as “self-evident,” as “real and concrete,” intelligible to “anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history,” yet (by his own admission) take months to understand the implications of Onement I? Only after a kind of hermeneutical exercise—examining the appearance of an individual piece against the ideas that were important to him, and examining an individual piece against his production as a whole—could the artist refine and construct the meanings of his works.47 The very tension Heidegger resolved by arguing that, in the end, no facts exist independent of the meanings we project onto them is no less pertinent to Newman. He may have believed his images to be endowed with a self-evident concreteness, but that same concreteness was still in need of interpretation, even from him. On the basis of translating a fragment by Heraclitus, Heidegger also relieved this tension by stressing Being’s continual vacillation between concealment and un-concealment: “Being (emerging appearing) inclines intrinsically to self-concealment.”48 Since Being means to emerge from concealment, Heidegger concludes that concealment “belongs” to Being no less than un-concealment. Since Being originated in concealment, then “Being inclines back towards it, both in great silence and mystery and in banal distortion and occultation.”49 Being thus moves in and out of concealment: just as something is shown, something is also withheld. Even if all beings are endowed with Being, there is no physical analog to Being within beings. Even as Being manifests itself in beings, it hides itself in the process, provoking our forgetfulness of Being. If we concede, for the sake of argument, that, like Heidegger, Newman sought to impart attentiveness to the meaning of existence, he may have concurred that Being cannot qualify as a material object. From this perspective, representational art embodies that very same deceptive strategy of occultation mentioned by Heidegger, not simply because Being cannot be represented by figurative means, but also because the employment of idealization distracts us from—even obfuscates—the predicament of existence. To put it in Heideggerian parlance, figurative art is insidious because it withholds the reality of human nature in its own self-showing. To reach a deeper state of truth or unconcealment, it is imperative to discard the external world in favor of interrogating the all-important question of Being. It was Heidegger’s belief, after all, that

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Being “can least of all be something ‘behind which’ something else stands.”50 As such, the meaning of Being may be covered up, not just because it is dissimulated, but because it remains “still completely undiscovered.”51 In his “Letter on Humanism,” for example, Heidegger wrote that “Being is the nearest. Yet the near remains farthest from man.”52 What he means is that, because we all exist, Being is close to us, but because we do not attend to its implications—or live in the forgetfulness of Being—then Being is also furthest from us. This is what Heidegger intuits by something concealing itself in its own self-showing. Interpreting Newman’s comments in this light, we surmise that, for the artist, representational art reveals the appearance (and the beauty) of the human body (figure 3.1), but conceals the intense experiences that awaken us to our own existence (e.g., the kind of attunements Newman felt while perusing non-Western art or when visiting Indian mounds in Ohio). Realism, Newman declared, is “deceitful.”53 Bribing us with sensual gratification, it fails to arouse those moments of keen self-awareness that trigger our sense of presence. That is why Newman wrote that understanding non-Western art is predicated upon rejecting the “cover” of “beauty.” “Cover” is the operative word; in the domain of art, Newman is saying, beauty covers truth, a statement fully congruent with Heideggerian notions. The beautiful should not be construed as “what pleases,” the philosopher writes, but as the truth that “comes to be when that which is eternally non-apparent and therefore invisible attains its most radiantly apparent appearance.”54 Since Heidegger construes truth (aletheia) in the ancient Greek sense of un-concealment, then truth “is something stolen.”55 Heidegger even cites Heraclitus (whom Newman also quoted, as we shall see later) as saying, “Higher and more powerful than the harmony lying open to the day is the harmony which does not show itself (is concealed).”56 Connecting the idea of logos with aletheia, Heidegger further stipulates that language’s responsibility is to make truth manifest, to steal truth from concealment into un-concealment. This means, the philosopher writes, that the logos must induce “that which conceals itself and does not show itself (that which is not self-showing), to show itself, the task of making it manifest.”57 Again, Newman repeated such sentiments nearly verbatim. If Heidegger interprets the Greeks as conceiving truth as something stolen, torn from concealment, Newman interprets the function of art as “wrest[ing] truth from the void.”58 And if Heidegger argued that the logos compels that which hides itself to show itself, Newman asserted that the first manifestations of human self-awareness were primordial attempts at linguistic expression. “Original man,” he wrote, “shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.”59 The topics of language and humanity’s confrontation with the void will be addressed in greater detail later. For now, suffice it to say that these intersections buttress the

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hypothesis that, just as Heidegger described the ancient Greeks’ belief in nature’s lying in concealment, a state from which truth as un-concealment must be stolen by means of the logos, Newman also justified his experiments with abstraction on the grounds that representational art “covers truth” by concealing the very existential dilemmas that prompt humanity’s ability to question the meaning of its own existence. On this account, the vertical beam in Newman’s work would not stand for a human being per se, but, by echoing our vertical orientation in space (we will revisit this question in the section on Da-sein), it is meant to ignite a sense—pure and simple—of our awareness of self. The beam, in effect, does not re-present an entity as much as evoke, in Newman’s own words, “an embodiment of feeling.” Like Heidegger, who conceded that Being, despite defining the horizon of our possibilities, nonetheless remains an intangible and immaterial concept, Newman sought to conjure metaphysical ideas to the exclusion of portraying a representational entity. The stripe, by recalling our vertical orientation and upright posture, yet without outlining the physical contours of a specific human being, was a convenient solution. It suggests the eruption of Being into the realm of beings, but, by virtue of being abstract, it cannot be conflated exactly with any physical being, even the human being. But given the intimate associations Heidegger drew between Being and presence, the beam can be conflated with a human “presence.” The slowness with which Newman construed these implications, moreover, hardly mitigates a Heideggerian reading: for Heidegger, the meaning of Being is both the nearest and the furthest from us, self-evident, though still in need of interpretation. Occasionally, he submits, thinking “does not fully comprehend the new insights it has just gained, and does not properly see them through.” The purpose of thought, he adds, is “to listen to that which our questioning vouchsafes—and all questioning begins to be a questioning only in virtue of pursuing its quest for essential being.”60 It is indeed tempting to assume that such a situation transpired with Newman: that he contemplated his canvas with an attitude Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, a kind of release, a state of mind wherein we wait, without specifying or anticipating what we are waiting for. In that state, the philosopher hints, Being itself may open itself to us.61 This idea also tallies with Peter De Bolla’s astute observation that Newman’s aspiration to provide spectators with a sense of their own presence cannot be considered the “content” of his paintings, as much as an occurrence that emerges from the encounter “between the viewer and the work.”62 Though in dire need of awakening, such sensations are rare, arising only during moments of extreme intensity. Interpreting his own images according to the kind of forceful sensations he experienced in Ohio, Newman counted abstraction as the most effective means of alerting his audience to the metaphysical implications of his images, just as Heidegger concocted a new terminology to

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alert his readers that his philosophy was addressing the meaning—not of a physical entity—but of what it means to be. Since there is no such thing as a “to be” (“No thing,” Heidegger reiterates, “corresponds to the word and the meaning ‘being’” 63), approaching the question of existence as if one were interpreting the meaning of some physical object would trivialize the entirety of the enterprise.64 This situation applies no less to Newman. If he conceived of presence as an exceptionally acute form of self-awareness, as a sense of existence awakening to itself, then it would stand to reason that these ideas could only be communicated by nonfigural means. Of course, as already intimated, these meanings are not objective properties of Newman’s canvases; these were associations the artist projected upon—but later assumed, wrongly, were actually “contained in”—the images themselves. (Inanimate objects, arguably, cannot “contain” meanings; they can only have meanings be projected onto them. Although Newman seems to have overlooked this issue, he can be excused, given that he was projecting meanings onto intentional objects such as works of art—objects, after all, in which, both emotionally and intellectually, he was deeply invested.) But we still stand on very thin ice. Not simply because Newman’s process of ascribing meaning is highly intuitive; also because the nature of this meaning is less than concrete. It bears mentioning—in view of Newman’s distrust of logical thinking65—that Heidegger equally argued that the implications of Being are disclosed only “to poetic insight.”66 Logic, he believed, was appropriate to the study of beings, not to uncovering Being. Invoking logic for the purpose of defining the “essence of thinking,” he maintained, “is a questionable approach if only because logic as such . . . is questionable.”67 Poetic insight, conversely, is not just intuition; it is the thinking of Being. Rejecting logic does not relinquish thought; “it means more radical, stricter thinking, a thinking that is part and parcel of being.”68 What this stricter thinking reveals, however, remains intangible and nebulous, no doubt because the nature of Being is intangible and nebulous, neither something whose existence is empirically verifiable nor whose meaning is amenable to empirical demonstration. In fact, Heidegger’s own definitions of Being vary so considerably69 that no less a philosopher than Karl Jaspers agreed with a quip once made by Karl Löwith—namely, “No one will in fact be able to assert that he has actually understood what that Being, that mystery, is of which Heidegger speaks.”70 Consequently, unanswered questions remain. If Heidegger and Newman associated presence with a keen sense of alertness, and with a consciousness of our origins, it is difficult to gauge how Newman thought a physical object such as a painted canvas (i.e., an object that exists in the dimensions of space and time) could trigger such a complex matrix of ideas. Our own awareness of Being (even if Being does not qualify as a physical entity) can only be awakened within the all-too tangible spatial and temporal constraints of our physical existence. The

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term “presence” is thus forced to carry a heavy load. Intended to enable metaphysical self-awakening, the idea still relies upon the connotations we attach to physical presence in order to make that point. When we say that someone “makes their presence felt,” or that a work of art “has a certain presence,” we mean that their visual or psychological impact is either inordinately powerful or disproportionate to their literal size. Accordingly, even if Being is not a being, the concept is only apprehensible within the confines of a spatio-temporal framework. Even if Being is not endowed with literal extension, Heidegger has no choice but to describe it, metaphorically, as though it were: that is, Being can be housed and shepherded, it can decay and die, it can be concealed or un-concealed, and so forth. Which is to say that, although Being is a metaphysical idea, and presence an intangible experience, these concepts must, in the context of either philosophy or visual art, be translated into verbal expressions that refer to physical situations (Heidegger) or by means of visual relationships on a physical canvas (Newman). For all his pronouncements about the difference between Being and beings, Heidegger had to concede, “Everything that really exists is a ‘this-nowhere.’”71 And by employing titles such as Now, Here, Right Here, and Moment, Newman acknowledges, if only tacitly, that even the metaphysical problems of existence can only be communicated in physicalist terms. Neither Newman nor Heidegger could escape this dilemma. In an earlier section, we cited one as declaring, “What I’m saying is that my painting is physical and what I’m saying also is that my painting is metaphysical. What I’m also saying is that my life is physical and that my life is also metaphysical,”72 and the other as writing, “Although poets . . . are thus essentially ‘spiritual’ themselves, they must at the same time also remain immersed and captive within what is real.”73 For all that, we are still unclear as to how Being becomes manifest. “Presence,” then, was Heidegger’s way of making Being more concrete: “‘It is in being’ means ‘it persists in its presence,’ and in its persistence concerns and moves us.”74 The vertical beam was Newman’s, meant to be both ontic and ontological, more than a human being (insofar as it represents the metaphysical concept of presence) and less (insofar as it does not represent or objectify a physical person). Perhaps this was the meaning underlying Newman’s statement that, for the Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast, abstract art was directed toward “metaphysical understanding,”75 or that, when applying the term ideographic to his work, he cited the following definition: “A character, symbol or figure which suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name.”76 If Newman chided European artists for being too “at home in the world of cognitive objects and materials,”77 William Barrett describes Heidegger as chiding “Western man” for being “bound to things, to objects.”78 Again, the dilemma was finding an appropriate means to translate the metaphysical into a physical image. And if presence gave a nebulous concept such as Being greater concreteness, so would the

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concept of “place.” To sharpen this idea, Heidegger’s concept of Da-sein, to which we will now turn, provides further assistance. First, Da-sein—literally meaning “being-there” and sometimes even translated as “There being”—embodies the very problems mentioned above: a Da-sein, in effect, is a (metaphysical) being that has been placed within the (physical) constraints of the “here.” It is physical because only a being endowed with extension can be located “here” as opposed to “there,” but it is also metaphysical because it alone reflects on the fact of its own existence. For Heidegger, then, Da-sein only truly applies to human beings. They are the only beings that literally exist in the “here” and “now,” but can, at the same time, brood over the meaning of their condition. Still, Da-sein is not exactly synonymous with “human being” insofar as human beings do not always question the meaning of Being. (Even if Heidegger acknowledged thoughtlessness as a way of Being, thoughtlessness is a way of Being wherein we are not ourselves, wherein we have, so to say, fled from our own nature.) Just as the new artist, according to Newman, creates an “abstract world which can be discussed only in metaphysical terms,”79 Barrett acknowledges that in using the term Da-sein, Heidegger is not indicating “a definite object with a fixed nature.”80 No less importantly, Heidegger’s Da-sein will also prove germane to interpreting Newman’s abstractions because the indispensable, literal “thereness” implicit in the concept echoes one of Newman’s major preoccupations: the idea of place.

Notes 1. Barnett Newman interviewed by Emile de Antonio, 1970, transcript, page 22, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 2. Barnett Newman interviewed by Karlis Osis, 1963, transcript, page 20, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 3. SWI, 174. 4. Barnett Newman interviewed by Lane Slate, 1963, for Contemporary American Painters, broadcast on March 10, 1963, CBS Television; audiotape, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 5. SWI, 174. 6. Martin Heidegger, Letter to Karl Löwith, August 19, 1921, cited in Theodore Kisiel, “Heidegger’s Apology,” in Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis (eds.), The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 24. 7. What Is Called Thinking?, 41. 8. OWL, 103–4. 9. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 46.

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10. IM, 61. J. Glenn Gray, in “Heidegger’s ‘Being,’” Journal of Philosophy 49 (June 5, 1952): 416, picks up on this point: “For Being in the Greek tradition came to be understood as substance, ousia, and substance in turn was equated with parousia, presence. That which is truly present is the enduring, the unchanging.” 11. What Is Called Thinking?, 236. 12. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 81. 13. Heidegger, quoted in Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 119. 14. On Time and Being, 5. 15. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 31, 33. 16. W. H. Werkmeister, “An Introduction to Heidegger’s ‘Existential Philosophy,’” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (September 1941): 83: “There is given from the very first a distinction between ‘beings’ (Seiendem) such as we are, and ‘beings’ (Seiendem) such as we are not.” 17. Martin Heidegger, “Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 40. Miguel de Beistegui’s summary of Heidegger’s position recalls the emphatic employment of vertical beams in Newman’s canvases, and the artist’s own avowal that his work, though abstract, is involved in man: “For the first time, in Ancient Greece, man rises up (sich aufsteht) against the totality of what is and stands erect in the midst of that totality by way of his questioning attitude. It is there, in the full assumption of his verticality, that man finds his proper dwelling” (Heidegger and the Political, 48). 18. FCM, 198. 19. FCM, 193. 20. Humanity’s ability to break the ring of inhibition in which animals are entrapped, and to glance at the truth of its existential condition, is often referred to by Heidegger as a form of clearing, again reinforcing the parallel between light and darkness, and the view that Being is most keenly felt against the possibility of non-Being. This view again can be construed as comparable to Newman’s images, such as Moment, when, as an oblique reference to Genesis, light seems to emerge abruptly from darkness. 21. See Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, 4ff. 22. EGT, 9. In his introduction to Introduction to Metaphysics, ix, Ralph Manhein adds the following: “Heidegger’s translations from the Greek . . . differ radically from other translations of the same texts. Heidegger’s translations are based on his investigations of Greek words and Greek thought. Since his interpretations of words and thought are very different from the traditional ones, it is only natural that his translations should be different from traditional translations.” See also Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 106; and Robert Cumming, “Existence and Being: Martin Heidegger’s Einfluss auf die Wissenschaften,” Journal of Philosophy 48 (February 15, 1951): 105, and Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 110, 150. 23. IM, 176. 24. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 111.

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25. EGT, 36–37. 26. One exception here is Helene Weiss, “The Greek Conception of Time and Being in the Light of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (December 1941): 173–87. But while Weiss agrees with Heidegger that the Greeks believed Being was presence, and that time was as important for the Greeks as it was for Heidegger, she comes to a different conclusion as far as the idea of Being was concerned: “Yet, the ways in which time answers the ontological questions in Greek philosophy and in Heidegger’s respectively, differ widely” (183–84). 27. SWI, 145. 28. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstader, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 48. 29. BT, 29. 30. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, 79. 31. BT, 202. 32. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (with the assistance of Barnett Newman), letter to Edward Alden Jewell, art editor, New York Times, June 7, 1943, reprinted in Lawrence Alloway and Mary Davis MacNaughton, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective (New York: Arts Publisher, 1981), 169. 33. SWI, 146. 34. See Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 21. 35. IM, 12. 36. IM, 13. 37. SWI, 167. 38. SWI, 173. Intriguingly, in What Is Existentialism? (12), William Barrett thinks that existentialism could be baptized as “the search for the concrete.” 39. Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 2. 40. What Is Called Thinking?, 8. 41. FCM, 232. In Mindfulness, Heidegger mentions the same idea in relation to art: “whenever the semblance of mindfulness surfaces, what is strived for becomes immediately transparent” (29). 42. The point has already been mentioned in Paul Crowther’s essay “Barnett Newman and the Sublime,” Oxford Art Journal 7:2 (1984): 56ff. 43. BT, 27. 44. See Gelven, A Commentary, 38–41. 45. Marjorie Glicksman, “A Note on the Philosophy of Heidegger,” Journal of Philosophy 35 (February 17, 1938): 98: “It is evident . . . not only that there is no bare fact; but if there were any, no ‘point-of-viewless’ approach to it would be possible. ‘There is no point-of viewlessness,’ Heidegger declares, ‘there is only choice of point of view.’” It should be noted that Glicksman attended Heidegger’s courses at the University of Freiburg during the summer semester of 1932. 46. Richard Shiff, “The Despair of Self-Awareness,” in Shiff, Mancusi-Ungaro, and Colsman-Freyberger, Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, 87. 47. Intriguingly, the idea of the hermeneutical circle—that the whole cannot be understood without an understanding of the parts, and that the parts, in turn, cannot be understood without an understanding of the whole—was a key notion for Heidegger.

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48. IM, 114. 49. IM, 114. 50. BT, 31. 51. BT, 32. 52. “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 210. 53. Barnett Newman, “Las formas artisticas del Pacifico,” Ambos Mundos (June 1946): 51–55. Quoted and translated by Barbara Reise, Primitivism in the Writings of Barnett Newman: A Study in the Ideological Background of Abstract Expressionism, MA thesis, Columbia University, 1965, 19ff. 54. What Is Called Thinking?, 19. 55. FCM, 29. 56. FCM, 29. 57. FCM, 29. 58. SWI, 140. 59. SWI, 158. 60. OWL, 72. 61. See Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), 44. See Discourse on Thinking, 67ff. 62. Peter De Bolla, “Serenity: Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” in Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 48. 63. IM, 88. 64. See Gelven, A Commentary, 25–26. 65. See, for example, SWI, 157. 66. IM, 149. 67. IM, 120. 68. IM, 122. 69. See Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, esp. 32ff. 70. Löwith cited in Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger (Munich: Piper, 1978), 189: “Heidegger’s passion was for questioning, not answering.” Steiner puts it this way: “In Heidegger’s ‘questioning of being,’ an activity so central that it defines, or should define, the human status of man, there is neither enforcement nor a programmatic thrust from inquisition to reply” (55). Steiner also adds that, according to Heidegger, “That which is ‘worthy of questioning’ . . . is literally inexhaustible” (56). 71. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 66. 72. SWI, 280. 73. EHP, 86. 74. OWL, 95. 75. SWI, 108. 76. SWI, 107. 77. SWI, 163. 78. William Barrett, Irrational Man (New York: Anchor Books, 1958), 212. 79. SWI, 163. 80. Irrational Man, 218.

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CHAPTER 4

Place: Da-sein

Apart from connecting presence with self-awareness, Newman and Heidegger also connected it with “place.” A painting, Newman stated, “should give man a sense of place: that he knows he’s there, so he’s aware of himself. In that sense he relates to me when I made the painting because in that sense I was there. . . . [T]his is what I have tried to do: that the onlooker in front of my painting knows that he’s there. To me, the sense of place not only has a mystery but has that sense of metaphysical fact.”1 When describing how he hoped a spectator would interpret his work, Newman referred to place no less than to presence. In fact, the two, like truth and presence, are inextricably linked. A painting should provide, he declared, “someone who looks at it [with] a sense of place so that he sees and feels himself.”2 Like presence, place generates self-awareness: “It is only after man knows where he is that he can ask himself ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where am I going?’”3 Again, Newman left the idea ambiguous, defining neither the concept nor its intellectual pedigree. One of the few surviving clues, as already indicated, lies in the notes from which he spoke during his 1962 lecture at Hunter: “Sein ist Da-sein—one creates place.” The connection is warranted. One of Heidegger’s key points is that the question of Being “embraces the foundations of being-there [Da-sein].”4 If Newman’s sense of place was closely anchored to his idea of presence, so is Heidegger’s. We already cited Newman’s reference to the Hebrew term Makom: that a synagogue is more than a house of prayer, it “is place, Makom, where each man may be called to stand before the Torah.”5 From his own grounding in Greek culture, Heidegger observed something strikingly similar with respect to the term Polis. Though Polis is usually understood as city or city-state, Heidegger, predictably, disapproves of this translation, replacing it with “the place, the there, wherein and as which historical being-there [Da-sein] is.”6 The Greeks, he continues, “had no word for ‘space.’ This is no accident; for they experienced 75

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the spatial on the basis not of extension but of place (topos); they experienced it as chora, which signifies . . . that which is occupied by what stands there. That place belongs to the thing itself.”7 Thus even if Newman’s idea of place was extrapolated from the concept of Makom in the Jewish tradition, and Heidegger’s Da-sein from polis in ancient Greece, Newman discerned a connection. If presence is not just physical existence, but a state wherein one is “awakened” to Being, so is place more than physical location. Heidegger, in fact, explains Da-sein in terms of self-awareness. An understanding of Being, the philosopher claims, “belongs to the being of Da-sein.”8 Inasmuch as Newman sought to instigate a feeling of presence by galvanizing the spectator’s sense of “separateness” and “individuality,”9 so does Heidegger construe Da-sein as an emphatically individual, if not solitary, condition: what really exists in an existential sense “is individual.”10 The Being about which a human being is concerned, the philosopher contends, is always its own.11 Each man, he adds, can only assert the Being intended “for himself.”12 In effect, even if only human beings can awaken themselves to their own Being, they must do so entirely on their own. Self-awareness is a condition into which we enter alone. As a way of sharpening the definition of Da-sein, it might be useful, though Heidegger did not do so himself, to reference the difference between metonyms and hypernyms, with Da-sein exemplifying the latter. A metonym is a figure of speech that connotes an individual or institution by means of a part or accoutrement: “a sail” for a boat or “the crown” for the king. When connoting human beings, metonyms can be disparaging, as when businessmen are called “suits” or women “skirts.” When parts of the body are taken out of context, especially private parts, metonyms can be downright vulgar. Hypernyms do the reverse. In the examples Steven Pinker uses, when a male individual is called “a man” or “a mensch” (which also means “man”), the redundancy somehow confers a sense of nobility or dignity to the person. Note that, unlike metonyms, the hypernyms Pinker mentioned designate the person as a whole, not a part or accoutrement. Coupled with this sense of dignity, then, is a kind of physical indivisibility. Half a bowl of pudding or cereal is still pudding or cereal, but half a person is not a person.13 As a rule, Pinker observes, “metonyms derogate, hypernyms elevate.”14 Da-sein is a perfect example of a hypernym; just as all adult males are men, yet some exceed (“he’s a real man!”) and others need to be reminded to live up to expectations (“be a man!”), human beings are Da-seins only insofar as they think. Much has been made, of course, of Heidegger’s antipathy to the term “humanism,” but, according to William Richardson, this hostility stems from Heidegger’s view that humanism places too low a value on man, that man, more than a rational animal, is the only being among beings called upon to have a relationship with Being.15 The same might apply to Newman’s beams, which, as Thierry de Duve aptly put it, “exceed human scale as if to magnify it.”16 If

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Heidegger sought to restore Da-sein “to the domain of being, which it was originally incumbent on man to open for himself,”17 Newman hoped to provide his audience with a sense of place, ostensibly because this sense is too often absent. Attached to this restoration of dignity and nobility is a distinctly spatial connotation. The word Da-sein, in the Heideggerian sense, does not simply evoke “existence” or “presence,” but, quite literally, a sense of “Being there.”18 This spatial component, the da of Da-sein, inserts a greater degree of concreteness in what might otherwise be an exceedingly nebulous concept. (For Adorno, Heidegger’s concept unites “an absent concreteness with the ennobling of that concreteness.”19) Da-sein, Heidegger explains, “is ‘spatial’ with regard to its being-in-the-world.”20 Similarly, when relating the concept of Da-sein to his own idea of “creating place” while lecturing at Hunter, Newman ascribed spatial connotations to the sensation of presence; from his description of the Ohioan mounds, one gets the distinct impression that Newman’s spatial isolation from the surrounding environment provoked an acute sense of his own presence. “Looking at the site,” he remembered, “you feel, Here I am, here . . . and out beyond there there is chaos, nature rivers, landscapes. . . . But here you get a sense of your own presence [italics mine].” As Guenther Stern puts it: Da-sein “is not just a sort of ‘to be,’ but a ‘being there,’ a ‘being present’; since it says ‘here I am’ or ‘I am there.’”21 For both Newman and Heidegger, the awakening of presence is contingent upon a sense of being in as much as upon a sense of being different from nature. As the self becomes aware, it distinguishes itself spatially, and feels itself to be qualitatively different from the non-self. Self-awakening, for Heidegger, means exhibiting the “specific characteristics of the being of Da-sein qua Da-sein as opposed to the characteristics of the being of what is not Dasein, for instance, nature.”22 This statement could not be closer to Newman’s self-described experience in Ohio. Since the latter argued that man is sublime only insofar as he is aware, the self-awareness sparked by a sense of presence and place explains the artist’s use of titles such as Here (figure 4.1) or Not There-Here (figure 4.2). For Newman and Heidegger, collapsing place and self-awareness allowed a metaphorical space to form where the physical and metaphysical meet. The distinction between the “here” and the “there,” after all, is among the most basic distinctions humans make: children engage in pointing even before learning to speak—a critical activity in the acquisition of language—and parents point to objects when teaching children their corresponding words. Terms such as “here” and “there,” in addition, are especially focal insofar as pointing to an object refers to the object itself as well as to its location, a redundancy that, as Michael Tomasello explains, children intuitively grasp. Demonstratives such as “here” and “there,” moreover, are present in all known languages and “always embody a spatial component of distance from the speaker (as in this versus that) . . . [and] do not derive from

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Figure 4.1. Barnett Newman, Here III (1965–1966), stainless steel and Cor-Ten steel, height—23.5 inches, depth—18.5 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 4.2. Barnett Newman, Not ThereHere (1962), oil and casein on canvas, 78  35 inches. Centre Pompidou, Paris © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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other types of words. And so demonstratives may be the most basic communicative acts in the vocal modality.”23 Coupled with the distinction between “me” and “not-me,” what could be more fundamental than the distinction between the “here” and the “there?” Being “here” means not being anywhere else, and “being here” means being different from what is “not here.” A sense of place, in other words, forces us to contemplate our nature, face our limitations, and accept any constraints upon our mobility. Over and above the associations logically deduced from living in a physical world, Newman and Heidegger also endowed place and Da-sein with a mystical aura inconducive to verbal explanation. As much as Newman saw place and existence as being mysterious, and praised pre-Columbian sculptors for evoking the “elemental mystery of life,”24 so did Heidegger assert that “absolute mystery, mystery as such (the dissimulation of the dissimulated), pervades the whole of man’s Da-sein.”25 Mystery permeates Da-sein because it is the “there” of Being. Of all beings, Da-sein has been charged to be that “place” wherein Being comes into presence—to be its shelter or abode, as it were. How and why Being manifests itself in human beings—beings whose responsibility is the thinking of Being—still remains mysterious, the more so, as indicated above, because there is no physical location where Being itself is, provoking our obliviousness to Being. When alert and mindful, though, Da-sein, as mysterious as it sounds, may yet become that location: the place where Being is manifest. And as inscrutable as the meanings Heidegger and Newman projected upon presence and place may be, these designations function no differently than the way Sweetser described metaphors.26 Even if Da-sein is a philosophical idea, Heidegger did not divorce it from its physical, spatial connotations: “In the term situation (position—‘to be in the position of’), there is an overtone of spatial significance. We shall not attempt to eliminate it from the existential concept. For such an overtone is also implied in the ‘there’ of Da-sein. Being-in-the-world has a spatiality of its own.”27 In fact, one could make the argument that, for the existential concept to have the requisite connotations, the spatial overtones must be retained. Absent its ability to describe the literal position of objects in space, the word “place” could not convey the subjective feelings of status associated with living in a hierarchical society (in such expressions as “I know my place in the pecking order” or “this is what I would do in your place”). It is even particular to the human being (i.e., to a being that thinks) to have the very capability to “be” at a location it does not physically inhabit. Similarly, if Da-sein marks the condition of a being alert to its existence, capable of differentiating itself from its natural surroundings, then the concept is incomprehensible independently of our physical experiences as embodied beings. On this account, the physical limitations under which Newman worked, and the physicalist connotations of Heidegger’s arcane concepts, enhance rather

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than impede the communicability of philosophical ideas. The point is not to leave interpretation at the level of physicality alone; as Hubert Dreyfus clarifies, even if Da-sein is not “in” the world in the same way as an ordinary object in space, this does not mean that Da-sein has no spatiality: “There is a spatiality of in-volvement,”28 a “spatiality” best expressed through terms such as “dwelling,” “sojourning,” or “staying.”29 Objects exist in space, but only Da-sein dwells.30 These terms buttress Sweetser’s explanation of metaphor’s ability to enlist the physical to convey the psychological, and, for these reasons, reinforce the contention that Heidegger’s Da-sein proves helpful in interpreting Newman’s “sense of place.” Like Heidegger’s, Newman’s idea is grounded in—but also conveys a great deal more than—a simple spatial relation,31 and comparable to the way physical space can describe moods, emotions, or psychological states. Expressions such as “I am in a good mood,” “I am in a great relationship,” “she has fallen in love,” “I have come out of a depression,” or “he is out of his mind,” betray the extent to which attunements are conceptualized as if they were physical spaces (i.e., spaces endowed with inside and outside boundaries, “in” and “out” of which human individuals may be described as moving as their disposition alters). Other expressions such as “I have come a long way,” “he has gone far,” or “where are we on this matter?” also bespeak how easily we equate distances traveled and personal or professional goals; conversely, sentences such as “I feel out of place,” “he cannot get on track,” or “we have lost our way,” convey emotional or intellectual disconnection. Just as being admonished for not knowing “one’s place” in the social order is a frustrating and humiliating situation, “feeling at home” or “knowing one’s place” implies accepting our precise function in the social sphere. In his 1948 essay on Heidegger, Karl Löwith describes the modern condition in similar terms, terms Newman may have found suggestive: “modernity begins with the dissolution of a natural and social order in which man was supposed to have a definitive nature and place, while modern man ‘exists,’ displaced and out of place, in extreme situations on the edge of chaos.”32 Newman’s use of “place” to evoke self-awareness works in precisely the same way, reflecting how readily a geographical location is made interchangeable with a disposition or mood, and, more importantly, how Newman’s intention to give the spectator a “sense of place” stands—in the grander, philosophical scheme of things—as the direct opposite of being “out of place.” In this way, the feeling of presence hinges on being alert to our own location in the here-ness and now-ness of the physical universe. During moments of acute self-awareness, our sensitivity to our own Being is enhanced because the world also begins to exist for us in a more intense manner. This is why a “sense of place” does not define a geographical location as much as our disposition toward a geographical location (i.e., the world at large in a physical and existential sense). Since the world looks differently depending upon our attitude,

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Heidegger argues that the “affective state in which we find ourselves not only discloses, according to the mood we are in, what-is-in-totality, but this disclosure is at the same time . . . the ground phenomenon of our Da-sein.”33 Heidegger’s view is reminiscent of Newman’s description of his works as “embodiments of feeling,” and, more specifically, of how physical encounters (such as the one the artist experienced in Ohio) initiated those feelings. Consonant with Newman’s sensations being triggered by the surrounding environment, Heidegger writes that Da-sein understands “its own being in terms of that being to which it is essentially, continually, and most closely related—the ‘world.’”34 Place, in other words, reflects how our physical location interconnects with a disposition or mood, a dimension, Heidegger explains, not spatial “in the familiar sense” but spatial “in the dimensionality which Being itself is.”35 “The ‘here,’ ‘over there,’ and ‘there’ are not primarily pure locative designations of innerwordly beings objectively present at positions in space,” he continues, “but, rather, characteristics of the primordial spatiality of Da-sein . . . they have primarily an existential, not a categorical meaning.”36 In this existential dimension, the “where” is comparable to the “how.” Mood, Heidegger contends, reveals “how one is and is coming along;” it brings Being to its “there.”37 In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he put it more succinctly: “We would do well to infer from where we are standing how things stand with us.”38 In effect, since Da-sein means location in an existential as well as physical sense, only beings for whom an awareness of Being is possible can feel this sensation. A plant or animal cannot be a Da-sein; a plant or animal cannot have a sense of “place.” Because Da-sein is spiritual, Heidegger writes, “it can be spatial in a way that essentially remains impossible for an extended corporeal thing.”39 These ideas were central to Newman’s worldview as well. The purpose of art, he stated, “it to create a sense of place, so that the artist and beholder will know where they are.” In parallel to Heidegger’s differentiation between Da-seins and not Da-seins—that is, beings that have a sense of place from beings that do not, beings that are spiritual from beings that are not—Newman insisted that the true artist “distinguish between a place and no place at all; and the greater the work of art, the greater will be this feeling. And this feeling is the fundamental spiritual dimension.”40 Spirit is significant because it endows Da-sein with the ability to break the ring of inhibition to which other beings are consigned. Instead of being programmed by their instincts, human beings shift their perception according to their relationship with or feelings toward the world, and, in the process, alter their relationship with or feelings toward themselves. This unique human ability, arguably, underlies both Newman’s sense of place and the spatial-existential dimension of Heidegger’s Da-sein: “the most extreme demand must be announced to man, not some arbitrary demand, not this one or that one, but the demand

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pure and simple made upon man. . . . It is that Dasein as such is demanded of man, that it is given to him—to be there.”41 To reinforce his view of spatiality as “a spatiality of in-volvement”42—a use of space particular to the relationships humans establish—Heidegger introduced the term “de-distancing.” De-distancing suggests, as Dreyfus explains, that Dasein “brings things close in the sense of bringing them within the range of its concern, so that they can be experienced as near to or remote from a particular Dasein.”43 Again, spatial orientations (near versus far, close versus distant) evoke nonspatial relations of concern or involvement; in describing this concept, Heidegger insists that it “does not depend on spatial-temporal relation. Nearness, then, is by nature outside and independent of [measurable] space and time.”44 When he disparaged the means by which technology eliminates distances in the modern world, Heidegger objected that the “frantic abolition of all distances [still] brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance.”45 In this way, de-distancing recalls the way expressions such as “he is a close friend,” “a distance has formed between us,” or “he and I have had a falling out” reference space to describe the state of emotional relationships. The spatial configurations are not literal (one may be physically separated from a “close” friend or live in proximity to individuals from whom one is emotionally “distant”), but effectively convey emotional or psychological connection. For Heidegger, space held similar connotations and, with the requisite philosophical spin, de-distancing connects with presence. By bringing the world within the orbit of our concern, de-distancing enhances the intensity of our awareness and accentuates the feeling of presence. Already cited were Heidegger’s statements about the emotional undertones of the term “neighborhood”: when we are “faceto-face with one another . . . not only with respect to human beings but also with respect to things of the world . . . all things are open to one another . . . one extends itself to the other, and thus all remain ourselves; one is over the other as its guardian watching over the other.”46 For Dreyfus, Heidegger is describing a way of Being that opens up a world in which things can be near or far, and thus encountered as present.47 Thus, if de-distancing heightens sensations of presence and place by bringing things nearer to us (i.e., within our purview), this idea is strikingly reminiscent of the way Newman wanted his works to affect his audience. Especially relevant is Newman’s belief that the encounter with his art was analogous to confronting another human being, and his insistence that, in spite of their size, his canvases be seen at close range. “There is a tendency,” he wrote, “to look at large pictures from a distance. . . . [My pictures] are intended to be seen from a short distance.”48 To be sure, the artist made this recommendation primarily on visual grounds, confident in his work’s greater impact when perused close up. But given his interest in communicating meaning, it is likely that Newman wished

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his canvases seen at close range to instigate a spatiality of in-volvement, a form of Heideggerian de-distancing. To encourage emotional empathy from the spectator, he insisted, the shapes and colors in his pictures should “act as symbols to [elicit] sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist’s vision.”49 Newman’s one-time friend, Mark Rothko, described an analogous motivation, admitting that, while working on a large scale is emblematic of historical painting in the grand manner, his own reason for favoring large canvases was to be “intimate and human.” 50 There is a compelling parallel, therefore, between Newman and Rothko’s desire to engage the spectator emotionally by having their works seen at close range and Heidegger’s concept of de-distancing, where the elimination of physical distance evokes the bringing of things within the realm of one’s concern. From a Heideggerian perspective, then, Da-sein moves within an existential dimension just as beings move within physical space. As we draw nearer or farther from objects in actual space, Da-sein draws closer or farther from things by becoming mindful. De-distancing, Heidegger explains, “means making distance disappear, making the being at a distance of something disappear, bringing it near. Da-sein is essentially de-distancing.”51 “An essential tendency towards nearness,” he adds, “lies in Da-sein.”52 Thus, although Heidegger does not call the ability to engage in de-distancing exclusive to Da-sein (in the way being “present” is), he nonetheless counts it as one of its essential properties. To his mind, one cannot sense one’s self without sensing the world, and one cannot sense the world without drawing it within our purview. For his part, Newman expressed the sentiment that “you can only feel others if you have a sense of your own being.”53 In Ohio, Newman came at the issue from the other side: intimating that one can only feel one’s self if one has a sense of the non-self (e.g., nature or chaos). Either way, the artist was echoing both Heidegger’s distinction between what is Da-sein and what is not, as well as Da-sein’s unique proclivity among all beings to engage in de-distancing. Of course, experiencing nearness also means experiencing distance. “[O]nly he can be lonesome,” Heidegger declared, “who is not alone.”54 In this sense, because Da-sein discovers beings in their remoteness, distances between innerwordly beings become manifest.55 While pondering the implications of this passage, it should be remembered that, because Heidegger’s terminology (and, in many ways, Newman’s) is profoundly metaphorical, the term remoteness should, once more, not be taken literally. As the philosopher himself admits, “remoteness is never understood as measurable distance.”56 Similarly, what is existentially “closest” is what is most readily available to us, what concerns us most deeply. In the end, “Nearness and presence, not the magnitude of separation, is what is essential.”57 Since existential nearness and remoteness measure unquantifiable distances, both are consequences of de-distancing. As we cannot

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bring everything within the realm of our concern, and the demands of our everyday lives actually preclude us from doing so, we keep individuals and things continually at arm’s length, preventing ourselves from being open to the world. De-distancing reverses this neutral state of indifference and opens our environment, and all it offers, to our view. To counter the hostility and indifference with which much abstract art is received, Newman asked his public to peruse his work from a short distance, encouraging his audience to contemplate his production more seriously and hoping for greater intimacy between work and spectator. Engaging in his own form of de-distancing, Newman sought to bring his paintings within the realm of our concern. If de-distancing encourages the empathetic response among the audience Newman desired, it also ignites enough of a sense of awareness for the spectator to acquire a feeling of presence and place. Just as people who do not know their “place” in the social world are awkward and bungling in ordinary situations, or move aimlessly through life, a lack of self-awareness prevents us from knowing how we fit in the grander scheme of things, and whether our existence has any meaning. It was precisely to spark such questioning that Newman sought to give the spectator a sense of place. Inasmuch as having a sense of place makes us self-aware, self-awareness also gives us a sense of place. In fact, were it not for Da-sein’s self-awareness, space would be a homogeneous, measurable extension—like coordinates on a map—no site more important than the next; because of Da-sein, however, a sense of place exists. Without it, we are homeless. Not surprisingly, Heidegger especially appreciated Novalis’s statement: “Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.”58 Such an urge exists, Heidegger interjects, because those who philosophize “are not at home everywhere.”59 Despite modern technology’s attempt to make human life more comfortable, to make us feel, so to say, at home anywhere, humanity longs to be relieved of an underlying sense of homesickness, a sense of not belonging to the world. Yearning to be at home everywhere means, Heidegger explains, to be “within the . . . wholeness [of] the world,”60 a situation that remains one of striving, not one of satisfaction. “[T]o the extent that we are,” Heidegger interjects, “we are always waiting for something. . . . This is where we are driven in our homesickness. . . . Our very being is this restlessness.”61 Heidegger’s longing to be at home, then, compares with Newman’s striving to provide his audience with a sense of place. It is our very “placeless-ness,” our homesickness, in other words, that prompts our asking metaphysical questions and awakens a desire to philosophize. Just as his difference and separateness from nature made Newman aware of his own sense of place, our very cognizance of our physical situation, our rooted-ness in the physical world, and our inextricable difference from it, is the fundamental prerequisite, the trigger, for our awareness of our existential place in the world.

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Notes 1. SWI, 257. 2. Dorothy Gees Seckler, “Frontiers of Space,” Art in America 50 (Summer 1962): 87. 3. SWI, 289. 4. IM, 174. 5. SWI, 181. 6. IM, 152. 7. IM, 66. 8. BT, 80. 9. SWI, 257–58. 10. Martin Heidegger, Frühe Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1972), 194. 11. BT, 40. 12. IM, 69. 13. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 167. 14. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 120; see also Keith Allan and Kate Burridge, Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as a Shield and Weapon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 15. William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 531. 16. Thierry de Duve, “Ex situ,” Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 27 (Spring 1989): 46. 17. IM, 41–42. 18. Werner Brock, “An Account of ‘Being and Time,’” in Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 15. 19. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 81. 20. BT, 97. 21. Guenther Stern (Anders), “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (March 1948): 342. 22. Zollikon Seminars, 122. 23. Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 232, 233. 24. SWI, 64. 25. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 313. 26. That Newman and Heidegger both saw the physical and metaphysical as interconnected suggests again that the structure of metaphor fits their intellectual and expressive demands to the letter (as well as reinforces their view that a cognizance of the literal origins of our linguistic expressions leads to a deeper understanding of our intellectual and philosophical concepts). 27. BT, 275. 28. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 128. 29. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 27-28. 30. Even if humanity is encircled by the world, Heidegger argued, “The quality of ‘around’ which is constitutive of the surrounding world does not, however, have a primarily ‘spatial’ meaning” (BT, 62).

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31. Another example of Heidegger’s metaphorical usage can be found in the following description of the “sight of Da-sein” from BT, 138: “We must, of course, guard against a misunderstanding of the expression ‘sight.’ It corresponds to the clearedness characterizing the disclosedness of the there. ‘Seeing’ not only does not mean perceiving with the bodily eyes, neither does it mean the pure, nonsensory perception of something objectively present in its objective presence. The only peculiarity of seeing which we claim for the existential meaning of sight is the fact that it lets the beings accessible to it be encountered in themselves without being concealed.” A similar discussion of sight also appears in “The Anaximander Fragment,” in EGT, 36: “In ‘to have seen’ there is always something more at play than the completion of an optical process. . . . On that account, ‘to have seen’ is related to self-illuminating presencing. Seeing is determined, not by the eye, but by the lighting of being. . . . The essence of seeing, as ‘to have seen,’ is to know.” 32. Karl Löwith, “Heidegger: Problem and Background of Existentialism,” 347. 33. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 334. 34. BT, 14. 35. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 213. 36. BT, 112. 37. BT, 127. 38. FCM, 76. 39. BT, 336. 40. SWI, 289. 41. FCM, 165. 42. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, 128. 43. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 130–31. 44. OWL, 103. 45. “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 163. 46. OWL, 103–4. 47. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 131. 48. SWI, 178. 49. SWI, 142. 50. Mark Rothko cited in Interiors 110 (May 1951): 104. 51. BT, 97. 52. BT, 98. 53. SWI, 258. 54. OWL, 134. 55. BT, 97. 56. BT, 98. 57. Heidegger, marginal note to BT, quoted in Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 132. 58. Novalis cited in Heidegger, FCM, 5. 59. FCM, 5. 60. FCM, 5. 61. FCM, 5.

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CHAPTER 5

The Void

By differentiating himself from the Ohioan landscape, Newman did not simply underscore modern humanity’s decreasing connection with things natural. Given his fascination with beginnings, he also aspired to recapitulate the state of original man. In fact, the revelation he experienced in Ohio echoes statements the artist already made in 1947 regarding the elemental condition of early humanity. In “The First Man Was an Artist,” he declared, “Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.”1 In effect, paintings such as Onement and Be arguably visualize the vulnerable state of early hominids confronting the wide expanses and ultimate strangeness of nature. Awareness of self, for Newman, is predicated upon an awareness of our place in the world, but that same awareness, conversely, is a reminder of our inescapable difference and separateness. No wonder Newman’s ambition was to instill in the spectator the feeling “of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”2 When writing about Amlash sculpture, Newman exclaimed how “refreshing” it was to see artists for whom art embodied a “declaration of man’s nature against Nature.”3 Newman’s view, again, strikes a compelling parallel with Heidegger’s attempt to “exhibit the specific characteristics of the being of Da-sein qua Dasein as opposed to the characteristics of the being of what is not Da-sein, for instance, nature.”4 This opposition, of course, is purely arbitrary. Some belief systems count human beings as integral to nature’s fabric, and others as separate, indivisible entities (recall our example that half a bowl of cereal is still cereal but half a person is not a person). Depending upon our cultural baggage, we see ourselves relating to nature one way or the other. Yet, as Steven Pinker contends, if human beings could discern “the crystals, fibers, cells, and atoms making up matter,” we might never have developed such distinctions in the first place. The cleavage in 87

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our minds, he continues, “is not just unfettered by the object-substance distinction in the world; it is unfettered by the physical world altogether.”5 Unfettered though it may be, this distinction helps conceptualize our subjective reactions to the natural. To Heidegger’s mind, humanity sees itself as different, as a species whose essence lies in its existence, whose antecedent understanding of which sets it apart, and whose way of Being transcends that of ordinary beings. Humanity feels not just different from, it also feels not at home in, the world, explaining Heidegger’s sympathy with Novalis’s view that philosophy is a form of homesickness. What emerges from philosophical questioning is “the ultimate solitariness of man, in which he stands for him- or herself as someone unique in the face of the whole [i.e., the world].”6 Since humanity is mindful and conscious, it thus stands—and feels itself—apart from that which is unmindful and unconscious. A keen feeling of one’s own presence, therefore, stems from differentiating the “here” from the “there” both spatially and existentially. If Newman titled some of his works Here (figure 4.1), Right Here, and Not There-Here (figure 4.2), it is precisely to convey what he construed as the metaphysical implications of place: the absolute difference and utter loneliness of the human in the midst of the nonhuman. Likewise, Heidegger wrote that Da-sein understands “its here in terms of the over there of the surrounding world. The here does not mean the where of something objectively present, but the where of de-distancing being with . . . together with this de-distancing. In accordance with its spatiality, Da-sein is initially never here but over there.”7 “From this over there,” however, Da-sein “comes back to its here, and it does this only by interpreting its heedful being toward something in terms of what is at hand over there.”8 Heidegger’s wording is again metaphorical. “Here” and “there” are states of Being, not literal locations in space: “where we already are, we are in such a way that at the same time we are not there, because we ourselves have not yet properly reached what concerns our being.”9 Unfortunately for the present argument, the 1962 John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation of Being and Time in Newman’s library—unlike the more recent translation by Joan Stambaugh quoted above—translates the German Dort (there) with the more archaic “yonder.”10 But although the contrast between “here” and “yonder” is not as close to the exact wording of Newman’s title Not There-Here, the implications are the same. In fact, the same terms were used in Ralph Manheim’s 1959 translation of An Introduction to Metaphysics, where he explains that Heidegger’s Da-sein “means man’s conscious, historical existence in the world, which is always projected into a there beyond its here.”11 Given the difficulty of Heidegger’s language, it is useful to reiterate, if only parenthetically, that some translators have rendered Da-sein as “to be there,” “being-there,” or even “There-being.”12 Although the term “Da” in German can be used, depending on the context, to evoke both “here” and “there,” Michael Gelven persuasively argues that the

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“here” has priority over the “there.”13 Recalling Newman’s admission that “Here I am, here . . . and out beyond there there is chaos, nature rivers, landscapes,” Gelven makes the point that the da of Da-sein should be interpreted as “Here I am, open to possibilities!”14 But just as we can be “here,” open to possibilities, we can also be oblivious to them. In which case, although we exist “here” in a literal sense, we can also be “elsewhere.” It often happens, Heidegger observes, that in conversation with others, we are “not there,” we are “absent, albeit without having fallen asleep. This not-being-there, this being-away, has nothing at all to do with consciousness or unconsciousness in the usual sense.”15 Heidegger thus uses terms such as “being-there” or “not-being-there” to measure the degree of Da-sein’s involvement and intensity, as well as its openness to possibilities. If we think of an extreme case of madness, he adds, we say, “The person is de-ranged, displaced, away and yet there.”16 This means that Da-sein can be “over there” only because it can also be “here.” A stone or animal cannot be “here” in this sense because it cannot be “over there” either. Being “away” pertains to, and is even inseparable from, the human condition as much as being “here.” Both belong to the Being of Da-sein: “Being away is itself a way of man’s being. Being away does not mean: no being at all. It is rather a way of Da-sein’s being-there. The stone, in its being away, is precisely not there. Man however must be there in order to be away, and so long as he is there does he in general have the possibility of an ‘away.’”17 Although translations are unfortunately confusing when the difference between being “here” versus “there” is sometimes transcribed as that between being “there” versus “away,” especially in view of Gelven’s point that to stress the “there” over the “here” is distortive, what emerges unequivocally is the extent to which both Newman and Heidegger deploy spatial orientation, metaphorically, to convey existential quandaries. If we examine the “here/there” dichotomy against the proposition that Heidegger is devising is a spatiality of involvement, then the “here” represents that realm where we are close to things, when we bring things within the orbit of our concern. The “there” is its opposite: a state where closeness and concern neither sway nor affect our existence. As a result, moving from the “there” to the “here”—from lethargic indifference to a meaningful form of engagement—is emblematic of an awakened form of existence. In the same way as Heidegger hoped that “From this over there,” Da-sein “comes back to its here, and it does this only by interpreting its heedful being toward something in terms of what is at hand over there,” Newman titled a painting Not There-Here (figure 4.2) to incite a pulling back from our state of “being away” and reclaim our involvement in the “here.” When Heidegger uses the term “at hand,” for example, he often means that which is used and manipulated. By asking us to return to the “here” from what is “at hand over there,” Heidegger is suggesting that instead of taking a functional, almost exploitative, attitude

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toward things in the world, we need to bring aspects of the world within our care, a form of concern that invites a more meaningful and authentic way of relating to the world. Along such lines, the distinction between the “here” and the “there” does not simply represent the self versus the non-self (i.e., Da-sein versus what is not Da-sein) or the distinction between what lies within our care and what does not; the “here” versus the “there” also means, from a Heideggerian standpoint, the distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic self. The difference is between an individual who is resolute and aware, conscious of its possibilities, and one who is insensitive, uninformed, and simply moves with the collective will of the crowd. When Newman declared man to be sublime only insofar as he is aware, we speculate that, for him no less than for Heidegger, the “there” from which man must return is that very inauthentic condition of blind unawareness, a condition preventing us from reaching the sublimity that is our potential—even our responsibility—to achieve. Although we are literally “here” in the spatial sense, for Heidegger, we are almost always emotionally “over there,” involved with what is not Da-sein because we have no other choice but to live in the world. Immersed in day-to-day existence, we lose cognizance of the meaning of Being and never realize our true possibilities. “[S]cattered into the many,” Heidegger writes, we “are absorbed into the dispersion,” but, even so, we can “demand counter-movement against the dispersion, against the falling apart of life.”18 When Newman titled his own works Here or Not There-Here, he seems to be suggesting, as did Heidegger, that it is imperative to return to the metaphorical “here” precisely because we spend most of our lives “over there,” away from the reality of our Being, lost in a state of dispersal and unawareness. On this point, it is instructive to note that, unlike Here III (figure 4.1), which is perfectly symmetrical, Not There-Here (figure 4.2) and Right Here (figure 5.1) are markedly asymmetrical compositions, perhaps Newman’s way of visualizing this very kind of tension. The artist, in fact, commented specifically on this potential dichotomy: “you put something in the middle of the canvas and there it is. That’s focus. Or you put something in each corner and you leave the middle empty. That’s something else.”19 The desire to have “the painting be asymmetrical,” he stated elsewhere, “create[s] a space different from any I had ever done, sort of—off balance.”20 Yve-Alain Bois has already remarked on the importance of symmetry versus asymmetry in Newman’s compositions.21 The symmetrical Onement I (figure 2.1), he writes, functions as “a command to the beholder: Stand there, just in front of it, and you will know exactly where you are, for this will be the middle of your visual field, just as it is the middle of this painting.”22 Given our tendency to recruit the physical as a metaphor for the psychological, it is instructive to consider how terms such as “centered” or “balanced” are employed in everyday

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Figure 5.1. Barnett Newman, Right Here (1954), oil on canvas, 50.25  35.25 inches. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

discourse. Someone who is “centered” is “inwardly calm and steady,” a person whose “mental and emotional energies [are] well-balanced.”23 Someone who is “balanced” possesses “mental or emotional steadiness.”24 Meyer Schapiro made an equally useful observation about the way artists exploit such associations for expressive purposes: when placed in the middle of a painting, a human figure has a markedly different quality “than when set at the side, even if balanced then by a small detail that adds a weight to the larger void. A visual tension remains, and the figure appears anomalous, displaced, even spiritually strained.” “The tendency to favor an off-axis position,” Schapiro adds, “has been noticed in the drawings of emotionally disturbed children.”25 Newman and Schapiro were friends; the latter even assisted Newman when Erwin Panofsky corrected the artist’s Latin in Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Schapiro, moreover, wrote a perceptive, albeit brief, critique of Heidegger’s essay on art, a piece with which Newman could have been familiar.26 In any case, Schapiro’s observations about visual symmetry are perfectly apposite to Newman’s compositional choice in Onement versus Right Here: the symmetrical compositions endow the beams with stability and permanence, steadfastness and resolution, poise and dignity; the asymmetrical ones with mutability and impermanence, hesitation and doubt, nervousness and tension.

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Intriguingly, even if a state of unawareness prevents us from knowing ourselves and fulfilling our potential, a state of awareness forces us to confront the tragedy of our indelible separation from the world. For Newman and Heidegger, humanity’s first vocalizations are nothing if not expressions of this tragic condition. If one conceptualized early humanity “shouting consonants” in “yells of awe and anger” at its “tragic state,” at its own “self-awareness and helplessness before the void [italics mine],”27 the other conceived of the “experience of beings in their Being which comes here to language” as “tragic. . . . [W]e discover a trace of the essence of tragedy, not when we explain it psychologically or aesthetically, but rather only when we consider its essential form, the Being of beings [italics mine].”28 Both Newman and Heidegger see the tragic nature of the human condition being vocalized in language—explaining Heidegger’s statement that language is the house of Being and Newman’s fascination with the “human utterance”—but no less important is relating this idea to the existential connotations extrapolated from the “here” and the “there,” especially as an awareness of self is nothing but a tragic form of loneliness. In his inaugural lecture at Freiburg, moreover, Heidegger maintained that philosophy begins when we are brave enough to “let nothingness encounter us,” an idea echoed in Newman’s suggestion that primal humanity’s self-awareness was vocalized in expressions of “helplessness before the void.” This helplessness works on many levels. We have already related how Da-sein differentiates itself from beings that have no philosophical relationship with the world (e.g., plants or animals). Animals, in effect, can escape neither their instincts nor their environment; they are bound by what Heidegger likes to call a ring of inhibition. By contrast, a free space opens between humans and their world.29 Unlike animals, human beings can see and also see themselves seeing; their very awareness and self-consciousness creates a distance between them and the world. Heidegger calls this condition “freedom.”30 Freedom, however, is difficult to attain. If Newman ascribed our sensations of presence to our separation from nature, he also recognized forces that impede awareness, forces that re-inscribe us in the earth, as it were. Just as Newman stated, “The first man was called Adam. ‘Adam’ means earth but it also means ‘red,’” 31 Heidegger recognized that man can “open up to the vastness of the sky and at the same time be rooted in the dark of the earth.”32 The earth, in this sense, represents that primordial state of oneness with nature from which Adam originally emerged, a state of connectedness, to be sure, but also of oblivion since humanity’s relationship to Being was yet concealed. Standing out in the midst of nature, Adam broke out of this state, grasped his uniqueness, and became self-aware—an act of rivalry and defiance for which he was summarily punished. By virtue of its ability to divorce itself from nature, humanity also achieved freedom, even sublimity; but for all these achievements, it left itself alienated and

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alone. The prospects are grim: either we belong in an oblivious way, or we stand out in utter isolation. Emerging from the earth, moreover, is no gentle event (recall that Heidegger sees Being as set apart by conflict, polemos). And, since an awareness of being “thrown” into the word is integral to the very nature of Da-sein, existence manifests itself as a burden. Even if Da-sein attains freedom, it cannot freely decide whether or not to exist; on that score, Da-sein is powerless.33 Newman concurred: “No one gets anybody’s permission to be born. No one asks to live.”34 Under these conditions, deductive or logical reasoning being ineffective, only emotions ignite self-reflection, more specifically, our philosophical anxiety over the burdensome and unjust character of existence. For Heidegger, philosophy begins with mood, with “astonishment, fear, worry, curiosity, jubilation.” 35 For Newman, art is “full of feeling,”36 “the fullness that comes from emotion. . . . I work only out of high passion.”37 Even more compelling, especially in view of Newman’s image of man screaming “consonants . . . in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void,” is the following from Heidegger: “When we are caught in the uncaniness of dread, we often try to break the empty silence by words spoken at random, only [proving] the presence of Nothing.”38 These citations reinforce Newman’s view that the first man was an artist because only a being who understands its predicament and can exteriorize it in art and poetry is worthy of the name “man,” just as, for Heidegger, since it is in the nature of Da-sein to question its existence, the first man was something of a poet or philosopher. It is also for this reason that Heidegger called language “the house of Being,” precisely because poetic language allows us to be simply by expressing what we are. The poet, Heidegger adds, “always speaks as though the essent were being expressed and invoked for the first time. Poetry, like the thinking of the philosopher, has always so much world space to spare that in it each thing—a tree, a mountain, a house, the cry of a bird—loses all indifference and commonplaceness.”39 The parity between Newman’s use of the term “void” and Heidegger’s “Nothing” is equally suggestive. Both evoke concepts with which the human presence stands intertwined, but in a state of absolute and mutually exclusive confrontation. As David Farrell Krell explains, “Coming to presence suggests an absence before and after itself, so that withdrawal and departure must always be thought together with Sein as presencing; disclosedness or unconcealment suggest surrounding obscurity . . . darkness and oblivion must be thought together with Aletheia.”40 It was already related above that even if Being comes to presence through Da-sein, Being is never fully manifest in a physical state; it always remains partially obscured: in this way, revealing and occluding cannot be completely differentiated. Accordingly, the “Nothing” is not nothingness in the ordinary, literal sense, but the opposite of prescencing, the absence of Being,

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a kind of philosophical “dark matter,” as it were. Just as dark matter is invisible and undetectable, but exerts its influence upon visible matter, Heidegger, as Gelven puts it, employs the “Nothing” to suggest what “has existential significance but cannot have any metaphysical referent.”41 And just as self-affirmation is prompted by a confrontation with the void in Newman’s way of thinking, Being is only graspable against the Nothing in Heidegger’s. Truly understood, Brock explains, the problem of nothingness is “inseparably linked with the problem of ‘Being’ . . . we rise to the problem of ‘Being’ only if we have faced the problem of ‘nothingness.’”42 Thus, just as Being comes into presence through Da-sein, but always against the surrounding withdrawal of the Nothing, Newman differentiates his human presences from, but always depicts them against, a surrounding void. If Newman’s original man railed against this void at his own tragic helplessness, Brock also describes the essence of the Nothing as instilling dread, “making the things in the world slide away out of reach and yet . . . directing and fixing the attention of the powerless man on them. It is not merely the ‘feelings’ of the individual that are aroused . . . the whole of his ‘Dasein,’ i.e. his actual relationship with the things and persons around him . . . and even with himself, is profoundly affected.”43 Although confronting the Nothing is terrifying, that same situation incites greater understanding. Against the “horror and awe” of Nothingness, Brock writes, “the things in the world begin to stand out as what they actually are.”44 Were it not for the Nothing, there would be no self-hood and no freedom.45 What is significant, for Heidegger, is “to experience in Nothing the vastness to that which gives every being the warrant to be. That is Being itself. Without Being, whose unfathomable and unmanifest essence is vouchsafed us by Nothing in essential dread, everything that ‘is’ would remain in Beinglessness.”46 Awakening us from a superficial form of existence, Angst ignites philosophical insight. Human beings, therefore, should permit this experience to intensify their apprehension, not shun the anxiety provoked by the Nothing. Angst may even spark so severe a collapse of the personality that societal expectations will loosen their grip on the individual completely—a strong parallel, arguably, to Newman’s call for an art of “absolute emotion.” These concordances make a strong circumstantial case that Newman came across Brock’s 1949 anthology of Heidegger’s writings. But the connections do not end there. To bolster Heidegger’s position, Brock defended his references to early Greek myths, to “Chaos” and “Genesis.”47 Newman also stressed the importance of chaos in painting his own series on the theme of Genesis, and in expressing the opinion that “the artist like a true creator is delving into chaos. It is precisely what makes him an artist, for the Creator in creating the world began with the same material—for the artist tried to wrest truth from the void.”48 That statement squares with Heidegger’s that the individual for whom existence is an issue “must wrest

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both appearance and being from the abyss of nonbeing.”49 For Newman, then, chaos is another term for the void, just as, for Heidegger, non-Being is another word for the Nothing. By inducing anxiety, the void and the Nothing are disconcerting, albeit necessary experiences: as modern artists struggle, Newman wrote, they “bring out from the unreal, from the chaos of ecstasy something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experience of total reality.”50 Analogously, Brock expressed the view that by “exposure to ‘nothingness’ the strangeness of the things that are will be newly and deeply felt. Only when they are impressing one as strange can the genuine astonishment . . . be aroused.”51 Pagan Void (figure 2.3), Day Before One (figure 2.9), or even the background of pivotal paintings as Onement I (figure 2.1) or Be (figure 2.10) can be thus interpreted as examples of this nothingness. Presence is not only contingent on oneness, apprehension, and a sense of place, but also contingent on its inseparability from, as well as its incommensurability with, the void. The Nothing is frightening, not only because it stands as utterly distinct from humanity,52 but also because it represents the state from which humanity emerged and to which it may return, especially if it abrogates its responsibility to contemplate the meaning of Being. In this sense, the Nothing, the void, or chaos should not be construed too literally. Like Being, the Nothing is not a physical being, yet the Nothing has a certain tenuous reality. It is not empty space as much as that before which we are anxious, the absence of meaning; it can also mean, as we shall see in a later section, the emptiness of death. The only being that can face this emptiness and come to terms with its existential implications is Da-sein, a human being who is “present” and who understands what sets the special nature of his or her existence apart from everything else. On this account, the contrasts between the beams and their backgrounds in Newman’s work may be read, in part, as the artist’s meditation on humanity’s confrontation with chaos, just as Heidegger’s was a meditation on Da-sein’s confrontation with the Nothing. From this perspective, Newman opted for an abstract idiom to convey such ideas because, just as Da-sein connotes human selfawareness rather than a human being in the literal, physical sense, the Nothing connotes an existential idea rather than a literal absence of physical objects. And, by virtue of the very contrast the experience of chaos strikes between humanity and the Nothing, that experience somehow also sparks the very self-awareness of Da-sein who stands against—and whose unitary oneness comes together to face—the emptiness of the void. To emphasize that distinction, Newman clearly differentiated the beam from its surroundings, not simply in terms of line and color, but also in terms of its uninterrupted, vertical directionality. For his part, Heidegger also interpreted the void as a field, “the field of withdrawing concealment.”53 It is also from this concealment, however, that un-concealment comes to light: “the concealment that does not allow anything to emerge but only

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withdraws, nevertheless prepares the ground of essence of disclosure.”54 The two, in effect, cannot exist without the other. “Man,” Heidegger contends, “stems from the district of uncanny divine place of withdrawing concealment,”55 just as in Newman’s canvases, the beams are always separate from, but positioned in relation to, a background field. When confronting this void, Da-sein’s harmonic wholeness compensates for its separateness and individuality—precisely the sensation (Onement) Newman sought to evoke in his audience. As such, the human being who comes into presence, and comprehends its position as Da-sein, embodies the opposite of chaos. This opposition takes many forms: humanity versus the rest of nature, self-awareness versus oblivion, and order versus disorder. And to the degree that Newman sees the artist delving into chaos and wresting truth from the void, Heidegger sees Anaximander arguing that “whatever is present . . . which lingers awhile in presence becomes present as it surmounts reckless disorder. . . . [O]rder belongs to that which comes to presence by way of presencing—and that means by way of a surmounting [of disorder].”56 In other words, consonant with Newman’s view that human presence represents a state of harmonious oneness in opposition to the chaos of the void, Heidegger sees presence as coming to order by surmounting disorder.57 This confrontation sharpens the individuality and oneness that Newman and Heidegger intimately associated with presence, qualities that, in turn, directly contradict, say, Freud’s interpretation of the human condition as a continual battle between ego and id. The ego, Freud was fond of saying, was not the master of its own house. 58 For Newman and Heidegger, internal conflicts pale in comparison to the existential conflicts between Da-sein and nature, the self and the void, or self-awareness and lack thereof. No Da-sein facing such existential crises has time for neurotic self-indulgence. When you meet another person for the first time, Newman mused, you do not focus on “details. It’s a total reaction in which the entire personality of a person and your own personality make contact.”59 Accordingly, factoring Rothko into this equation is instructive, a painter with whom, on this very point, Newman parts company. The superimposed layers dividing Rothko’s canvases (figure 5.2), as the artist himself claimed, provided a “pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.”60 On another occasion, Rothko intimated how riddled with conflict he believed this “complex inner self” actually was: antitheses were neither synthesized nor neutralized in his work, only held in “momentary stasis.”61 Visually, Rothko transcribed these antitheses in terms of the opposition of dark versus light and top versus bottom forms, analogs for the tensions he believed scissored and bedeviled our tormented psyches. His very sensitivity to internal conflict, arguably, led him toward greater appreciation of modern drama at the expense of early Greek tragedy. With time, Rothko mused, “Shakespeare has come closer to me than

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Figure 5.2. Mark Rothko, Green and Tangerine on Red (1956), oil on canvas, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (Kate RothkoPrizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society; photograph: Phillips Collection) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Aeschylus, who meant so much more to me in my youth. Shakespeare’s tragic concept embodies for me the full range of life.”62 If this statement leaves the central difference between Aeschylus and Shakespeare in abeyance, another citation helps clarify the point: the Archaic Greeks, Rothko observed, “used as their models the inner visions which they had of their gods. And in our day, our visions are the fulfillment of our own needs.”63 Again, the statement is not entirely unambiguous, but we take it to mean that Rothko differentiates Greek drama, in which individual heroes wrestle with an unjust fate preordained by the gods, from the more introspective edge of modern drama, where an internally conflicted hero (say, Hamlet) wrestles with himself. If this were indeed Rothko’s point, it would fall perfectly in line with Heidegger’s warning against understanding pain “psychologically” as a form of “lived experience.” Our usual interpretation of suffering, he argues, guarantees that Greek tragedy is still “sealed off to us. Aeschylus-Sophocles on the one side, and Shakespeare on the other, are incomparable worlds.”64 On this issue, Newman’s reading is also Heideggerian. The Greek idea of tragedy, he writes, was “a statement concerning the chaos of individual action. Contrary to the prevailing psychological interpretations—that it was concerned with individual frustration, with the problems of individual failure and success—Greek tragedy constantly

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revolves around the sense of hopelessness: that no matter how heroically one may act, no matter how innocent or moral that action may seem, it inevitably leads to tragic failure because of our inability to understand or control the social result; that the individual act is a gesture in chaos, so that we are constantly the helpless victims of an insoluble fate.”65 Unlike Rothko, Newman stayed loyal to Aeschylus. After two thousand years, he contends, “we have finally arrived at the tragic position of the Greeks . . . because we have at last ourselves invented a new sense of all-pervading fate.”66 For Newman, the individual’s confrontation with fate trumps the individual’s confrontation with himself, which, in turn, explains Newman’s general hostility toward Freudian psychoanalysis (a hostility, incidentally, that Heidegger also shared67). For both men, presence did not simply mean self-awareness and the surmounting of disorder; it also meant achieving the singular oneness called for in Newman’s Onement.68 Da-sein, Heidegger argued, “is not a structure which is pieced together, but rather a structure which is primordially and constantly whole.”69 Unlike the contrasts in Rothko’s work—between the lighter versus darker, or upper versus lower, strata—those in Newman’s—between the beams and their background——were meant to evoke the tension between a holistic human presence and the void, not that between the different, potentially contradictory, facets of an individual personality. The stripe, in other words, delimits the self from the non-self, that which is Da-sein from that which is not Da-sein, that which has a sense of place from that which has no place, that which is one from that which is chaos. If the meaning of human existence hinges on these differences, these differences cannot be breached, even at the price of isolation and containment. Just as Newman sought to underscore a spectator’s feeling of totality, separateness, and individuality,70 Heidegger sought to investigate “man in his totality,”71 even if that totality segregates Da-sein from it surroundings. “That which lingers awhile in presence,” Heidegger maintains, “comes to presence within bounds.”72 “Where demarcation is lacking,” he interjects elsewhere, “nothing can come to presence as that which it is.”73 In a rather extraordinary interpretive leap, Heidegger sees these bounds as determined by usage. In this light, “to use” means “to let something present come to presence as such . . . to hand something over to its own essence . . . preserving it as something present.”74 Thus understood, usage “enjoining order and so limiting what is present, distributes boundaries. . . . [I]ts essence consists in sending boundaries of the while to whatever lingers awhile in presence.”75 Conceived in this way, “the essence of Being is determined by the unifying One.”76 This visual metaphor coincides with Newman’s signature image: a unified stripe silhouetted against a void and contained within its own boundaries. Elsewhere, Heidegger again stressed the importance of limits. Summarizing the Greeks’ concept of Being as standing presence, he argues that what “comes

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up and becomes intrinsically stable encounters, freely and spontaneously, the necessity of its limit, peras. . . . Limit and end are that wherewith the essent begins to be.”77 In this particular sense, the boundary does not block, as much as liberate an entity into presence and unconcealment.78 The boundary, Heidegger explains, is not a point “at which something stops” but from which “something begins its presencing.”79 These ideas are consonant with Newman’s visual formulas: the emphatic verticality of the stripes, their chromatic differentiation from the fields that surround them, and the strict, unbreachable boundaries that set them apart. Heidegger’s statements also clarify Newman’s emulations of nonWestern art, whose predilection toward abstraction, he believed, reveals “more of man’s nature than a naturalistic representation of man’s physical contours.”80 This framework of ideas—that Da-sein’s essence lies in its unifying oneness, separation from the void, and in its ensuing loneliness—underwrites Newman’s belief that abstraction is more amenable to communicate philosophical ideas, especially if concepts such as presence and the void have no physical referents. Even so, embracing abstraction was still not sufficient. At the core of modern art, Newman believed, was a “desire to destroy beauty”81 and replace it with “self-evident and concrete” images intelligible to “anyone.”82 Superficial beauty and sensual gratification, in other words, should give way to the self-evident concreteness of truth. Truth and beauty, of course, were of equal interest to Heidegger, and, in accord with Newman, the philosopher also deemed beauty inimical to art. Beauty only attracts the longing for “power in man,” reinforcing “the disappearance of the work of art in favour of sheer machination.”83 To counter this nefarious urge, Heidegger reconceptualized beauty in conformity with his own interpretation of truth, by which he meant man’s essence, not an idealized representation of physical appearance. “Beauty,” Heidegger writes, “is truth experienced in a Greek way . . . the unconcealing of what comes to presence by its own power.”84 Befitting Newman’s rejection of Greek figuration, Heidegger regretted how unfaithful the Greeks grew to the principle of unconcealment. Greek philosophy, he lamented, never returned to this ground.85 But he found it, as Newman did, in Greek tragedy. Later Greek philosophy, Heidegger bemoans, occluded the original idea that “standing-in-itself was nothing other than standing-there, standing-in-the-light. Being means appearing. . . . Appearing is the very essence of being.”86 This point has significant implications. With Plato, Heidegger argues, appearance was unhinged from its connection to Being and “degraded.”87 Inasmuch as Newman asserted that modern artists “reject the Grecian form—we do not believe any longer in its beauty—while accepting Greek literature, which by its unequivocal preoccupation with tragedy is still the fountainhead of art,”88 Heidegger insisted that, for the Greeks, thinking and poetizing have “priority” over sculpture and architecture.89 This is not to award “aesthetic” preeminence

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to one artistic idiom over another, as to identify the idiom closest to Being.90 For Heidegger, the poetry in which the Da-sein of the Greeks was most manifest is tragedy: the key, he maintains, to “Greek poetic philosophy.”91 “The unity and conflict of being and appearance,” he continues, “was represented with supreme purity in Greek tragic poetry.”92 The achievement of Greek Tragedy is to allow Being, not physical beauty, to manifest itself. In fact, both Newman and Heidegger praised Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the artist for making “each of us” stand like Oedipus, able “by his acts or lack of action, in innocence, [to] kill his father and desecrate his mother,”93 and the philosopher for hurling the situation of a king, the “murderer of his father and desecrator of his mother,” into “unconcealment.”94 Oedipus Rex is not about repressed sexual desire, but reflective of an underlying Greek obsession with the “disclosure of being,”95 a disclosure most evident in pre-Socratic philosophy and Greek tragedy, not in the idealized art of the classical period. When coming across the phrase in Parmenides—“being present . . . is entirely, unique, unifying, united, gathering itself in itself (cohesive, full of presentness)”96—Heidegger claimed these words “stand there like the Greek statues of the early period.”97 Since Heidegger views Being as permanent in its presentness, the most effective visual parallel he produces for this condition are archaic Kouroi (figure 5.3), sculptures whose sense of immobility approximates what he sees as the perma-

Figure 5.3. Greek, Kouros, Archaic Period, c. 600 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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nence of Being. The more dynamic, transient poses of later classical statuary (figure 3.1) achieve a more realistic effect, but stymie what he sees as the hallmark of Being: “the pure fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change.”98 This idea justifies Newman’s own decision to reject Greek visual idealization while harboring a keen appreciation for Greek drama, and to reveal “man’s nature” by emulating the “abstract quality” of non-Western art. It also aligns his art with Heidegger’s inquiry into the essence of Da-sein. If understanding non-Western art required rejecting “the skin of ‘beauty’ in which we have grown up, and the cover that permeates the art of the West,” this sentiment squares with Heidegger’s view that the true purpose of art is not “the beautiful in the sense of the pleasing, the pleasant . . . [but] disclosure of the being of the essent.” Only on the strength of its relation to Being, Heidegger writes, will art be awarded “a new content.”99 No less than Newman, therefore, Heidegger supplied an alternative interpretation of beauty from that of physical prowess, replacing the athletic, heroic body with “the shining appearance of the spirit which struggles forth into its corporeal measure and form, and grasps itself therein.”100 Though Heidegger’s attitude is consistent with Newman’s, he resolved the problem less by rejecting beauty than by changing its definition, one that walks in lockstep with his own interest in the essence of Da-sein, and, arguably, with Newman’s in the presencing of “man’s nature.” Beauty, Heidegger now insisted, “is the enduring presence of Being. Being is what is true about beings.”101 In Greece, he continues, “the truth of being originally opened itself up as the shining revelation of what comes to presence. There truth was beauty itself.”102 If one follows this rather idiosyncratic reading, beauty is connected neither with formal idealization nor with sensual gratification, but with truth, with what Newman himself associated with the real, the concrete, and the self-evident.103 Returning to the issues raised by humanity’s confrontation with the void, it is important to relate how Newman and Heidegger envisioned that confrontation to be riddled with anxiety—even terror. Though a great admirer of nonWestern cultures, Newman closely associated their art with a primal state of terror. In a review, he even claimed that Rufino Tamayo (figure 5.4) had recaptured “the basic terror, the brutality of life. . . . Terror before the mystery of life has been one of the main themes of pre-Columbian art and of the present-day life of the Mexican Indian.”104 Reviewing the “Art of the South Seas” exhibition at MoMA in 1946, Newman reasserted similar beliefs. “[A]ll life,” he declared, “is full of terror. The reason primitive art is so close to the modern mind is that we, living in times of the greatest terror the world has known, are in a position to appreciate the acute sensibility primitive man had for it.”105 For Newman, a primordial terror exists whenever the sources of terror remain undefined (e.g., the incomprehensibility of nature or what the artist described as “abstract

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Figure 5.4. Rufino Tamayo, Animals (1941), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

forces”).106 As a result, terror is imbued with mystery. In the modern age, the advent of nuclear weaponry has altered this scenario; Hiroshima, he argued, “has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can exist only if the forces of tragedy are unknown.” We no longer face “a mystery. . . . The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have now is a tragic rather than a terrifying situation.”107 These statements betray numerous points of intersection with Heidegger. If Newman hoped art would rekindle primal emotions of terror and awe, philosophy, for Heidegger, represented, not “comfort and assurance,” but “the turbulence into which man is spun, so as . . . to comprehend Dasein without delusion.”108 Intriguingly, Heidegger also believed that terror, when deeply felt, reflected the mystery of existence, a state eclipsed in modern times, but in dire need of resurrection. “The oppressiveness of our Dasein,” he writes, “still remains absent today, and the mystery still lacking, then . . . we must first call for someone capable of instilling terror into our Dasein again.”109 Even more to the point, Heidegger, like Newman, also differentiated various forms of terror on the basis of whether their sources are known or unknown. Inasmuch as Newman attributed tragedy to known, and terror to unknown, forces, Heidegger made a near identical distinction. The object “before which we are afraid,” he

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writes, “the ‘fearsome,’ is always something encountered within the world.” If what threatens us is “something completely unfamiliar, fear becomes horror . . . [and] fear becomes terror.”110 Although Newman calls terror before a knowable entity “tragedy” and Heidegger “fear,” both distinguish this weaker emotion from the inhibiting anxiety sparked by an unknown entity111—and, just as importantly, both designate this emotion by the same word: terror (though, on occasion, the word is translated as “dread”): dread differs qualitatively from fear: “We are always afraid of this or that definite thing, which threatens us in this or that definite way. ‘Fear of’ is generally ‘fear about’ something.” Dread is not “of this or that. . . . The indefiniteness of what we dread is not just lack of definition: it represents the essential impossibility of defining the ‘what.’”112 And just as Newman blamed the threat of atomic annihilation for providing humanity with a specific object of apprehension, robbing us of our primordial sense of terror, Heidegger likewise remarked that the “present world is arranged and organized around the possible threat of a future atomic bomb explosion.”113 Yet nuclear war is avoidable, Heidegger intimates, precisely because it is conceivable; as such, diplomatic efforts may be marshaled to prevent it.114 By contrast, Newman and Heidegger focus on a different, more fundamental form of terror, one that, by virtue of being unknowable, offers no path of escape: our very existential condition of existing in the world. This is not to say that Newman or Heidegger underappreciated the gravity of nuclear Armageddon, but, on the basis of the distinction they drew between knowable versus unknowable objects of dread, both construed any anxiety stemming from a detectable source, however grave, as philosophically and existentially different—different, because our cognizance of preventive measures tempers our uncertainty. If the precautions undertaken to prevent nuclear war inspire sufficient confidence, our anxiety may, if not dissipate altogether, at least be mitigated to some degree. If, on the other hand, the source of our anxiety is unknowable, because it represents a sense of terror about the mystery of our own existence, then no preventive measures may alleviate it. Under these circumstances, terror does not relax its hold; it intensifies—all the more reason, Heidegger and Newman intimate, for us to resolve to endure it. Having no remedy, yet going to the heart of who we are, this form of terror is the more profound. However horrendous a prospect, even nuclear annihilation poses a threat for which, conceivably, a permanent solution may be devised in the future, in which case, we will return to our daily routines without giving the issue another thought. For the primordial terror Newman and Heidegger seek to rekindle, no such prospect exists. That this kind of terror can be re-awakened implies that “someone” already experienced it in the past and, specifically, in the genuine way Newman and Heidegger envision it. That proverbial “someone,” not surprisingly, was

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“primitive man.” Orienting the analysis of Da-sein toward “the life of primitive peoples,” Heidegger claimed, “can have a positive methodical significance in that ‘primitive phenomena’ are often less hidden and complicated by extensive self-interpretation. . . . Primitive Da-sein often speaks out of a more primordial absorption in ‘phenomena.’”115 Newman and Heidegger associate the terror they have in mind with original hominids precisely because they knew neither the source of, nor how to alleviate, their terror. Theirs was a genuine response to the uncertainty of existence. Whether our forebears ever felt this kind of “terror” is, of course, debatable, and the artist and philosopher’s armchair anthropology may represent nothing more than the projection of Western preconceptions on non-Western cultures. Even so, Newman’s and Heidegger’s interest in a primordial form of terror functions, not so much on a literal, as on a figurative level. It is not so much that modern individuals should quake before abstract forces (as Newman and Heidegger may have assumed their ancestors did) as be jolted from a state of affective apathy. Better be terrified, they reasoned, than indifferent. In fact, Newman and Heidegger never conceived of the terror they sought to reignite as a sign of weakness. To their minds, moods do not represent subjective states of mind as much as betray the degree to which existence matters: our senses, arguably, are never as acute as when we are apprehensive. Just as Newman longed for “the fullness that comes from emotion,” Heidegger investigated moods because their sway over our lives demonstrates the extent to which existence is of concern to us. For him, Da-sein even becomes transparent to itself in mood. Again, better to be terrified than indifferent; a condition of indifference, however, unfortunately permeates the modern world. When Newman valued the importance of having a sense of place, and declared that original man, in his primal sense of terror, shouted his consonants in awe at his tragic state, at his own helplessness before the void, he believed that only the poet and the artist are “concerned with the function of original man” and attempt “to arrive at his creative state.” He could, of course, have included the philosopher—and one philosopher in particular. Heidegger, after all, maintained that only “when there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment—being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breadth of all philosophizing.”116 As he describes human existence held out into the Nothing, Heidegger contends, “One of the essential theaters of speechlessness is dread in the sense of the terror into which the abyss of Nothing plunges us.”117 Newman’s void and Heidegger’s Nothing thus represent those abstract forces that inspire dread by virtue of being unknowable, a condition that modern individuals, in their quest for comfort and tranquility, endeavor to forestall. If the vertical beams in Newman’s works were meant to signify—or, more precisely, to arouse a feeling of—human presence, the backgrounds were meant, conversely, to remain indefinite and, arguably, evoke the terror sparked by the

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unknowability of the void. Yet this experience is not entirely negative. In the grip of terror, worldly concerns lose their significance, and Da-sein is brought back to itself. These sensations underscore the vulnerability of the human condition, but also enable the self to differentiate and assert itself as a free and autonomous entity. These ideas are interdependent; as Heidegger put it, without the revelation imparted by the Nothing, there is “no self-hood and no freedom.”118 The issue of freedom will be the focus of an upcoming section; at this particular point, however, one may well ask the following question: What exactly is the revelation extracted from the Nothing? Confronting the void forces us to recognize ourselves as Da-sein and as different from anything that is not Da-sein. When human beings realize that they are the only species endowed with self-awareness, this realization engenders feelings of extreme solitude, and a tendency to see anything and everything else as irredeemably other. Our self-awareness is thus a double-edged sword: once we grasp the meaning of our own existence, we find ourselves alone. Unlike animals, which are embedded in their environment, human beings have the unique ability to break through this ring of inhibition, and to stand out in the midst of the Nothing. This uniqueness leads to solitude, and solitude, in turn, to terror. We are anxious over the world and over our selves; we even become answerable to our existence. Describing his own feelings as he worked—and, ostensibly, the feelings he hoped to impart to his audience—Newman wrote, “The terror of that blank area is the whole issue. . . . The most difficult thing [about painting] is sitting in that room by yourself. . . . [I]t’s not like sitting at a place with a desk, where other people are talking to you and the phones are ringing. You are there all alone with that empty space.”119 There is no relief to the isolation humanity feels once it discovers its own uniqueness and finds no satisfactory means of explaining it. The void also provokes anxiety by threatening to reclaim us from our special status as thinking beings. In a sense, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t: self-awareness leads to terror by forcing us to face our solitude, while a lack of self-awareness leads to the terror of losing our sense of self and being reclaimed by the Nothing. This may suggest that Newman’s and Heidegger’s views of existence are pessimistic through and through. And there is much in their statements to reinforce this suggestion. Newman insisted that his art was nothing if not a confrontation with the “terror of [the] Self,”120 and Heidegger that the “business” of philosophy is “the philosophizing person himself and (his) notorious wretchedness.”121 The mindful awareness or apprehension that Heidegger encourages is not just another activity we might indulge, as a way to enhance our spirituality, say, or to understand our own inner motivations. “No, apprehension is wrested from the habitual press of living” and thrusts humanity “into homelessness, insofar as the home is dominated by the ordinary, customary, and common-place.”122

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By the same token, if Newman judged man to be sublime only insofar as he is aware, Heidegger wrote that the “terror that every mystery carries with it . . . gives Dasein its greatness.”123 Because it, and little else, awakens us to our selves, to the nature of our existence, and to the meaning of Being, terror has salutary consequences. “Readiness for dread,” Heidegger exclaims, “is to say ‘Yes!’ to the inwardness of things, to fulfill the highest demand which alone touches man to the quick. Man alone of all beings, when addressed by the voice of Being, experiences the marvel of all marvels: that what-is is. Therefore the being that is called in its very essence to the truth of Being is always attuned in an essential sense. The clear courage for essential dread guarantees that most mysterious of all possibilities: the experience of Being. For hard by essential dread, in the terror of the abyss, there dwells awe (Scheu). Awe clears and enfolds that region of human being within which man endures, as at home, in the enduring.”124 In other words, human beings suffer, yet they must endure. It is their primary responsibility to preserve the reality of Being no matter what they may be forced to undergo: “Freed from all constraint, because born of the abyss of freedom, this sacrifice is the expense of our human being for the preservation of the truth of Being in respect to what-is.”125 Newman was no stranger to this attitude: if Heidegger thought that readiness for dread is to say “yes” to the essence of things and to acknowledge humanity’s responsibility toward existence, Newman also thought, in spite of art being a confrontation with the terror of the self, that “life, as is a true work of art, is, after all, always positive.”126

Notes 1. SWI, 158. 2. SWI, 257–58. 3. SWI, 130. 4. Zollikon Seminars, 122. 5. The Stuff of Thought, 171. 6. FCM, 8. 7. BT, 100. 8. BT, 100. 9. OWL, 93. 10. See BT, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 140. 11. IM, 9. 12. See George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990). 13. Gelven, A Commentary, 27. 14. Gelven, A Commentary, 27.

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15. FCM, 63. 16. FCM, 63. 17. FCM, 64. 18. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosett-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 151–52. 19. Barnett Newman, “Picture of a Painter,” Newsweek, March 16, 1959, 58. 20. SWI, 192. 21. See Yve-Alain Bois, “Perceiving Newman,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 193ff. 22. Yve-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 33. 23. Random House Webster’s Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1991), 220. 24. Random House Webster’s Dictionary, 104. 25. “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image Signs” (1969), in Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 12. 26. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” (1968), in Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art, 135–41. 27. SWI, 158. 28. EGT, 44. 29. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 200. 30. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 200. 31. Barnett Newman, interview with Voice of America in São Paulo, 1965; quoted in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 192. 32. Heidegger quoted in Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 3. 33. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 2. 34. SWI, 188. 35. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 1. 36. SWI, 69. 37. SWI, 248. 38. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 336. No less relevant is the following statement: “it is as much a property of language to sound and ring and vibrate, to hover and tremble, as it is for the spoken words of language to carry a meaning.” OWL, 98. 39. IM, 26. 40. David Farrell Krell, “General Introduction: ‘The Question of Being,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 32. 41. Gelven, A Commentary, 117. 42. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 203. 43. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 213. 44. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 214. 45. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 339–40. This may be usefully compared to a passage in Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be: “Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man’s spiritual self-affirmation in terms of meaninglessness” (41).

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46. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 353–54. 47. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 215. 48. SWI, 140. 49. IM, 110. 50. SWI, 163. 51. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 220. 52. Heidegger wrote, “The [distinction between] One and the Other is the true origin of thought” (Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 62). 53. P, 121. 54. P, 123. 55. P, 124. 56. EGT, 48, 49. 57. Intriguingly, this connection intersects the similarities already mentioned above concerning Newman’s and Heidegger’s views on language. Newman’s scenario of humanity yelling in anger at its own tragic state, for example, echoes Heidegger’s own view that, through the word, the existence of Being not only is asserted but also emerges out of concealment: “Revealing, ‘taking from concealment’, is that happening which occurs in the [logos; word]. In the [logos] the prevailing of beings becomes revealed, becomes manifest” (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 27). In other words, just as Newman intimates that a feeling of presence and self-awareness manifests itself when early man exclaims words of anger against the void, so does Heidegger construe the logos, the “bringing things to word,” as a manifestation of primordial presence out of concealment. By speaking, in effect, man asserts his existence and brings himself into presence against the Nothing. 58. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917), trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 285. 59. SWI, 306. 60. Mark Rothko, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, 8 July 1945, sec. 2, 2. 61. William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 102. 62. Rothko, interviewed by Peter Selz, in Selz’s Mark Rothko (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 12. 63. Rothko cited in Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The New York School: The First Generation (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1965), 142. 64. P, 72. 65. SWI, 168–69. 66. SWI, 169. 67. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 46. 68. In this respect, the unitariness in Newman’s concept of the self, in opposition to Rothko’s complex and divided self, dovetails with the view Michael Leja proposes when demarcating Newman from other Abstract Expressionists in “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango,” 562ff. 69. BT, 37. 70. SWI, 257–58.

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71. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 31. 72. EGT, 53. 73. P, 82. 74. EGT, 53. 75. EGT, 54. 76. EGT, 55. 77. IM, 60. 78. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “Addendum,” 82. 79. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 152. 80. SWI, 64. 81. SWI, 172. 82. SWI, 173. 83. Mindfulness, 23. 84. EHP, 185. 85. IM, 61. 86. IM, 101. 87. IM, 106. 88. SWI, 168. 89. P, 117, 115. 90. P, 117. 91. IM, 144–45. 92. IM, 106. 93. SWI, 169. 94. IM, 106. 95. IM, 107. 96. IM, 96. 97. IM, 96. 98. IM, 97. 99. IM, 132. 100. EHP, 185. 101. EHP, 156. 102. EHP, 186. 103. Heidegger further posits that, for the Greeks, “supreme understanding” meant “the capacity to let everything reflect back whatever shines within it most purely, and thereby comes to presence. What comes to presence in such shining is . . . the beautiful” (EHP, 185). “[W]hat is to be shown, that is what shines of its own power, is therefore true: beauty. That is why truth needs art, the poetic being of man” (EHP, 186–87). Intriguingly, Newman also made reference to shining and illumination in a number of his titles (e.g., Anna’s Light, Shining Forth, Shimmer Bright, Primordial Light). We shall investigate the philosophical implications of light and illumination in a later section, but, returning to the question of beauty, it is significant to iterate that Heidegger did not simply conflate beauty with truth and presence (two issues of great concern to Newman); he also conflated beauty and the presence of Being with oneness, another connection that strikes a chord with Onement. “Beauty,” Heidegger writes, “is the original unifying One. This One can appear only if it is brought together in its Oneness as the unifying One.

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According to Plato, the [hen; one] is only visible in the . . . bringing together. But the poets bring together like painters. They let Being (the [idea]) appear in the aspect of the visible. [However, l]ike painters does not mean that these poets depict the real” (EHP, 156). Newman also did not aspire to emulate painters who “depict the real” (i.e., conventional artists who strove to create an illusionistic rendering of three-dimensional space). By seeking to create an abstract image whose simplicity and economy might evoke the enduring presence, the unity and oneness of Being, he was simply visualizing his own pictorial version of a metaphysical “bringing things together.” 104. SWI, 74. 105. SWI, 100. 106. SWI, 100. 107. SWI, 169. 108. FCM, 19. 109. FCM, 172. 110. BT, 131, 133. The distinction also appears in Kierkegaard—see Kurt Reinhardt, “Existence and Being. By Martin Heidegger,” New Scholasticism 25 (1951): 354—and in Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, 36. 111. In his essay, “Time Consciousness in Husserl and Heidegger,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (September 1947): 38, Philip Merlan summarizes Heidegger’s view analogously, but makes “dread” a synonym of “anxiety” rather than “fear.” In contradistinction to anxiety, he writes, “Dread and fear have this in common that their object is determinate. But the mood bearing witness of our finiteness is characterized just by the absence of any determinate object. The object of anxiety is nothing—not death itself as an impending event—it is rather the pure opposite of any significance altogether, the impending possibility of the end of significance altogether.” The terms may vary from translator to translator, but the distinction between a weaker emotion stemming from a known object to a stronger one stemming from an unknown one remains. 112. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 335. 113. Zollikon Seminars, 159. 114. Discourse on Thinking, 49. 115. BT, 47. 116. FCM, 365, 366. 117. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 360. 118. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 180. 119. SWI, 282. 120. WI, 187. 121. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 119. 122. IM, 168–69. 123. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 196. 124. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 355. 125. “What Is Metaphysics?,” 358. 126. SWI, 187.

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CHAPTER 6

Others

While crafting his art, Newman kept highly contradictory ideas in precarious balance: hoping to remind his spectators of their own “separateness” and “individuality” as well as of their “connection to others” who “are also separate.” Any sense of self, he admitted, always functions “in relation to other selves.” “[Y]ou can only feel others,” he added, “if you have some sense of your own being.”1 Interestingly, an identical dialogic framework underlay Heidegger’s philosophy While he asserted that the “being which I myself am . . . is in each case mine . . . the I itself, the ‘subject,’ the ‘self,’”2 he also recognized that Da-sein is “in itself . . . essentially being-with.”3 The world of Da-sein, he added, “is a withworld. Being in is being-with others.”4 Inasmuch as Newman claimed that we feel others only if we have a sense of our own being, Heidegger asserted that even the solitariness of Da-sein “finds ‘itself’ in what it does, needs, expects, has charge of, in the things at hand which it initially takes care of in the surrounding world.”5 “Knowing oneself is grounded in primordially understanding being-with.”6 The “world” of which Heidegger speaks is not the physical environment as conventionally understood: it is the complex network of relations that makes our lives meaningful. In that world, other Da-seins “reside,” not as physical beings exclusively, but as presences that affect the course of our existence. Could this tenet have compelled Newman to insist that his canvases, though undeniably bisected by vertical stripes, were “never divided”?7 “[I]nstead of making shapes or setting off spaces,” he maintained, “my drawing declares the space. Instead of working with the remnants of space, I work with the whole space.”8 With this statement, Newman is intimating that, though his stripes are distinguished from their background (just as a human presence is distinguished from the void), a human presence is still wedded—inescapably—to its world. In Heidegger, Karl Löwith writes, the relationship between man and the world “is an ‘undivided phenomenon.’”9 Since man’s relationship to the world is existential rather than 111

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spatial, this connection, as any between Heidegger’s philosophy and Newman’s work, is, if it exists at all, purely analogical. If Newman sought to spark an individual spectator’s sense of singularity and separateness as well as his or her sense of connectedness to a world of meaning, how could he do so (as a painter) except by means of the physical space on a canvas? Recall that even Heidegger argued that the “overtone of spatial significance” should not be eliminated from the existential concept of Da-sein because Da-sein “has a spatiality of its own.”10 Just as, for Heidegger, spatiality injected a certain degree of concreteness in, and provided a useful means of communicating, existentialist ideas, for Newman, the space in his canvases had an existentialist quality of its own. Yet even as Da-sein exists in the world, this condition presents its own set of difficulties. If the dialogic relationships Heidegger and Newman established between the terrible versus positive implications of existence provide any indication, our situation of being-in-the-world, our separateness versus our connection with others, betrays a comparable complexity. The public realm into which we are immersed can force us to behave according to the rules and standards of a broader collective will, what Heidegger disparagingly calls “the they.” In the process, the individual loses autonomy and authenticity. In such situations, Heidegger writes, “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The ‘they,’ which supplies the answer to the question of the ‘who’ of everyday Dasein, is the ‘nobody’ to whom everyday Dasein has already surrendered itself in beingamong-one-another.’ The being that is us is eroded into commonality; it subsides to a ‘oneness’ within and among a collective, public, herdlike ‘theyness.’”11 To be authentic, in other words, means awareness of self and acting on one’s own terms; to be inauthentic means unawareness and behaving blindly, only as others would have us do. Living inauthentically, we are dragged down into an average, mediocre form of existence bereft of intensity and sublimity, a form of existence, moreover, where we abrogate our responsibility to ponder the mysteries of existence and serve as the custodians of Being. No wonder Heidegger conceived of philosophy as a solitary occupation, one not liable to establish schools of thought, with a domineering thinker dispensing doctrinaire principles to adoring acolytes: “When we hear of disciples, ‘followers,’ as in a school of philosophy for example, it means that the nature of questioning is misunderstood. Such schools exist only in the domain of scientific and technical work.”12 Newman felt similarly. According to Richard Shiff, his art stood as an “act of uncoerced moral judgment . . . without any guarantee of correctness or success.”13 Heidegger’s ravings against “publicness,” and the leveling down of intensity particular to the realm of the they, are consonant with Newman’s against the “philistine world.” The artist asserted that his “struggle against bourgeois society” involved its “total rejection.”14 In a manifesto penned during his unsuccessful bid to become New York City’s mayor in 1933, he raved against “the

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psycho-pathology of the mob mind,”15 and, in an equally pointed statement, lamented the loss of individuality among those he dismissingly labeled “herdmen.”16 Although these terms could easily have been borrowed from Nietzsche, their connotations apply no less to Heidegger’s “the they.” Like many Abstract Expressionists, Newman prized and never relinquished his own aesthetic and intellectual autonomy. He reviled anything that might lead to a “denial of self,”17 and declared that, even when they act in concert, artists “still speak for themselves, as individuals, and not as an organized group.”18 Asked to describe what he had contributed to a particular artist’s workshop, Newman proudly replied, “myself.”19 He also deplored the ways modern culture—its premium on industrialization and efficiency, in particular—stymied those primordial emotions that compel the self to confront the afflictions of existence, an attitude akin to Heidegger’s. If the painter sought to recover the “position of the primitive artist . . . his wonder . . . before [the mystery of life] or the majesty of its forces,”20 the philosopher praised “the Greeks’ perseverance in the face of what is, a stance that was initially one of wonder and admiration.”21 In our contemporary situation, however, “everything primordial,” Heidegger bemoans, “is flattened down. . . . Every mystery loses its power.”22 Just as he insisted that being-with is an unalterable aspect of Da-sein, or Newman that, despite our individuality, we are inescapably connected to others, this irremediable condition, they both warned, leads to a servile, subservient form of life. The they encourages averageness and levels down what Heidegger sees as the possibilities and aspirations of life. “In utilizing public transportation, in the use of information services such as the newspaper,” he insists, “every other is like the next. This being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Da-sein completely into the kind of being of ‘the others’ in such a way that the others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the they unfolds its true dictatorship. We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature the way they see and judge. But we also withdraw from the ‘great mass’ the way they withdraw.”23 Under these conditions, the primordial terror that sparks philosophical questioning is extinguished, and Da-sein is beguiled into forgetting the predicament of existence. In Heidegger’s philosophy, human beings are the shepherds of Being and answerable to the accusation of being negligent, of improperly discharging this responsibility. Swayed by modern comforts, their attention lapses, they lose sight of their “answerability,” they become unburdened of their responsibilities, and they dilute, even forget their true selves. Largely existential, these distinctions remain nebulous. To provide them with greater concreteness, Heidegger and Newman, as we have seen, expressed their ideas in terms of spatial metaphors, such as Heidegger’s proclivity to describe the self’s vacillation between being “here” versus “there,” a distinction

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closely echoed in Newman’s use of titles such as Here (figure 4.1) and Not There-Here (figure 4.2). Admittedly, the meanings underlying these distinctions are somewhat vague. But since the distinction is not literal, the differences Heidegger outlines between the authentic and inauthentic self (i.e., a self that has “grasped itself” versus one that is “dispersed” or “led astray”) reinforce the idea that “hereness” conveys the keen self-awareness that leads to authentic existence while “thereness” the distraction and oblivion of the inauthentic self (if we forget something, the philosopher writes, “we are no longer with it, but instead we are already ‘away,’ ‘drawn aside’”24). This self is inattentive, dispersed, insincere, and unable to fulfill its potential. Against this backdrop, the reasons for Newman’s choice of titles such as Here or Not There-Here become more intelligible. From a Heideggerian standpoint, Newman—reminding us of the continual threats to which our all-important autonomy is exposed—sought to give his audience a sense of presence and place by bringing the spectator back from the “there” to the “here.” If acute awareness brings us back to our selves by dispelling the oppressive grip of a conformist and escapist culture, then it stands to reason that Newman insisted that man is sublime only insofar as he is aware, and explains why he hoped to remind spectators (in spite of their connection with others) of their own individuality, totality, and separateness. For Heidegger, too, the public realm impedes the self-actualization of Dasein. Losing itself in the they, Da-sein becomes “entangled.” Lulled in a state of tranquility and complacency, Heidegger writes, Da-sein “gets spread abroad increasingly that there is no need for authentic, attuned understanding. The supposition of the they that one is leading and sustaining a full and genuine ‘life’ brings a tranquilization to Da-sein, for which everything is in ‘the best order’ and for whom all doors are open. Entangled being-in-the-world, tempting itself, is at the same time tranquilizing.”25 Tranquilization plunges Da-sein deeper into the realm of the they, mitigating the sense of awe and wonder that authentic Da-sein feels at the very mystery of existing, and dissipating the feelings of terror that awaken the self-awareness necessary for living authentically. In these conditions, Heidegger adds, Da-sein “drifts toward an alienation in which its ownmost potentiality for being-in-the-world is concealed. Entangled being-in-the-world is not only tempting and tranquilizing, it is at the same time alienating.”26 The point is simple: while Da-sein remains in the numbing state of entanglement imposed by the they, Da-sein lives inauthentically and has fled “from itself.”27 The insidiousness of the they is such that, when ensnared in its clutches, our understanding dims and the very questions whose responsibility it is ours to ponder are no longer of any consequence. Abandoning our own set of convictions, we only care for trivial matters and, even then, only in a way that is preprescribed. How is tranquilization and alienation to be counteracted? By means of the state of terror discussed in the last section. To the degree that terror, for New-

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man, captures the condition of original man struck in a state of wonder at the mystery of life, angst, for Heidegger, individualizes Da-sein and pulls it back from collective conformity. Inasmuch as Newman’s beams stand out dramatically against an undefined field, Heidegger claims that only as an individual acting on its own terms, can Da-sein understand its own existential predicament and make an informed choice about its life. Angst is the antidote to the soothing, yet superficial tranquility of the they; it individualizes Da-sein by bringing it back to itself. This individualization, Heidegger writes, “fetches Da-sein back from its falling prey and reveals to it authenticity and inauthenticity as possibilities of its being. The fundamental possibilities of Da-sein, which are always my own, show themselves in Angst as they are, undistorted by innerwordly beings to which Da-sein, initially and for the most part, clings.”28 Heidegger’s belief that anxiety individuates Da-sein to its very foundations does not mitigate his other claim that the basic condition of existence is still one of being-in-the-world. Da-sein is in the world because, essentially, there is nowhere else for Da-sein to be. Da-sein literally means Being that has somehow found its way “here.” The dilemma remains that, despite our individuality, we long to be with the they; for the most part, this is how we live our lives. Given our state of being-in-the-world, the tension between individuality and collectivity, the self and others, lies at the center of our condition. This point of view finds a striking analogue in Newman’s own insistence that “Man is a tragic being, and the heart of this tragedy is the metaphysical problem of part and whole. This dichotomy of our nature, from which we can never escape and which because of its nature impels us helplessly to try to resolve it, motivates our struggle for perfection and seals our inevitable doom. For man is one, he is single, he is alone; and yet he belongs, he is part of another. The conflict is the greatest of our tragedies.”29 On this account, one may propose that, if Newman was not actually reading Heidegger, he was, at the very least, thinking along parallel lines. Heidegger’s contention was that the “compound expression ‘being-in-the-world’” signals that even the condition of a solitary Da-sein must still be construed as “a unified phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole.”30 Newman’s was that while man is “single and alone,” he is nonetheless “part of another.” This assertion explains why the artist considered his canvases to be undivided, works of art whose emotional impact hinged on working “with the whole space.” Heidegger’s view that Being means being-with thus parallels the kinds of sensations Newman sought to evoke in his own audience. “I feel,” he proclaimed, “that my zip does not divide my paintings. I feel it does the exact opposite. It does not cut the format in half or in whatever parts, but it does the exact opposite: it unites the thing. It creates a totality.”31 By analogy, by metaphor, then, Newman translated existential space into physical space.

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Accordingly, although it is easy to conflate Newman’s stark vertical lines with, say, a solitary human presence confronting the void, it must be acknowledged that many of Newman’s canvases include several vertical beams. In view of Heidegger’s stress on Da-sein’s inescapable condition of being-in-the-world with other Da-seins—and Newman’s on the solitary individual belonging to some greater whole—we construe the co-existence of multiple beams as reflective of this condition of being-with. Heidegger employed not only the expression Mit-sein (Being-with) but also Mit-Da-sein, which, of course, is untranslatable.32 Instead of an isolated Da-sein contemplating the nature of its existence before the immense emptiness of the Nothing, Newman, in these cases, stresses the unresolvable tension between individuality and collectivity, between human solitariness and human interaction. One is again reminded of a passage penned by Meyer Schapiro: “For the aesthetic eye, the body, and indeed any object, seems to incorporate the empty space around it as a field of existence. The participation of the surrounding void in the image-sign of the body is still more evident where several figures are represented; then the intervals between them produce a rhythm of body and void and determine effects of intimacy, encroachment, and isolation, like the intervals of space in an actual human group.”33 Schapiro hits the nail right on the head, and, arguably, supplies an avenue toward interpreting Newman’s signature style. Concord (figure 6.1), for instance, which depicts two stripes in close proximity, could evoke, as the title itself suggests, a sense of solidarity between two distinct, albeit connected, human presences. It has been alleged, moreover, that the title refers to Concord, Massachusetts, a location Newman and his wife visited. In which case, the painting could suggest a primordial couple, a subject not uncommon in Abstract Expressionism (e.g., Pollock’s Male and Female [figure 6.2], Gottlieb’s Man Looking at a Woman, and even Mark Rothko’s Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea [figure 6.3], which, ostensibly, was meant to be a self-portrait of Rothko and his wife). Newman’s Genetic Moment of 1947, though less abstract (figure 6.4), could also fit comfortably within this context, as the beam on the right could be construed as more “masculine” than the one on the left. It has also been suggested that Concord (figure 6.1) remains incomplete since Newman never removed two rows of masking tape he affixed to the composition. The thinness of the overlay, moreover, coupled with its loose execution, betrays an anomalous combination in Newman’s work, reinforcing the assumption that the painting was left unfinished—perhaps a preliminary stage. But given that Newman spent long hours contemplating his works in progress (“just as I affect the canvas, the canvas affects me”), one may speculate that there was something about the piece, incomplete though it was, that struck the artist as especially poignant. If he indeed intended this work to evoke the solidarity between two separate, yet emotionally united human beings, he may then have found the turbulent gestural activity to function, fortuitously, as an effective allusion to the trials and tribulations two Da-seins, standing side by side, endure

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Figure 6.1. Barnett Newman, Concord (1949), oil on canvas and oil on masking tape, 89 3/4  53 5/8 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, George A. Hearn Fund, 1968 © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 6.2. Jackson Pollock, Male and Female (1943), oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. H. Gates Lloyd, 1974. (1974-232-1) © ARS, New York. (Photo Credit: Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York)

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Figure 6.3. Mark Rothko, Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea (1944), Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 6.4. Barnett Newman, Genetic Moment (1947), oil on canvas, 37.5  27.5 inches. Foundation Beyeler, Riehen, Switzerland © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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together. Pleased with the effect, and with the meaning that could thereby be constructed, Newman chose to leave the piece as it was. It should also be interjected that the condition of being-with is not necessarily literal; Heidegger argues that insofar as “human beings exist at all, they already find themselves transposed in their existence into other human beings, even if there are factically no other human beings in the vicinity.”34 In other words, the presence of multiple beams may not necessarily signal the physical presence of other Da-seins as much as the way other Da-seins come into presence for us. A hammer and a nail may stand in close physical proximity, but it is only for a being such as Da-sein that their practical relationships are discernible; similarly, it is only for a being such as Da-sein that another Da-sein can be encountered, be alongside, or come into presence, even if that other Da-sein is not physically present. Pieces such as Here I (figure 6.5), The Promise (figure 6.6), By Two’s, and Shimmer Bright also place two vertical stripes in close proximity. As such, they

Figure 6.5. Barnett Newman Here I (To Marcia) (1950), bronze with black patina, overall height—107 3/8 inches, height without base—96 3/8 inches, base—11 1/4  28 1/4  27 1/4 inches. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of Marcia S. Weisman. Photograph © 2009 Museum Associates/ LACMA © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 6.6. Barnett Newman, The Promise (1949), oil on canvas, 51.5  68 1/8 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art. Gift of Adriana and Robert Mnuchin © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

could again be construed as evoking the presence or even solidarity of two individual Da-seins, and interpreted in light of Heidegger’s concept of de-distancing (the elimination of emotional distance by means of bringing things within the domain of our concern). On this point, it might be mentioned, if only parenthetically, that the simplicity of Newman’s beams allows them to be oriented in various ways in the spectator’s mind. It was previously mentioned, for example, that human beings have a proclivity to map aspects of their body unto inanimate objects (the “face” of the clock or the “back” of the chair), and the same, with some latitude, may be said of Newman’s zips. By eliminating any facial features, Newman’s visual economy allows spectators the freedom to interpret that presence as directly confronting them (as when Newman compared looking at a work of art to meeting another person) or as moving away from them (as when Newman spoke of original man’s confrontation with the void). Alternatively, we also have the option of seeing the stripes as human presences oriented toward or away from each other, the spaces between them evoking, not physical space, but the space of meaning that forms whenever things enter the orbit of our care. On this account, if Newman believed that a painting’s emotive resonance varied depending upon the range from which it was perused, he must have reasoned

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that the gaps between the stripes on its surface could also generate different responses. The distances between the stripes themselves, in other words, might be no less pregnant with potential meaning than the distance between the stripes and the beholder (i.e., the shorter the distance, the greater the intimacy and closeness; the longer the distance, the greater the isolation and separateness). Along these lines, Barbara Reise made a suggestive comment regarding the bands in Vir Heroicus Sublimis (figure 6.7)—namely, that “one’s empathy with any vertical carries a gently ordered participation with the ‘we’ of others.”35 If, for Heidegger and Newman, space is never literal (as Heidegger put it, “remoteness is never understood as measurable distance”36), then terms such as “closeness” and “distance” might correspond to Heidegger’s spatiality of involvement. For Newman—forced to work in the concrete world of pigment and canvas, of physical objects and physical spectators—that spatiality was all the more tangible and immediate, but no less metaphorical. And given his concern with individual autonomy and separateness, one could almost predict that the number of canvases evoking human solidarity (i.e., where the beams stand in close proximity) would be proportionally smaller than those where the beams are markedly at arm’s length from one another. Regardless, Newman always allowed stripes to stand alone, even when painted in combination, exacerbating the impression that, though they belong to a broader social fabric, human beings remain separate and solitary. For Heidegger, similarly, even if de-distancing is an essential quality of Da-sein, that quality permits Da-sein to discover “remoteness.”37 “Only because Da-sein discovers beings in their remoteness,” Heidegger continues, “do ‘distances’ and intervals among innerwordly beings become accessible in relation to other things.”38 Our desire to overcome distance, then, alerts us to remoteness, but this same desire makes us vulnerable to what Heidegger calls “the they” and

Figure 6.7. Barnett Newman, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950, 1951), oil on canvas, 95 3/8  213 1/4 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller, 1969 © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Newman “the psycho-pathology of the mob mind.” Human beings, it seems, are trapped in an impossible dilemma. Either the unity they desire imperils their individuality and authenticity, or achieving individuality and authenticity means their existential hardships must be borne alone. The only unity to which we can legitimately aspire—one that is ultimately redemptive, authentic, and that will counteract the nefarious effects of collectivity—is a solitary self-unity: the very “oneness” of which Newman and Heidegger often speak. We may be forced to face the terror of existence in isolation; yet, in that isolation, we remain true to ourselves. Terror and constancy, it seems, are inextricable. If, according to Heidegger, uncanniness and angst are emblematic of the authentic self awakened to its own Being, this idea parallels the aforementioned comment by Newman: “The self, terrible and constant . . . is, for me, the subject matter of painting.”39 Heidegger likewise spoke about the “terrible” nature of man and the constancy of Being. With respect to the former, Heidegger writes that man is referred to as “to deinotation.”40 The deinon is “the terrible in the sense of the overpowering power which compels panic fear, true fear; and in equal measure it is the collected silent awe that vibrates with its own rhythm.”41 Man is terrible, Heidegger continues, “because he is the violent one.”42 By “violent,” of course, Heidegger means something other than the conventional sense of the term. Man, he explains, “is the strangest of all . . . because he departs from his customary, familiar limits, because he is the violent one, who, tending towards the strange in the sense of the overpowering, surpasses the limit of the familiar.”43 If being violent means striving beyond one’s familiar sphere, this violence has dramatic consequences: it casts man out of his habitual domain, prevents him from being at home and secure, and makes him strange and uncanny. He becomes, according to Heidegger, “the strangest of all beings because . . . he is cast out of every relation to the familiar and befallen by até, ruin, catastrophe.”44 Yet, in spite of his uncanniness, his being thrown into the world and forced to face countless obstacles, man still assumes the responsibility to Be: “Be . . . this means: as violent men to use power, to become pre-eminent in historical being as creators, as men of action. Pre-eminent in the historical place, they become at the same time apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, and alien, without issue amid the essent as a whole, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this.”45 If we transpose these ideas to an interpretation of Newman’s work, then we might say that, unlike Concord, Be (figure 2.10) conveys, not the solidarity between two human presences, but the terrible uncaniness of man, solitary in the universe, cast out without satisfactory explanation, still condemned to Be. So much for the “terrible” self. Now for the “constant” self. According to Heidegger, as Da-sein is delivered over to existence, it “remains so constantly.”46 As Da-sein is ontologically different from other objects in space, its meaning

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resides “in the ‘self-constancy’ of the existing self.”47 For Heidegger, a key antidote to our state of throwness in the world, and our inauthenticity when entangled in the realm of the they, was the resoluteness and steadfastness proper to an authentic Da-sein. “The constancy of the self,” he claims, “in the double sense of constancy and steadfastness is the authentic counter-possibility to the lack of constancy of irresolute falling prey. Existentially, the constancy of the self means nothing other than anticipatory resoluteness.”48 These thoughts help elucidate what Newman may have meant when he professed that the “self, terrible and constant,” was, for him, the “subject matter of painting.” But the attacks on publicness in Being and Time, and on the pernicious collectivism of the they, are profoundly ironic in view of Heidegger’s later Nazi sympathies and endorsement of the Führer principle. If his support of National Socialism were not deplorable enough, employing his own philosophical terminology in his rector’s address on 27 May 1933 to articulate that support corroborates his most ardent critics’ accusations. We shall return to the potential interrelationships between Heidegger’s political activities and his philosophy in due course, and, given that so many parallels can be traced between Newman’s and Heidegger’s worldviews, we shall also address what these parallels may say about Newman’s own political inclinations. But even at this stage of the discussion, it is perfectly plausible to assume that Newman, had he read Heidegger, detected no hint of the philosopher’s actual political loyalties, if only because nothing could be more incongruous with the dictatorial anti-individualism of Nazi ideology than Heidegger’s call for an individual’s awakening to Being in defiance of the public realm. How could anyone reading the passages from Being and Time cited above have suspected the philosopher of supporting Hitler, a ruthless tyrant who, even after the defeat of his 6th Army at Stalingrad, stated, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation.”49 And though the very possibility that Heidegger himself endorsed such an attitude stretches credulity, in 1933, in a speech titled “The University in the National Socialist State,” he declared, “Struggle alone reveals the true laws whereby things are brought into being. The struggle we seek is one in which we stand shoulder to shoulder, man to man.”50 What could be more different from the denunciation of the they in Being and Time? Two years later, during the height of Nazism, Heidegger delivered a lecture at Freiburg, when he seems to have reversed his position yet again: “when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph—then, yes then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a specter: What for?—Whither?—And what then.”51 These statements are hard to reconcile. Perhaps his enthusiasm for National Socialism began to wane, or perhaps Heidegger had another target in mind. Still, his allegiance to, let alone praise of, the Nazi regime remains mind-boggling to say the least; as is the way,

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according to Theodor Adorno, “thought accommodates itself to the goal of subordination even where it aspires to resist that goal.”52 If Heidegger’s critique of mass rallies shows anything, it is how mutable the language of accusation and the terminology of invective may be. Most individuals, religious groups, political parties, and national entities take it for granted that sincerity, wisdom, and right are on their side, and, in parallel, that it is their rivals who are insincere, ignorant, and in the wrong. The targets change; the rhetoric stays the same. When Heidegger was intoxicated with National Socialism, the Nazis represented authentic Da-seins, and their opponents the averageness of the they. When these loyalties strained, so did the terms of the equation (i.e., as when the philosopher sought to rehabilitate his position after World War II by disavowing any hint of National Socialist sympathies53). Consequently, there is both something elastic and, frankly, empty about Heidegger’s concept of “resolve” (the antipode to inauthenticity). Heidegger involuntarily conceded as much when he asked “to what does Da-sein resolve itself in resoluteness?” and answered, “Only the resolution itself can answer this.”54 At this point, perhaps Karl Löwith’s observation is worth citing, especially as it exposes vulnerabilities in Heidegger’s thinking: namely, that resoluteness “lacks a definitive aim,” and “does not come to any conclusion; it is a constant attitude.”55 Löwith’s colleagues, fellow students of Heidegger, also realized how malleable, and ultimately flawed, their teacher’s concepts proved. “I am resolved,” one of them joked, “only towards what I don’t know.”56 At a minimum, resolution should move Da-sein toward self-transparency. But for Adorno, Heidegger’s “jargon of authenticity” was particularly insidious. Since one could be resolved without knowing the object of the resolve, the “formal gesture of autonomy replaces the content of autonomy.”57 The distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, he concludes, “lies with the arbitrariness of the definition.”58 Given the elasticity of some Heideggerian tenets, it is plausible that Newman interpreted Being and Time in concordance with his own individualism, and that any promise of sparking a more intense, authentic form of life would have presented an exciting prospect for him. An overly individualistic reading of Being and Time, admittedly, runs afoul of Heidegger’s own views about the synchrony between his philosophical and political beliefs in the early 1930s. But Newman could easily have construed such passages as consistent with his own notions, particularly as they stress the importance of human individuality and self-awareness, or decry the potentially oppressive nature of collective thinking: “The self of everyday Da-sein is the they-self ’, which we distinguish from the authentic self, the self which has explicitly grasped itself. As the they-self, Da-sein is dispersed in the they and must first find itself. . . . Initially, Da-sein is the they and for the most part it remains so.”59 In other words, the self that is exclusively concerned with the mundane and the everyday, that falls prey to collective

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thinking, is inauthentic and lost, diffused among the multitude. The self that is aware and resolved, that aspires to greater spirituality and sublimity, that breaks from the totalitarian stranglehold of the they, is true, authentic, and faithful to its responsibilities. That Newman could associate this kind of meaning with the reductive austerity of his canvases suggests, moreover, that the contrast between the vertical beam and the backgrounds impart something analogous to the idea of Da-sein: namely, human existence in a state of being-with that comes to presence in the “here” (i.e., against, but inseparable from, an environment into which it is invariably embedded). These contrasts also suggest that, while a longing for connectedness marks human existence, that same longing encounters separation and remoteness. To stay authentic, humanity must resign itself to enduring this very separation. The unbroken, uninterrupted beam, arguably, creates a visual equivalent for Newman’s (and Heidegger’s) belief in the resolute constancy and immovable steadfastness necessary to endure the terror of this existential situation. Verticality, in fact, creates a poignant metaphor for unshakable resolve. Compare these assumptions with a passage from the Aeneid where Virgil describes Aeneas’s iron discipline when, having decided to fulfill his destiny and leave Carthage, he was forced to resist Dido’s entreaties: He stood firm like a strong oak-tree toughened by the years when northern winds from the Alps vie together to tear it from the soil, with their blasts striking it now this side and now that; creaking, the trunk shakes, and leaves from on high strew the ground; yet still the tree grips among the rocks below, for its roots stretch far down toward the abyss as its crest reached up to airs of heaven. Like that tree, the hero was battered this side and that by their insistent pleas, and deeply his heart grieved. But his will remained unshaken.60

As a concept, the heroic was dear to Newman (e.g., Vir Heroicus Sublimis), one he easily connected to works of art whose simplicity was not unlike his own. Reviewing an exhibition of Herbert Ferber’s work (figure 6.8) in 1947/1948, for instance, Newman wrote, “Ferber’s skeletal line, by the majesty of its abstract freedom, touches the heroic base of each man’s own nature.”61 It is very likely, of course, that Newman, as in the case of his analyses of non-Western art, was actually describing his own motivations rather than those of his subject. Regardless, the heroic provided an example of constancy in the face of existence, and of defiance against the averageness of the collective. As a counter-pole to the emphatic verticality of Newman’s beams, with their aura of unshakable resolve, one may look to Louise Bourgeois’s Femme volage (figure 6.9). “Volage” means flighty, fickle, inconstant, a connotation evoked in a form no less upright than Newman’s beams, but whose strict verticality is continually interrupted by small-scale elements oriented horizontally. These perpendicular elements not

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Figure 6.8. Herbert Ferber, Surrational Zeus II (1947), bronze, Leslie and Roslyn Goldstein Fund, 2004-43, Jewish Museum, New York © 2008 Herbert Ferber Estate. Photo: Richard Goodbody. (Photo Credit: Jewish Museum/Art Resource, New York)

Figure 6.9. Louise Bourgeois, Femme volage (1951), painted wood and stainless steel, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 92.40002. Photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. (Art © Louise Bourgeois Trust/Licensed by VAGA, New York)

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only scissor the contiguity of the figure but also seem to pull against, or work at cross-purposes with, its overall vertical configuration. The figure, in effect, seems divided against itself. Newman, obviously, sought an opposite impression: one of undivided steadfastness and resolve. Emblematic of heroism, such qualities are important even, nay especially, in the face of tragedy and defeat. Not surprisingly, this explains the artist’s interest in Greek heroes, with whose names he titled several works: Achilles (figure 6.10), Ulysses (figure 6.11), and Prometheus, three works where the artist, intriguingly, steered away from his characteristic signature formula. All three defied authority, sometimes out of pride, but always at great peril to themselves. Having quarreled with Agamemnon over booty, Achilles stubbornly refused to fight on the Achaean side in the Trojan War, going so far as asking his mother, Thetis, to petition Zeus to bring disaster upon his erstwhile allies. At the brink of defeat, Achilles reasoned, the Greeks would acknowledge his worth and entreat him to rejoin the fight. Prior to the war, Achilles was even given the choice between a long, uneventful life and a short, glorious one. Predictably, the hero chose the latter. When asked about this painting, Newman mentioned the “shield form, red and fiery.”62 A shield was in fact newly forged for Achilles’ return to the field, his old armor having been lost to Hector

Figure 6.10. Barnett Newman, Achilles (1952), oil and magna on canvas, 95 1/8  79 1/8 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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by Patroclus in hand-to-hand combat. But the painting might be read another way. Achilles was part human and part divine, the offspring of the sea nymph Thetis and the mortal king Peleus. Hoping to confer divine status upon her son, Thetis surreptitiously placed him in fiery embers by night to expunge the human half, only to be prevented from completing the task by her dismayed husband. To this author, Newman’s image is actually more reminiscent of this episode in the hero’s life: the self has not yet coalesced, hanging in the balance between humanity and divinity, freedom and destiny, the sublime and the mundane. Revealingly, references to fire occur frequently in Heidegger, especially in his interpretations of Hölderlin, as we shall see in chapter 12. Fire, coming down from heaven, is a means through which divinities call upon the poets to take up a higher calling, regardless of the travails and suffering involved. Metaphorically speaking, then, Newman’s painting stands for dilemmas we all face whenever any painful choice crosses our path and forces itself, unwanted, upon us. We literally feel, as in a burning caldron, tried by fire. But it also stands for the intensity of exaltation that accompanies the achievement of one’s potential. As Fred Dallmayr observes, for Heidegger, pain “does not have to be a debilitating or destructive but a transformative and regenerative quality.”63 The challenges of Ulysses are different in nature. By slaying Polyphemus, he drew the ire of the Cyclops’s father, Poseidon, and saw his every attempt to reach Ithaca thwarted by the gods. By dint of intelligence and perseverance, however, he finally returned to his homeland and reclaimed all he had lost. In reference to Ulysses, in fact, Newman intimated that the work was about “the sea and the ‘endless search.’”64 When commenting on a passage in Sophocles’ Antigone, Heidegger also latched upon the playwright’s employment of the sea as a symbol. The philosopher argues that, in Sophocles, the image of the sea should not be taken as a natural phenomenon. “Man embarks on the groundless deep,” he writes, “forsaking the solid land. He sets sail not upon bright, smooth waters but amid the storms of winter. . . . [H]e abandons the place, he starts out—and ventures into the preponderant power of the placeless waves.”65 He even employed a similar metaphor to describe our concern over existence. This situation, one reads, “does not correspond to a safe harbor but to a leap into a drifting boat, and it all depends on getting the mainsheet in hand and looking to the wind.”66 Ulysses’ seafaring, then, his attempt to return home, no less than Newman’s “endless search,” is not literal. The theme of returning to the source, or to the origin, also occurs frequently in Heidegger, a short-hand for returning to the question of Being through self-discovery. In view of the many travails Ulysses endured, and the countless obstacles he faced before returning home, one would think that Newman would have placed his beam before as large a space as possible, as he did in Uriel, a painting about as wide as the artist ever created. Newman even admitted that, in Uriel, he wanted to see how far

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Figure 6.11. Barnett Newman, Ulysses (1952), oil and magna on canvas, 132 1/2  50 1/8 inches. Menil Collection, Houston, Texas. Gift of Adelaide de Menil Carpenter and Dominique de Menil © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

he could go, stretching the canvas “until it breaks.” Ulysses, however, is narrow and confined. It is not the space that stretches, but the beam itself. As such, it loses its “place.” Rather than being localized, it dilates, as if it were getting ahead of itself, wandering endlessly, reading less as a beam than as a field.67 In parallel, Heidegger writes that the movement of existence “is not the motion of something objectively present. It is determined from the stretching along of Dasein. The specific movement of the stretched out stretching itself along, we call the occurrence of Da-sein.”68 The case of Prometheus is the most tragic. For gifting fire to humanity in defiance of a divine edict, he was tied to a rock and condemned to have his liver eaten by a vulture, a grisly ordeal repeated every day as his organ miraculously healed. The individual strives against fate, a fate beyond his control, but in the act of striving, insubordination makes the individual heroic. Newman was himself fascinated by the idea of humanity’s struggle against fate, and hoped that even modern individuals would experience its powerful hold. Heidegger likewise looked favorably on the Greeks’ view that “Prometheus had been the first philosopher. It is this Prometheus into whose mouth Aeschylus puts an adage that expresses the essence of knowledge: techne d’anangkes asthenestera makro ‘But knowledge is far less powerful than necessity.’ That means: all knowledge

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of things remains beforehand at the mercy of overpowering fate and fails before it.”69 For this reason, knowledge is a form of “defiance, for which alone the entire might of the concealedness of what is will first rise up, in order really to fail.”70 Heidegger even cites Prometheus by Aeschylus: “Often everything is a load to bear, except the mastery over gods,” the very mastery Prometheus has failed to secure.71 The beam in Newman’s work is not vertical but horizontal; as many of the forms in Rothko’s work, it appears crushed under a mass of blackness. All the same, its luminosity shines through all the more. By invoking the struggle between men and gods, Newman and Heidegger hoped that modern individuals would grow attuned to their tragic predicament and assume a heroic stance. In so doing, human beings might resist the easy temptations with which the mob mind encourages a “denial of self,” and make the heroic a province, not simply of Achilles, Ulysses, and Prometheus, but of all persons who become self-aware. For Heidegger, the “authentic retrieve of a possibility of existence that has been—the possibility that Da-sein may chose its heroes—is grounded in anticipatory resoluteness.”72 But Newman, it seems, wanted more than to “chose his heroes.” He wanted to place his entire audience in the position of a Greek warrior forced to face the tragic nature of destiny. “By insisting on the heroic gesture,” Newman wrote, “and on the gesture only, the artist has made the heroic style the property of each one of us, transforming, in the process, this style of art that is public to one that is personal. For each man is, or should be, his own hero.”73 The hero may be cast aside; the hero may live a life of utter isolation; the hero may even have to perish, but the hero is free.74

Notes 1. SWI, 258. 2. BT, 108. 3. BT, 113. 4. BT, 112. 5. BT, 112. 6. BT, 116. 7. SWI, 249. 8. SWI, 251. 9. Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporaility and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (September 1942): 63. 10. BT, 275. 11. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 92. 12. IM, 20. 13. Richard Shiff, “To Create Oneself,” in Richard Shiff, Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro, and Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, 6.

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14. SWI, 201. 15. Newman interviewed by A. J. Liebling in “Two Aesthetes Offer Selves as Candidates to Provide Own Ticket for Intellectuals,” New York World—Telegram, November 4, 1933. SWI, 5. 16. Barnett Newman, draft of a letter to Alan Power, September 4, 1959, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives; also quoted by Richard Shiff in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 89. Shiff links the term to Nietzsche. 17. Statement, June 1965, in The United States of America, Eighth São Paulo Biennial, non-paginated. 18. Newman quoted by Thomas B. Hess in “Editorial: Barnett Newman, 1905– 1970,” Art News 69 (September 1970): 29. 19. SWI, 185. 20. SWI, 145. 21. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 33. 22. BT, 119. 23. BT, 119. 24. P, 82. 25. BT, 166. 26. BT, 166. 27. BT, 173. 28. BT, 178. 29. SWI, 76. 30. BT, 49. 31. SWI, 306. For Newman’s use of the term “zip,” see Lawrence Alloway, “Color, Culture, the Stations: Notes on the Barnett Newman Memorial Exhibition,” Artforum X (December 1971): 32; and Sarah K. Rich, “The Proper Name of Newman’s Zip,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 96–114. 32. BT, 110ff. 33. Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image Signs” (1969), in Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 11–12. 34. FCM, 205. 35. Barbara Reise, “The Stance of Barnett Newman,” Studio International 179 (February 1970): 53. 36. BT, 98. 37. BT, 97. 38. BT, 97. 39. SWI, 187. 40. IM, 149. 41. IM, 149. 42. IM, 150. 43. IM, 151. 44. IM, 152. 45. IM, 152–53. 46. BT, 255.

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47. BT, 281. 48. BT, 296–97. 49. Adolf Hitler cited in “Stalingrad: June 1942–February 1943,” The World at War, directed by Hugh Raggett, written by Jerome Kuehl, series producer Jeremy Isaacs © 1973 Thames Television, Ltd. 50. Martin Heidegger, “The University in the National Socialist State,” November 30, 1933; Tübingen, cited in Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 243. 51. IM, 38. 52. Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 5. 53. See, for example, Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 20ff, 163ff, or 275ff. 54. BT, 275. 55. Karl Löwith, “M. Heidegger and F. Rosenzweig or Temporaility and Eternity,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3 (September 1942): 66. 56. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933, trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 30. 57. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 18. 58. Adorno, 123. 59. BT, 121. 60. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. W. F. Jackson Knight (London: Penguin, 1956), 111. 61. SWI, 110. 62. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 55. 63. Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 173. 64. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 55. 65. IM, 153. 66. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 29. 67. See Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 237. 68. BT, 344. 69. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 31. 70. Martin Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 31. 71. Mindfulness, 3. 72. BT, 352. 73. SWI, 111. 74. See also Carter Ratcliff, “Newman’s Perennial Now,” Art in America 90 (September 2002): 99.

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CHAPTER 7

Freedom

For Newman, artistic production was not just his major field of activity; it also represented an overarching framework that absorbed philosophy and politics. The meanings of his work, he insisted, revolved around an “assertion of freedom,” a “denial of dogmatic principles,” and a “repudiation of all dogmatic life.”1 As artists, he proclaimed, we “go out into normal society and insist in acting on our own terms.”2 Similarly, Heidegger promoted a pensive mindfulness, not an “inflexible doctrine” employed for “exhortation” or “edification.”3 One’s professed rejection of bourgeois society mirrors the other’s hostility to “publicness,” the dictatorship of the they, or any collective behavior that enforces the “leveling down of all possibilities.”4 Seeking alternatives to the homogeneity of the public realm, both sought to foster a keener form of existence, one in which human autonomy thrives beyond the interference of a pervasively mediocre “bourgeoisie.” Accordingly, freedom, as both men defined it, was as much philosophical as political. For Heidegger, truth and freedom were synonymous: “The essence of truth,” he writes, “is freedom.”5 For Newman, “the artist is free and insists upon freedom.”6 Of course, Newman and Heidegger were not so naïve as to believe in the prospect of unrestricted freedom; one’s references to primordial man’s “helplessness,” the other’s to our inescapable condition of being-in-the-world, attest to their having no illusions on this score. Instead, both made freedom hinge on the issue of choice: following the dictatorial dictates of collective thinking versus facing the burden of existence on an individual basis, or turning away from the reality of Being versus accepting anxiety with resolve and determination. Applying this reading to Newman no less than Heidegger rests on the former’s curious claim that the artist “insists upon freedom.” One says “curious” because, although one can fight for freedom, or insist upon the need for freedom, insisting 133

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upon freedom sounds peculiar. A prisoner may wish for freedom and try as he might to escape his captors, but can he really “insist” upon freedom? The statement is more credible, however, if interpreted along Heideggerian lines. We have already related Heidegger’s view of animals being locked within a ring of inhibition, compelled to act only in accordance with their instincts. Animals, the philosopher maintains, lack “the capacity for resoluteness and steadfastness. . . . In short, they lack freedom, that is: spirit.”7 Human beings have spirit; irrespective of their situation, the choice to be authentic is always available. At liberty, they can follow the path chosen by others, or decide for themselves; unjustly incarcerated, they can collaborate with their captors or adopt a defiant stance. According to Steiner, Heidegger posits that, although it is never the origin of its own Being, Da-sein “must take that being upon itself and bring it to its full realization. This confrontation entails choice.”8 Any affirmation of human existence, Heidegger asserts, is equally predicated upon “freedom of decision.”9 To be free, then, is to choose to be true to one’s essence.10 In this light, Newman’s otherwise curious statement is more intelligible. Insisting upon freedom means that, irrespective of our physical or political situation, we choose to think for ourselves and assert our existence in defiance of any limitations. Subscribing to this definition also suggests that, despite his avowed anarchism, and entrance into the political arena by running for mayor of New York City, Newman’s interpretation of freedom is actually more existentialist than anarchist. As Gerald Runkle argues, existentialist freedom “is not something that, in the manner of the anarchists, we have to struggle for. . . . The existentialist’s freedom can neither be given nor taken away, while the anarchist’s freedom is contingent.”11 Similarly, Marjorie Greene explains that, for Heidegger, freedom “is a risk, a venture, a demand.”12 Unlike political freedom, in other words, existentialist freedom is something one can insist upon. Even if incarcerated or oppressed, we may still insist to choose authenticity over inauthenticity, a choice that defines our existence as Da-seins, and that, unlike other freedoms, cannot be wrung from us. Another reason to propose this reading is Heidegger and Newman’s preoccupation with destiny, an acceptance of which, for both men, was entirely compatible with an insistence upon freedom. To their minds, freedom represented a resolved acceptance of, not a violent rebellion against, any form of constraint—a seemingly contradictory proposition, but, as already mentioned, Newman was especially attracted to Greek tragedy, especially for its ability to impart a “sense of hopelessness: that no matter how heroically one may act, no matter how innocent or moral that action may seem, it inevitably leads to tragic failure because of our inability to understand or control the social result; that the individual act is a gesture in chaos, so that we are consequently the helpless victims of an insoluble fate.”13

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Still, reconciling antithetical notions such as fate and freedom could not have been easy, even for Newman. Again, Heidegger may have provided a way. For him, fate was equally “insoluble”: “the Greek gods,” he writes, “just like men, are powerless before destiny and against it.”14 Human beings, of course, are more vulnerable, especially when fate forces them to confront the inescapability of their own transience. Da-sein’s finitude will be revisited in the section pertaining to time, but, for our present purposes, it is relevant to clarify how accepting our inevitable mortality, for Heidegger, collapses any contradiction between freedom and destiny. Resigned toward death, Heidegger argues, Da-sein casts off the very tranquilizing strategies the they employs to obfuscate the tragedy of existence, and, released from that soothing spell of self-delusion, it accepts its fate as a matter of individual choice. Only under such conditions is it free to face destiny authentically. “Only being free for death,” Heidegger contends, “gives Da-sein its absolute goal. . . . The finitude of existence thus seized upon tears one back out of endless multiplicity of possibilities offering themselves nearest by—those of comfort, shirking and taking things easy—and brings Da-sein to the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate the primordial occurrence of Da-sein that lies in authentic resoluteness in which it hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility that it has inherited and yet has chosen.”15 Fate and freedom were thus no more antithetical for Heidegger than for Newman. We seldom control the situations in which we are ensnared, our own death most of all, but the way we face these situations, and the kinds of possibilities we extract from them, still lie within our power. These situations, moreover, may be understood authentically or inauthentically. And in accepting finitude authentically, the very condition of freedom is achieved: anticipating death, Da-sein “understands itself in its own higher power, the power of its finite freedom, and takes the powerlessness of being abandoned to itself in that freedom, which always only is in having chosen the choice, and becomes clear about the chance elements in the situation disclosed.”16 Heidegger’s notion of “freedom for death,” then, provides a way to reconcile Newman’s otherwise contradictory fascination with fate and freedom. Intriguingly, Heidegger also attributed a social component to the idea of fate, perhaps accounting for Newman’s insistence that “our inability to understand or control the social result” of our actions leads to tragedy. “[F]ateful Da-sein,” the philosopher writes, “essentially exists as being-in-the world in being with others, its occurrence is an occurrence-with and is determined as destiny. With this term, we designate the occurrence of the community of a people.”17 In many ways, Newman’s and Heidegger’s concepts of fate first diverge and then converge. Newman accepts our inability to control the social results of our actions, and insists that our civilization’s invention of nuclear weapons has imposed a “new sense of all-pervading fate.”18 This situation becomes tragic,

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not simply because the source of our anxiety is disclosed, but because our ensuing destiny has been artificially manufactured, a manufacture against which it is the artist’s responsibility to resist. Unlike Greek sculptors, who mitigated our tragic condition by creating works of “beauty” (figure 3.1), Newman exhorted artists to “tear the tragedy to shreds.”19 Heidegger would have appreciated such resentment; in fact, he endorsed a late nineteenth-century anti-capitalist romanticism encapsulated in the dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation, according to which culture mandates a rejection of modernity.20 While Zivilisation was deemed artificial and contrived, Kultur reflected an authentic relation to an indigenous tradition. Like Newman, Heidegger related fate to an individual Dasein’s uneasy connection to a social fabric. But that fate need not necessarily be rejected. If it represented a genuine destiny attending to the concerns of a community rather than a civilization, and if its meanings were properly understood, fate could authentically be taken over (a possibility Da-sein “has inherited and yet chosen”). Within this context, freedom is inordinately relevant, especially as it closely aligns with choice no less than epistemological truth. If its choices are legitimate and veridical, willingly accepted and truly grasped, the actor remains free. Da-sein, according to Heidegger, “is the possibility for being free for its ownmost potentiality of being. Being-possible is transparent for it in various possible ways and degrees.”21 Without access to truth, therefore, Da-sein neither understands the meaning of Being nor has the freedom to fulfill its potential; the very choices it makes, if it “makes” them at all, are simply dictated by others. Without transparency, Da-sein has knowledge neither of itself nor of its world; Da-sein becomes opaque, even to itself. “[T]he opacity of Da-sein,” Heidegger continues, “is not solely and primarily rooted in ‘egocentric’ self-deception, but also in lack of knowledge about the world.”22 Newman also decried the effects of egocentrism: “I cannot work . . . to express myself—or to tell the story of my life—or to find my personality.”23 Instead, he also sought some form of transparency: “Clarity alone,” he insisted, “can lead to freedom.”24 Implicit in such a statement, arguably, is a premise nearly identical to Heidegger’s assertion that truth is freedom: that freedom derives only from an unvarnished appreciation of humanity’s precarious status as Da-sein—again, an existential rather than an anarchist view. Curiously, although collapsing the political and epistemological did not trouble Newman, confounding such disparate domains had significant, sometimes perplexing, consequences. Conflating freedom and truth did not simply subsume the political within, it also awarded dominion to the philosophical (when Heidegger denigrated Alfred Baeumler’s interpretations of Nietzsche, he wrote, “Baeumler does not grasp metaphysically, but interprets politically”25). This recalibration not only places the feasibility of meaningful political reform on precarious ground but also accounts, arguably, for the unrealistic expectations artist and

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philosopher held, and the rather outlandish claims they made for their respective contributions. What, if not the conflation of politics and philosophy, led Heidegger to believe in his ability to provide the intellectual backbone for the Nazi state?26 He even petitioned for a leave of absence in 1943, arguing to his dean that the request arose, not “from a personal interest in the promotion of my own work,” but from a “knowledge of the limits of German philosophical thinking with regard to the future of the West.” It seems, Tom Rockmore contends, as though Heidegger literally believed the future of the West depended “on the proper understanding of metaphysics, supposedly presented in his own thought.”27 Did not a similar conflation of politics and philosophy likewise prompt Newman, when challenged by Harold Rosenberg to explain the meaning of his paintings, to answer, dismayingly, that a correct interpretation would bring an end to “all state capitalism and totalitarianism”?28 (On this point, it might be worth mentioning, if only parenthetically, that Egon Vietta, who lectured on Heidegger at the Club, penned the following aphorism: “If Heidegger’s thinking were understood, then the technological age in which we live would come to an end.”29 Newman may thus have styled his own answer to Rosenberg’s query on Vietta’s account.) Of course, such claims reflect far more negatively on Heidegger than on Newman, and strike a present-day observer as particularly egregious in view of the philosopher’s quips about “egocentric self-deception” and a “lack of knowledge about the world.”30 Still, their political naiveté (a word perhaps too mild to apply to Heidegger) may be directly attributed to their fusion of philosophy and politics—a fusion, in turn, that led them to endorse an unconventional definition of freedom. That definition may yet be salvaged, albeit provisionally, if a later Heideggerian idea were factored into the equation—one postdating the failure of his rectorate, and following his alleged disillusionment with politics: namely, the idea of “letting things be.” This attitude weds truth to freedom by making the freedom of any entity contingent upon an understanding of, and fundamental respect for, its existence: “Freedom reveals itself,” Heidegger writes, “as the ‘letting-be’ of what-is.”31 A true understanding of Da-sein now means that Da-sein should not so much fulfill its destiny as simply be allowed to “be,” and, in being allowed to be, Da-sein may achieve the condition of freedom. This conclusion may strike many as anti-climactic, if not utterly disappointing, but one should remember that, for Heidegger, Da-sein cannot be defined beyond its own potential; Da-sein is nothing if not “a being-possible entrusted to itself.”32 Da-sein is in-the-world, entangled in the they, and still the possibility of meeting its potential is there, dormant perhaps, yet undeniably there. Thus, if Da-sein understands itself, it will do so, not as a predetermined entity, but as a being for which something more is always possible. Only by grasping possibility as its essence, and by being allowed to fulfill it, will Da-sein, in Heideggerian parlance, be free.

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The correlation between freedom and truth is now easier to comprehend: the freedom to “be” is predicated on acknowledging the essence of our existence as possibility and being empowered to realize it. And though “letting something be” may connote indifference or negelct, Heidegger’s meaning is radically different. By letting an entity “be,” he means discovering its truth by contributing to, even participating in, its unveiling. It was already related that, by investigating the Greek word for truth, Heidegger claimed that its literal meaning is “revealment” and “unconcealment.” It therefore stands to reason that Heidegger would also endorse an unconventional definition of freedom. For him, freedom is not the ability to act without constraints; freedom is the bringing about of “revealment” and “unconcealment.” Freedom, he writes, “seen from the point of view of the nature of truth now shows itself as the ‘exposition’ into the revealed nature of what-is.”33 Freedom is “a participation in the revealment of what-is-as-such.”34 Since it is easier to see how error leads away from freedom than how truth leads to it, perhaps reversing the relationship might also prove beneficial. If letting things be allows something to manifest itself in a state of revelation, the opposite means turning away from reality, and losing ourselves in everyday concerns. In which case, we do not let things “be”; we contribute to their occlusion, even to the occlusion of our own Being. Heidegger called this form of existence “erring.” Granted, Newman did not delve into these issues at any great length, but when he proclaimed that clarity alone leads to freedom,35 he forged, like Heidegger, an indissoluble link between freedom and truth. Unlike representational art, which dissimulates our existential predicament under a veneer of beauty, his paintings were professed to reveal the truth of our existence, empowering us to accept it freely. And when he titled one of his works L’Errance (figure 7.1)—which refers, of course, to the act of straying, but also evokes the idea of mistaking (as in the expression “to go astray”)—he may, given his metaphorical bent, also be employing physical erring to reference our losing sight of the truth and mystery of existence. Newman even decried Surrealism’s interest in the human psyche as “a mundane expression” of the “human world.” Instead of the “mystery of his own personality,” Newman continued, the new painter should contemplate “the world-mystery . . . the mystery of life and death.”36 Rejecting the mundane in favor of the mysterious, Newman, whether consciously or not, was aligning his views with Heidegger’s. As the philosopher himself put it, the “insistent turning towards the practicable and accessible and this ex-sistent turning away from the mystery go together . . . Man’s drifting from the mystery to the practicable and from one practicability to the next, always missing the mystery is erring.”37 Erring thus refers to the mundane pragmatism of inauthentic Being, a form of untruth and unfreedom. L’Errance, it should be noted, is composed in an emphatically asymmetrical manner, with a red beam at the extreme left and another at the right, in dark blue, flush with the framing edge. We have already hypoth-

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Figure 7.1. Barnett Newman, L’Errance (1953), oil on canvas, 86  77.5 inches. Collection Denise and Andrew Saul, New York © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

esized that paintings such as Not There-Here (figure 4.2) and Right Here (figure 5.1), by virtue of being radically asymmetrical, denote a de-centered subject, oblivious to the truth and meaning of existence. In fact, William Richardson describes the condition of errance in a way that is not so far from the sensations induced by Newman’s painting: Da-sein “wanders from one being to another in a state of confusion, driven about hither and thither, looking for a satisfaction that no being can give, searching for a repose that no being, torn from the roots of ultimate meaning in mystery, can offer.”38 With an empty chasm at its center, L’Errance (which has also been called The Wandering) induces a similarly dizzying and disconcerting effect, forcing us to direct our attention first to one beam, then to the other, without allowing our gaze to rest comfortably on any single spot. The disparity in hue, dark blue versus intense red, also accentuates the difference, even incommensurability, of the disparate beams. The painting appears both literally and figuratively bipolar: visualizing two existential alternatives about which a self, uncertain and confused, cannot decide. If such a reading is persuasive, it might explain why, in contradistinction, Be I (figure 2.10) and Onement I (figure 2.1) are perfectly symmetrical, denoting a centered, authentic human presence aware of itself and of its place in the world. In this way, Newman would be availing himself of the symmetrical versus asymmetrical compositional dyad to convey something analogous to Heidegger’s distinction

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between authenticity and inauthenticity: between a Da-sein, grounded and secure, resolved and confident, and another who drifts and errs aimlessly, unable to choose between two alternatives. The latter is a most undesirable situation. Losing sight of the truth of Being, Da-sein can understand neither itself nor fulfill the very potential for which it is responsible; in this condition, Da-sein is inauthentic and unfree. To compensate for the inauthenticity of our being-in-the-world, Heidegger postulates that “care,” “concern,” or “solicitude” may serve as well as existential self-awareness.39 By “care,” Heidegger means genuine involvement and concern, not the everyday chores and burdens to which we attend by rote—sincere interest, not complacency, involvement, not indifference. Newman was no stranger to this mindset: “For me, painting involves an immediate exercise of total commitment.”40 Creating works of art, he insisted, is “an attempt to put down what you really believe and what you really are concerned with or what really moves you and interests you.”41 This form of commitment, coupled with Newman’s stress on self-awareness, provides a compelling analog to Heidegger’s concept of authentic Being. If, according to Safranski, to ponder something means “to return its dignity to it,”42 then pondering the mysteries of existence, as Newman professes, means reclaiming authenticity and dignity for existence. Authenticity, therefore, is achievable by resolution, by attentiveness to the mystery, but also by genuine concern for others. Accordingly, Heidegger’s disparagement of collectivity does not absolve the individual from social responsibility,43 as Newman’s diatribes against the herd did not preclude him from expressing his own concern for giving spectators the feeling of their own presence and place, and for eliciting “sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist’s vision.”44 At this point, one may be in a better position to appreciate Newman’s and Heidegger’s claim for the inordinate philosophical (and political?) import of extreme states of Being. For both, alienation, anxiety, and terror counteract the conformity typical of the mob mind or dispel the soothing effects with which the they beguiles Da-sein into inauthentic existence. In the process, Newman and Heidegger were diagnosing problems they saw as endemic, specifically, to modern Western culture. As far as Newman was concerned, preindustrial cultures had nothing comparable to the “mob mind.” Whether this view is at all accurate, or a romantic projection on Newman’s part, is of less concern to this study than his belief that “primitive man,” living in a state of terror before abstract forces, was freer and more authentic than modern man, especially as the latter is condemned to a spiritually barren, conformist existence. Recalling his early writings on non-Western art, Newman wrote, “I was talking about man’s birthright, his urge to be exalted, which even primitive man understood and which modern man seems to have forgotten,”45 a statement perfectly consistent with Heidegger’s view that modern man, living a life of mundane mediocrity,

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and ignoring the all-important question of Being, lives unfree and in utter forgetfulness, contrary to his own essence. Whether such a politico-philosophical hybrid provides a satisfactory account of freedom remains, of course, an open question; Guenther Stern, for one, finds Heidegger’s position ultimately disappointing by making humanity appear freer “than it actually is.”46 An excellent point, to be sure, but even if one rejects the conflation of politics and philosophy, or of truth and freedom, those connections clarify why Newman and Heidegger ascribed freedom, not to unfettered action, but to loyalty to the self. “Resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own self,” Heidegger writes, “loyalty is at the same time a possible reverence for the sole authority that a free existence can have.”47 From this perspective, authenticity and freedom are ours only after accepting the “thrownness” of our own Da-sein in a way that is “free from illusion.”48 Seeking any kind of emotional solace is tantamount to losing our freedom. Freedom, for Heidegger, is only found “where there is a burden to be shouldered.”49 To be free, Da-sein must choose to be brought face to face with its nakedness, its thrownness, and its anxiety. As philosophy overtakes politics, it is incumbent upon Da-sein to free itself, an endeavor achievable by none other than Da-sein: freedom, Heidegger insists, consists only in Da-sein’s “freeing itself,” a self-liberation contingent on Da-sein’s self-disclosure.50 Again, freedom is nothing if not truth. If Newman was thinking along such lines (and his comment that “clarity alone can lead to freedom” strengthens this reading), then his claims for a proper understanding of his works precipitating the end of all capitalism and state totalitarianism seem at least a little less nonsensical. By feeling their own presence and alienation, members of his audience might extricate themselves from the tranquilizing delusions perpetuated by a pedestrian culture. By witnessing the large expanses of space in Newman’s canvases, they might grasp their potential: that their condition is one of freedom, openness, and possibility.51 “I have always been aware of space as a space-dome,” Newman recalled, “I would prefer going to Churchill, Canada, to walk the tundra than to go to Paris. For me space is where I can feel all four horizons, not just the horizon in front of me and in back of me.”52 Any sense of space induced by his paintings, he added, should make the spectator feel “full and alive in a spatial dome of 180 degrees going in all four directions.”53 Instructively, Heidegger also expressed freedom in terms of openness: to disclose, “i.e., to let appear in the open, can only be accomplished by what gives in advance this open and thus is in itself self-opening and thereby is essentially open, or as we may also say, is of itself already ‘free.’ The still concealed essence of the open as the primordial self-opening is ‘freedom.’”54 Forced to work within the confines of a physical canvas, Newman, then, sought to transcribe Heidegger’s openness, metaphorically, into the “open space” of his own works.

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Though both conceived of freedom in primarily philosophical terms, this does not mean that Newman and Heidegger ignored political questions (as already mentioned, Newman ran for the mayoralty of New York and Heidegger lent his support to National Socialism). At issue, then, are the more specific political implications of their philosophy. If understanding an entity, after all, is predicated upon recognizing its truth, that same recognition, for Heidegger, meant that this same entity should be allowed to be what it is. Letting things “be” denotes, in theory, an attitude incompatible with all forms of control and manipulation—what Heidegger derogatorily called “machination” or “intelligence.” Any form of exploitation for utilitarian and ideological purposes engenders a loss of spirituality and the closing of Being. Intelligence, he writes, “relates to the regulation and domination of material conditions of production (as in Marxism) or in general to the intelligent ordering and explanation of everything that is present and already posited at any time (as in positivism), or whether it is applied to the organization and regulation of a nation’s vital resources and race.”55 No sooner is spirit misinterpreted into intelligence than spirit is degraded “into a tool,” and “the energies of the spiritual process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion, become subject to conscious cultivation and planning.”56 Newman likewise held Marxism in contempt for treating the artist no differently than the worker.57 “The worker creates for use,” he asserted, “but the artist definitely does not. It is only the slave psychology of masses in chains, given expression in the Marxian parties, that insists that art must be useful. The worker recognizes the true creative artist as his enemy, because the artist is free and insists upon freedom.”58 Heidegger also decried “the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative.”59 Some thirteen years after Newman’s statement, Heidegger intriguingly insisted that his philosophy had no utilitarian purpose (although this text postdates his failure to put that philosophy into practice during his rectorate at Freiburg60). Its goal was now to discover a truth that, once exposed, precluded interference and manipulation. Any thinking of Being, the philosopher contends, “is neither theoretical nor practical. . . . Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is. . . . Its relevance is essentially higher than the validity of the sciences, because it is freer. For it lets Being—be.”61 Speaking of his own work, Newman, as cited at the outset, similarly iterated “its assertion of freedom, its denial of dogmatic principles, its repudiation of all dogmatic life.”62 Analogously, Heidegger argued that “no arbitrary idea of being, no matter how ‘self-evident’ it is, may be brought to bear on [the question] of this being in a dogmatically constructed way; no ‘categories’ prescribed . . . may be forced upon Da-sein.”63 The laconic use of the word “be” in several of Newman’s titles also echoes the Heideggerian idea of simply letting things “be.” Revealingly, Richard Shiff,

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an astute reader of Newman’s work, also titled, independently and without any reference to the Heideggerian concept, one of the sections of his essay in the Philadelphia Museum catalog as “Let it Be.”64 Yet it bears repeating that letting “things be” should not be confused with indifference,65 only associated with the solicitude necessary to allow things to manifest themselves outside the oppressive power of authoritarian forces. The clear distinction Heidegger drew between authentic versus inauthentic existence, or Newman between sublime awareness versus mob mentality, makes it clear that, as they saw it, individual autonomy and group collectivity are in continual tension. Just as Newman declared that man “is one, he is single, he is alone; and yet he belongs, he is part of another. The conflict is the greatest of our tragedies,” Heidegger believed that the basic conflict to be resolved is whether man must be “the subject as an I let loose with limitation as to his own choice and arbitrariness, or as the We of society, whether as individual or community or a mere member of a group.”66 In this conflict, there is no ambiguity as to where Newman falls. It was already proposed that Newman’s use of multiple beams might provide an analogy to Heidegger’s concepts of Being-with: Mit-sein or Mit-Da-sein, the inescapable condition of Da-sein being-in-the-world with other Da-seins even if other Daseins are not present. But it may be significant to note that whenever Newman represents numerous beams within a single image, it is exceedingly rare to find more than two displaying the same color. It is, of course, impossible to determine what this observation might signify. But in view of Newman’s radical individualism, we conjecture that, when two beams evidence the same color, this connection reinforces the impression that a certain solidarity exists among, or binds, two discrete human presences, as in Concord (figure 6.1). Conversely, when Newman entwined a human presence among a larger cluster of human presences, as in Vir Heroicus Sublimis (figure 6.7), he refrained from ascribing a common color to all individual beams, lest this undermine their autonomy and bespeak a common destiny. Perhaps so subtle a formal decision might convey Newman’s desire to prevent more than two Da-seins from sharing the same fate, or endorsing an identical, collective mindset. Though Heidegger’s support of National Socialism makes his case more problematic, he wrote sufficient passages, even in Being and Time, whose implications Newman could have taken as consistent with his own views. Heidegger’s position is that Da-sein is authentic when it has the courage to base itself on itself. Heidegger, Safranski writes, “deploys his ethics of authenticity against public ethics.” 67 If it manages to extricate itself and return to itself, the self achieves an awareness of mortality, of time, and of its own potentiality for Being: as such, it may be spontaneous, creative, authentic, and free. All these qualities lead to an intensification of Da-sein, an intensification occurring exclusively on an individual basis. If Newman conceived his paintings “in utmost solitude,” and to “be examined by critics in relation to

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the true nature and degree of how much solitude,”68 Heidegger also expressed the view that his kind of philosophy “depends on an enigmatic solitude, taking the word ‘solitude’ in a high, unsentimental sense.”69 Thus, in allowing philosophy to trump politics, neither Newman nor Heidegger relinquished their right to impugn totalitarian governments on both political and philosophical grounds. The political argument would revolve around the individual’s subordination and loss of autonomy, the philosophical around the trampling of Being whenever collective groups thwart individuals from fulfilling their potential. One would think that, having formulated such ideas, Heidegger would have been inoculated against any involvement with National Socialism; yet, on the whole, these concepts are entirely consonant with Newman’s anarchist politics. When Heidegger declared, for instance, that creators and thinkers become “apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, and alien, without issue amid the essent as a whole, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this,”70 this sentiment is hardly incompatible with anarchism, a concept extrapolated from the Greek word anarkhia, from the term anarkhos, meaning “without a ruler.” From being without a city, it is but a short step to being without a ruler. For his part, Newman identified the state as the artist’s “traditional enemy.”71 In his foreword to Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs, he declared anarchism as “the only criticism of society which is not a technique for the seizure and transfer of power by one group against another. . . . What is particular about anarchism is not its criticism of society but the creative life it offers that makes all programmatic doctrine impossible.”72 These sentiments are hardly incompatible with Heidegger’s doctrine of letting things be. Intriguingly, Newman also describes Kropotkin in terms not dissimilar from Heidegger’s description of the tyrannical oppression of the they: he was a person “intoxicated with the love of personal freedom . . . he stood against all forms of domination.”73 Kropotkin, Newman continues, was “scrupulous to the point of fanaticism in his defense of the untrammeled person. He was careful to respect the identity of others as he was conscious of his own.”74 It should be admitted, of course, that respecting individual autonomy is hardly exclusive to Newman or Heidegger, and placing Kropotkin’s anarchism on the same plane as ideas from a philosopher who, for however long, sympathized with Nazi ideology may seem perverse at best. (In fact, Newman’s own endorsement of Kropotkin was itself not above contradiction: as Ann Alexander Schoenfeld observed, “the anarchist does not aspire to a governmental position,”75 an obvious reference to Newman’s candidacy for the mayoralty of New York.) But celebrating personal autonomy is not the only element binding Newman and Heidegger. Even more relevant is the increased existential intensity

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both associate with escaping the grip of collectivist thinking. “The more inward man’s feeling of freedom,” Heidegger contends, “the more he feels himself to be existent.”76 Similarly, according to Newman, what comes through Kropotkin’s “engagement” in the events that changed his life “is a heightened sense of ‘being.’”77 This statement adds weight to some of the connections between Newman and Heidegger postulated here: if achieving a heightened state of Being is a crucial aspect of Heideggerian philosophy, Newman uses these very terms to laud Kropotkin’s work. Even if many at the time voiced a concern for freedom and individuality, the idiosyncratic connections both men drew between freedom and truth, collectivity and the loss of self, or individual authenticity and a heightened state of Being denote a narrower compass of ideas. By praising the way Kropotkin’s “engagement” leads to a heightened state of Being, Newman also echoes Heidegger’s stress on the decisive role of engagement: philosophy “is not a matter of method, but one of engagement and of the possibility of engagement pertaining to a philosophical existence.”78 Intriguingly, when expounding on the authenticity of Da-sein, Safranski describes Heidegger’s ideas in a way that is remarkably similar to Newman’s exultations of Kropotkin: authenticity “is about the intensification of the sense of Dasein. Authenticity is intensity.”79 Heidegger, Safranski continues, made his philosophy into an attempt to awaken “existential engagement” in his readers and students, to invoke “the Dasein in Man” and conjure “moments of true sensation.”80 Not only did Newman and Heidegger define freedom philosophically rather than politically, they also employed the openness of space to evoke it, an attitude Safranski describes this way: “Freedom in this sense means having distance, open space. This distance, providing an open space, is also called ‘openedness’ by Heidegger. Only in this openedness is there a play of concealment and unconcealment. If this openedness did not exist, man could not distinguish himself from what surrounds him. He could not even distinguish himself from himself, and thus would not even know that he is there.”81 This attitude strikes a compelling parallel with Newman’s claim that “anyone standing in front of my paintings must feel the vertical domelike vaults encompass him to awaken an awareness of his being alive in the sensation of complete space.”82 Newman, in effect, devised his own paintings along these lines: the beam was meant to trigger the intellectual idea of self-awareness extrapolated from the physical sensations humans feel when bound to a specific place. Self-awareness, in turn, might trigger sensations of alienation and anxiety, but those feelings would ostensibly be compensated by the expansive space of his canvases. This space, surrounding the beam as it does in all directions, furnished a way of translating the euphoric sensation of freedom and possibility sparked whenever the oppressive mentality of the collective mind is overcome. As the artist himself put it, “The freedom of space, the emotion of human scale, the sanctity of place are what is moving.”83 And just as Newman

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lauded the “freedom of space,” the “emotion of human scale,” and “the sanctity of place,” so did Heidegger employ space as a metaphor for freedom and potential, as an analog for Da-sein’s recognition of its own potentiality-for-Being. The experience of Being is, as Safranski summarizes it, that of Being in the midst of an “open place.”84

Notes 1. SWI, 251. 2. SWI, 241. 3. Mindfulness, 17. 4. BT, 119. 5. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 303. 6. SWI, 8. 7. Martin Heidegger, “The Call to Labor Service,” in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 54. 8. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 108. 9. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 274. 10. See Faye, Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, 134. 11. Gerald Runkle, Anarchism Old and New (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972), 307. See Ann Alexander Schoenfeld, An Art of No Dogma: Philosophical Anarchist Protest and Affirmation in Barnett Newman’s Writings and Art. 12. Marjorie Greene, Martin Heidegger (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1957), 47. 13. SWI, 168–69. 14. P, 110. 15. BT, 351. 16. BT, 351–52. 17. BT, 352. 18. SWI, 169. 19. SWI, 169. 20. Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 32. 21. SWI, 135. 22. SWI, 137. 23. SWI, 250. 24. SWI, 123. 25. Heidegger, cited in Bambach, 287. 26. See Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 54ff. 27. Rockmore, 92. 28. SWI, 251. 29. Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 102.

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30. BT, 137. 31. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 305. 32. BT, 135. 33. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 307. 34. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 307. “The ex-istence of historical man begins at that moment,” he continues, “when the first thinker to ask himself about the revealed nature of what-is, poses the question: What is what-is?” (“On the Essence of Truth,” 308). 35. SWI, 123. 36. SWI, 140. 37. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 316–17. 38. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 224. 39. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 99. 40. SWI, 248. 41. SWI, 254. 42. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 354. 43. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 108–9 44. SWI, 142. 45. SWI, 287. 46. Guenther Stern (Anders), “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” 359. After explaining how Heidegger’s theory of freedom is closely connected to his theory of freedom, Stern incisively states, “The fact that the major portion of history is history of power, thus history of the un-free, history imposed upon people, is totally suppressed” (360). 47. BT, 357. 48. BT, 357. 49. FCM, 182. 50. FCM, 149. 51. A similar idea was proposed, without reference to Heideggerian philosophy, by Ann Alexander Schoenfeld in An Art of No Dogma: Philosophical Anarchist Protest and Affirmation in Barnett Newman’s Writings and Art, 212. 52. SWI, 249. 53. SWI, 250. 54. P, 143; Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 304: “In the experience of Being, man discovers himself and his play space. He is not captured or trapped in the existent. . . . Amid the things he has free ‘play,’ just as a wheel must have ‘play’ at its hub in order to move.” 55. IM, 47. 56. IM, 48. 57. See Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, 18. 58. SWI, 8. 59. IM, 38. On page 63, moreover, Heidegger added, “When the creators vanish from the nation, when they are barely tolerated as an irrelevant curiosity, an ornament, as eccentrics having nothing to do with real life; when authentic conflict ceases, converted

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into mere polemics, into the machinations and intrigues of man within the realm of the given, then the decline has set in.” 60. See Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 54ff. 61. “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 236. 62. SWI, 251. 63. BT, 14–15. 64. Richard Shiff, “Whiteout: The Not-Influence Newman Effect,” in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 84ff. 65. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 31: “What seems easier than to let a being be just the being that it is? Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks, particularly if such an intention—to let a being be as it is—represents the opposite of the indifference that simply turns its back upon the being itself in favor of an unexamined concept of being? We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself in its very own being.” 66. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 297. 67. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 165. 68. SWI, 261. 69. What Is Called Thinking?, 169. 70. IM, 152–53. 71. See Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 17. 72. SWI, 45. 73. SWI, 45. 74. SWI, 45. For an extensive analysis of Newman’s relationship with Kropotkin, see Ann Alexander Schoenfeld, An Art of No Dogma. 75. Schoenfeld, An Art of No Dogma, 6. 76. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 70. 77. SWI, 48–49. 78. FCM, 154. 79. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 170. 80. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 177. 81. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 218, 219. 82. SWI, 250. 83. SWI, 186. 84. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 304

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CHAPTER 8

Mood

Inasmuch as art, for Newman, emerges from “the fullness that comes from emotion. . . . I work only out of high passion,”1 metaphysical concepts, according to Heidegger, are only intelligible when we are “gripped by whatever [we] are supposed to comprehend. The fundamental concern of philosophizing pertains to such being gripped, to awakening and planting it.”2 In fact, Heidegger saw his work as being predominantly concerned with mood. “Being gripped,” he continues, “comes from and remains in an attunement . . . the attunements out of which our being gripped philosophically and our philosophical comprehension arise are always necessarily fundamental attunements of Dasein.”3 Existing means establishing a relation to one’s own self and to the meaning of Being. How do we become aware of our own Being? Heidegger’s unexpected answer is: in mood.4 Mood, he contends, betrays how things stand with us; mood is our way of Being, especially moods we consider unwelcome: moods Da-sein intentionally tends to evade.5 This evasion fascinates Heidegger and alerts him to something significant: that the reality of Being (e.g., our loneliness in the world) calls out to us in terror, anxiety, and solitude, the very disconcerting affects we instinctively avoid. But instead of listening to what these moods disclose, we insistently turn away. As Safranksi explains, Da-sein becomes “active, refuses to admit to itself what the mood notifies.” Heidegger’s ontology, he continues, could be construed as an attempt to cut Da-sein off “from its routes of retreat” and focus on those moods in which the “burdensome character” of our existence is revealed.6 Even if Heidegger’s analysis of mood pertains specifically to Da-sein, such an investigation is hardly irrelevant to the study of art. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger awards greater credence to mood than to rational explanations. “[F]eeling or mood,” he writes, “is more reasonable—that is, more intelligently perceptive—because more open to Being than all that reason which . . . was misinterpreted as being rational.”7 If one accepts that Newman was 149

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attempting to evoke, however analogically, the existential condition of Da-sein in his own works (its own openness to Being, as well as its feelings of anxiety and terror), then exploring the connection between moods and our perception of works of art is apt, if only because Heidegger sees mood as disclosing the thrownness of Da-sein, its exposure to the Nothing, and its relation to other beings in the world—the very sensations Newman hoped to elicit from his art. Of all the unpleasant moods that pique Heidegger’s interest, however, the most surprising is boredom, a mood, again, we desperately hope to keep in abeyance. To avoid its torpor, we hunger for distraction, a form of desperation that intrigues Heidegger, as if this very recoil betrays a deeper, underlying malaise. Curiously, this same aversion dovetails with the hostility Newman’s work often encounters—an irony, of course, given Newman’s own abhorrence of boredom: “I have great admiration for raw, boundless energy, but I cannot work out of boredom. . . . I paint out of high passion.”8 Newman, it seems, painted with that same intensity Heidegger mandated, and frequently alluded to the same sensations, but if the reductive severity of his images was meant to spark anxiety and terror (i.e., the very moods that accentuate rather than distract us from the weightiness of existence), many commentators associated Newman’s economy with the lassitude of boredom. Think of Jean-François Lyotard’s reaction already cited: that, when perusing a painting by Newman, there is almost nothing to “consume,”9 a form of reaction often found among Newman’s critics—when perusing The Stations of the Cross (figures 8.1 and 8.2), for instance, Emily Genauer dismissed it as “an adventure in emptiness.”10 Though such reactions are typical of boredom, this attunement, Heidegger submits, hardly qualifies as meaningless. Longing for distraction, we overlook “those attunements which attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement there at all.”11 In other words, since attunement is our way of Being, Da-sein is always attuned, always in a mood of some kind. But if we fail to register the attunement, the essence of attunement remains concealed.12 And although we are fully cognizant, even painfully, of being bored, our attempts to avoid this mood prevent us from understanding its broader implications. Along these lines, one may conjecture, even if this comprises something of an interpretive leap, that Lyotard and Genauer’s reactions to Newman’s works are also examples of an attunement—boredom or irritation—whose meanings, because both were left unsatisfied, remain concealed. This is not to claim, of course, that Newman intentionally sought to bore his audience—only that, if Da-sein is always attuned, this proposition makes it fair to investigate the forms of attunement induced by works of art, and to propose, just as Heidegger construed attunements we shun as metaphysically significant, that Newman projected meaning onto aesthetic pieces that, for others, may have been simply “boring.” Even some of Newman’s admirers, such as Mark Godfrey, recognized how

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Figure 8.1. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross (1958–1966), various media on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection Robert and Jane Meyerhoff © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 8.2. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross (1958–1966), various media on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection Robert and Jane Meyerhoff © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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“empty” Newman’s rhetoric sounded to many critics. Which is not to say, he continues, that the emptiness “was unintended.”13 Might this “emptiness” not be one of those very attunements that, as Heidegger would have it, attune us in such a way that we feel as though there is no attunement at all, and that, by neglecting its connotations, we overlook its significance? Again, we are confronted with one of those Heideggerian situations where something is both close and far away from us. Since we are always in a certain mood, we are always attuned in a way that betrays our way of Being, but, distracted by the frantic pace of everyday existence, we are oblivious to its meaning. Sensitivity to mood, for Heidegger, represents grasping the specific way in which Da-sein is grasping itself or letting itself be, “a strange undertaking, difficult and scarcely transparent.”14 From this perspective, the frequency with which observers left Newman’s exhibitions feeling empty makes it fair to suggest that, like Heidegger, the artist saw something especially revelatory in just letting things “be,” although, for the rest of the audience, the end result was simply tedious. Newman’s propensity to construe metaphysical meanings in works by artists for whom such connotations were abhorrent reinforces this hypothesis. As already indicated, despite the Minimalists’ rejection of extraneous meaning, Newman, in full cognizance of their position, detected metaphysical implications in their works. This ability to “extract” metaphysical content from works that, for a sculptor such as, say, Carl Andre (figure 8.3), could be so inconspicuous as to be ignored,15 betrays how adept Newman was, like Heidegger, at discerning meaning in situations many considered boring or meaningless. It was not only our abhorrence of boredom, of course, but also its relation to time that piqued Heidegger’s curiosity—and time, as we shall see, is focal to his interpretation of Being.16 In a state of boredom, after all, time becomes “long”—in German, boredom (Langeweile) literally means “long while.” Such an attunement, Heidegger acknowledges, emerges from different circumstances: we arrive at a train station too early and have nothing to pass the time. Neither productive nor entertained, we feel our time is wasted. Conversely, there are situations for which we deliberately, even happily, make time, such as visiting friends. Still, such circumstances can also leave us empty and dissatisfied, or, as Heidegger sometimes puts it, in limbo—a situation akin to perusing a work of art from which, as Lyotard put it, there is “nothing to consume.” Visiting a museum is also a voluntarily leisure activity for which we deliberately set the day aside. We do not wish the minutes away as in the train station; we take the time to enjoy the works before us. But what if enjoyment is not forthcoming? What if we are not in the appropriate mood to take pleasure in the experience? A form of boredom can overtake us.17 Even if approached with the right attitude, a painting may still leave us dissatisfied—especially if its meaning is incomprehensible. In addition, we automatically infer that works of art serve a specific purpose, one

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Figure 8.3. Carl Andre, Lead Copper Plain (1969), Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. (Art © Carl Andre/Licenced by VAGA, New York)

that, to some extent, includes the audience’s enjoyment and understanding. We are predisposed to believe, if only tacitly, that artists toil, at least partially, for our gratification, so that we might benefit from their labors—increasing our irritation if these expectations are violated. Nothing forces us to stand before a work of art, of course; we can blame the artist personally for our consternation and walk away, frustrated and annoyed, to look at something else. Still, something may compel us to stay. Aware of Newman’s intentions, we might say to ourselves, “The artist claimed to communicate metaphysical secrets. I should give his paintings a chance.” What if, after extended periods of looking, these meanings still remain inaccessible? Unwilling to be taken for a philistine, for one of those people who spends barely a second perusing a painting, we force ourselves to look, dissatisfied, even if we have no choice but to admit to ourselves that understanding eludes us, even if we begin to harbor doubts as to whether there is anything to understand, even if we feel passive, in limbo, bored.18 This does not mean, however, that we will languish in a vegetative state. According to Stefan Klein, human beings are incapable of complete idleness. Despite our irritation, our minds will remain active; if we do not concentrate on the painting, our attention will drift. If the brain is underutilized, Klein maintains, “its activity turns to day-dreams, internal monologues, and anxiety.” Experimental evidence suggests “that our attention is automatically directed inward

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when there is little else to occupy it. If researchers measure their test subjects’ brain activity without giving them a task to keep them occupied, they still show eagerness to engage in thought. On the monitor, areas of the brain light up that are responsible for self-imaging.”19 This inability to remain idle squares with Heidegger’s view that we are always attuned, as does the contention that, when bored, our attention turns, reflexively, on the self. Heidegger’s recommendation is that, in such situations, we learn to wait; if attunements provide a glimpse into our way of Being, those attunements that attune us in such a way as though there is no attunement at all “are the most powerful.”20 Instead of resisting experiencing the “long while,” we should “let [it] resonate.”21 That resonance may enhance our understanding because, just as he distinguished fear, which has a specific object, from anxiety, which is indefinite and more profound, Heidegger distinguished boredom over a specific situation (e.g., waiting at a station) from a more general, indefinite, more profound version of the same attunement. These different forms are difficult to parse, as it entails conjecture about another person’s frame of mind, and as Heidegger provides scant assistance in helping us distinguish a fundamental mood from an ordinary mood,22 or a fundamental attunement from emotions or psychological states in general. How do we ascertain, for instance, whether Lyotard was bored by a painting from which there was nothing to “consume,” or by a less definite, more profound, version of boredom? Would an ordinary object, one might ask, a tablecloth having no more to consume than a Newman, also leave Lyotard feeling empty? Probably not. But in saying so, we work under the assumption that Lyotard had no expectation of “consuming” anything from the tablecloth. All of which suggests that boredom is as much a product of our personal expectations as of the situation itself, making it as difficult to explain boredom as why, in certain circumstances, we feel in a good or bad mood without a legitimate reason. To provide such a reason, Heidegger postulates that boredom does not necessarily intrude from outside; boredom may intrude “out of Dasein itself.” In that case, moods are less situation-bound, and, when in the grip of this more profound form of boredom, “we are held more towards ourselves, somehow enticed back into the specific gravity of Dasein, even though, indeed precisely because in so doing we leave our own proper self standing and unfamiliar.”23 This again jibes with Klein’s assessment that, when bored, our attention turns to internal monologues and anxiety, inviting the proposition that, just as Heidegger construed boredom as a fundamental attunement—because our “own proper selves” are left standing—Newman construed an evocation of presence in the very same pieces that left his public baffled. Not that Newman wanted to be boring, but that, like Heidegger, he understood everyday occurrences very differently, and could detect philosophical implications in situations where other persons detected nothing at all.

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This very same ability, arguably, allowed him to infer metaphysical connotations from works he knew to be intentionally bereft of meaning. “The art of association,” Carl Andre explained, “is when the image is associated with things other than what the work itself is . . . my work is the exact opposite of the art of association.”24 Likewise, Donald Judd rejected “all extraneous meanings—connections to things that didn’t mean anything to the art.”25 And Robert Morris (figure 8.4) asserted “the non-imagistic as an essential condition.”26 Though these artists were consistently arrayed against interpretation, one finds, on occasion, a hint as to what Newman was after. Despite intending to draw no associations with objects in the external world, or evoke meanings extraneous to their works’ visual form, the Minimalists hoped to provoke another form of attention: making the spectator cognizant, not of perceiving something, but of perception itself. Instead of precipitating interpretive activity or aesthetic appreciation, Minimalist pieces would make spectators cognizant of their own share in the act of looking. The new sculptures, Morris alleged, are “more reflexive because one’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work is stronger than in previous work. . . . One is more aware than before that he himself

Figure 8.4. Robert Morris, Untitled (Three L-Beams) (1966), Leo Castelli Gallery © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions [italics mine].”27 Just as our attention is automatically directed inward when we are unoccupied, the reflexive effect of perceiving a Minimalist piece is attributable to the non-associative, non-imagistic aspect of the object—which, Morris readily conceded, was often criticized as “boring.”28 And though this reflexivity was hardly meant to induce existentialist reflection, one wonders if Newman himself did not interpret it in precisely those terms. (Morris even spoke of a “non-dominating form of presence,”29 a kind of letting be, as it were.) If so, Newman would have understood Minimalism in a Heideggerian way. He would have understood that, when gripped by profound boredom, we are held “more towards ourselves, somehow enticed back into the specific gravity of Dasein, even though . . . we leave our own proper self standing and unfamiliar.”30 When visiting the Northern tundra, in fact, Newman described his own experience not too differently: “You’re not looking at anything. But you yourself become very visible.”31 It was Newman’s ability to project metaphysical meanings where none were intended, arguably, as it was Heidegger’s to discern self-confrontation in profound boredom, which allowed both men to perceive philosophical implications in situations most of us chose to ignore. Along Heideggerian lines, Lyotard’s response to Newman’s work might not be too far off the mark; apparently, Lyotard was not only irritated with Newman’s work but also irritated, so to say, at his own irritation. Of course, whether the attunement over an attunement encourages further philosophical reflection, or a boring situation triggers selfawakening, ultimately lies in the mind of the person being attuned. Such reactions are individual and idiosyncratic, and cannot be counted as objective characteristics of the situation itself, an indeterminacy Heidegger even ascribed to the condition of Being: “Only because the ‘is’ remains intrinsically indeterminate,” the philosopher interjects, can it “fulfill and determine itself ‘as the circumstances require.’ The diversity of definite meanings . . . offers the clearest proof that in order to be determinable being must be indeterminate.”32 Analogously, responses to Newman’s canvases vary widely. Though many spectators were baffled, Newman recalled that, during his first show in 1950, a painter friend of his “got terribly upset and had tears in his eyes and began to abuse me. And I said: ‘What’s the trouble?’ He said: ‘You called me names, you made me aware of myself.’ I said: ‘Well, take it easy. I mean everything is going to be alright.’”33 Newman revealed neither the painter’s identity, nor whether this response at all corresponded to his intent. But in view of the artist’s own comments (“man is sublime in his relation to his sense of being aware,” “you can only feel others if you have a sense of your own being,” or the “self, terrible and constant is the subject matter of painting”), one suspects that, despite attempting to console his friend, Newman was nothing short of elated. Becoming self-aware and appre-

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hensive also tallies with Heidegger’s quest for experiences that expose Da-sein to itself with such intensity that the collective no longer holds sway over its way of Being: “Because Da-sein is lost in the ‘they,’ it must first find itself. In order to find itself at all, it must be shown to itself in its possible authenticity.”34 Da-sein becomes transparent—finds itself—ironically enough, through anxiety: when it is disoriented and its surrounding world loses all its meaning. But Heidegger was not just interested in boredom or anxiety. The kinds of sensations Newman attributed to early man—who expressed his helplessness “in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state”—and which he sought to induce in the spectator, also intrigued the philosopher, especially awe. Awe, Heidegger contends, is the “disposition” which determines the essence of man and his relationship to Being. Being itself, he continues, “sustains awe, namely the awe over the ‘to be.’ In this way Being at the very beginning is protective of its own essence. [Aidos] refers to this awe, which thrusts something upon man.”35 As an attunement, awe makes us recognize that our own essence lies in having a relationship to Being. It is not that, in having an awe-inspiring experience, we realize our own essence and come to experience Being; it is more that, in having an awe-inspiring experience, we, as the beings whose essence it is to think, are claimed by Being. What does Being claim of us? That we fulfill this essence. Surprisingly, such experiences can even result from “looking,” so long, of course, as the word is reinterpreted along Heideggerian lines. When Newman announced that the meaning of his art emerges from “the seeing, not from the talking,” one naturally assumes that he meant “seeing” in the conventional sense. But when he stated, “Looking at the site you feel . . . here I am, here . . . here you get a sense of your own presence [italics mine],” the implication is that “looking” is less a means of observing objects in the external world than a means of allowing the looker to come into presence. This proposition coincides with Heidegger’s reinterpretation of the ancient Greek term for sight, thea, from which our term “theater” is derived: “‘looking’ . . . in no way means ‘seeing’ in the sense of representational looking upon and looking at, by which man turns toward beings as ‘objects’ and grasps them. [Thea] is rather the looking in which the one who looks shows himself, appears, and ‘is there.’” Heidegger indicts modern usage for defining looking as humanity’s “representational self-direction towards beings.” Consonant with Newman sensing his own presence while looking at the Indian mounds, Heidegger argues that the Greeks first experienced looking “as the way man emerges and comes into presence.”36 On this reading, looking is a reflexive process; it does not simply radiate from the onlooker—it boomerangs. We look and are also looked upon, not as an object of contemplation, but as a being whose essence is to think, an essence Being calls upon us to fulfill: “That which within the ordinary comes to presence by his own look is

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man. . . . Man himself is that being that has the distinctive characteristic of being addressed by Being itself.”37 In our compulsion to be occupied, we unfortunately do not hear the call. And not simply because we fail to recognize profound boredom as a fundamental attunement, but also because a question Heidegger asked himself, among others, is “whether contemporary man has become bored with himself.”38 For a philosopher who always asked “how do things stand with man?” no less than “where does man stand?,” the question is of capital importance. One gets the impression that Heidegger would have found portentous implications even in the most dismissive reactions to Newman’s work, perhaps betraying that condition where we have grown bored, not simply with our everyday activities, friends and acquaintances, but, worst of all, with our very selves. This clarifies why boredom is a fundamental attunement of Da-sein, and why this attunement can also prove detrimental. Why? Because boredom may lead to the feeling that makes “everything of equally great and equally little worth.”39 This condition, of course, was anathema to an artist who worked out of high passion, or to a philosopher who identified depth with intensity. “[T]hrough this boredom,” Heidegger continues, “the beings that surround us offer us no further possibility of acting and no further possibility of our doing anything.”40 Under the weight of this attunement, Da-sein becomes oblivious, relinquishes action, and forfeits its own possibilities—which are tantamount to Da-sein refusing to be itself. Yet Heidegger still construed this very refusal as pregnant with meaning. “All telling refusal,” he interjects, “is in itself a telling, i.e., a making manifest.”41 What does the refusal say? It hints at the possibilities of Da-sein. The refusal will not describe them, or lead to them directly, but it “points to them and makes them known in refusing them.”42 Thus, even in a state of indifference, the possibilities that remain unexploited might show themselves. Even if boredom predominates, the refusal announces “possibilities left unexploited.”43 So just as Being is both closest and farthest from man, or as truth can hide itself in its own self-showing, here too Heidegger insists that the announcement that illuminates the possibilities of Da-sein goes together with the telling refusal.44 Just as Newman hoped his hermetically abstruse paintings would induce a sense of place and awareness, Heidegger insisted that the condition of boredom may yet bring “the self in all its nakedness to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being-there of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be that Da-sein.”45 We are still on shaky ground, of course. How a refusal of possibilities sparks an announcement of possibilities is not exactly clear. How abstract paintings leave one spectator nonplussed and another in tears is no less so. What is clear, however, is that both Newman and Heidegger constructed (or projected) powerful sensations of self-awareness from situations many readily dismiss as boring, and then connected these sensations with a grander, metaphysical sense

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of presence and place. For both, that same sense was marshaled for a single purpose: for us to resolve to “be.” The announcement in telling refusal, according to Heidegger, “is a calling, is that which properly makes possible the Dasein in me.”46 This sentence recalls Newman’s use of titles such as The Voice (figure 2.12), End of Silence (figure 8.5), or The Command, titles that perhaps should not be accepted too literally—possibly as examples of human or even divine communication—but as Da-sein’s calling its own self to authenticity. When entangled in the oppressive realm of the they, the self is inauthentic, lost to itself, and oblivious to its own possibilities. The awakening of the self cannot originate from outside; it only comes from within. This self-exhortation is the “calling” of which Heidegger speaks, and, perchance, the “voice” or “command” alluded to in Newman’s titles. The call could be a sudden jolt, like a bolt of lightning. When interpreted along such metaphorical lines, the flaming red beam transversally crossing a dark field in End of Silence (figure 8.5) might represent Newman’s attempt to visualize the self’s sudden awakening to its own presence after a long period of bland non-awareness. The reddish, irregular beam ruptures space, suggesting a sudden irruption of sound: the voice is thunderous, unexpected, jarring, almost dissonant. Existence being called back to itself, Newman may have

Figure 8.5. Barnett Newman, End of Silence (1949), oil on canvas, 38  30 inches. Collection Marsha and Jeffrey Perelman, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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reasoned, is comparable to a long, hypnotic silence suddenly interrupted by a loud, shrill sound, or a flash of light suddenly dispelling the darkness. Yet the call need not be intimidating, nor the command domineering. As Heidegger sees it, to call means to “set in motion, to get something underway—which may be done in a gentle and therefore unobtrusive manner.”47 To command, Heidegger writes, means “not to give commands and orders, but to commend, entrust, give into safe-keeping, keep safely. To call means: to call into arrival and presence.”48 Perhaps this latter, alternative scenario is evoked in The Voice (figure 2.12), where, before a spacious white field, a beam painted in off-white is barely discernible on the right side. As an exercise in subtlety, The Voice outdoes even Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918), only to be bested by some of Ad Reinhardt’s most close-valued, black paintings. Regardless, if interpreted against a Heideggerian standpoint, Newman’s exploitation of visual nuance may connote how a change of disposition may also emerge in a gentle, gradual, and understated way. Unlike End of Silence, which approximates a violent emotional reversal, or dramatic philosophical about-face, The Voice intimates that even life-altering events may conquer a person slowly, gradually, so much that the person in question barely recognizes the momentous change overtaking him. How the self actually awakens to its own individuality and to its own potential, Heidegger does not fully elucidate. But just as Newman saw metaphysical possibilities in unexpected places, Heidegger declared that this “strange lack of content to whatever properly makes Da-sein possible should not disturb us . . . if we are at all in a position to let this attunement” affect us. 49 In other words, the disturbing sensation of being unable to extract meaning from a painting, or of being in a dull situation, may yet have salutary effects. If we allow boredom to resonate, rather than resist it, the attunement might lead to ponderous conclusions about who we are. Instead of distracting ourselves, we should consider how things stand with us. And since fullness of meaning can emerge from a lack of meaning, we must always remain attuned to, not turn away from, our dispositions: “Only a being that is intrinsically attuned in general,” Heidegger writes, “can find itself adversely attuned. Whatever is adversely attuned can undergo a change of attunement . . . and thus also [an] awakening attunement.”50 Heidegger’s point, arguably, is echoed in Newman’s view that man is sublime only insofar as he is aware; if human beings are indifferent to their attunements, they run the risk of becoming ordinary, indifferent, bored. By declaring that a lack of meaning should not disturb us, Heidegger, conversely, is suggesting that even a situation that leaves us empty and frustrated can, by virtue of that very same emptiness and frustration, incite us to examine the underlying reasons for these reactions. Even if negative, our attunements may encourage positive reflections—if we arrest our continual quest for pleasure and entertainment, and listen to what the mood is trying to tell us.

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In satisfying our daily desires and fleeing from anything disconcerting, we have ignored deeper questions, even our very selves. And in so doing, we have become boring, and to ourselves most of all. To dispel this indifference, we need to rekindle the mystery and terror of Being. “The absence of an essential oppressiveness in Dasein is the emptiness as a whole. . . . Each and everyone of us are servants of slogans, adherents to a program, but none is the custodian of the inner greatness of Dasein in its necessities. This being left empty ultimately resonates in our Dasein, its emptiness is the absence of any essential oppressiveness. The mystery is lacking in our Dasein, and thereby the inner terror that every mystery carries with it and gives Dasein its greatness remains absent.”51 This point, of course, revisits issues addressed in previous sections. And as much as this study has endeavored to divide the connections between Newman and Heidegger into discrete thematic compartments, in reality, all these connections overlap, requiring a certain degree of repetition. The need for Da-sein to resurrect its inner terror, for example, dovetails with Newman’s description of non-Western art as permeated by a terror before the mystery of life, and of modern art as approximating the condition of early human beings. But these questions are also directly relevant to the present section because, by averting our attention from this terror, we shun not just the oppressiveness of existence, but anything oppressive—even boredom—and in distracting ourselves, we shun and have forgotten our special place in the world. Only by recognizing the terror of life, can we, in a sudden moment of vision, come back to ourselves, and accept our responsibility to bear the burden of being Da-sein. It is in this sense of the term—to “be here”—that Da-sein means knowledge of our place in the world and having the courage to face the oppressiveness of Being without escaping into frivolous distraction. This may put us face to face with the unvarnished terror of existence, yet this terror disrupts the attempts mobilized by the they to tranquilize us in a soothing and largely inauthentic mode of life. Terror, in other words, like genuine care and solicitude, is an antidote to boredom and inauthenticity; it is the inescapable condition of a Da-sein that is self-aware and has a sense of place. Freedom is achievable only if, accepting this burden, we wrest our own possibilities from ourselves, and if we listen to those attunements that announce themselves even in their own telling refusal. Given the above, it is hardly surprising that Heidegger counts philosophy as “the opposite of all comfort and assurance. It is turbulence, the turbulence into which man is spun, so as in this way alone to comprehend Dasein without delusion.”52 The true hero, Safranski writes, echoing the vertical orientation of Newman’s beams, “bears the weight of the world like Atlas and is, moreover, expected to accomplish the trick of having an upright gait and a bold plan of life.”53 It is for these reasons, returning to issues addressed in the previous section, that, for all of their negative repercussions, anxiety and alienation promote

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freedom—not because political empowerment will necessarily ensue—but because they compel us to confront the reality of our existence. Similarly, Newman must have reasoned that, realistically speaking, even experiences that spark an intensification of Being will not eliminate all forms of capitalism and state totalitarianism. But they will sharpen our clarity of purpose and heighten our self-awareness. Even if his canvases were intended to reinforce an individual’s separateness from the social fabric, or induce a sense of anxiety and terror, the negativity of these feelings, if experienced in their full intensity, are compensated by an exhilarating sensation of freedom. In view of Newman’s and Heidegger’s rejection of the pettiness of middle-class existence, one could further argue that, for both men, the very feelings of separateness and anxiety described above would establish the conditions—a kind of prerequisite—for the possibility of freedom. No one whose perception is clouded by delusion can be free. As interpreted by Heidegger (and perhaps Newman too), freedom is not bestowed upon us by an exterior entity—a government, a constitution, a set of political guidelines; freedom, rather, is a condition whose responsibility it is ours to win.

Notes 1. SWI, 248. 2. FCM, 7. 3. FCM, 7. 4. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 158. 5. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 158. 6. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 158. 7. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 24–25. 8. SWI, 251–52. 9. Jean-François Lyotard, “Newman: The Instant,” in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 241–42. 10. Emily Genauer, “Christ’s Journey in Canvas,” New York Herald Tribune, April 20, 1966. 11. FCM, 68. 12. FCM, 68. 13. Mark Godfrey, “Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross,’” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 57–58. 14. FCM, 68. 15. Carl Andre—cited in E. Develing, Carl Andre (The Hague, 1974), 5—stated the following: “I don’t want to make works that hit you over the head or smash you in the eye. I like works that you can be in the room with and ignore them when you want to ignore them.” 16. Interestingly, there is a parallel here with the work of Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), Vol. I, 313:

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“The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, ‘to kill time,’ in other words, to escape from boredom.” 17. See Peter De Bolla, “Serenity: Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” in Art Matters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 30. 18. Again, this is not to suggest that Newman deliberately sought to make us feel this way. But it would be equally difficult to gainsay anyone who claimed that Newman’s work does not provide, in spite of its consistent use of the vertical beam, a systematic approach to meaning that could legitimately be deciphered or said to run through the entirety of his production. Given Newman’s own view that the titles he ascribed to his works were especially significant for him, we can, of course, attempt to deduce why Newman may have titled a work the way he did, or how, as has been tried on occasion in this book, the particular formal properties of a given work may elicit the kinds of associations the title evokes. Yet whether a particular formula is consistently in operation throughout Newman’s work (e.g., that a light beam or background will always signify one particular meaning, or that a dark beam or background will always signify another) remains, if not highly doubtful, then impossible to corroborate. Since Newman frequently ascribed his titles after the fact, and understood the meanings of his paintings after they were completed (e.g., Onement), it is very likely that he constructed the meanings of his works as he perused his works during post-creative contemplation, not as part of a preplanned iconographical scheme. What Newman did, arguably, was (to put it in Heideggerian terms) to allow himself to be attuned by his own work once it was completed, and then allow that attunement to resonate. And in view of Newman’s ascribing metaphysical meaning to the work of the Minimalists, the case could be made that Newman was especially prone to project meanings in a way the average spectator may not follow. 19. Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time (New York: Marlowe, 2007), 91. 20. FCM, 68. 21. FCM, 82. 22. Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 161. 23. FCM, 128. 24. Andre quoted in Develing, 5. 25. John Coplans, “An Interview with Don Judd,” Artforum 9 (June 1971): 44. 26. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture,” Artforum (February 1966) and (October 1966), reprinted in Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), 226ff. 27. Battcock, 232. 28. Battcock, 235. 29. Battcock, 235. 30. FCM, 128. 31. Barnett Newman, transcript of the artist interviewed by Alan Solomon and Lane Slate, May 20, 1966, page 26, Alan Solomon papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. For a reading of Newman’s art along these lines, see also Armin Zweite, Barnett Newman (Ostfildern-Riun: Hatje Cantz, 1999), 83. Even Michael Fried’s aversion to Minimalism provides clues as to what enticed Newman.

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Fried dismissed as anti-artistic the “paradigmatically theatrical” “latent anthropomorphism” “at the core” of Minimalist practice. Even an abstract cube, for Fried, “might be something of a surrogate person—that is, a kind of statue.” Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artform (June 1967) reprinted in Battcock, 129, 145, 128. 32. IM, 91. 33. SWI, 258. 34. BT, 248. 35. P, 75. 36. P, 103. 37. P, 104. 38. FCM, 132. 39. FCM, 137. 40. FCM, 139. 41. FCM, 140. 42. FCM, 140. 43. FCM, 141. 44. FCM, 142. 45. FCM, 143. 46. FCM, 143. 47. What Is Called Thinking?, 117. 48. What Is Called Thinking?, 118. 49. FCM, 143–44. 50. FCM, 181. 51. FCM, 163–64. 52. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 191. 53. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 160–61.

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CHAPTER 9

Technology

In his seminal essay “The First Man Was an Artist,” Newman virulently denounced science and technology. Motivated by a “drive to conquer” and dominate “all realms of thought,” science denies “any place to the metaphysical world.”1 By identifying “truth with proof,”2 science dominates “the mind of modern man,”3 stifling both humanity’s original curiosity and the artist’s fascination with “the elemental mystery of life.”4 In modern times, Newman declares, we have betrayed the first impetus underlying scientific inquiry: to answer metaphysical questions.5 The only “questions worth discussing,” Newman declares, “are the questions that cannot be proved.”6 This attitude intersects poignantly with Heidegger’s. If Newman decried science’s denial of the metaphysical world, the philosopher affirms that “[s]cience today in all its branches is a technical, practical business of gaining and transmitting information. An awakening of the spirit cannot take its departure from such science.”7 This distrust of science walks in lockstep with Heidegger’s critique of technology, which, to his mind, substitutes an attitude of control for the respectful attitude of letting things be. The indictment should also be seen in the context of Heidegger’s larger agenda to divorce philosophy from rigorous logic, demonstrable proofs, and the implementation of a completely dispassionate methodology. Already cited were Heidegger’s assertions that philosophical concepts are accessible only to those whom they grip emotionally, assertions that align philosophy with art and poetry. And just as Newman excoriated scientists for fetishizing the ability to prove, insisting that the most important questions are those for which no proofs can be found, Heidegger considered philosophy to be inherently ambiguous. In opposition to science,8 philosophy “remains in the perilous neighborhood of supreme uncertainty. No knower necessarily stands so close to the verge of error at every moment as the one who philosophizes.”9 Irrelevant and “of little value,” anything provable carries “no intrinsic weight in 165

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itself.”10 Since metaphysical questions provide no exact answers, philosophy cannot be put to practical use. Inasmuch as Newman lambasted Marxist thinkers for insisting that art must be useful,11 Heidegger dismissed any attempt to impose utilitarian demands upon the discipline (i.e., that its “knowledge be practically applied” to “factical life”).12 According to Thomas Hess, Newman visualized this suspicion of science in Euclidian Abyss (figure 9.1), a canvas meant to evoke the “perils of geometry,”13 with “geometry” as code for an oppressive, exacting state of mind. “It is precisely this death image,” the artist declared, “the grip of geometry, that has to be confronted. In a world of geometry, geometry itself has become our moral crisis. . . . [The] only answer is no geometry of any kind.”14 In parallel, Heidegger insisted that mathematical knowledge is “the emptiest knowledge imaginable.”15 Mathematics, he maintained, pales when compared to philosophy. And if Newman, Gottlieb, and Rothko averred art to be an adventure “violently opposed to common sense,”16 Heidegger warned against “making sound common sense the ally and guide of philosophy.”17 Newman did not fully explain his hostility to technology, but Heidegger’s stems from the contrast he strikes between a respectful attitude toward the world—one that lets things be—versus one that looks at the world from an ex-

Figure 9.1. Barnett Newman, Euclidian Abyss (1946–1947), oil, oil crayon, and wax crayon on textured paperboard, 27.75  21.75 inches. Private collection, Artherton, California © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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ploitative perspective. As already mentioned, the philosopher thought it imperative to let things “be as they are and in order that they be such.” He denounced the modern proclivity not to let something be but to “work over it, improve it, destroy it.”18 Think of the difference between a bridge and a hydroelectric plant; the bridge permits human locomotion yet respects the river by letting it be. The power plant alters the landscape, diverts rivers, disrupts natural habitats, and sets ecosystems out of balance. The power plant ignores what the river is by turning it into inventory, as it were.19 Turning things into inventory is a recurrent metaphor in Heidegger because it extends to widely asymmetrical power relationships: between rulers and subordinates, individuals and the they, human beings and the state, and so on. At issue is whether the relationships are respectful, wherein things or individuals are allowed to fulfill their potential, or whether these relationships are motivated by the drive to control and exploit. Newman would have concurred. “Only by first ridding itself of this obsession for utility,” he writes, “this human desire for a set of hierarchies of usefulness, can a true morality begin to be postulated. The only moral act is the useless one, and the only useless act is the aesthetic one. The artist is the only man who performs an act for no useful purpose; he is, indeed, opposed to its usefulness. His behavior is completely, unalterably, and profoundly futile.”20 Again, this statement squares with Heidegger’s view that “it is meaningless to ask why and to what purpose we philosophize,”21 or that philosophy “cannot be directly applied, or judged by its usefulness in the manner of economic or other professional knowledge. But what is useless can still be a force, perhaps the only real force.”22 As already mentioned, letting things be does not simply designate an attitude of solicitude necessary for the granting of freedom; it is also anchored to the interpretation of truth because letting things be means allowing things to come into presence as what they really are. The desire to control, which Newman and Heidegger impute to modern technology, represents its diametrical opposite, and, as such, runs afoul of the ancient concept of truth as presence or bringing forth. Intriguingly, Heidegger locates the idea of truth-as-presence at the core, not just of all genuine scientific investigation—if its aim is true discovery rather than exploitation—but of all artistic endeavor. All handcraft manufacture, all artistic or poetical activity, Heidegger writes, “is a bringing forth, poiesis. Physis also, the arising of something out of itself, is a bringing forth, poiesis.”23 Bringing forth refers to the concept of truth as unveiling; in art or in nature, bringingforth occurs whenever something concealed comes into unconcealment.24 Technology, in the ancient sense of techné, was also a means of bringing forth. But its modern incarnations twisted that original purpose into the demand that nature “supply energy that can be extracted and stored.”25 If a windmill is left to the wind’s blowing, if a bridge connects two banks without disturbing a river, if a peasant sows grain, these activities do not challenge nature to provide “the

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maximum yield at the minimum expense.”26 By abusing the environment to satisfy human demands, and forgetting that nature also exists on its own terms, technology turns destructive, reneging on its original function to bring things forth into unconcealment. “Everywhere,” Heidegger writes, “everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We call it the standing reserve.”27 This is not to say that modern technology fails to bring aspects of nature into unconcealment, only that it is underwritten by a posture Heidegger designates as “enframing.” Enframing is Heidegger’s term for the nefarious attitude of control that dominates modern technology, an attitude that sets upon humanity the challenge “to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve.”28 This mindset is especially dangerous, not simply because it compels us, unthinkingly, to drain the earth of its resources, and thus to imperil its survival (and our own), but also because it compels the true to “withdraw.”29 In other words, if we look at the planet only with a view to drawing economic and financial advantage, we obfuscate the truth of things and do not allow nature to be. As we set the natural order out of balance, the reality of things becomes lost to us. For Heidegger, the epistemological implications are no less alarming than the ecological ones, primarily because enframing, by infiltrating every aspect of our lives, becomes applicable, mutatis mutandis, to humanity itself. The more we push ourselves to master nature, the more we lose sight of our own nature. In time, exploitation serves as the model for all our endeavors, contaminating the relationships established among human beings, even the relationship we have with ourselves. Man has come to the point, Heidegger writes, “where he himself will be taken as standing-reserve.”30 Newman shared the same outlook. “Those who emphasize the world of objects,” he maintained, “make man himself an object. . . . My whole life has been a struggle against becoming an object!”31 Objectification is to Newman what enframing is to Heidegger. In fact, Heidegger also expressed the view that, in the world of technological dominion and market value, man “himself and his things are thereby exposed to the growing danger of turning into mere material and into a function of objectification.”32 If we exploit and objectify our environment, Newman is saying, we exploit and objectify ourselves. It follows that, in so doing, we lose sight of what we are. Similarly, Heidegger maintains that nowhere does man today “encounter himself, i.e., his essence.”33 In such a situation, man, the philosopher likes to say, “withdraws.” Of course, Heidegger does not mean that man literally withdraws or disappears, but in the metaphorical sense that we act in such a way as is contrary to our nature. Withdrawal, in effect, is Heideggerian shorthand for describing the condition of any person or idea that has been unjustly misused or forgotten. Since whatever is so treated is no longer respected

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or accessible, its reality may as well withdraw. Just as nature withdraws when we twist it into standing reserve, so does our essence withdraw whenever we live in opposition to it. These propositions cement the larger point that, by ignoring the truth of things, enframing is antithetical to aletheia and blocks the “holding sway of truth.”34 Even if enframing is the mode of unconcealment typical of the modern age, it remains, in Heidegger’s words, fundamentally incompatible with the unconcealment particular to poeisis, a mode that, by rejecting manipulation or control, lets “what presences come forth into unconcealment.”35 In his essay on art, Heidegger provides an intriguing example of poetic unveiling: erecting a statue in the temple precinct. Unlike modern technology, whose central means of disclosure is exploitation, and whose working definition of truth is “correctness,” art searches for truth by simply allowing things to be. Heidegger insists that, in classical Greece, the arts were not segregated by a separate aesthetic category but all fell under the rubric of techné. Art, he continues, was originally considered techné because it revealed and brought forth, yet also belonged to poiesis: “that revealing which holds complete sway in all the fine arts, in poetry, and in everything poetical. . . . The poetical brings the true into the splendor of . . . that which shines forth most purely.”36 Unlike modern technology, art has remained true to the ideal of aletheia. The difficulty with which art satisfies practical purposes also makes it less vulnerable to enframing. As Heidegger put it, “the more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.”37 Accordingly, Lyotard’s remark that, in Newman’s abstractions, there is nothing “to consume,” might itself be an example of enframing (an attitude that sees works of art as entities from which something should be extracted). Ignoring its ability to enable the unveiling of truth, such a mindset transforms art into standing reserve. In contradistinction, Heidegger paints art as “a refuge in which the real bestows its long-hidden splendor upon man ever anew, that in such light he may see more purely and hear more clearly what addresses itself to his essence.”38 By extension, Lyotard should have shown restraint and resisted the expectation to consume anything; in simply letting things be, truth will be disclosed. The ancient Greeks understood this relation, formulating ideas on truth that, on the one hand, were inconsistent with the dominance of technology, but, on the other, inadvertently set this same form of dominance into motion. Ever the etymologist, Heidegger exhorts us to attend to the forgotten levels of signification revealed in Greek figures of speech. When we say “something works,” we mean that it produces the desired effect, reflecting, for Heidegger, modern technology’s emphasis on predicting the consequences of particular actions so as to exploit them for maximum profit. The Greeks, conversely, thought of “working” differently: namely, as bringing “hither—into unconcealment, forth—into presencing.”39

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Since art functions as an obvious counterpole to science and technology, it is logical for Heidegger’s critique of technology to mirror his praise of art,40 although most art historians, alert to the political purposes visual images have served throughout history, would discard the contention that art is inimical to domination and control as unrealistic at best, and hopelessly naïve at worst.41 But if a belief in art’s potential to counteract the control of technology seems no more than innocent, it is important to remember that, in opposing the artistic to the technological, Heidegger is attempting to distinguish the “essence” of art from its “practical” applications. Just as science could have spawned from a spirit of wonder and degenerated into an attempt to master, so could art have begun as an evocation of lofty, metaphysical ideals and then degenerated into political propaganda and commercial advertising. Which is not to say that these claims do not raise a number of unresolved questions (e.g., the legitimacy of any strict demarcation between theory and practice, essence and appearance, meaning and application), only that, without digressing into a point by point critique of Heidegger’s position, it is perhaps more productive (for the purposes of this study) to ask how, according to Heidegger, art, like early Greek science, approximates aletheia. In this endeavor, George Pattison’s summary proves especially helpful. Considering a Greek temple, he observes, Heidegger “describes how, by means of the presence of the Temple, nature is made visible in its materiality as if for the first time.”42 Although building a temple requires that natural materials be employed and refashioned, it is imperative that architects take precautions against these being exploited as standing reserve. Artisans can work in such a respectful way as to allow materials to exhibit their inherent properties without dissimulation (i.e., their surface appearance, texture, tensile and compressive strength, and so on). And if these qualities emerge in Greek architecture (figure 9.2), it is because the Greeks conceived of art and craft as complimentary forms of knowledge. In art, things come into presence and show themselves as they are. As Pattison puts it, “the artist is understood primarily in terms of techné . . . not because art is a kind of making but because it actively uncovers, actively brings beings forth into unconcealedness, into the openness of disclosure, and thereby enables us to see things for what they are, to see metals glitter and shimmer and colors glow.”43 Heidegger’s account, regrettably, is not grounded in archaeological research, and one wonders how a cognizance of the Greek practice of painting their temples would have altered his reading. All the same, making no attempts to disguise the properties or textures of his media, Newman made truth to materials a hallmark of his own sculptures; upon reading Heidegger’s stress on metals coming “to glitter and shimmer,”44 in fact, one cannot help but think of the highly reflective, gleaming surface of Here III (figure 4.1). Employing materials without encroachment or dissimulation is, of course, perfectly consistent with

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Figure 9.2. Temple of Poseidon, Cape Sounion, Greece, circa 440 BCE.

the attitude of letting things be, an attitude that should govern artists’ use of materials, and encourage them to work in conformity with the guiding principles of nature. According to Heidegger, the Greeks believed that nature was that which is “continually forming and passing away of its own accord, as distinct from that which is of human making, that which springs from [techné], from skill, invention, and production.”45 In is perhaps the very autonomy of nature, rather than truth to materials, that Newman’s early works such as Gea (figure 9.3) and Songs of Orpheus were meant to connote. In these pieces, effervescent, biomorphic forms evoke nature’s ability to act independently of human interference. Whether Heidegger would have appreciated these pastels remains an open question, but many are comparable to images created by Paul Klee, who was fascinated by organic life, and highly esteemed by Heidegger.46 The philosopher also claimed that one of the varying potential connotations of physis was the “self-blossoming emergence (e.g., the blossoming of a rose), opening up, unfolding, that which manifest itself in such unfolding and perseveres and endures in it; in short, the realm of things that emerge and linger on.”47 Such language is particularly appropriate to the suggestion of continual germination and dynamic movement in Newman’s formative work. Heidegger’s other claim, moreover, that “physis originally

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Figure 9.3. Barnett Newman, Gea (1945), oil and oil crayon on cardboard, 28  22 inches. Art Institute of Chicago. Through prior gift of the Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

encompassed heaven as well as earth, the stone as well as the plant, the animal as well as man,”48 is echoed in Newman’s praise of his contemporary, the painter Theodoros Stamos (figure 9.4), whose “ideographs capture the moment of totemic affinity with the rock and the mushroom, the crayfish and the seaweed. He redefines the pastoral experience as one of participation with the inner life of the natural phenomenon. One might say that instead of going to the rock, he comes out of it. In this Stamos is on the same fundamental ground as the primitive artist, who never portrayed the phenomenon as an object of romance and sentiment but always as an expression of the original noumenistic mystery in which rock and man are equal.”49 Like many of Newman’s early pastels, Gea also evokes the sensation that nothing in nature is static. For Heidegger, physis means “growth, that which has itself grown in such growth.”50 And since physis denotes “the ‘self-forming prevailing of beings as a whole,’”51 man is included in this category. The events human beings experience, “procreation, birth, childhood, maturing, aging, death,” Heidegger explains, “are not events in the narrow, present-day sense of a specifically biological process of nature. Rather, they belong to the general prevailing of beings, which comprehends within itself human fate and history.”52 One sense of physis is thus primordial and all-encompassing: nature seen through Heidegger’s

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Figure 9.4. Theodoros Stamos, Sounds in the Rock (1946), oil on composition board, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward W. Root.

fascination with beginnings, and “not meant in the modern, late sense of nature, as the conceptual counterpart to history. . . . Rather it is intended more originally than both of these concepts, in an originary meaning which, prior to nature and history, encompasses both.”53 These statements are congruent with Newman’s description of the original artist’s quest to commune with nature in this primordial sense, nature as differentiated from the creations of humanity, and, more specifically, from the dominant tendency toward control endemic to technology. “In clarifying the expression [physis] in the sense that which subsists independently for itself and grows and prevails from out of itself,” Heidegger writes, “we distinguished it from those beings that are on the basis of their being produced by man.” But the philosopher also mentions an “opposite concept” of physis, one that is more in tune with Newman’s mature work, and “one which comprises everything referring to human deed and action, including man in his activity . . . a being who is distinct from nature in the narrower sense.”54 Just as Heidegger insisted that translating physis into natura ignores the “fundamental poetic and intellectual [Greek] experience” of physis55—that is, an all-encompassing experience including man as well as nature—Newman claimed that the primordial artist’s quest for true communion with, later changed into one of admiration for, nature—an

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admiration that, paradoxically, succeeded in excluding man and “setting him apart to make nature the object of romantic contemplation.”56 Such a cleavage is even symptomatic of Newman’s own later production, one best clarified in light of another distinction Heidegger draws: that between “Being” and “becoming.” While becoming is a state of not-yet Being, Being is endowed with the stability and permanence of presence. “What becomes,” Heidegger explains, “is not yet. What is need no longer become. What ‘is,’ the essent, has left all becoming behind it if indeed it ever became or could become. What ‘is’ in the authentic sense also resists every onsurge of becoming.”57 Newman’s development seems to straddle this same fence. Early works such as Gea suggest the growth and energy that permeates nature as a whole, a dynamic of which humanity remains an integral component; by imparting a sense of flux, energy, and impermanence, these images might be construed as examples of becoming. Mature paintings such as Onement or Be, conversely, suggest the way Da-sein comes to itself only upon feeling distinct and different from nature; by imparting a sense of fixity, stasis, and permanence, these images might be construed as examples of Being. To reinforce his point, Heidegger cites Parmenides: “being present . . . is entirely, unique, unifying, united, gathering itself in itself (cohesive, full of presentness).”58 This description, arguably, tallies with Newman’s ambitions for Onement or Be, insofar as the unified and singular beam evokes the intransient stability of presence, in opposition to Gea, whose suggestions of growth and transience evoke the temporary state of becoming or not-yet Being.59 This interpretation may be directly applied to visual images because, immediately after citing Parmenides, Heidegger could not resist awarding the status of presence to Archaic Greek sculptures. Standing, seemingly stationary and immobile, resilient against whatever surrounds them, erect Kouroi (figure 5.3) ostensibly provide the perfect visual analog for unified and gathered presence.60 “Being appears,” Heidegger contends, “as the fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change.”61 A logical intermediary between Heidegger’s Kouroi and Newman’s beams, of course, might be supplied by Giacometti’s emaciated human beings (figure 9.5), sculptures that Newman fervently admired,62 a bridge, if one wills, between Greek Kouroi and Newman’s own abstractions. The distinction between Being and becoming thus helps differentiate Newman’s earlier production from Onement, and clarifies why this painting signals such a radical break in the artist’s career. While pondering the implications of a new image he did not fully understand, even upon its completion, Newman came to identify and empathize with the vertical orientation of the red stripe. Contemplating the stripe’s opposition to the surrounding field, he came to realize that he had devised a visual formula befitting a different understanding

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Figure 9.5. Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman (1947, 1948 [cast 1949]), painted bronze, Museum of Modern Art, New York, James Thrall Soby Bequest © ARS, New York (Photo Credit: Digital Image © Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York)

of humanity’s relationship to nature than that reflected in his previous works: he now fully felt his own presence and experienced an alternative sense of his place in the world. This realization instigated the irreversible development of his signature style, a rift so drastic for him that he identified completing Onement I with the “beginning” of his “present life.”63 From then on, the mature work was no less incommensurate with the artist’s formative phase than the distinction between Being and becoming. Any entity in a state of becoming, after all, hovers between being “no longer” (i.e., different from its anterior state) and “not yet” (i.e., different from the state into which it is moving). Heidegger even suggests that becoming is actually permeated with non-Being: “In view of this ‘no longer and not yet,’ becoming is shot through with non-being. Yet it is not pure nothing, but no longer this and not yet that and as such perpetually other. Consequently it looks this way and now that. It presents an intrinsically

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unstable aspect.”64 Given the above, it is not surprising that Heidegger appreciated Archaic Kouroi over their classical or Hellenistic progenitors (figure 5.3), sculptures whose greater suggestions of movement evoke a vacillation between one state and another. Nor is it surprising that Newman, who harbored a keen admiration for non-Western art, moved from evoking transient germination in Gea or Orpheus to sensations of permanent presence in Onement or Be. “As contrasted with becoming,” Heidegger writes, Being “is permanence, permanent presence.”65 Against this background, one may return to Euclidian Abyss (figure 9.1) and address its denunciation of “the perils of geometry” which Newman associated with “death.”66 For “geometry,” in this case, one could read, not that branch of mathematics per se, but the imposition of standardization and efficiency upon human activity, an imposition that Newman saw reflected in the impersonal character of geometric abstraction (“If we substitute Mondrian’s name for that of Euclid,” Barbara Rose writes, “we may better understand the battle Newman fought to find some avenue of escape from geometric painting”67). Heidegger would have sympathized. He decried the use of mechanical apparatuses that conceal “the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same.”68 For some, of course, Newman disparaging geometric abstraction is like the pot calling the kettle black, given that his own employment of masking tape often left hard edges that, at first glance, look completely mechanical, conveying little if any emotional content or personal touch. But Newman defended his approach—and, ostensibly, its difference from the kind of emotionally neutral and cold geometry he despised. “Straight lines,” he insisted, “do exist in nature. . . . A straight line is an organic thing that can contain feeling.”69 This statement may explain how Newman could distance his work from “geometry.” Yet how Euclidian Abyss specifically exposes, confronts, or alleviates “the grip of geometry” is more difficult to gauge, especially as Euclidian Abyss includes two elements rarely found, let alone combined, in Newman’s artistic production: a curved stripe and one that forms a right angle.70 Other instances are Death of Euclid (figure 9.6) and a number of works on paper that functioned, quite unusually, as preliminary sketches for Euclidian Abyss. One says “unusually” because, later in his career, Newman purported to be an intuitive painter who never worked from sketches, or planned a painting in advance.71 This attitude, incidentally, is very much in keeping with Heidegger’s: “the moment when planning and calculation have become gigantic. . . . The ‘world’ becomes smaller and smaller, not only in the quantitative but also in the metaphysical sense: a being as a being, i.e., as object, is in the end so dissolved into controllability that the being-character of a being disappears.”72 The near verbatim repetition of its compositional configuration in several instances, in flagrant violation of the artist’s normal working methods, suggests

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Figure 9.6. Barnett Newman, Death of Euclid (1947), oil on canvas, 16  20 inches. Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

that Euclidian Abyss must have held a specific meaning for Newman, although its exact nature is impossible to discern with any degree of certainty. Perhaps the bent versus right-angled beam combination could be explained if these elements were interpreted one at a time. Compared to the majority of Newman’s beams, the one to the left of Euclidian Abyss warps or curves. One could almost say that it is slightly, but noticeably, bent “out of shape.” This expression, of course, is used deliberately here, suggesting, once again, how the physical can impart an emotional charge. When we say that someone’s view of things is “twisted,” or that they behave as though they are “bent out of shape,” we mean that their opinions are exceptionally biased, or that their reactions are disproportionately aggressive (taking a page from Heidegger’s book, we may mention that, in Greek, “orthodox” literally means “straight thinking”). Insofar as Newman’s canvases are concerned, we speculate that, if the strictly vertical beams in Onement or Be stand for a resilient, mindful human presence against all in nature that is not mindful, the left beam in Euclidian Abyss could perhaps be interpreted as a failure of resolve, or, from a Heideggerian perspective, a failure of Da-sein to

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live up to its charge. By bending, in effect, the beam evokes a human presence deviating from its course or acting in opposition to its nature. The Greek words ptosis and enklisis, Heidegger writes, “mean falling, tipping, inclining. This implies a deviation from standing upright and straight. But this erect standingthere, coming up and enduring is what the Greeks understood by being. . . . Something is present to us. It stands by itself and thus manifests itself. It is. For the Greeks ‘being’ basically meant this standing presence.”73 The beam on the right is equally uncharacteristic. Not because it warps, but because it is solidly anchored along the lower perimeter by a right angle and fails to extend beyond the bottom edge. If the left beam’s curvature can be contrasted to the erect posture of Newman’s signature zips, the beam at the right of Euclidian Abyss also evokes a different feeling. To be sure, a beam’s verticality makes it look immobile and unbending—as Heidegger believed the appropriate stance was for standing presence among the Greeks—but, comparatively speaking, the perfect right angle conveys excessive hardness and rigidity. If Newman sought to give his spectators a sense of place, so that they would know where they are, he was equally preoccupied with the sensation of freedom, a feeling he seldom sought to curtail. The same, of course, applies to Heidegger; as Michael Gelven explained, the da of Da-sein should be read as “Here I am, open to possibilities!”74 Thus, while the left beam is bent, digressing from its path, failing in its resolve, the right appears so unbending and inflexible, so similar to the framing edge, as to inhibit any possibility of lateral movement. Instead of freedom, the right angle conveys a sensation of extreme constraint. If this reading seems stretched, it might be recalled that another Abstract Expressionist, Clyfford Still (figure 9.7), also construed the geometric limitations of the framing edge in oppressive terms, and employed derogatory references to Euclid in order to make that point: “To be stopped by a frame’s edge,” he proclaimed, “was intolerable; a Euclidian Prison, it had to be annihilated, its authoritarian implications repudiated.”75 Like Still, then, Newman may have chosen a right angle to visualize the repressive nature of rational thinking, a form of thought that gives short shrift to creativity and spontaneity—a form of thought comparable to what Heidegger disparaged as enframing. Perhaps Newman was even suggesting that the left beam is forced to bend, or compelled to act contrary to its nature, precisely because of the disproportionate severity of the right-angled-beam. It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what Newman had in mind by differentiating both stripes in this manner. But given that he spent extended periods of time examining his canvases with a view to detecting their potential emotive resonance, one may conjecture that, during this process, both beams elicited different physical associations (i.e., the firm versus the pliable, the bent versus the unbending) creating the basis for the artist’s construction of meaning. Inasmuch as Heidegger saw what is “bent” or “inclining” as a metaphor for a

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Figure 9.7. Clyfford Still, 1954 (1954), oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. Gift of Seymour H. Knox, 1957.

deviation from the upward stance of Being, or Still the edge of a painting’s frame as an authoritarian limitation to overcome, Newman arguably read the physical configuration of both beams in Euclidian Abyss in analogous terms, terms that provided the interpretive foil against which he later conceptualized the seminal evocation of human presence in Onement. Although no interpretation can, admittedly, be considered definitive, the one presented here may explain how, in Newman’s mind at least, the beams in Euclidian Abyss could visualize his general antipathy toward rational thinking, an antipathy for which he coined the rather idiosyncratic rubric “perils of geometry.”76 Intriguingly, Heidegger also pondered the implications of the word “abyss,” claiming that its original meaning was that ground toward which, because it lies undermost, all things gravitate downward. But if the “ground is the soil in which to strike root and to stand,” then the “age for which the ground fails to come, hangs in the abyss.”77 There is something suggestive in this passage, insofar as the literal ground, as something upon which to strike root and make one’s stand, provides both the physical and metaphorical basis for Newman’s stripes. In Euclidian Abyss, however, the curved beam does not hold itself erect, and the right-angled beam cannot strike root. They reside in an abyss because

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they cannot “strike root and stand,” a metaphor, possibly, for an inauthentic and disconnected form of existence, a life, in other words, dominated by enframing. Newman did not simply alter the physical configuration of his beams. As we shall see, he also differentiated soft from hard edges, distinctions that were also likely to be purveyors of meaning. On this point, we conjecture that, just as Newman (like Heidegger) stressed both humanity’s separateness and connection to others, the edges may be made softer or harder as needed. A razor-sharp edge, in effect, evokes the isolation of the human presence from the world, while a softer one the nature of our existence as being-with. One may also speculate that if the bending of the beam connotes a failure of resolve, a failure to stand upright, perhaps the softening of the beam may be another way of imparting the same sentiment: namely, that the human presence is in danger of being re-claimed by nature, or by the Nothing which stands as an ever-present source of anxiety to Da-sein. Whether Newman intended to employ the softer versus harder edges of the beams in this way is, of course, impossible to say, but this much is sure: whether bent or strictly vertical, hard or soft, nothing would have displeased him more than comparing his lines to anything industrial or technological.

Notes 1. SWI, 157. 2. SWI, 157. 3. SWI, 157. 4. SWI, 67. 5. See also Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, 25ff. 6. SWI, 158. 7. IM, 49. 8. FCM, 10. 9. FCM, 19. 10. FCM, 14, 15. 11. SWI, 8. 12. FCM, 11. 13. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 54. 14. SWI, 179. 15. FCM, 17. 16. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko (with the assistance of Barnett Newman), letter to Edward Alden Jewell, art editor, New York Times, June 7, 1943, reprinted in Lawrence Alloway and Mary Davis MacNaughton, Adolph Gottlieb: A Retrospective, 169. As Max Kozloff also wrote, “All the ideas of the New York School were colored by antagonism to the practical mind. . . . Nothing was more irrelevant and foreign to their conception of terror in the world than American “knowhow.” Kozloff, “American

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Painting During the Cold War,” in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 110. 17. FCM, 15. 18. BT, 79. 19. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 398. 20. SWI, 112. 21. Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Reason, 10. 22. IM, 8. Heidegger continues, “You hear remarks such as ‘Philosophy leads to nothing,’ ‘You can’t do anything with philosophy,’ and readily imagine that they confirm an experience of your own. There is no denying the soundness of these two phrases. . . . Any attempt to refute them by proving that after all it does ‘lead to something’ merely strengthens the prevailing misinterpretation to the effect that the everyday standards by which we judge bicycles or sulphur baths are applicable to philosophy” (11–12). 23. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 10. 24. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 11. 25. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 14. 26. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 15. 27. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 17. 28. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 20. 29. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 26. 30. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27. 31. Barnett Newman, draft statement relating to an interview with Lane Slate in preparation for “Contemporary American Painters,” aired on 10 March 1963, CBS; typescript, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 32. “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 113. 33. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 27. 34. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 28. 35. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 21. 36. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 34. See also “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 57. 37. “The Question Concerning Technology,” 35. 38. “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 156. 39. “Science and Reflection,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 161. 40. George Pattison, The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000), 43. 41. See, for example, David Castriota (ed.), Artistic Strategy and the Rhetoric of Power: Political Uses of Art from Antiquity to Present (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986). 42. George Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 48. 43. George Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 50. 44. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 45. 45. FCM, 31. 46. See Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Arnfinn Bø-Rygg,

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“Thinking with Klee,” in Audun Eckhoff, Karin Helandsjø, and Juri Steiner (eds.), In Paul Klee’s Enchanted Garden (Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 86ff. 47. IM, 14. 48. IM, 14. 49. SWI, 109. 50. FCM, 25. 51. FCM, 25. 52. FCM, 26. 53. FCM, 26. 54. FCM, 35–36. 55. IM, 14. 56. SWI, 109. 57. IM, 95. 58. IM, 96. 59. This same distinction may tally, incidentally, with Bois’s insightful observation that, prior to Onement, Newman felt he was “manipulating” space, while afterward he was “declaring” it. Yve-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 32. Perhaps manipulation corresponds to “becoming,” declaration to “Being.” 60. IM, 96: “These few words [of Parmenides] stand there like the Greek statues of the early period.” 61. IM, 97. 62. See Ann Gibson, “Barnett Newman and Alberto Giacometti,” Issue 3 (Spring/ Summer 1985): 2–10. 63. SWI, 255. 64. IM, 114. 65. IM, 125. 66. SWI, 179. 67. Barbara Rose, “The Passing and Resurgence of Barney Newman,” New York Magazine 8 (November 1971): 82. 68. P, 81. 69. SWI, 241. 70. Untitled of 1946 (Phil cat. # 28, presently on extended loan to the Princeton University Art Museum) includes a curved and straight stripe, although without the inclusion of a right-angled one. 71. SWI, 248. 72. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowing), 348. 73. IM, 61. 74. Gelven, A Commentary, 27. 75. Still cited in Patricia Still, “Clyfford Still: Biography,” in Thomas Kellein, ed., Clyfford Still (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 162. 76. To add yet another level of complexity to this image, it is also be difficult to gainsay that both Euclidian Abyss and Death of Euclid could be legitimately read as more abstract versions of Genetic Moment, which, intriguingly enough, includes a curved beam on the left and the spherical shape that appears in the upper right-hand corner of Death of Euclid. But since Genetic Moment is often interpreted, and persuasively so, as an allusion

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to sexual coupling, then the curved beam at the left would stand for the female figure while the right-hand beam for the male one, with Newman using the right angle as a more simplified rendition of male genitals than is found in Genetic Moment (see Jeremy Strick, The Sublime is Now: The Early Work of Barnett Newman, 24, and Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, 193ff). In which case, any link between the theme of Genetic Moment and the ostensible theme of Euclidian Abyss or Death of Euclid (i.e., the “perils of geometry”) becomes not only difficult to fathom, but reading Genetic Moment as sexual coupling would also throw the entire interpretation of Euclidian Abyss and Death of Euclid suggested above off-kilter. Why? Because the curvature of the left stripe would simply be Newman’s way of differentiating the female form from the strictly vertical male at the right and would have nothing to do with a human presence forced to deviate from its course. Similarly, the right angle of the “male” stripe would be Newman’s way of distinguishing its gender by referencing male genitals in simplified form, just as he did in Genetic Moment, and the spherical shape in the center of Death of Euclid and Genetic Moment might be a reference to an ovum at the time of fertilization. 77. “What Are Poets For?” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 90.

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CHAPTER 10

Language

Combining a love for early Greek thought with a marked hostility toward pragmatism, Heidegger conceived of philosophy as a form of original poetry. Not poetry that permits the expression of subjective states of mind; poetry that allows the concealed to come forth into unconcealment. Thinking, for Heidegger, “is poetizing.” “Thinking of Being is the original way of poetizing. . . . Thinking is primordial poetry.”1 The primary object of philosophy—the question of Being—is thus also presented as the primary impetus behind poetry, an impetus that lies forgotten and in dire need of recovery. Newman felt no differently; asserting the autonomy of art from utilitarian pressures, he also took poetry as a model. Insisting that the “necessity for dream is stronger than any utilitarian need,” Newman declared man’s “first expression” to have been “an aesthetic one.” “Speech,” he continues, “was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication.” As man first wielded a stick to draw a line, not to use it as a javelin, “human language,” Newman concludes, “is literature, not communication. . . . The purpose of man’s first speech was an address to the unknowable. His behavior had its origin in his artistic nature.”2 Several connections with Heidegger immediately come to mind. If Newman rejects the definition of language as communication, Heidegger insists that language is not “a means of giving information. . . . Language is not a mere tool. . . . [I]t is that event which disposes of the supreme possibility of human existence.”3 Rejecting the common definition, Heidegger is now free to enlist language for his own philosophical ends—namely, to enable “man to stand in the ‘overtness’ of all that is.”4 Incumbent upon the poet, therefore, is making humanity aware of Being, “the ground of the appearance of the things.”5 The symmetry between Newman’s and Heidegger’s positions is highly suggestive. Disconnected from its function as communication, language is now recruited for a deeper purpose. As Newman’s original man shouted his sense of awe and anger over his tragic 185

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state in poetical outbursts, Heidegger’s poet makes man realize his place in the world, “establishing firmly, through the medium of well-chosen words, the ground, scale and standards for human Dasein.”6 As Newman’s original man felt helpless and alone, Heidegger’s poet faces existence in an “essentially solitary” way.7 As poetry existed prior to communicative speech for Newman, poetry, for Heidegger, “first makes language possible.”8 The contention that poetry precedes utilitarian language is difficult to defend, contradicting Sweetser’s more persuasive view that literal anteceded metaphorical language. Yet Heidegger’s conclusions spring naturally from his conflating essences with the first manifestations of things. Congruent with Newman’s assertion that the first man was an artist, thereby identifying creativity as the defining aspect of humanity, Heidegger alleged that human existence “is fundamentally poetic.”9 If one accepts this premise, it follows that poetry preceded communicative speech and provides the most effective means for Dasein to affirm itself. In fact, Heidegger cites Hölderlin as saying that language has been given to man, so that “he may affirm what he is.”10 Heidegger’s claim is not just that humanity uses poetry to think and express itself; it is also that, in its essence, humanity is the aesthetic species. To dwell poetically means to stand in proximity to “the essence of things. Existence is ‘poetical’ in its fundamental aspect.”11 If Newman had indeed been working under similar assumptions, it would have been perfectly logical for him to declare the first man to be an artist. Since human beings are aesthetic beings, it is only through art and poetry that their singular self-awareness is externalized and their own artistic essence actualized. Prior to this ability, no legitimate means existed to express our understanding or to fathom the amplitude of our possibilities. Prior to this ability, humanity wallowed in a state of becoming; no wonder Heidegger thinks human existence is poetic in its essence, and living artistically means residing near the essence of things. Given the above, it is predictable that Heidegger would privilege language, the primordial poetry through which humanity speaks Being: “The Greeks created and experienced this poetry through Homer. Language was made manifest to their being-there [Da-sein] as departure into being, as a configuration disclosing the essent.”12 To be a Da-sein, then, is inextricable from the ability to use language. For Heidegger, the Being of human being, Da-sein, is delineated as “that creature whose being is essentially determined by its ability to speak.”13 It is, of course, difficult to divine the exact motivations underlying Newman’s titles such as The Word I (figure 10.1), The Name (figure 2.11), The Promise (figure 6.6), or The Command, over and beyond the artist’s admission to Thomas Hess that these works referenced the “human utterance.” 14 But one may speculate that Newman did not just concoct a similar bond between language and an affirmation of existence. All of the titles just mentioned betray a common element: in

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naming things, we institute new relationships; in issuing lawful commands, others are bound to obey; in making promises, we are bound by our commitments. These forms of address are not simple statements; by establishing parameters for our behavior toward other individuals, they change our way of Being. In a way, Newman’s titles recall what J. L. Austin called “performatives”: verbal expressions that, when uttered, do not simply comment upon, but actually perform, an action. When an officiator at a wedding says, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” that individual is not simply saying something, but doing something: conferring marital status on a couple. Interestingly, other examples of performatives Austin mentions are commands, promises, and the naming of things—the very activities evoked in Newman’s titles just cited.15 Though Austin and Heidegger may not have taken kindly to being associated in this way, let alone mentioned in the same sentence, their ideas converge insofar as Austin concedes that, in order to engage in naming, promising, or commanding, one must first be in the position of being able to name, promise, or command. In other words, these forms of address betray who we are, our place in the world, and the extent of our authority; these are forms of address, in effect, in which our Da-sein is directly implicated.

Figure 10.1. Barnett Newman, The Word I (1946), oil on canvas, 16  20 inches. Collection Irma and Norman Braman, Florida © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Heidegger also forged a link between saying and showing. When asked to define the word “say,” he replies that it is the same “as ‘show’ in the sense of: let appear and let shine, but in the manner of hinting.”16 Heidegger even insisted that to say means “to make appear,” or “set free,”17 expressing the view that any conversation presupposes showing “to one another that which is claimed in the speaking.”18 Thus, if language provides a demonstration, then, with some latitude, it functions as a performative, albeit, revealingly, by excluding the intermediary of a sign. This “showing character is not based on signs of any kind. . . . Self-showing appearance is the mark of the presence and absence of everything that is present.”19 Yet just as Heidegger’s position about appearance is bi-polar (i.e., that something “makes itself known but [also] conceals itself in the appearance”20), so is his position about language: the Logos that points out, Heidegger interjects, “has the intrinsic possibility of revealing and concealing.”21 This dual potential coincides with Newman’s view that while non-Western art discloses the reality of “man’s nature,” Western art obfuscates that reality beneath a varnish of beauty. Not only do language and appearance reveal as well as conceal, but, for Heidegger, both also “only [give] an indication, a pointer to the fact that anyone who seeks to understand is called upon by this conceptual context to undertake a transformation of themselves into their Dasein.”22 Heidegger’s stance on language’s dual ability is thus reminiscent of Newman’s on art. When applying the designation “ideographic” to his work, it will be recalled, he explained the term as “a character, symbol or figure which suggests the idea of an object without expressing its name.”23 Like Heidegger, Newman is reverting to the idea of showing as the core of art—but showing, not in the form of clear signs, only in the form of hinting and suggestion, a form that itself makes the creation of signs possible. If representational art reveals human anatomy but obfuscates the human condition, then abstract art does the reverse, no differently than poetic language.24 Still, assuming that language conceals as much as reveals, and that a philosophically penetrating mindset is required to grasp the revelation, what, then, is the nature of the revelation, and how may it accelerate social change? On a mundane level, of course, language reveals or conceals states of affairs in the world; as such, it can advance or impede social causes. But it is safe to assume that, for Heidegger, what language uncovers or occludes is, first and foremost, Being itself. “[O]nly where the word for the thing has been found,” he writes, “is the thing a thing. Only thus is it.”25 Since the Being of an existing entity resides in the word, he submits that language is “the house of Being,”26 a point he reinforces by citing, approvingly, the last line from a Stefan George poem: “Where word breaks off no thing may be.” Heidegger even interprets this very line as “a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows.”27 What does it mean to admit nothing as Being where the word breaks off? And why is the

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poet entrusted with this directive? Heidegger answers that the poet’s experience is privileged because “only the word makes a thing appear as the thing it is, and thus lets it be present.”28 To put it differently, once poets grasp that words bestow Being, they understand the unique responsibility with which they are entrusted, clarifying Heidegger’s description of the word as “the bourn of Being.”29 Since Being and language are so inextricable that the Being of language is synonymous with the language of Being,30 poets are the chosen ones whose charge is to recognize the gravity, and to use the word in full cognizance, of this extraordinary relationship. On this account, poetry was to Heidegger what art was to Newman. One’s idea that the word makes things appear into presence echoes the other’s ambitions about making the viewer present. And when Newman hoped paintings such as The Voice (figure 2.12) would evoke “the human utterance,”31 he implied that language, no less than art, asserts existence and makes the spectator present. Just as “place” means more than physical location, “voice” means more than sound. “Voice” denotes art and poetry’s near unique ability to express our place in the world; for Heidegger, man, by using language, is claimed by Being. That is why language is proper to man and man has the power of speech. In the process, language is redefined from a means of communication to an existential activity, and human beings from rational to poetical animals. As the only species for whom language was destined, human beings can come into presence, affirm their existence, and become Da-seins. When Newman declared that modern painting was an attempt to transform painting into a poetic language, or that man’s first speech was poetic before it became utilitarian, he was thinking along Heideggerian lines—as when he attributed to the artist a concern for the function of original man and an ambition to emulate his creative state.32 But just as existence can be inauthentic, language can abdicate its responsibility and degenerate into meaningless gossip. Heidegger warns that language for modern man “has become banal” because human beings have forgotten their own nature and their own relationship to Being.33 To the extent that Da-sein can err, language can degenerate into a mode of pseudo-communication unhinged from its relationship to Being. Language becomes “idle talk, a concealment rather than disclosure of being, dispersion, disorder and mischief rather than a gathering into structure and order.”34 Just as we can forget Being, we can forget the original function of language. And given the intimate relationship between both, the degradation of one triggers the degradation of the other. Inasmuch as Being has become “no more than an empty word,” language “is worn out and used up—an indispensable but masterless means of communication that may be used as one pleases, as indifferent as a means of public transport.”35 Again, one is reminded of Newman’s declaration that human language “is literature, not communication.”36 If language capitulates to the demands of enframing—that is, to

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the utilitarian requirement that it communicate clearly and efficiently—the link between language and Being guarantees that Being capitulates in equal measure. As our neglect of one engenders the degeneration of the other, the oblivion of the very word “Being,” the philosopher declares, “the total disappearance of its appellative force, is not merely a particular instance of the general exhaustion of language; rather, the destroyed relation to being as such is the actual reason for the general misrelation to language.”37 Thus, we need to recover our poetic engagement with language.38 Responding to the speech of the great poets, we counteract how inauthentic language, complicit in the abuse of human beings as standing reserve, tones down the intensity of existence and establishes itself as a means of control. Similarly, by declaring painting to be an “exercise of total commitment,”39 Newman differentiated individual artistic expression from impersonal, utilitarian activities. One enhances, while the other thwarts, our relationship to Being. In this sense, a proper understanding of art and language dispels occlusion and furthers social change. Newman even used typically Heideggerian terminology to describe his canvases as “authentic and personal expressions . . . [that] have the authority of my being.”40 On his account, art’s independence from practical demands ensures its autonomy from nefarious forces; its authentic practice asserts human presence in defiance of attempts to manipulate and homogenize culture. Those who are worthy to be called artists accept the responsibility, and create in such a way as to affirm their individuality. This line of reasoning strikes a compelling parallel to Heidegger’s claim that “[l]anguage is the house of Being. Man dwells in this house. Those who think and who create poetry are the custodians of the dwelling.”41 The special responsibility Heidegger confers upon artists—that they be the custodians of Being—recalls Newman’s assertion that artists are called to a duty over and beyond that of other men and women: “While the futility of an artist’s act gives him strength, at the same time it intensifies the tragedy of his life above the normal tragedy of other men, who, suffering equally with the artists, cannot, in their suffering, permit themselves the despair of self-awareness, this sense of futility.”42 The “despair of self-awareness” is thus among the primary responsibilities artists and poets assume, a responsibility few accept, but one that, when legitimately performed and authentically conveyed, permits others to sense their own presence. Putting his audience in touch with such feelings, Newman believed, would induce social renewal, though, in theory, art was under no obligation to satisfy practical demands. The loaded terms with which Heidegger impugned humanity’s day-to-day existence (“fall,” “entanglement,” “inauthenticity”)— even if he conceived of philosophy as diagnosing the human condition, rather than providing predetermined goals or prescriptive blueprints for a more meaningful life—also invite the conclusion that, if only partly, he hoped his writings

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would disabuse human beings of their illusions and nudge them toward greater authenticity. Being, he believed, has a voice,43 and to live authentically, one must pay attention, even become “obedient,” to this voice.44 Speaking of voices, the fact that poetry was originally sung prompts Heidegger to extend the expression of Being from speaking to singing. “To recite song,” Heidegger observes, “is: to sing. Singing is [also] the gathering of Saying in song.”45 Along these lines, the concept of the “voice of Being” permits a Heidegerrian interpretation of a group of Newman’s canvases, particularly as it has been suggested that the vertical zip may stand, not just for a human presence, but also for sound.46 In view of Newman’s claim that original man shouted his consonants in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, titles such as Outcry (figure 11.3), The Voice, The Command, End of Silence, and The Queen of the Night (a reference, as Newman himself admitted, to the high note that character sings in Mozart’s Magic Flute) open the possibility that the stripes were meant to interrupt a visual field the way sound interrupts silence.47 Considering the intimate relationship Heidegger drew between language and Being, moreover, Newman’s reference to the “human utterance” aligns with his stated desire to evoke presence, especially if Heidegger described the awakening of Da-sein as the voice of Being. “[I]ntoxication,” Heidegger writes, “is that sublime elevation of mood wherein that single voice can be heard that sets a tone, and where those who are attuned to it may be led most resolutely beyond themselves. Of course, they are not resolute by means of any calculated decision of their own, but because their essential being is directed by that which the voice has provided them.”48 For Heidegger, the awakening of Da-sein to itself is a kind of call of conscience. Not the kind that generates feelings of remorse over having behaved immorally, but the kind that reminds us of our responsibility toward Being.49 The call “does not say anything, does not give any information about events in the world, has nothing to tell.”50 Its voice, though foreign and unfamiliar, beckons us to be receptive. It extricates us from the tranquilizing doldrums of the they and summons us to fulfill our potential.51 The call, in other words, motions Da-sein in the direction of authenticity. In complying, Da-sein understands itself and undertakes its decision in an attitude of resolution, an attitude that reinforces the ideas previously outlined about the way freedom denotes truth as well as individual autonomy. In resoluteness, we recognize “the primordial truth of existence. Resolute, Da-sein is revealed to itself in its actual factical potentiality-of-being in such a way that it itself is this revealing and being revealed.”52 How could Newman have disagreed? He also insisted that clarity alone leads to freedom. He also believed in art’s ability to express the self, independently of external considerations and demands, closely paralleling Heidegger’s view that the meaning of Da-sein is not something foreign or extraneous, “but is selfunderstanding Da-sein itself.”53

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If art and poetry establish a domain immunized from the controlling strategies of enframing, it is no wonder that sustaining the cause of authenticity is entrusted to artists, poets, and philosophers, and that art is related to truth, not in terms of a correspondence between propositions and the factual world, but as a form of unconcealment. Taking the discussion to another level, Heidegger wrote, “What we found and create . . . alone will be true.”54 This statement raises the epistemological bar, as it were, because, as Steiner sees it, Heidegger now contends that “Art is not an imitation of the real. . . . It is more real.”55 Art is more real, not because it has greater physical tangibility than objects in the external world, but because (unlike enframing) it does not occlude reality; it lets things be. Intriguingly, Newman also placed art above reality. “I’m not interpreting nature or reality,” he declared, “I’m making it. . . . This position is really saying that the world is created by the artist. Reality is what the artist makes it.”56 Reality is what the artist makes? Does Newman mean that we each make our own reality, construct our own truths? Unlikely. More germane, arguably, is the Heideggerian concept that man is world-forming. Heidegger, of course, recognized that nothing, not even so-called objective facts, are uninflected by ideology (“every fact we can produce has always already undergone a process of interpretation”57), but this is not what the philosopher has in mind when he declares that man is world-forming. Although a stone exists, Heidegger argues, it is world-less because its environment remains inaccessible to it, and because, having no access to anything, “it cannot possibly be said to be deprived of anything either.”58 Its lack of access or deprivation makes the stone world-less. By contrast, insofar as things are accessible to and can be withheld from them, animals have world. Yet they remain confined to their environment, consigned to “a fixed sphere that is incapable of further expansion or contraction.”59 Animals, as Heidegger sees it, both have and do not have world, compelling the philosopher to label animals “poor in the world.”60 Against this, although human beings exist in a physical universe, they establish relationships of meaning; their world is “constantly extendable not only in its range (we can always bring more and more beings into consideration) but also in respect to the manner in which we can penetrate ever more deeply in this penetrability. Consequently we can characterize the relation man possesses to the world by referring to the extendibility of everything he relates to. This is why we speak of man as world-forming.”61 Though Heidegger insists that his categorization is not hierarchical, the implication is that a stone, an animal, and a human being may all literally exist in the same way, but their way of Being is qualitatively different.62 Whether Heidegger’s idea that man is world-forming is at all equivalent to Newman’s statement that “reality is what the artist makes,” is, of course, impossible to corroborate. What is certain, however, is that someone of Newman’s intelligence could hardly have meant that the artist literally makes the world. He admitted as

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much by conceding that artists cannot fashion “the hills and the rivers,” yet still insisted that whatever “reality we have has been created by the artist and only by the artist.”63 Like Heidegger’s concept of man being world-forming, Newman’s idea is metaphorical. It might mean that the artist “creates” by changing our attitude toward, and by allowing us to understand, reality. In fact, after asserting that the artist makes reality, Newman added, “By ‘reality,’ I mean human reality.”64 Although this addendum does not exactly dispel all ambiguity, its overall meaning is best clarified, again, by the artist’s seminal experience in Ohio. Being acutely cognizant of his physical location, Newman became keenly attuned to the world around him and, in turn, to his metaphysical place within it. No stone or animal could respond this way; feeling alienated from one’s own environment or having a sense of one’s own presence are exclusively human reactions. And if the creation of art (an exclusively human activity) supplies a means through which such awareness is aroused, then art ignites sensitivity to our existential situation. Art, therefore, helps us comprehend our human reality—again, not reality in terms of establishing an objective correspondence with the external world, but in terms of enhancing the reality of our Being. (It will be recalled that, for Heidegger, there can be more or less Being.) Of course, Newman’s assertion that reality is “what the artist makes” does not coincide exactly with Heidegger’s concept that man is world-forming, if only because the philosopher declared man, not the artist, to be world-forming. But given Heidegger’s privileging of art as a way of letting things be, of bringing things out of concealment, and of dispelling indifference,65 these characteristics are all the more in tune with those salient aspects of the human condition that qualify human beings as world-forming. In his essay on aesthetics, after all, Heidegger declared that art “is truth setting itself to work.”66 “The work [of art] as work,” he continues, “sets up a world.”67 Inasmuch as Newman’s alienation from nature sparked a keen cognizance of his own presence and place, Heidegger argued that man should not simply be regarded as part of the world in which he appears; man, rather, “also stands over against the world. This standing-over-against is a ‘having’ of world as that in which man moves, with which he engages, which he both masters and serves, and to which he is exposed.”68 In other words, we can “have” a world only if it possible for us to lose it. Having world, therefore, does not mean existing in the physical sense; it means being attuned to, understanding one’s difference from, and place within, the world—precisely the way Newman described his experience in Ohio, and precisely the sensations he hoped his art would convey. Since “having world” or “being world-forming” are only accessible to Dasein, Da-sein may use language, by virtue of which, as already discussed, Heidegger believes a thing appears as “the thing that it is, and thus lets it be present.” What is more, “the word avows itself to the poet as that which holds and sustains

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a thing in its being.” Thus, if language bestows Being, and the poets are the masters of language, then the poets are those who bestow Being. For Heidegger, this condition has more reality than objects in the external world. In fact, a Heideggerian leitmotif is the assertion that, since it represents a condition with which all things are endowed, Being remains the ultimate reality. Heidegger even insists that his philosophical stand “is more real than just about anything else that we call real; it is more real than cats and dogs, automobiles and newspapers.”69 Consequently, if Newman’s work was indeed intended to give the spectator a sense of presence and place, thereby establishing human reality, that purpose dovetails nicely with the fundamental tenet of Heideggerian philosophy: “not to describe the consciousness of man but to evoke the Dasein in man.”70 For Heidegger, that very evocation has more reality than even the objects in our physical environment. In which case, if Newman intended his abstractions to evoke the Da-sein in man (“Sein is Dasein—one creates place”), he could have felt himself justified in saying that reality is what the artist makes, precisely because he would have managed to suggest a level of reality that, for some at least, was more real “than cats and dogs, automobiles and newspapers.” By rejecting the idea of truth as agreement between propositions and states in the world, Heidegger makes truth a property, not of the world, but of Dasein. So just as Newman argued that the artist, by dint of his presence, makes reality, Heidegger declares that, in a state of disclosedness, “Da-sein is essentially in the truth. . . . ‘There is’ truth only insofar as Da-sein is and as long as it is. Beings are discovered only when Da-sein is, and only as long as Da-sein is are they disclosed. Newton’s laws, the law of contradiction, and any truth whatsoever, are true only as long as Da-sein is. Before there was any Da-sein, there was no truth; nor will there be after Da-sein is no more.”71 “If no Da-sein exists,” Heidegger insists, “no world is ‘there’ either.”72 This strikes a chord with Newman’s statement about the artist creating reality because, again, Newman made sure to say that by “reality,” he meant “human reality,”73 a statement befitting Heidegger’s view that “all truth is relative to the being of Da-sein.”74 This is not to say, of course, that truth is entirely subjective, left to the whim of each individual; it is only to say that, if truth is a kind of unveiling, then Dasein is the central—nay, the only—agent through and for whom the process of unveiling occurs. Da-sein cannot decide what truth is by itself; nor does it arbitrarily assign truth-values. But since truth is redefined as unveiling, and since only Da-sein can unveil, truth is relative to the Being of Da-sein.75 It thus follows that, if Da-sein is the only being to whom truth is disclosed, and if art and poetry are primary modes of disclosure, then, insofar as a committed poet and artist are authentic Da-seins, then truth can be seen to be “what the artist makes.” This concept of truth brings us back to the idea of hermeneutical phenomenology (that even the self-evident nature of things is a product of an interpretive

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process), and to the view that art, as a primary means of triggering unconcealment, enhances authenticity. This argument mandates, of course, accepting Heidegger’s reading of aletheia as a form of “self-evident” truth.76 This idea will be further scrutinized in the penultimate chapter; for our immediate purposes, it is more relevant to underscore the extent to which Heidegger’s use of the term “self-evident” to describe the nontheoretical nature of undisclosed truth echoes Newman’s own assertions. When asked to provide a descriptor for Abstract Expressionism—and, one supposes, for his own work—Newman supplied the word “self-evident.”77 “The image we produce,” he wrote, “is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history.”78 It is perhaps an overconfidence in the intelligibility of his work that led Newman to assert that his art, without explanatory remarks, could communicate effectively to his public. Indeed, despite requiring extended periods of time contemplating his work to detect its emotional resonances, Newman still hoped any painting that affected him would also affect “anybody else who saw the painting,” communicating “the emotional content I had when I worked at it.”79 But the long intervals he required to study the canvas, and his admission that the “verbalized title” came only after completion,80 means that, irrespective of his desire to communicate, the construction of meaning, for Newman no less than for the spectator, is essentially a matter of projection. This stands, arguably, as a far more persuasive account of the interpretive act than the artist’s declaration that his art is self-evident and concrete. If his paintings were in fact transparent purveyors of meaning, there would be no need to elicit a sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder; the beholder would simply register what the artist intended—automatically and unequivocally. Implicit in Newman’s hope for a sympathetic reading, moreover, is the tacit assumption that art functions as a conduit through which we can empathetically transpose ourselves into the mindset of another human being. The purpose of his paintings, he mused, was to create “shapes and colors [that] act as symbols to [elicit] sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist’s vision.”81 Intriguingly, when Heidegger distinguished animals who are poor in the world from human beings who are world-forming, he posited that among our exclusive characteristics is the ability to do precisely that: namely, to transpose ourselves onto another person. Because being means being-with, Heidegger argues that “the intrinsic possibility of one human being transposing him- or herself into another human being . . . belongs to man’s own essence. . . . [T]he Da-sein in man means, not exclusively but among other things, being transposed into other human beings.”82 To engage in such transposition is indeed a specifically human trait, as we shall explore later, but this ability hardly guarantees that all works of art will transmit their intended effects. The successful transfer of meaning is contingent

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on a common interpretive background being established between addresser and addressee, in absence of which the feasibility of empathizing with other human beings, or perusing abstract paintings so as to sympathize with “the artist’s vision,” is seriously imperiled. On this account, Newman’s insistence on the universality and concreteness of his work cannot be accepted uncritically.83 It was already stated that the differences between his work and McLaughlin’s (figure 1.2) reside not so much “in” the works themselves as “in” our own inferences about the motivations underlying them. Similarly, it is patently inconsistent for Newman to assert the comprehensibility of his work to “anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history” when he himself needed a year to grasp the implications of Onement. Always attuned to anything mysterious, Newman would probably have rejoined in his own defense that, even in the best of circumstances, philosophical meanings are difficult to fathom. In fact, just as Heidegger wrote that truth “must always first be wrested from beings,”84 Newman declared that the “artist tried to wrest truth from the void.”85 Again, the continual tension at the heart of the artist and philosopher’s epistemology— between a phenomenological “concreteness,” on the one hand, and the idea of hidden meanings, on the other—reemerges. How successfully this tension was resolved is hard to say, or, more accurately, depends on the ideological loyalties of the person answering the question. But this much is sure: assuming reality to be hidden did supply a convenient rhetorical stratagem by which both men could make truth the exclusive province of artists, poets, and philosophers, and a clever pretext, for Newman specifically, to have taken a year to understand Onement. If he looked to Heidegger to justify this lag, Newman would in fact have found ample ammunition. Seldom, Heidegger reminds us, do human beings become self-aware in everyday situations, only unexpectedly—in intense moments of awe or astonishment—or when they are moved by works of art. Not surprisingly, Newman spoke of his work in analogous terms: “We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions.”86 “It’s no different, really,” Newman asserted, “from one’s feeling a relation to meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically . . . [but] there’s a metaphysical thing in the fact that people meet and see each other, and if a meeting of people is meaningful it affects both their lives.”87 Sure enough, Heidegger also argued that meeting another individual affects our way of Being. If friends are overcome with grief, they will lie beyond our reach. Though our relationship may be intact, the way in which we socialize differs.88 Depending on our mood, the way we are with that person, and that person with us, alters: “the being-there of our Da-sein, is different.”89 This may have occurred to Newman while pondering Onement I. No differently than a person with whom communication is difficult one day and effortless the next,

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Onement I was “concretely” the same one day but radically different the next. Nothing changed but the artist’s predisposition. Nothing changed but everything changed. A shift in attunement enabled the artist finally to “wrest” its “hidden” meanings. For Heidegger, attunement is neither inside nor outside a person like a tangible object in space; it simply permeates the way we are with one another,90 a fundamental way in which Da-sein is Da-sein.91 Thus, although we judge moods as too impermanent to betray who we are, Heidegger proposes that “in” a mood—angry, sad, hopeful, worried—we are in that state, and being in that state, the state becomes, if only temporarily, our way of existing. Despite their impermanence, moods are consequential precisely because we are never without attunement; there are only changes of attunement.92 The lingering tensions between phenomenological concreteness and hidden meanings notwithstanding, one begins to understand why Heidegger ascribed such importance to moods in Da-sein’s way of Being, and why he deemed the frenetic activity underwriting modern life to be so corrosive. What is essential to Da-sein, he writes, “cannot be forcibly brought about by any busyness or mad rush. . . . The ‘having no time’ that looks like the most rigorous seriousness is perhaps the way in which we are most lost in . . . banalities.”93 This rush of activity, at a most fundamental level, distracts us from our attunements, degrades our existence, and divorces us from ourselves. For both Newman and Heidegger, moreover, being authentically ourselves means being passionate, an attitude Newman brought, not just to art, but also to his writing about art. “Today, criticism is becoming neutral,” he complained, “dispassionate, ‘scientific.’”94 “The ‘scientific’ critic,” Newman continued, “lives in constant fear that he will make a mistake.”95 “[A]esthetics is for me like the study of ornithology must be for the birds. . . . I am now asking for passionate criticism because anything else fills me with a sense of humiliation.”96 Even a biologist, he claimed, striving to maintain “the in vivo situation of his specimen, no matter how objective his attitude . . . has more respect for a living amœba than the ‘scientific’ critic has for a living work of art.”97 “The ‘scientific’ art critic,” he continues, “does not hesitate to use every crude weapon to kill the in vivo quality of the work of art.”98 Newman’s critique again walks in lockstep with Heidegger’s. A mindful attentiveness to art, the philosopher maintains, “lies outside all theories of art. That is why the overcoming of aesthetics remains a concurrent task.”99 Art should avoid complicity with machination and control, with the very kind of hyper-rationalism implicit in enframing, an attitude wherein art is forbidden free play.100 Traditional logic, Heidegger contends, is incapable “of even understanding the question about the essent by its own resources.”101 Not only did Heidegger dismiss logical rigor, but, just as Newman rejected attempts to make criticism scientific, he also decried attempts to make philosophy into a science.102 Comparing philosophy with art or religion, conversely, reveals their

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essence as equal, even though equality should not be confused with identity.103 On this premise, it follows that Newman no more believed in the possibility of teaching art than Heidegger did philosophy.104 “Metaphysical concepts,” the latter insisted, “are not something that we could simply learn this way, nor something which a teacher or anyone calling themselves a philosopher might require to be simply recited and applied.”105 The conviction that art and philosophy evade instruction, however, did not prevent Newman and Heidegger from writing art and literary criticism, respectively (Heidegger’s appreciation of poetry even inspired him to write poems himself). The “accuracy” of their interpretive efforts, of course, is not at issue here. We have already insinuated that Newman frequently projected his own concerns on the targets of his investigations, and if Heidegger’s idiosyncratic interpretations of pre-Socratic philosophy are frequently frowned upon, his readings of Hölderlin are no less so. At issue, rather, is the premise that the criticism of art or literature, no less than art itself, can foster an authentic response to its interpretive object, provided it is practiced in an appropriate way, as a sincere reflection of the critic’s commitment. Otherwise, art criticism simply degenerates into another form of enframing. Just as Newman accused the “scientific” art critic of using every weapon at his disposal to kill the work of art, Heidegger decried scientific aesthetics for taking art as an object “of sensuous apprehension. . . . Yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies.”106 It was never his ambition to compete with the scholarly research on Hölderlin, or to present a definitive interpretation of his poetry, “like a specimen of natural scientific work.” The point was to ponder and expose Hölderlin’s work to our perusal.107 In the end, to understand the respective value of art and technology in the grand scheme of Newman or Heidegger’s thought, one need look no further than the philosopher’s succinct declaration that art “is the sister of philosophy,”108 or the artist’s that his ambition was to place art “on its rightful plane, the plane of the philosopher.”109

Notes 1. EGT, 19. 2. SWI, 158–59. 3. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 276–77. Intriguingly, Heidegger argued in BT that the availability and usefulness of things in the world—their being “ready-at-hand”—preceded their being “present-athand” (i.e., our ability to see them independently of their function). In “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” however, he made startlingly different claims. The essay, in fact, is emblematic of the different direction of his later philosophy—a direction wherein poetry plays a central role.

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4. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 182. 5. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 186–87. 6. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 187. 7. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 196. 8. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 283. 9. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 282. 10. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 273. 11. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 282–83. 12. IM, 171–72. 13. BT, 22. 14. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 55. 15. See J. L. Austin, How To Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). 16. Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in OWL, 47. 17. The entire citation reads as follows: “‘To say,’ related in the Old Norse ‘saga,’ means to show: to make appear, set free, that is, to offer and extend what we call World, lighting and concealing it. This lighting and hiding proffer of the world is the essential being of saying” (OWL, 93). 18. OWL, 122. 19. OWL, 123. 20. BT, 27. See also Steiner: “In the great work of art, hiddeness and exhibition—the absence of the object itself and its intense presence via the artist’s representation—are in internal conflict. The work of art shows us that ‘truth happens in the guise of the primordial struggle between “clearance” and concealment’” (Martin Heidegger, 135). 21. FCM, 312. 22. FCM, 297. 23. SWI, 107. 24. No wonder that, just as the study of philosophy demanded a shift in attitude for Heidegger, so did understanding the new painting for Newman. Failing to appreciate how the abstract art of non-Western cultures was neither a formal exercise, nor the “exercise of a snobbish elite,” but an attempt to evoke “the metaphysical pattern of life” (SWI, 106), a spectator will similarly misconstrue the purpose of his work. Not that the prospects for such a successful recalibration are good—as Newman sarcastically remarked, “modern man has lost the ability to think on so high a level” (SWI, 106–7)—but, if successful, the new perspective, in turn, would lead people to rethink their position in the world, so much so that broader, salutary social consequences would ensue. “[I]f my paintings were properly understood,” Newman mused, “society would change” (SWI, 276). A surprising statement, to be sure, if only because it runs afoul of one of the artist’s ambitions: namely, to disassociate art from any responsibility to be useful, though not from another—in other words, to inject art with a higher moral, philosophical purpose. 25. OWL, 62.

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26. OWL, 63. 27. OWL, 65. 28. OWL, 65–66. 29. OWL, 66. 30. OWL, 72. 31. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 55. 32. SWI, 160. 33. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 128. 34. IM, 172–73. 35. IM, 51. 36. SWI, 158. 37. IM, 51. 38. OWL, 83. 39. SWI, 248. 40. SWI, 198. 41. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 127. 42. SWI, 112. 43. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 354 (see also 230). 44. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 52. 45. OWL, 148. 46. Brenda Richardson, Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, 1944–1969 (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1979), 24. 47. There is even a charming anecdote in the Newman literature that supports this reading: A Swedish baroness once told Newman about a trip she had taken to the Laplands where she was confronted by a vast expanse of space until, unexpectedly, a flock of geese flew overhead and shattered the space with sound. The baroness told an elated Newman that the stripe in his canvases reminded her of that experience (see Richardson, Barnett Newman: The Complete Drawings, 1944–1969, 24). And since human beings have already transcribed sound in spatial form by measuring decibels and frequencies along graphs, the ability to read sound, metaphorically, in terms of space is not altogether foreign to us. 48. EHP, 142. 49. BT, 249. Guenther Stern (Anders), in “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” sees it this way: “the voice of conscience . . . is the voice of the Self exhorting the Self (or the ‘Dasein’) to be his Self” (361–62). 50. BT, 252. “Conscience,” Heidegger adds, “speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence” (BT, 252). “[T]he caller is definable by nothing ‘worldly.’ It is Da-sein in its uncanniness, primordially thrown being-in-the-world, as not-at-home, the naked ‘that’ in the nothingness of the world. The caller is unfamiliar to the they-self, it is something like an alien voice” (BT, 255). 51. “When Da-sein understandingly lets itself be called forth to this possibility, this includes its becoming free for the call: its readiness for the potentiality-of-being summoned. Understanding the call, Da-sein listens to its ownmost possibility of existence. It has chosen itself” (BT, 265).

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52. BT, 284. 53. BT, 299. 54. Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, cited in Reiner Schürmann, “Riveted to a Monstrous Site: On Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie,” in The Heidegger Case, 315. 55. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 136. 56. SWI, 246. 57. FCM, 190. 58. FCM, 197. 59. FCM, 198. 60. Intriguingly enough, Newman, being an amateur ornithologist, also spoke of the behavior of animals in ways that, again, strike compelling parallels with what Heidegger is saying. When Newman stated, for example, that “aesthetics is to artists what ornithology is to the birds,” he wanted to declare how indifferent artists are to the way art critics label and categorize them. And although the animal’s lack of cognizance tallies with Heidegger’s idea of the animal as being poor in the world, it is highly unlikely that the segment on artists should be taken completely literally. After all, Newman was the one who said that man is sublime only insofar as he is aware. It is therefore doubtful that he would attribute a state of non-awareness to artists. 61. FCM, 193. 62. FCM, 202. 63. SWI, 245. 64. SWI, 245. 65. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 297. 66. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 35–36. 67. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 44. 68. FCM, 177. 69. IM, 78. 70. FCM, 174. 71. BT, 208. 72. BT, 334. 73. SWI, 245. 74. BT, 208. 75. Gelven, A Commentary, 132–33. 76. BT, 202. 77. Newman quoted in Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The New York School (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1965), 37. 78. SWI, 173. 79. SWI, 305. 80. SWI, 258. 81. SWI, 142. 82. FCM, 205. 83. SWI, 304: “I hope that my work can be seen and understood on a universal basis.” 84. BT, 204. 85. SWI, 140.

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202 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

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C HA P TER 10 SWI, 173. SWI, 259. FCM, 66. FCM, 66. FCM, 66. FCM, 67. FCM, 68. FCM, 130. SWI, 131. SWI, 135. SWI, 136. SWI, 132. SWI, 133. Mindfulness, 28. Mindfulness, 27. IM, 25. FCM, 2. FCM, 3. See Robert Murray, Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 14. FCM, 6–7. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 77. Martin Heidegger cited in Hoeller’s introduction to EHP, 9. FCM, 5. SWI, 147.

2/29/12 12:55 PM

CHAPTER 11

Time

Expanding upon his experiences visiting the Ohioan mounds, Newman disconnected presence from “space and its manipulations.” The sensation of presence, he insisted, “is the sensation of time—and all other multiple feelings vanish like the outside landscape. . . . Only time can be felt in private. Space is a common property. Only time is personal, a private experience. That’s what makes it so personal, so important. Each person must feel it for himself. . . . The concern with space bores me. I insist on my experiences of sensations in time—not the sense of time but the physical sensation of time.”1 In a draft for the same statement, Newman wrote, “The greatest, most profound feelings of the human spirit never arise inside a frame of space. They always arise around the concept of time.”2 What did Newman mean by physical sensations of time? There is no way to know for certain, but in another compelling correspondence, Heidegger also argued in his magnum opus that the meaning of Being was time. Presence does not simply signal spatial here-ness (e.g., “I was present at the meeting”); it is also a state of Being in the chronological present. As Heidegger put it, we gain our “understanding of being from ‘time.’ . . . Beings are grasped in their being as ‘presence’; that is to say, they are understood with regard to a definite mode of time, the present.”3 Presence, then, is as much a question of time as bearing and self-awareness; inasmuch as Newman saw time as private, so did Heidegger. Having claimed the meaning of Da-sein to be one’s own,4 Heidegger also qualifies time as individual and private, not as public or objective. Half an hour, he writes, “is not thirty minutes, but a duration which does not have any ‘length’ in the sense of a quantitative stretch. . . . An ‘objectively’ long path can be shorter than an ‘objectively’ much shorter path which is perhaps an ‘onerous one’ and strikes us as infinitely long.”5 As already indicated, Heidegger’s interest in boredom also underscores how connected to physical sensations our descriptors of time actually are (the way the German word for boredom, Langeweile, literally 203

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means “long while”). What is “decisive about reckoning with time,” Heidegger concludes, is not “the quantification of time, but must be more primordially conceived in terms of the temporality of Da-sein reckoning with time. ‘Public time’ turns out to be the time ‘in which’ innerwordly things at hand and objectively present are encountered. This requires that we call these things unlike Da-sein within-time.”6 Da-sein, then, exists within time differently than what is not Da-sein; Da-sein experiences time independently of quantifiable constraints. Unlike animals or inanimate objects, human beings exist in the present, with the past, and in anticipation of the future. As Newman would say, these experiences are personal and private, betraying Being’s inextricable connection to time. In German, moreover, references to time are profoundly physical in nature, establishing another potential link with Newman’s avowed interest in physical sensations of time. Future (Zukunft), as Steiner explains, means “that which comes toward one.” Anticipating the future, Da-sein is constantly “ahead of itself.” Present (Gegenwart) Heidegger “hyphenates as Gegen-wart and interprets as meaning a ‘waiting-towards’ or ‘waiting-against,’ with ‘against’ signifying . . . ‘in the neighborhood of,’ ‘in proximity to.’ ‘Present-ness’ is ‘a way of being-alongside.’”7 This terminology—again—is emblematic of how time may be described, metaphorically, by physical experiences. The past is behind you; the future ahead of you; and the present is where you are located at this moment.8 Da-sein, Heidegger writes, “exists, so to speak, ‘forward’ and leaves everything that has been ‘behind.’”9 Even our everyday expressions reveal how readily we conceptualize time and space as if they were interchangeable: remembering is “looking backward,” anticipating is “looking forward,” and when we are told to “look here,” we pay attention to what is being expressed now. We also speak of a “near future” or a “distant past.” When asked how far Boston is from New York, we can answer “three and a half hours” just as easily as “approximately two hundred miles.”10 It has been found, moreover, that the degree of precision with which languages express space and time is internally consistent (i.e., languages that tend to be precise or imprecise with one are the same with the other).11 And many of the linguistic prepositions and descriptors we employ to designate space are readily applicable to time. In English, for instance, we have such expressions as the following: he came “on time,” “around midnight,” “at the top of the hour,” “in July,” “in the middle of the week,” “under an hour,” “over the allotted time,” “within a minute,” “inside of a minute,” and so forth. We can “have our down time” or “take time off,” and be “ahead,” “behind schedule,” or even “in the nick of time.” Not surprisingly, the biologist John O’Keefe speculates that temporal prepositions “are similar to (diachronically borrowed from?) their homophonic spatial counterparts.”12 Accordingly, if Newman utilized the expanses of his canvases to evoke, not just space (the “hereness” versus “thereness” of experience), but also the idea of

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time (the ways in which past and future encroach upon us), then the space/time parallel squares with Heidegger’s view that Da-sein is both temporal and spatial.13 The two concepts are inextricable; the “being-there of our own Dasein,” Heidegger explains, “is what is precisely and only in its temporally particular ‘there,’ its being ‘there’ for a while.”14 Revealingly, Heidegger refers to time as a horizon, a suggestive metaphor, not simply because of its spatial character, but also because this trope is echoed in Newman’s statement: “For me space is where I can feel all four horizons, not just the horizon in front of me and in back of me.”15 The feeling of space created by his paintings, he added, should make a spectator feel “full and alive in a spatial dome of 180 degrees going in all four directions.”16 Newman even titled one of his works Horizon Light (figure 11.1). Whether he employed “horizon” to refer to time is impossible to say, but if he were thinking along Heideggerian lines, he would have appreciated the philosopher’s view that the “perspective in which Dasein constantly moves . . . proceeds to distribute itself into present, having-been, and future. These three perspectives are not lined up alongside one another, but originarily simply united in the horizon of time as such.”17 “The temporality of Dasein,” Brock explains, “with its relations to future, past, and present . . . opens up the ‘horizon’ for the question about ‘Being.’”18 It was speculated in a previous section that multiple zips in Newman’s paintings represent the relationship between discrete individual human presences (recall that Newman hoped his art would remind his spectators of their own “totality” and “separateness” as well as their “connection to others” who “are also separate”). But given Newman’s intent to devise visual analogs for physical sensations of time, the zips might also represent the same individual

Figure 11.1. Barnett Newman, Horizon Light (1949), oil on canvas, 30.5  72.5 inches. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Sills © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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presence at different moments in time. One says “at different moments,” but this designation is still too literal. More Heideggerian would be to understand multiple zips as evoking the way memory throws us back toward our past, or how anticipation projects us toward the future. Bois has already described the effect of lateral expansion created by Newman’s canvases and the need for spectators to rely on their peripheral vision to experience the artist’s work.19 Compellingly, Peter De Bolla also wrote of the zips animating “the canvas, introduc[ing] time to the look, and help[ing] temporalize the experience of viewing.” “In effect,” De Bolla, writes, “the zips keep time.”20 In parallel, one may propose that, standing, say, at the center of a painting punctuated by stripes on the left and right, we might tend—given that, in the West, we have a propensity to read a painting from left to right—to see the stripes to our left as “behind” and those to our right as “ahead.” This reinforces Bois’s suggestion that, when perusing a Newman, our gaze is not just frontal, but lateral, that we peruse not just the stripes, but scan the entire canvas.21 If we construe time as Heidegger does, in terms of a horizon, then “behind” will mean “past” and “ahead” will mean “future.” And the ways in which we reflect on our past and our future, in many ways, will also determine how we are, our state of Being, in the present. As already noted above, Heidegger describes the spatiality of Da-sein as having “directionality,”22 just as, for William James, our experience of time is analogous to standing on a ship with a bow and a stern, “a rearward- and forwardlooking end.”23 Could this be what Newman meant when he spoke of physical sensations of time? Of course, there is no way to know, but since Newman was no less concerned with the self, with human presence, and with the quandary of existence, then it is significant to mention Heidegger’s view that broaching the question of Being opens Da-sein “to unasked possibilities, futures, and at the same time binds it back to its past beginning, so sharpening it and giving it weight in its present. In this questioning our being-there [Da-sein] is summoned to its history in the full sense of the word.”24 But time is a tricky dimension. Even if it bestows meaning to our existence, we have difficulty accurately gauging its passage. Even professional athletes and professors, who engage in the same activity week after week, need to be reminded of how much time is left on the shot clock, or must glance at their watches to know when the bell will ring. “We experience time,” Stefan Klein writes, “exclusively against the backdrop of events.”25 Accordingly, one might construe the beams along a Newman canvas as designating important moments in the stream of time, their select placement at specific points eliciting different responses depending on the spectator’s perspective. Importantly, Mark Johnson and George Lakoff have identified the various ways verbal expressions betray our relationship with time,26 some of which may be directly relevant to interpreting Newman. In what they call the time-as-moving-object metaphor,

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observers feel as though they stand immobile in the present with the past moving behind and the future approaching ahead of them, a concept exemplified in expressions such as “time flies when you’re having fun,” “he finally put this experience behind him,” or “I don’t know where the time has gone.” But it is also possible to conceive of time-as-stationary, with the observer moving through its continuum, exemplified in expressions such as “we just passed the deadline,” “we’re halfway through the holidays,” or “we’re coming to the end of game.” These distinctions are based on our own physical experience: we can describe a room from a stationary position (a “gaze tour”) or as if we were literally moving through it (a “walking tour”).27 To this classification, Lera Boroditsky contributes the distinction between time-as-procession and time-as-landscape, which works in concert with Lakoff and Johnson’s categories.28 In the idea of timeas-procession, the evaluation is egocentric insofar as observers use themselves as the main, stationary reference point by which time figuratively passes. In the time-as-landscape metaphor, by contrast, the reference points are established by time itself, in whose dimension we are continuously moving. Although we often use both modes to refer to time, the two are actually incongruent. We can say “I am getting used to this as time goes by” (time-as-moving-object) or “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it” (time-as-landscape), but we cannot say “we’ll cross that bridge as time goes by.” These modes of conceptualizing time are mutually exclusive, most likely because they hinge on completely different physical experiences to communicate their point. Newman, arguably, availed himself of both alternatives, though, given their incongruence, not in the same paintings. Smaller pieces with symmetrical compositions, Onement I (figure 2.1), for instance, will encourage the spectator to stand relatively motionless at their very center. The viewer will tend to take himor herself as a frame of reference, mirrored by the frame of reference provided by the painting: the left of the painting is also to our left. The viewer-centered frame of reference thus coincides with the object-centered frame of reference, in which case, the central stripe, consistent with the time-as-moving-object metaphor, will stand for the present, with the left and right halves of the painting as the past and future, respectively. That time can be mapped onto space in this way should hardly be surprising; Bernard Comrie posits that such a diagrammatic representation also underpins—conceptually—the employment of past and future tenses in language, thus drawing yet another connection between language and space.29 On this account, canvases such as Onement or Be, by virtue of the beam’s central placement, and their strict adherence to bilateral symmetry, compel us to focus on the center as a visual analog for the “now,” a scenario consistent with the time-as-moving-object or time-as-procession metaphor. In real-life situations, however, the temporal present is a difficult sensation to appreciate. If asked to concentrate exclusively on the “now,” our minds will

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soon wander, remembering something yesterday or planning for something tomorrow.30 Newman provided analogs for such experiences as well. Larger paintings with multiple stripes, Vir Heroicus Sublimis (figure 6.7) for instance, encourage the spectator to stand at different points before the picture surface, not simply because the scale of the piece challenges any attempt to grasp it in its entirety,31 but also because the center, normally the ideal position from which to peruse a work of art, is bereft of any incident. Confronted with this void, the spectator will tend to wander, most likely stopping longer before each of the beams than before empty space, injecting discrepancies between our individual, viewer-centered frame of reference and the intrinsic, object-centered frame of reference of the canvas (just as we have trouble fixating our attention on the temporal present and are irresistibly drawn to remember the past or anticipate the future). The spectator’s need to move, then, could be interpreted as an analog to the difficulty we experience living in the moment, concentrating on the now—a scenario more consistent with the time-as-landscape than the time-asmoving-object metaphor. It needs mentioning, equally, that, even if Newman left the center of a composition bare, prompting observers to attend to the stripes at either side, that same center will still exert a certain pull, if only because the idea of “the present,” even if it cannot hold our attention consistently, supplies the only point around which “the past” and “the future” can be apprehended. “No language,” Steven Pinker writes, “has a tense that refers to the entirety of time other than the ‘now.’” This means that the now “intrudes between the past and the future with no detour around it, ineluctably dividing time into two noncontiguous regions.”32 This is not to suggest, of course, that arbitrary events cannot be inserted into the stream of time. In the West, the birth of Christ marks the time before and after the “Common Era,” and, in our own individual lives, special occasions establish chronological frames of references: births, graduations, weddings, retirements, and so forth. And since we construe remembering as a sending, and anticipation as a projection, a canvas with two beams at the left and right of an empty center could thus correspond to a sentence such as “between recruitment and retirement I plan to do the following,” when persons, still employed, are looking back to their date of hire and forward to their farewell party. But even in such cases, past or future, though they function as quasi-autonomous reference points, are always triangulated against a perpetual present: just as “left” and “right” would be meaningless without a concept of “center,” “before” and “after” are no less so without the “now.” Analogously, if an empty central area invites us to peruse any stripes Newman placed at its periphery, we will retain cognizance of the intrinsic center of the canvas no less than of our relationship to the beams distant from us at any given moment. Those on the left will be read as belonging to the past, those on the right to the future, and our moving along (or even scan-

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ning) the painting laterally as somehow equivalent to moving through the stream of time, with the middlemost void as a recalcitrant but conceptual demarcation point around which no deviation is possible. Though reflected in our figures of speech, the sense of moving through time as through a landscape violates an undeniable aspect of our experience: namely, that time is irreversibly uni-directional. The illusory sense of motion supplied by memory and anticipation, however, brings us back, conveniently, to Heidegger, a philosopher whose concept of time is closely anchored to that of history. If Da-sein’s ability to speak allows it to question its own existence, that same ability permits Da-sein to understand its relationship to time and “live with its past.” Through culture, human beings inherit customs and traditions; by means of language, they record their history and ponder its significance; in thinking, they plan for and anticipate upcoming events. By establishing a relationship with time, Da-sein, unlike everything else in the world, becomes historical, and recognizes how time bestows meaning upon Being. “Having time,” therefore, does not mean having the time to go to work and run errands; it means that living within this dimension offers opportunities. Whether completely open, or established in advance by destiny, the meaning of Being resides in our future. Just as Newman was reluctant to explain his art independently of an individual spectator’s act of looking, and himself required long periods of contemplation in order to determine the emotional resonance of specific works, Heidegger refrained from defining the specific meaning conferred by time. That meaning resides in the unwritten potential we have yet to fulfill in the future; it is incumbent upon us to fulfill this potential in a manner that is genuine and authentic, not one imposed upon us by others. This is the responsibility that the future, by still lying ahead of us, asks us to assume. Not surprisingly, Heidegger saw authentic existence in terms of “anticipatory resoluteness.”33 Anticipatory resoluteness is “the being toward one’s ownmost, eminent potentiality-of-being.”34 In other words, we must resolve to maintain our autonomy, face the terror of existence, and fulfill the potential afforded by future possibilities. The “letting-come-toward-itself that perdures the eminent possibility,” according to Heidegger, “is the primordial phenomenon of the future.”35 Anticipation, he continues, makes Da-sein futural in an authentic way, allowing Da-sein to come toward itself and be futural in its Being.36 As Heidegger employs space metaphorically, his terminology—referring to time as a horizon, or to Da-sein as coming toward itself—could easily have been construed by Newman as “physical representations of time,” albeit in an existential rather than exclusively chronological sense: any beams located to the spectator’s right might thus signify a future self, an unfulfilled potential coming toward us as a definite possibility. The prospect of seeing time as an existential dimension also reinforces Newman’s insistence that time is an individual rather than

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collective property. Since time is an immaterial dimension, we have no choice but to describe its passage by resorting to spatial metaphors. Heidegger concurred: when time is described as “long” or “short,” or as a line between two points, these terms are extrapolated “from the representation of three–dimensional space.”37 But precisely because this method of reckoning with time is metaphorical, it is potentially deceptive, particularly as Heidegger, somewhat predictably, sees time within an authentic/inauthentic framework. Only authentic time—which encourages us to ponder the full relations between past, present, and future, and opens us toward our possibilities—has true dimensionality. Authentic time is “the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past, and present.” Dimensionality, Heidegger writes, “belongs to true time and to it alone.”38 Only true time, for Heidegger, is “three-dimensional.”39 Not comprised of quantitative increments (days, months, years), “true” time is an existential dimension that unfurls when we accept the responsibilities we inherit from the past and assume a resolute stance toward our potentiality-forbeing in the future. It is in this sense that authentic time is three-dimensional. Inauthentic time, however (i.e., the time that is frittered away doing everyday chores), is uni-dimensional and unsusceptible to ignite deeper understanding. Did this idea motivate Newman to evoke “physical sensations of time,” to make spectators feel inside “a spatial dome going in all four directions,” or “alive in the sensation of complete space?” Even if this question cannot be answered with certainty, these declarations accord with Heidegger’s view that a linear progression from point to point evokes a false, uni-directional sense of time, while a broader, more open dimensionality evokes authentic time’s multi-perspective of past, present, and future. In fact, while discussing Aristotle’s concept of time, Heidegger used an image very similar to Newman’s dome-like vaults: “everything that is, is in time; but everything that exists is also inside the revolving vault of heaven, which is the outermost limit of all being. Time and the outermost heavenly sphere are identical.”40 Along these lines, analogies between space and time encourage parallel analogies between the employment of time and the employment of space. Expressions such as “losing time,” “quality time,” or “time is money,” reflect how readily we think of time as a resource, as something capable of being spent, wasted, or even lost. And since time is exploitable no less than natural resources, Heidegger hoped to counter this tendency by re-conceptualizing several Greek terms. By translating chreon as “usage” rather than “necessity,” a fundamental aspect of its meaning comes into view: not usage in the conventional sense of employment and manipulation, but in the more profound sense of enjoyment—being “pleased with something and so to have it in use.”41 Just as we must heed nature to preserve it, we must also heed time to enjoy what it offers, not turn it into standing reserve by forcing ourselves to be as efficient

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as possible. Availing ourselves of time permits us to ask important questions, not to rush about madly from activity to activity. “Used” in this way, time gives meaning to Being, mainly because Heidegger employs the term “use” to signify letting “something present come to presence as such . . . to brook, to use . . . to hand something over to its own essence.”42 If we “use” time authentically, we allow the truth of time to become manifest, reinforcing Heidegger’s connection between presence and truth. Presence is also related to time (and, possibly, to Newman’s “physical sensations of time”) because usage delivers what is present “to its lingering.”43 Human beings, as well as all that exists, exist only for a while, and it is usage in the Heideggerian sense that establishes the borders of this “while,” permitting beings to come into presence and then fade into obscurity when their allotted time expires.44 As existence comes into presence within the dimension of time, this time, perforce, is limited. Time allows us to exist and come into Being only within strictly defined boundaries; the “while” into which we have been delivered, Heidegger writes, “bounds and confines what is present.” “That which lingers awhile in presence . . . comes to presence within bounds.”45 Could this correspond to Newman’s worldview as well? Since the differentiation between the stripes and their backgrounds denotes the human presence’s totality and separateness—its “coming to presence within bounds” in Heideggerian parlance—then the human presence’s physical boundaries—given Newman’s insistence on physical sensations of time—also denote our coming into presence within the dimension of time. If our physical extension is limited by the literal boundaries of our own bodies (e.g., we exist “inside” not “outside” our bodies), our existence is also limited by our chronological lifespan (another physical boundary, as it were). All of this may or may not account for Newman’s cryptic statement about physical sensations of time, but if this ambition went hand in hand with his desire to trigger spectators’ awareness of their own presence, then it stands to reason that presence and time are related—that a sense of one’s own presence also entails an awareness of where one is now, at this present moment, as well as how this moment is affected by remembering the past and anticipating the future. Hence, although Da-sein is aware of its own spatial/existential location in the world, that awareness is inextricable from its awareness of being released, not only into a “there,” but also within a “while,” which, like the “there,” also has boundaries that are coexistent with our physical existence (our time) on earth. In view of the ease with which we construct equivalences between space and time, it is hardly surprising that Heidegger spoke of “temporal space,”46 an image no less physical than the expression “time horizon.” And though there is no guarantee that Newman was thinking along parallel lines, his “physical sensations of time” dovetail nicely with Heidegger’s “temporal space.”

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For Heidegger, time is the very first dimension, without which human beings, by virtue of existing “in” it, could not even experience space. Steven Pinker came at the issue another way, conceding that, however horrendous a prospect, one can imagine oneself blind and paralyzed, deprived of space; yet to imagine oneself existing outside of time, frozen as it were, is inconceivable.47 A stone, Heidegger would add, exists in space, but, having no cognizance of time, a stone exists in space without experiencing it. Animals do experience time, but, having no sense of a historical past and potential future, they do so to a far poorer extent than human beings. By dint of having language and being historical, human beings experience time in its full dimensionality, allowing them to have a sense of place and a full appreciation of their position in the world. “For true time itself,” Heidegger writes, “is the prespatial region which first gives any possible ‘where.’”48 Having a sense of place thus presupposes an awareness of time. When Newman described feeling his own presence in Ohio, that kind of experience is only accessible to a historical being—a being like Da-sein. Our sense of presence and place, however, induces an additional form of awareness: inasmuch as being “here” makes us cognizant of not being anywhere else, an awareness of the full dimensionality of past, present, and future underscores the brevity of time. If “usage” means allowing what is present to come into presence, usage also establishes the “boundaries of the while to whatever lingers awhile in presence.”49 In other words, by virtue of coming into presence, whatever is present is confined to the chronological while into which it is allowed to linger. By marking the beginning and end of our existence, birth and death thus demarcate the limits of “our” individual time—an additional way of interpreting what Newman may have meant by physical sensations of time. And when the artist ascribed, instructively, the title The Moment (figure 2.5) to one of his paintings, it was, ostensibly, because the spatial sensations sparked by the painting suggested, at least to him, a physical “equivalent” to a transient but distinct “instant” in time (no differently than the way time lines also demarcate chronological distinctions by means of spatial columns or stratifications). In its intensity, the yellow band stands out dramatically against the darker, more gestural areas surrounding it—again evoking something coming into presence within bounds. The clarity with which the yellow area is defined and segregated also suggests that the moment is of special import. Against the vertical strokes behind it, the beam almost looks as if it were expanding laterally, exacerbating its intensity. As was already mentioned, Newman once related that, during the creative act, he felt “present at a moment which is very real [italics mine].”50 It is the “reality” of this “moment” that the stark color contrasts and spatial differentiations convey: the moment is short-lasting yet intense; it has a beginning and an end, like any physical entity.

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To counter the average experience of time, Heidegger also used the idea of an intense “Moment” to articulate authentic temporality: “Resolute, Da-sein has brought itself back out of falling prey in order to be all the more authentically ‘There’ for the disclosed situation in the ‘Moment.’”51 By contrast, the inauthentic experience of time is a “pure succession of nows, without beginning and without end, in which the ecstatic character of primordial temporality is leveled down.”52 When ensnared in the they, we live in a dull and mundane manner, without moments of great intensity, during which time seems infinite but homogeneous. The they understands time as an endless continuum, a continuum where, in the end, time is always available to take care of everyday responsibilities. The infinity particular to inauthentic time, Heidegger interjects, reveals the “negative character of temporality.”53 The authentic concept of time, on the other hand, induces cognizance of the mortality (and eventual impossibility) of Da-sein: that, at some point, all of our possibilities will be closed off—permanently.54 Although time goes on, primordial time is finite.55 The distinction is critical because, adopting an inauthentic understanding of time, we will attend exclusively to everyday activities, forcing Da-sein into a state of dispersion.56 “Tangled up in itself, the dispersed not-staying turns into the inability to stay at all. . . . In this inability Da-sein is everywhere and nowhere.”57 The Heideggerian Moment is precisely the opposite; dispersion is nullified, resolution is found, and Da-sein is brought back to itself: “‘In the Moment’ nothing can happen.”58 “Just as the person who exists inauthentically constantly loses time and never ‘has’ any, it is the distinction of the temporality of authentic existence that in resoluteness it never loses time and ‘always has time.’ For the temporality of resoluteness has, in regard to its present, the nature of the Moment.”59 Understanding time inauthentically, we are dispersed; we rush about madly; we never have time to take care of everyday duties; we are also beguiled into thinking that, in the future, time will always be available. Understanding time authentically, we accept the end of our existence, a realization that brings us back to ourselves from countless distractions, and allots us the time necessary to reflect meaningfully on our situation in the “Moment.” This reading dovetails nicely with aforementioned interpretations of the symmetrical Moment (figure 2.5) versus the asymmetrical L’Errance (figure 7.1). When we come into presence, we recognize authentic time and the strict bounds into which our existence has been delivered: at this moment, the time we have, however limited, becomes all the more real and meaningful. We are wrested from entangled dispersion and are brought back to ourselves (Heidegger) or we are given a sense of place, and understand our individuality and our separateness (Newman). This is what, conceivably, Newman and Heidegger both meant by the “Moment.” Just as Heidegger stressed Da-sein’s coming back to itself, Newman insisted that his

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paintings were executed “in utmost solitude,” and should be examined “in relation to the true nature and degree of how much solitude.”60 From this perspective, Newman’s concerns with presence, place, and with physical sensations of time are intimately related. It is the stillness of a “Moment” à la Heidegger that Newman, arguably, sought to convey in his canvases, with vertical zips arresting our natural proclivity to read a painting from left to right, compelling us to ponder, for a short stretch of time, the separateness of our own Da-sein, a “Moment” when, as the philosopher would put it, “nothing happens,” or, more accurately, when nothing distracts us from the reality of our existential predicament.61 In a way, when “nothing happens,” everything important happens. In a “Moment” when no mundane activity or rushing about occurs, as in L’Errance, Dasein becomes present in the chronological as well as existential sense. Of course, we also acquire a sense of place or become resolved while exercising our language faculty: when we employ those performatives previously discussed. In nominating, promising, or commanding, we affirm our Da-sein and our place in the world. Instructively, Bernard Comrie observed that situations rarely “coincide exactly with the present moment . . . [or] occupy, literally or in terms of our conception of the situation, a single point in time which is exactly commensurate with the present moment.” Yet, among examples of such situations, Comrie includes performative sentences: promises or acts of naming. Although these acts are not exactly synchronous, “since it takes a certain period of time to utter even the shortest sentence, they can be conceptualized as momentaneous, especially in so far as the time occupied by the report is exactly the same as the time occupied by the act, i.e. at each point in the utterance of the sentence there is coincidence between the present moment with regard to the utterance.”62 This account provides a framework wherein Newman’s and Heidegger’s Moment takes concrete form: something “happens” at the very moment we name, promise, or command because the resolution, authority, and standing of our Da-sein is directly implicated. Heidegger’s insistence—that, during the Moment, the “authentic, historical constancy of the self”63 comes forth—also recalls Newman’s—that the “self, terrible and constant,” was, for him, the subject matter of painting. Newman may have been insinuating that the “self” he was evoking in his paintings was cognizant, resolute, and unified in the face of mortality. In parallel, cognitive psychologists argue that, when the mind conceptualizes an entity in a location, it tends “to ignore the internal geometry of the object and treat it as a dimensionless point or featureless blob.”64 This may account for the strict simplicity and indivisibility of Newman’s beams. Internal features and detail are downplayed, but the stark verticality recalls a marker or flagpole: a demarcation, a border, or a claim of property. As such, these poles communicate a sense of permanence and resilience in the face of whatever surrounds them—quite unlike the sensation of dispersion Heidegger associates with inauthenticity. Not surprisingly, the philosopher refers to everyday, factual life as “ruinant experience,” a term

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extrapolated from ruin or ruinous, which he also describes as “non-presence,”65 the diametrical opposite of “authenticity.” Again, Newman’s statement about man being sublime only insofar as he is aware comes to mind, as well as his view that the modern artist succeeded in setting “down the ordered truth that is the expression of his attitude towards the mystery of life and death.”66 Death, of course, is central to any authentic understanding of time, precisely because accepting our finitude compels us to confront that most momentous and unavoidable of events. If art is made in extreme solitude for Newman, death, for Heidegger, is that one aspect of existence we experience alone, that we cannot give over to others, and that we encounter in complete isolation. Death is also something we face either authentically or inauthentically. We may delude ourselves into thinking that death can always be deferred and therefore of no concern to us “now.” Or we can grasp how finitude accentuates the intensity of Da-sein and accept the certainty of our no longer Being. When faced with the inevitability of mortality, with the inescapable prospect of finitude, we are wrested away from the inauthenticity of public time—from thinking of time as infinitely extendable—and achieve genuine understanding. As already intimated, authentic understanding reveals time as future possibility. For Heidegger, inauthenticity belongs to actuality, authenticity to possibility.67 Though he recognizes both modes as inescapable (we could no more envision the possible without understanding the actual, than the actual without envisioning the possible), there is no question that, between both, Heidegger prioritizes the possible. And because the meaning of existence remains a cardinal question of his philosophy, that meaning is primarily understood in terms of humanity’s potential. Analogously, we might read the minimal austerity of Newman’s beams as intimating that, even if Da-sein may appear as it is, undisclosed and transparent in its truth, it can never appear as all that it is.68 As bare and exposed as they are, Newman’s beams underscore how, in its present state, Da-sein is always incomplete—in a state of “lack” or “absence.” The flip side, ironically enough, is that, however laconic and recalcitrant, or ostensibly bereft of meaning, the zip is meant to embody an excess or overabundance of meaning: namely, all of the future possibilities a Da-sein may project and yet realize in the future. Until its death, after all, Da-sein remains what Heidegger likes to call a “not-yet,” something that has not realized all of its potential. Da-sein, in effect, must interpret itself and, in the process, transcend, even overreach, its ontic limitations.69 Since Da-sein always exceeds its own factual existence, its meaning is its own possibility, a possibility to which it must lay claim. That is why the philosopher prioritizes the possible over the actual, and views a confrontation with death—its imposition of a limit to existence—as a fostering of authenticity. Death was no less crucial a concept to Newman. Abraham (figure 11.2) is not an exclusive reference to the Old Testament patriarch, but also, and more specifically, to Newman’s father, who bore the same name and whose death the

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painting is commemorating.70 If the intensity of the beam against its surrounding field in Moment or Be may supply an analog to the intensity of Da-sein, the close value contrasts in Abraham suggest the imminence of death, the eventual extinguishing of life, the gradual reclaiming of Da-sein by the void (Newman once referred to the “hard, black chaos that is death”71). It may be worth mentioning, if only parenthetically, that any belief in an afterlife would not mitigate the eclipsing of Da-sein at the moment of death. Da-sein, after all, means “Being” (Sein) that is “here” (Da). Even if there were life in the hereafter, the Being of Da-sein may still exist somewhere, but it would not be “here,” and thus no longer a Da-sein. From this perspective, the closeness in value between the black fields in Abraham is not necessarily a denial of an afterlife (although there is no reason to assume that Newman endorsed it either) as much as a recognition that death signifies the extinguishing of Da-sein.72 Similarly, given Heidegger’s referencing of human possibility in terms of expanses of open space, then the large dimensions of many a Newman canvas could be construed as analogs of our own potential, while narrower paintings such as Outcry (figure 11.3) or The Wild (figure 11.4) would represent the

Figure 11.2. Barnett Newman, Abraham (1949), oil and magna on canvas, 82.75  34.5 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Philip Johnson Fund © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 11.3. Barnett Newman, Outcry (1958), oil on canvas, 82  6 inches. Mr. and Mrs. S. I. Newhouse, New York © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 11.4. Barnett Newman, The Wild (1950), oil on canvas, 95.75  1 5/8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Kulicke family © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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opposite: extreme anxiety, or analogs to situations where one feels one’s possibilities are severely constricted.73 Allegedly, Outcry was Newman’s response to suffering a heart attack, a work possibly reflecting the artist’s confrontation with death and distress over the curtailment of his potential. The narrowness of the canvas restricts the human presence almost to the very edge of its own physical, bodily contours, curtailing the spiritual openness, the spatiality of involvement uniquely characteristic of Da-sein. The unusual gestural quality of the piece also induces a degree of visual tension with the frame, as if the human presence fights or rebels against its constriction, against being forced to relinquish its as-of-yet unfulfilled potential—but in vain. With death, of course, all our possibilities vanish, and Da-sein returns to a literal spatiality no different than that of any piece of equipment. The Wild is more difficult to interpret. But if we return to the questions broached in the section on technology—namely, to the way the earth is threatened by exploitation—then the thin red stripe might evoke the wildness of nature. According to Hess, the title refers to the wildness of birds, of which Newman, an amateur ornithologist and avid bird watcher, was extremely fond.74 In the condition of wildness, birds are free, a condition for which the artist also struggles. The narrow configuration of The Wild suggests that, as in Outcry, what is strictly contained within the narrow edges is “enframed,” under stress, perhaps misused by human beings to its and their own detriment—facing annihilation, just like a person facing mortality. But, interestingly enough, Heidegger proclaimed that, under these severe conditions, “Wildness becomes the absolute itself and holds as the ‘fullness’ of being.”75 The Wild is also higher (95.75 as opposed to 82 inches) and markedly narrower (1 5/8 as opposed to 6 inches) than Outcry, a difference that, on the one hand, exacerbates its constriction, but, on the other, invites viewers, as Michael Schreyach has argued, to extend their perception “vertically into the space above and below the customary focal point of foveal vision.”76 Thus, despite their strong similarities, The Wild makes a markedly different impression than Outcry, as if the extreme lateral containment imposed by the frame is somehow successfully overcome by sensations of upward and downward expansion, a sensation accentuated by the bright redness of the zip in The Wild. Again, one is reminded, not only of Heidegger’s view that wildness holds the fullness of Being, but also that freedom cannot be attained nor constraints overcome, unless limitations are readily accepted. At a minimum, these differences also serve as a reminder of the singularity of Newman’s individual paintings. Just as feelings of freedom can emerge in physically narrow paintings, feelings of constriction may emerge in physically expansive ones. Roelof Louw observes, for example, that whereas our primary experience when perusing Eve (figure 11.5) is governed by the “the enveloping presence of the cadmium orange expanse. . . . The band on the right edge of the painting, by deflecting one’s attention away from the centre of the painting, also emphasizes the lateral expansion of the area, and stresses the edge as

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Figure 11.5. Barnett Newman, Eve (1950), oil on canvas, 94  67.75 inches. Tate Gallery, London © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

terminating one side of the painting.”77 This may explain Newman’s rejection of frames, on account, in his own words, of their “restricting content.”78 It seems that, seeking to generate sensations of freedom or containment from his work, Newman hoped these effects should result from elements integral to the paintings, elements he had created and placed himself, not ones extrinsic to the piece, or contingent upon another’s person’s decisions. Regardless, capping the lateral expansion of a painting by “termination” points (a stripe or the edge of the canvas) might therefore signify the absence of possibilities: mortality, perhaps, or any form of limitation. The effect is remarkably different than in, say, The Third (figure 11.6). The first beam, in bright yellow, a possible reference to an awakening state of presence, emerges from an irregular, chaotic area at the extreme left, a suggestion not so much of physical birth but of existential awareness. The second beam, no less bright, but now closer to the right edge, seems more delicate due to its frayed lines, the red having bled into the yellow area. The sense of presence is still active, but somehow more fragile and brittle, less self-assured, owing, conceivably, to the looming termination of the canvas nearby, a hint at mortality or the imminent absence of possibilities. Again, we might be confronting two human presences, or the same presence at different moments in time: at the left, when all its possibilities are “ahead” of it, and, at the right, when all of its possibilities are “behind” it. That might account for the first and second elements referenced in the title The Third. The last third,

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Figure 11.6. Barnett Newman, The Third (1962), oil on canvas, 101 1/4  120 3/8 inches. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Gift of Judy and Kenneth Dayton © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

so to say, is the large expanse located at the center: the realm of possibility itself. Newman might be saying that we come into presence, not when we are born, but when we become fully aware (did he not identify the creation of Onement I as the “beginning” of his “present life”?79); invariably, we will confront the end of our existence, and our presence will return to nothingness. The fundamental question remains: What do we do with the time that has been allotted to us in between? How shall we seize the possibilities that are available? If we compare the wide area in between the bands in The Third to that of Tertia, a nearly identical composition, but far narrower, and with the right beam flush with the edge, the dramatically different effect becomes all the clearer. The possibilities are there, though more limited, and remain—where else?—in that space and within that time—between self-awareness and death—where the meaning of our existence, our potential, is to be determined. Intriguingly, Newman composed another work by recombining some of the same formal elements as in The Third, but in a radically different way. The

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Three is also painted on bare canvas, but exclusively in black (figure 11.7). If this color scheme were not enough to darken the overall tenor of the piece, the elements are introduced in reverse order. The first beam, unlike that in The Third, does not make its appearance until the approximate center of the painting, perhaps insinuating that the spark of self-awareness manifested itself only midway through the time-increment the work is meant to represent. In addition, the gestural traces of scumbling found at the extreme left of The Third, evoking the chaos from which the first beam emerged, is now found at the extreme right, at the “end” rather than at the “starting” point of the canvas. Coupled with the darker coloration, the overall impression induced is therefore more despondent. If The Third foregrounds the countless possibilities that life offers in that “space” between self-awareness and death, The Three evokes a late awakening, so late, perhaps, that the benefits normally accruing from an early heightened state of consciousness never came to pass. The rapid strokes at the “termination” of the canvas point to a sense of agitation, even despair, as if the possibilities that life put within one’s grasp were not fully realized. The effect is not only different from The Third but also different from Yellow Edge (figure 11.8), a remarkably minimalist piece, where Newman only animates a monochromatically black canvas with a yellow zip flush with the right edge of the painting. Placing the

Figure 11.7. Barnett Newman, The Three (1962), oil on exposed canvas, 76.25  72 inches. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright, Seattle © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Figure 11.8. Barnett Newman, Yellow Edge (1968), acrylic on canvas, 93.75  76 inches. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

brightest portion of the work at the extreme right—at its “termination” rather than “starting” point—arguably compensates for the foreboding, ominous sensation induced by the dark coloration, and the disorienting imbalance induced by the radically asymmetrical composition. At least it allows the work to end, so to speak, on a positive note. Accordingly, by manipulating placement and color, Newman sought to imbue a relatively limited visual vocabulary, the zips and the spaces that form between them, with a wide range of emotive associations. In a previous section, for example, it was proposed that Concord (figure 6.1) connotes the solidarity of two Da-seins forced to confront the vicissitudes of life in tandem; Shimmer Bright of 1968 (figure 11.9), arguably, conveys a similar meaning, but with a different set of connotations. As in Concord, and rarely for Newman, two beams betray the same color—bright blue, in this case—indicating the camaraderie between both human presences. But unlike Concord, where both zips are located dead-center (implying, metaphorically, that they face a common trial at the midway point of their lives), the zips in Shimmer Bright are located toward the extreme left of the canvas, as if they had far more “time” ahead of them. No less significant, the vast expanse of space to their right bears no evidence of the agitation caused by the gestural activity in Concord or The Three. What shimmers bright, as the title

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Figure 11.9. Barnett Newman, Shimmer Bright (1968), oil on canvas, 72  84 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

insinuates, is a future of immense and infinite possibility, as when we say, “These two have a bright future ahead of them.” In these ways, Newman’s cryptic statements about “physical sensations of time,” or about time felt only “in private,” become more intelligible. Along these lines, Louw’s view is remarkably suggestive: that, in Newman’s pieces, each division “arrests attention” while, as a whole, paintings give the impression of being complete segments belonging “to a temporal continuum.”80 One might add that Newman’s physical sensations of time stand, metaphorically, for the way space can be used to evoke the presence, freedom, and potential of Da-sein, or, conversely, the lack of it. If vast, Newman’s canvases evoke the idea of possibility, that a human being is a not-yet, with all of its potential waiting to be realized. If narrow, the physical limits of the canvas evoke the constraints on our existence, the closing off of our possibilities (the making of a “not-yet” into a “never”). Additionally, Newman can expand narrow canvases by extending our vision vertically, or alter the spectator’s lateral vision by leaving the edges clear, or by providing the spectator with “termination” points, creating different visual sensations that, when metaphorically projected, stand for different existential situations. In Heideggerian terms, although Da-sein lies within bounds—physical, social, and chronological—Da-sein also has, at least within its lifespan, an infinity of choices. This does not mean that everything is open to it (the pedestrian cliché that everything is possible), only the view that, at all times, as long as Da-sein exists, possibilities exist. Only in death do possibilities vanish. That such experiences are private is, in many ways, self-evident. No one can experience our past or our own potential. 81 But, on another level, if our cognizance of death triggers a recognition of authentic time as finite, and if death, as

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Heidegger stressed, is that supreme example of an experience that is uniquely and exclusively one’s own (i.e., that cannot be given over), then only authentic time can be felt privately. In fact, authentic time is the opposite of what Heidegger called “public time.” The latter is the dimension to which we are consigned as beings-in-the-world, the realm in which we encounter “things at hand and objectively present.”82 From this perspective, Newman’s emphasis on the privacy of time aligns perfectly with Heidegger’s. As an event that cannot be bypassed, death—the cognizance of which triggers an understanding of authentic time—is the most individualizing experience. Death, the philosopher writes, “does not just ‘belong’ in an undifferentiated way to one’s own Da-sein, but it lays claim on it as something individual. . . . [D]eath understood in anticipation individualizes Da-sein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the ‘there’ is disclosed for existence.”83 Facing mortality thus individualizes Da-sein, wrests its truth from the clutches of the they, gives Da-sein the freedom to confront its own impermanence, and sparks a more authentic understanding of time. In this sense, speaking of time as both physical and private is perfectly legitimate. In view of the relationship Heidegger draws between death and authentic time, it is equally instructive to consider how time plays a role in the narratives to which Newman’s titles refer. Even if Abraham (figure 11.2) alluded to Newman’s own father, it is unlikely that a spectator would fail to associate the work with the Old Testament figure.84 Newman may have considered the odd symmetry between a son (himself) dreading the death of his father (Abraham) and a father (the biblical Abraham) dreading the death of a son (Isaac). Newman could also have compared the way his own life changed since the time of his father’s death with the Jewish patriarch’s own agony when anticipating the imminent death of his son at his own hands. In each case, the interested parties need to face their future with resolve and fortitude. In Prometheus, time is also integral to the narrative: the moment of extreme suffering when the hero’s liver will be devoured, and the anticipation of the gruesome moment’s repetition on a daily basis. Even at the core of the story of Achilles is the relation between death and time: the hero must chose between a short yet glorious life and a long yet uneventful one. His existence will hinge on choosing one of two possibilities: being inauthentic, undistinguished, common, or resolving to confront death with authenticity, steadfastness, and sublimity. Whether these ideas indeed correspond to Newman’s stated intentions about inducing physical sensations of time must remain an open question, particularly in view of the difficulty of divining meaning directly from the visual appearance of his paintings. Sharpening the connections between Newman’s and Heidegger’s ideas on mortality might also rest, ironically, on the way humanity can resist the oppressiveness of death. If the meaning of Being lies in possibility, then death—a state of non-Being and the extinguishing of Da-sein—means the

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absolute elimination of all possibilities. This, as indicated above, may explain the darkness of Newman’s Abraham, as well as the closeness in value between its two fields. But referring to the end of Da-sein by the term “extinguishing” also segues naturally to its antithesis: namely, illumination. Newman frequently made references to light in his titles (e.g., Shining Forth [figure 12.6], Anna’s Light, Profile of Light, Shimmer Bright, Primordial Light) and one may suspect that illumination was his way of evoking the opposite of mortality and the extinguishing of presence conveyed in Abraham (think of the expressions we employ to suggest happiness: “her face just lit up,” or “he beamed as he heard the news”). Interestingly enough, Heidegger also referred to presence as illumination.85 And when he construed the awakening of Da-sein to the reality of Being, to its own self, or to its potentiality, he described this unveiling in terms of a metaphorical emanation of light. Of course, Heidegger’s references to “unveiling” or “illumination” should be taken figuratively, which explains, along similar lines, why he also used illumination in a metaphorical sense to suggest aletheia. The presence of all that is present to us, for Heidegger, is a form of illumination, by virtue of which beings shine forth in “radiance” or “self-disclosure.”86 As things enter into unconcealment, Being itself, though hidden, is revealed and declares itself in this clearing.87 In other words, since Being is not a being, it cannot manifest itself directly; Being is apprehended only in the light beings emanate. Intriguingly, while discussing the works of his friend and fellow Abstract Expressionist painter Adolph Gottlieb, Newman also referenced illumination by quoting a philosopher especially esteemed by Heidegger: Heraclitus. “It is gratuitous,” Newman wrote, “to put into a sentence the stirring that takes place in these pictures. But no one has a better right than the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The perfect soul is a dry light Which flies out of the body as Lightning breaks from a cloud.”88 Yet one could make a legitimate case that Newman had his own work in mind, rather than Gottlieb’s. Heraclitus’s image of lightning breaking from a cloud, after all, sounds remarkably close to Newman’s description of his own work: in fact, when asked about the potential meaning of the stripes or “zips,” he replied, “I thought of them as streaks of light.”89 Newman’s citation of Heraclitus90 echoes Heidegger’s interest in the very same image: “It remains to ask whether in our relation to the truth of Being the glance of Being, and this means lightning (Heraclitus, fr. 64) strikes; or whether in our knowledge of the past only the faintest glimmers of a storm long flown cast a pale semblance of light.”91 The standard translation of Heraclitus Fragment 64 reads, “The thunder-bolt (i.e. Fire) steers the universe.”92 But given

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his own proclivity toward idiosyncratic interpretations, Heidegger retranslates the fragment to read, “But lightning steers (in presencing) the totality (of what is present).” Once the fragment is retranslated, Heidegger offers the following interpretation: “Lightning abruptly lays before us in an instant everything presencing in the light of its presencing. The lightning named here steers. It brings all things forward to their designated, essential place.”93 Elsewhere, Heidegger again stressed the importance of this image: “The question ‘What calls us to think?’ strikes us directly, like a lightning bolt.”94 The link Heidegger establishes between illumination and presence can even be extended to our discussion of time. Using Newman’s experience in Ohio, we surmised that humanity’s difference from nature sparked its sense of presence and place. As humanity stands apart from a world that is different, it comes to ponder its own history, the way its existence is restricted by chronological as well as other physical constraints, an awareness that also makes it uniquely “present” in a chronological as well as spatial way: “being present” means both “being here” or “existing in the now.” It is this aspect of standing out that Heidegger identifies in Heraclitus and then expresses, metaphorically, by means of illumination. The lighting, Heidegger confesses, “is no mere brightening and lightening. Because presencing means to come enduringly forward from concealment to unconcealment, the revealingconcealing lighting is concerned with the presencing of what is present.”95 As Being comes into presence, he adds, it “enters into its own emitting of light.”96 On this basis, if death extinguishes Da-sein into a state of non-presence, illumination brings Da-sein into the full light of presence as a manifestation of Being. Turning to Newman with these ideas in mind, one may propose that, if the beams indeed stand for streaks of light, then another layer of complexity animates the artist’s version of the time-as-space metaphor. As already insinuated, we tend to read time sequentially as a path moving from left to right. Still, several beams in Newman’s early drawings and paintings, such as The Beginning (figure 2.4) and The Word I (figure 10.1), narrow toward the bottom, a solution the artist eventually abandoned, perhaps because of its perspectival associations. Yet connecting the beam with light (or lightning strikes) inevitably introduces another space-as-time metaphor: namely, that we will think of the beam as moving “downward.” If so, that occurrence, however brisk, also unfolds in time, as it does for any object rapidly falling under gravity. Intriguingly, although we tend to associate left with “past” and right with “future” in conformity with our writing system, the Chinese often speak of the past as “up” and the future as “down” in conformity with theirs.97 And given the uni-directionality of gravity, most objects fall more easily and with greater velocity than they rise. Accordingly, we assume that objects moving downward do so with greater momentum than those moving upward or even laterally, a visual effect upon which Newman relied while narrowing the beam in The Beginning.

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One might even say the same of Newman’s zips in general—even if they do not narrow toward the bottom—especially if we are meant, as the artist intimated, to construe them as streaks of light (although The Wild, assuming Hess is right in stating that Newman associated it with the wildness of birds, would actually provide an exception, since it suggests upward ascension). Either way, the very term Newman preferred to designate the beams, “zip,”98 connotes this faster velocity. Unfortunately, the word is somewhat inelegant, accounting for its infrequent use in these pages. Even so, Newman’s choice reinforces the analogy being proposed here—as Steven Pinker put it, “Long words may be used for things that are big and coarse, staccato words for things that are sharp and quick.”99 In which case, Newman sought to trigger two separate sensations of time from the majority of his canvases: a slower lateral motion and a faster downward thrust (analogous, say, to a person ambulating slowly while an object falls directly before them). As the directions are different, so are the velocities. Yet, unlike the time-as-procession versus time-as-landscape metaphors, these two sensations are actually compatible. Though we cannot say, “We’ll cross that bridge as time goes by,” we can say, “I was walking down the street when, suddenly, it hit me.” Newman could easily have capitalized on these associations in order to differentiate two different temporal and existential situations. The leisurely pace of lateral motion evokes moving through a medium that offers a certain degree of resistance, and is thus appropriate to the slower tempo of remembering or anticipating. It is also consonant with Heidegger’s view of public time as the dimension in which we move on account of being thrown-in-the-world. The rapid descent, lightning-strike of the zip, conversely, recalls those sentences of Heidegger’s such as “Lighting is the . . . bestowal of presencing” or “the temporality of resoluteness has, in regard to its present, the nature of the Moment.” In this way, Newman could be creating different visual analogs of temporal experiences that tally with Heidegger’s descriptions of authentic versus inauthentic time. In one case, we move through a continuum, a sequence of ordinary “nows,” in conformity with social convention; in another, we are struck by a flash of inspiration, time becomes private, and we are brought back to ourselves. In order to push these observations further, it is constructive to return, albeit briefly, to transitional pieces such as The Beginning (figure 2.4) and Moment (figure 2.5), both of whose compositions clearly lay the ground for, but cannot be completely assimilated with, Onement. It has long been acknowledged in the literature that, despite many key similarities with such transitional works, Onement I (figure 2.1) signals the dividing line Newman himself drew between his formative and mature style. One reason may be that the backgrounds around the zips in The Beginning and Moment still reveal a degree of gestural activity, a formal solution often in evidence in the artist’s drawings, but one the artist largely relinquished in his painterly production. Although the zips betray remarkable

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variety, in terms of color, width, brightness, and edge, the backgrounds, in general, tend to be homogeneous and uniform. This may seem like a trivial point. But in view of the different visual sensations of time his mature work is attempting to elicit—a slow, lateral pace versus a quick, downward thrust—it may have held a portentous meaning for the artist. The strokes at either side of the beam in Moment, for example, suggest that the background (the void) is active or in motion. If, during his mature phase, Newman decided to limit such color modulations in his backgrounds, the reason, arguably, was because he sought to reserve any evocation of activity or agency exclusively for the beams. In other words, he wanted Da-sein to have direction, and the void to be directionless. If the zips in his abstractions portend a rapid moment of unusual intensity, Newman also came to realize that a greater degree of lighting displayed in the stripes heightens the level of that intensity. With its darkness and close-valued contrasts, Abraham (figure 11.2) stands for the heaviness, the non-presence of death; a painting such as Be (figure 2.10), for the lightness and luminescence of existence as it emphatically stands out against all that is.100 It is here, perhaps, that the relevance of Heidegger’s metaphorical way of reading Heraclitus emerges in sharpest relief. Heidegger believes human beings “are not only lighted by a light—even if a supersensible one—so that they can never hide themselves from it in darkness; they are luminous in their essence. They are alight; they are appropriated into the event of lighting, and therefore never concealed.”101 Lighting, therefore, is not simply “enlightenment,” or the lighting of what, on occasion, remains in darkness. Lighting is what occurs when the immateriality of Being is manifest in a being such as Da-sein. This is perhaps how all of the elements discussed in previous sections converge. Newman’s beams stand for a Da-sein emerging from its environment, feeling its own presence and acquiring a sense of its existential place in the world by differentiating itself from what is not Da-sein. The intensity of the value contrasts in the paintings measures this difference: the degree to which Da-sein is both physical and metaphysical, denoting how the light of Being manifests itself, however mysteriously, in the “there” of a human being. In the context of a physical canvas, moreover, the beams, surrounded by spaces that appear either to expand or contract, may also denote our place within the stream of time: whether authentic possibilities stand before us or not. As already mentioned, Heidegger also conflated the manifestation of Being with illumination through the image of a horizon. In parallel with Newman’s title, Horizon Light (figure 11.1), Heidegger proposes that the “understanding of being already moves in a horizon that is everywhere illuminated, giving luminous brightness [italics in original].”102 Illumination, thus, is the effect of a primordial and authentic understanding of Being and time. Inasmuch as a horizon extends in physical space, Newman’s horizon may represent his own idea of

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time extending toward the future (as exemplified, say, in the everyday expression “time-line”); yet, given Newman’s reference to the privacy with which time is experienced, his image was unlikely to evoke the regularity and consistency of what Heidegger disparages as “public time.” Instead, Newman may have been invoking, especially if he used the trope of illumination figuratively, the idea of the possibilities time affords. On this account, the light set off by the horizontal beam is not a given, but represents the extent to which our possibilities are bestowed upon us provisionally, conditional upon our profound questioning of the meaning of our existence. Grasping these possibilities, however, lies beyond the senses; they also elude detached, deductive reasoning. It may be compared, rather, to what Newman described as the “ecstasy man feels whenever face to face with deep insight,”103 and also reminiscent of Heidegger’s own concept of ek-istenz, which is also extrapolated from the idea of ecstasy, the idea of standing outside of, and going beyond, the self. According to Heidegger, the ecstasy of recognizing one’s own Being reflects Da-sein’s exclusive ability to stand apart from, and contemplate, its own self, explaining the inclusion of the hyphen in the term “ek-istenz.” To stand outside, and extend beyond, ourselves is crucial to authentic temporality: we “retrieve” our past and “project” ourselves into the future. In view of Heidegger’s views on art, it would stand to reason if art and poetry would encourage the very form of ecstatic illumination of which he speaks. “Through a merry gaiety,” the philosopher writes, the poet “illuminates the heart of men, so that they may open their hearts to what is genuine in their fields, towns, and houses. Through a grand gaiety, he first lets the dark depth gape open in its illumination. What would depth be without lighting?”104

Notes 1. SWI, 175. 2. Barnett Newman, draft of the Statement “Ohio, 1949,” Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 3. BT, 22. 4. BT, 40. 5. BT, 98. 6. BT, 378. 7. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 110. 8. An exception to this general rule, though no less a physical way of representing time, is typical of an Amerindian group called the Aymara. They consider the past to be forward and the future to lie in back, because, unlike the past, the future is unknown and cannot be seen. See Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity (New York: Marlowe, 2007), xvii.

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9. BT, 342. 10. The idea of literally moving from one location to another also gives us a way to express the metaphorical idea of moving from one state to another: “I moved from point A to point B” underpins the concept of “things moved from bad to worse.” 11. See Bernard Comrie, Tense (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 12. John O’Keefe, “The Spatial Prepositions in English, Vector Grammar, and the Cognitive Map Theory,” in Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garett (eds.), Language and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 302. 13. BT, 335. 14. Martin Heidegger, Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 24. 15. SWI, 249. 16. SWI, 250. 17. FCM, 145. 18. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 20. “The unity of the horizontal schemata of the future, having-been, and present,” Heidegger proclaimed, “is grounded in the ecstatic unity of temporality. The horizon of the whole of temporality determines whereupon the being factically existing is essentially disclosed” (BT, 334). 19. Yve-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 34. 20. See Peter De Bolla, “Serenity: Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis,” 41. 21. Yve-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 44. 22. BT, 100. 23. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), 21. 24. IM, 44. 25. Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time, 55. 26. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 41ff. 27. See Barbara Tversky, “Spatial Perspective in Description,” in Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garett (eds.), Language and Space, 469. 28. Lera Boroditsky, “Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding Time through Spatial Metaphors,” Cognition 75 (2000):1–28. 29. See Bernard Comrie, “Time and Language,” in Tense, 2. 30. Stefan Klein, The Secret Pulse of Time, 89. 31. In “Silent Visions: Lyotard on the Sublime,” Art & Design 10 (January/February 1995): 73, Renée van de Vall speaks of “the impossibility of an overview” in Vir Heroicus Sublimis. 32. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 195. 33. BT, 299. 34. BT, 299. 35. BT, 299. 36. BT, 299. 37. On Time and Being, 14. 38. On Time and Being, 14. 39. On Time and Being, 15. The complete citation is as follows: As a result, dimensionality “consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching brings

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about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening up of openness. Thought in terms of this threefold giving, true time proves to be three-dimensional.” 40. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 234. 41. EGT, 53. 42. EGT, 53. 43. EGT, 53. 44. Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 144. 45. EGT, 53. 46. Martin Heidegger, “Remembrance of the Poet,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 251. 47. The Stuff of Thought, 188. 48. On Time and Being, 16. 49. EGT, 54. 50. Barnett Newman interviewed by Karlis Osis, 1963, transcript, page 20, Barnett Newman Foundation Archives. 51. BT, 301–2. 52. BT, 302. 53. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 273. 54. BT, 303. 55. BT, 304. 56. BT, 310. 57. BT, 319. 58. BT, 311. 59. BT, 377. 60. SWI, 261. 61. “Da-sein can ‘suffer’ dully from everydayness, sink into its dullness, and evade it by looking for new ways in which its dispersion in its affairs may be further dispersed. But existence can also master the everyday in the Moment, often only ‘for the moment,’ but it can never extinguish it” (BT, 339). Since the meaning of Being is time, then the authenticity of Da-sein is thus predicated upon loosening the demands and concepts of time that are imposed upon Dasein from the they: “access to genuine temporality demands a reevaluation of the banal construct of past-present-future whereby we, almost invariably without giving it much thought, imagine and conduct our daily lives” (Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 109). 62. Comrie, Tense, 37. 63. BT, 377. 64. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 48. 65. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 115, 116. 66. SWI, 140. What is the difference in Newman’s work between the vertical versus the horizontal stripes? Perhaps the horizontal recalls a historical or chronological movement from past to present to future: we look ahead of ourselves, or we retrace the steps of our lives in a sequential, chronological way. The vertical, on the other hand, suggests an arrest in time, a motionlessness where one takes stock in the intensity of the moment.

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When one is overwhelmed, or even gripped, by the concerns of life, life becomes a question of anticipation, in which the intensity of the moment gets lost. We must bring life back to itself: a moment of heightened unrest. For Heidegger, similarly, the question of being is inseparable from the issue of temporality, and the meaning of being is time; there is no ideal of permanency; in its passing and in its happening, but time, itself, provides no precise meaning. Newman, similarly, also gives us no answers. As Safranski put it, “We are caring and providing creatures because we expressly experience a time horizon ahead. Caring is nothing other than lived temporality” (Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 157). For Heidegger (cited in Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 84), “Not until we understand being-in-the world as an essential structure of Dasein can we have any insight into Dasein’s existential spatiality.” We do not live “in time”; we “live time.” 67. Gelven, A Commentary, 75. 68. See Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Typology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 245. 69. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 47, 166. 70. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 55. For an extensive discussion of Abraham, see Bois, “Abraham,” October 108 (Spring 2004): 5–27. 71. SWI, 108. 72. If, as Heidegger claims, “the essence of man is founded in the fact that he is that being to whom Being itself reveals itself, then the essential trans-mittal and the essence of ‘sending’ is the unveiling of Being” (P, 55). It is in man that this sending takes place, that this unveiling of truth, the luminous radiance of Being, is manifest. But this luminous radiance is synonymous with freedom and awareness, not with literal birth and death. One may be alive yet completely oblivious to the truth of Being. “For the Greeks,” the philosopher maintains, “death is not a ‘biological’ process, any more than birth is. Birth and death take their essence from the realm of disclosiveness and concealment” (P, 60). Newman also did not construe birth as a “biological process”; otherwise, he would not have referred to the creation of Onement I as the “beginning of my present life” (SWI, 255). But although awareness and the unveiling of truth do not coincide with one’s biological birth, there can be no denial that, at the point of death, that same awareness and unveiling, that same truth and radiance, is concealed. Though birth is not necessarily the emergence of presence, death is the opposite. “There prevails,” Heidegger adds, “a concealing appearing in the essence of death” (P, 76). 73. In this particular case, Stephen Polcari’s reading of The Wild and Outcry coincides with my own when he writes that “the central image and plane contrasting with the hard, clear edges of the canvas’s shape . . . [can be construed] as a metaphor for the shattering of the life journey.” See Stephen Polcari, Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 207. 74. Thomas Hess Papers, Archives of American Art. See also Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné, 106. 75. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), Vol. 54, 127, cited in Michael Zimmerman, “Ontological Aestheticism: Heidegger, Jünger, and National Socialism,” in The Heidegger Case, 70. 76. See Michael Schreyach, “The Visual Dynamics of Barnett Newman’s ‘Sense of Space’” (forthcoming).

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77. See Roelof Louw, “Newman and the Issue of Subject Matter,” Studio International 87 (January 1974): 31. 78. Newman, interviewed by Jane Dillenberger, March 27, 1967; see Dillenberger, “The Stations of the Cross by Barnett Newman,” in Secular Art with Sacred Themes (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1969), 104. 79. SWI, 255. 80. Louw, “Newman and the Issue of Subject Matter,” 32. 81. Gelven, A Commentary, 183. 82. BT, 378. 83. BT, 243. 84. See Lisa Saltzman, “Barnett Newman’s Passion,” in Marcia Kupfer (ed.), The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 205. 85. Steiner even described the philosopher’s concept of art as a “drawing up to the light from the well of being” (Martin Heidegger, 135). 86. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 65. 87. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 67. 88. SWI, 61. 89. SWI, 306. 90. Intriguingly, Newman’s reference to Heraclitus in the Gottlieb review was not taken directly from any of the surviving fragments attributed to the philosopher, but from a citation in Plutarch’s life of Romulus. See Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, trans. and ed. John and William Langhorne (Cincinnati, OH: Applegate and Co, 1859), 58. 91. EGT, 27. 92. Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 29. Freeman’s text is a translation of Diels-Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmannsche Verlagbuchhandlung, 1951), upon which Heidegger himself relied. 93. EGT, 72. 94. What Is Called Thinking?, 116. 95. EGT, 119. 96. “The Turning,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 45. 97. Lera Boroditsky, “Does Language Shape Thought? Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time,” Cognitive Psychology 43 (2001): 1–22. 98. SWI, 278; see also Sarah K. Rich, “The Proper Name of Newman’s Zip,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 96–114. 99. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 300. 100. Newman could also sharpen the nature of the moment by expanding or narrowing the beam, suggesting not only stability versus fragility, or a kind of sound of higher versus lower frequency, but also the brevity versus the length of the moment. In addition, the beam’s tonal contrast to the field gives it the effect, as Newman put it in another title, of “shining forth.” 101. EGT, 120. 102. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 284. 103. SWI, 76. 104. EHP, 37.

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CHAPTER 12

God

Although an unobservant Jew who reviled attempts to pigeonhole him as a “Jewish artist,” Newman nonetheless made numerous allusions to religion in his statements. He declared, for example, that the contemporary artist is creating “a religious art” whose “symbols will catch the basic truth of life, which is its sense of tragedy.”1 By assigning biblical titles to his work—notably, an entire cycle labeled The Stations of the Cross (figures 8.1 and 8.2)—he imbued his art with a certain metaphysical or transcendental aura, signaling how intricately related, albeit in an unorthodox way, his aesthetic philosophy must have been to matters religious. As already indicated, Newman referenced Genesis and proclaimed creativity to establish a relationship between humanity and divinity. Most early writing, he explained, was epic, its subject matter numinous: “how the gods lived, what the gods did, etc. Homer combined this preoccupation with divine matters together with the historic events of his country, so that although he worked in the epic form, he reduced it to a human . . . level, depicting the interplay of gods and men.”2 Newman saw his own work as underwritten by analogous motives; art, he asserted, is “concerned with metaphysical implications, with divine mysteries. These new painters have brought the artist back to his original, primitive role—the maker of gods.”3 These assertions strike a chord with Heidegger’s investigations of Hölderlin’s poetry. The poetic act, the philosopher writes, is “the fundamental naming of the gods.”4 (It should be said, if only parenthetically, that Heidegger’s use of “gods” does not signify a belief in a plurality of divinities, only in the unknowability of god “whether of one single god or many gods.”5) Seen against the contention that language bestows Being, whether art’s original goal is to make the gods (Newman) or name them (Heidegger), the two propositions are practically synonymous. As nomination gives form to something, naming an object is no less creative an act than making it. Steiner’s summary bears repeating here, 235

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clarifying, as it does, how closely Heidegger associated naming and making: “Authentic poetry does not ‘imitate.’ . . . It names, and by naming makes it real and lasting.”6 For all intents and purposes, language “makes” an entity by forging a link between the being that names (i.e., Da-sein) and the entity that is named, a link that heretofore did not exist—or did not exist in the same way. Analogously, if Newman saw the primordial role of art as the making of gods, the implication is that, by making images of their gods, artists allow the gods to come into Being by permitting a relationship between gods and men to emerge. This does not mean that the divine is nothing but a human concoction. Poetry assumes its power to name, Heidegger insists, only when “the gods themselves bring us to language. . . . The establishment of being is bound to the sign of the gods.”7 In other words, we may have “made” the gods through art and poetry, but the gods initiated the process by giving us the gift of language: naming and creating form a reciprocal relationship. Humanity was offered language to set it apart from all that exists; in return, humanity must establish a conversation with the divine. Heidegger interprets Hölderlin’s phrase, those who “have heard one another,” as referencing men and gods.8 The dialogue is a precarious one, however, sustained only if the very language bequeathed to us is appropriately employed as poetry and song. A strange reading, perhaps, but in line with Newman’s declaration that early writing was “epic,” the primary subject matter of which was “the interplay of gods and men.” What Newman calls “interplay,” Heidegger calls “conversation.” According to Heidegger, the gods “acquire a name only by addressing and, as it were, claiming us. The word which names the gods is always a response to such a claim.” In the process, we decide “whether we are to yield ourselves to the gods or withhold ourselves from them.”9 “We—mankind—are in conversation.”10 The obligation that accompanies the receipt of language—to sustain the dialogue between gods and men—is thus the charge of art and poetry. Not surprisingly, Heidegger counts the birth of language as “the supreme event,”11 an assertion that works hand in glove with Newman’s that the first man was an artist and that creativity is determinative of human existence. Yet poetic language does not simply allow us to converse with, or name, the gods; it also lets Da-sein affirm the primacy of human existence in an emphatic way12: “[W]hen the gods are named originally and the essence of things receives a name, so that things for the first time shine out, human existence is brought into a firm relation and given a basis. The speech of the poet is establishment not only in the sense of the free act of giving, but at the same time in the sense of the firm basing of human existence on its foundation.”13 Although it is impossible to know whether Newman had analogous ideas in mind when he employed titles such as The Word I (figure 10.1) or The Name (figure 2.11), it is tempting to conjecture that his stress on creativity as distinctive of human existence tallies

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with Heidegger’s declaration that the basis of existence is to exist poetically. “To ‘dwell poetically’ means,” Heidegger argues, “to stand in the presence of the gods and to be involved in the proximity of the essence of things. Existence is ‘poetical’ in its fundamental aspect.”14 If dwelling poetically induces proximity to the divine, it also means allowing the essence of things to shine forth in a religious sense. Inspired by Hölderlin, Heidegger views nature as a manifestation of holinesss (“the holy is the essence of nature”15), and resurrects the metaphor of illumination to denote how essences are unveiled as a form of such holiness: “The clear lets everything emerge into its appearance and illumination, so that everything real, set aflame by it, will stand in its own contour and measure.”16 But this form of revelation, as it is typical for Heidegger to say, is rarely apparent; to the poets, above all, is the essence of things and the illumination visible, so much so that the poets themselves are illuminated: when the holy is unveiled, a “light shines in the ‘souls of the poets.’”17 Heidegger further contends that the poet is unable to name the holy without divine intercession: “The blaze of light, quietly preserved in the soul of the poet, needs to be kindled. Only a ray of light that emanates again from the holy itself is strong enough for that. Therefore, someone higher, who is nearer to the holy and yet still remains beneath it, a god, must throw the kindling-lightning-flash into the poet’s soul.”18 In another passage, Heidegger expresses ideas closely echoed in a host of Newman titles: “Now when the holy ray strikes the poet, he is not carried away into the blaze of the ray, but is fully turned towards the holy. The poet’s soul ‘quakes,’ to be sure. . . . The shaking breaks the peace of silence. The word comes to be. The word-work which originates in this way lets the belonging together of god and man appear.”19 That shaking breaks the peace of silence, or that the word comes to be recalls End of Silence, The Word, and Be. These connections resonate all the more because Heidegger’s reference to fire as denoting poetic inspiration recalls other Newman titles (e.g., Voice of Fire, White Fire, and Black Fire I [figure 1.1]). What the song of the poet reveals, Heidegger maintains, “is the awakening inspiration, the blazing brightness: ‘heavenly fire.’”20 Intriguingly, just as analogies could be detected across different traditions—between Heidegger’s concept of Da-sein and the Hebraic Makom—another can be posited between Heidegger’s claim that the song of the poet is “awakening inspiration,” “blazing brightness,” “heavenly fire,” and Newman’s claim that the use of fire in his titles alluded to an old Hebrew legend where white fire and black fire “joined to form the Word.”21 Of course, Heidegger does not differentiate the color of fire, but his connecting heavenly fire with the poet’s song parallels Newman’s between fire and the Word (e.g., Voice of Fire). For both men, language’s fiery origin evokes the image of a creative though violent process. The implication is that language imposes order and quietude upon the chaos of nature’s destructive forces, an

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interpretation that, arguably, is consistent with Newman’s recollection of his experience in Ohio, when human presence was contrasted to the chaos of nature, as well as with his statements that original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his own helplessness before the void. Born of violence and anxiety, language functions, partly, as humanity’s answer to chaos. From a Heideggerian perspective, the same could be said of Newman’s use of the word “now” in titles such as Now I and Now II: perhaps the very Moment when chaos is overpowered and the word comes into Being. For Heidegger, the “heavenly” fire kindled in the souls of the poets helps the poet temper the terrible, chaotic characteristics of nature: “The shaking of Chaos, which offers no support, the terror of the immediate, which frustrates every intrusion, the holy is transformed through the quietness of the protected poet, into the mildness of the mediated and mediating word.”22 As a manifestation of the holy, nature is chaotic and dangerous; it unhinges humanity and provokes terror and anxiety. The poet’s mediation is thus necessary to impose order upon chaos. Even if Heidegger did not differentiate white from black fire (figure 1.1), following Hölderlin, he did reference a “dark light.” Though accessible to poets, the heavenly fire overwhelms the non-poets. The poet therefore needs the dark light (the black fire?) to tone down the excessive brightness (the white fire?) of a message otherwise incomprehensible to those for whom it was originally intended. As the all-too-flaming fire blinds the eyes, Heidegger writes, “the poet asks for the gift of the dark light in which the brightness is tempered and softened.”23 The view that poetic meditation tempers the heavenly fire by means of the dark light is concordant with Newman’s recollection of the Hebrew legend describing the joining of white and black fire to form the Word. What also emerges from Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin is the pivotal place allocated to artists: the only ones brave enough to receive, and sensitive enough to understand, a divine message so powerful that some form of moderation is required before the rest of humanity may receive it. The artists’ very privileged position as intermediaries between gods and men provides this moderation. This role, however, places artists in a precarious position. Incurring the jealousy and resentment of their fellow human beings, poets are ostracized. Still, their solitude is no empty abandonment; they understand their charge and celebrate what belongs to humanity as a whole. Newman’s claim that a work of art is created in solitude, yet aimed at “anybody else who saw the painting,”24 thus accords with Heidegger’s that he “who is alone and ponders what is his own at the same time commemorates his companions.”25 Language is thus both a gift and a responsibility; by receiving it, artists declare that they are, affirm their existence, and initiate a conversation with the divine for the sake of the entire human race. Newman was no less interested in the idea of such a conversation than Heidegger. By his own admission, The Stations of the Cross represented the

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cry of Jesus on the cross: “Lema Sabachthani—why? Why did you forsake me? Why forsake me? To what purpose? Why?”26 For Newman, the cry of Jesus was neither a “complaint”27 nor a “protest but a declaration.”28 The cry embodies the “original,” “unanswerable question of human suffering.”29 That the question is unanswerable, though, invites the conclusion that Newman worked under the assumption that the conversation between humanity and the divine has been interrupted, a prospect Heidegger himself intensely feared. That language, art, and even existence itself can be authentic or inauthentic is, as we have seen, a refrain of Being and Time. Inasmuch as human beings use language to affirm their existence and sustain the conversation, they can also use language inauthentically by disseminating information in a manipulative, exploitive way. Language, Heidegger writes, can express what is purest and most profound no less than what is banal and ordinary: “Even the essential word, if it is to be understood and so become a possession in common, must make itself ordinary.”30 As a result, language is both pristine and mundane, essential or counterfeit. An essential word may be so simple as to be mistaken for an unessential one, or an inessential one promoted as authentic and meaningful. Thus, even language itself may endanger its most significant characteristic: “the genuine saying.”31 For these reasons, a line from Hölderlin resonates especially powerfully with Heidegger: that language is “the most dangerous possession given to man.”32 Why? Because language, if employed inauthentically, runs afoul of its original purpose and degenerates into meaningless gossip. Under these conditions, the divine message is eclipsed; the conversation interrupted, and, as Heidegger reads Hölderlin, God withdraws—and humanity’s abuse of the gift of language may be directly to blame. Accordingly, the case may be made that, if Newman feared that God had forsaken humanity, this judgment invites another conclusion: namely, that Newman also believed that God is not so much dead—as Nietzsche declared, and as was often debated at the time Newman painted33—as withdrawn. From Heidegger’s perspective, the impact of God’s withdrawal is nothing short of devastating. It leaves humanity to confront existence alone, without, as Newman was intimating, the ability to explain its suffering. This very inability, in turn, exacerbates the unjust affliction of an involuntary life— the very question Newman raises by allowing the following tract from the Talmud to accompany the Stations: The one who are born are to die Against thy will art thou formed Against thy will art thou born Against thy will dost thou live Against thy will die.34

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Newman reiterated the point himself: “No one gets anybody’s permission to be born. No one asks to live.”35 Of course, he was not the first, nor the last person to raise this question; the fact that Heidegger did so as well provides no evidence of an identical worldview. But it does hint at how compatible those views actually are. The involuntariness of existence was central, after all, to Heidegger’s idea of humanity being thrown into the world (“Has Da-sein as itself ever freely decided and will it ever be able to decide whether it wants to come into ‘Da-sein’ or not?”36). What is more exclusive to Newman and Heidegger is not the asking of the question, but the belief that human beings may partially compensate for the involuntariness and anguish of existence by questioning the meaning of Being. If Newman believed that human beings are sublime only to the extent that they are self-aware, Heidegger argued that they endure their suffering and relieve the inexplicability of their existence by being authentic. Authenticity, moreover, might involve connecting the significance of beginnings and language, Being and poetry, in a religious manner. Following Hölderlin, Heidegger assumes that the “establishment of being is bound to the sign of the gods,” an assumption based on the premise that, if language is a divine gift, then everything that ensues from its authentic employment—such as our awareness of our own Being, or of our own potential—also stems from the divine. For this reason, poets who employ language authentically are the most authentic of human beings, prompting Heidegger to award them the intermediary position between gods and men: the poet is one who has been cast out “into that Between, between gods and men. But only and for the first time in this Between is it decided, who man is and where he is settling his existence.”38 By shaping language, the poets bring Being to light and intercede between humanity and the divine. It is their authentic employment of this divine offering that provokes self-awareness, makes our relationship with the gods manifest, and on which the responsibility to sustain the conversation rests. The site of the conversation, what Heidegger calls “the Between,” is the boundary that separates gods and mortals as well as the locus of their mediation.39 By accepting language, poets nurture the conversation and bequeath an awareness of Being to humanity. But poets can also usurp the power of language. As already mentioned, Newman saw both proximity and feelings of extreme rivalry between the human and the divine converging in the artistic will. An examination of Genesis, he wrote, explains how “Adam, by eating from the Tree of Knowledge, sought the creative life to be, like God, a ‘creator of worlds’ . . . and was reduced to the life of toil only as a result of a jealous punishment.”40 From the pessimistic slant of Hölderlin’s poetry, Heidegger, though less emphatically, also underscored humanity’s rivalry with the divine. In interpreting Hölderlin, he described “those who stand between the men and gods and endure this ‘between’ . . . [as] the demigods. . . . These pointers are the poets.”41 Since

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their status falls between gods and men, the poets are prone to feelings of rivalry and competition. All too often, Heidegger writes, the poets, pushed out “above men,” but not wanting “to endure [their] inequality to the gods,” wrongly measure themselves by human standards. Not knowing exactly who they are, poets are “thrown into doubt.”42 More than human yet less than divine, they assume an uneasy, difficult position. If the poet cannot bear the Between, the conversation between gods and men fails, especially as the dialogue is contingent upon the Between being endured: “[T]hrough the divisive desire to become one of the two, that between, to which the demigods must keep, is destroyed. The open realm of this between closes itself up. By this closing, that which is above men and gods becomes inaccessible.”43 Thus, just as Newman described Adam as reduced to a life of toil, punished for seeking a creative life and rivaling the divine, Heidegger construes the poet’s pretension to be godly as precipitating the destruction of the Between. If this realm is destroyed, the conversation is interrupted (e.g., the “unanswerable cry” of Jesus for Newman), and God, for Heidegger, withholds his presence. In view of the artist’s position as the intermediary between the human and the divine, and as residing in the Between, may we allow Yve Alain-Bois’s emphasis on the asymmetricality of Newman’s canvases to be read as an example of this Between, a realm wherein human and divine may meet, but where clear demarcations emerge? The Stations of the Cross (figures 12.1 and 12.2) are notably asymmetrical, betraying the extent to which two realms (the human and the divine?) appear condemned to separation. But these implications need not be entirely negative. The wide gulf separating humanity from divinity can be construed as an invitation to fill the space. If the Between is empty, it is full of possibilities, liable to be filled in the future by an authentic existence dedicated to living poetically. The difficulty of reading Newman, according to Lyotard’s claim, was premised on the assumption that, when looking at his paintings, there is nothing to consume. But if this proposition were reread as Newman’s granting of permission to project, in Heideggerian fashion, our own possibilities onto the beams, then the empty spaces in the Stations play an analogous role. Since the beam does not represent a preordained meaning, as much as present a neutral receptacle upon which we may project our own possibilities, the empty space at the center of the Stations may stand for something like Heidegger’s Between. Did Mark Godfrey not write that, though many found Newman’s work empty, this is not to say that the emptiness was unintended?44 Perhaps that emptiness awaits a resolved and futural existence, one that, if lived poetically, compensates for God’s withdrawal and for the inexplicability of our suffering. If modern humans are derelict in their responsibility to live poetically, they must endure God’s self-withholding “until the present era of trial is over.”45 How long this trial will last, no one knows—another uncertainty humanity

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Figure 12.1. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: First Station (1958), magna on exposed canvas, 78  60.5 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Figure 12.2. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Second Station (1958), magna on exposed canvas, 78  60.5 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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needs to bear. Not surprisingly, Newman construed the human condition in terms of tragic helplessness, and Heidegger in terms of abandonment, homelessness, and errancy, an uncertainty visualized in the Stations insofar as the series is structured around a theme of “call and response,” according to Sarah Rich,46 or as a “confrontation between the left and the right,” according to Barbara Reise.47 Might these visual polarities, and the empty spaces between them, be interpreted as the conversation between humanity and divinity? This may seem like forcing the evidence. But by the end of the series, that same “conversation” is, from a formal and visual point of view, literally terminated. In the last work, Reise observes that the right zone is annihilated,48 and Rich that the “white band on the left receives no answer from the blank area which previously had been occupied by thin Zips [figure 12.3]. The suspense of the unanswered element in the final canvas paralleled the lonesome, even desperate quality that Newman had hoped to evoke for the entire series.”49 This astute and persuasive reading allows us to construe the meanings of Newman’s austere visual vocabulary, and to align them with certain Heideggerian notions: “Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. . . . They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. . . . In the depth of their misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.”50

Figure 12.3. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Fourteenth Station (1965–1966), acrylic and Duco on canvas, 78  60 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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Having no explanation for God’s withdrawal, unsure as to how long the trial will last, we cannot but recognize the fundamental incommensurability between humanity and divinity. This condition represents a more acute version of the state of pilgrimage, with which Newman identified as he worked on the series (“I was a pilgrim as I painted”51). Relying on Edith and Victor Turner’s work,52 Rich intriguingly describes pilgrimage as a condition where “normative cultural structures are temporarily suspended, and the subject is placed in a state of being in between,” a situation she sees echoed in the spatial gaps forming in Newman’s compositions.53 A pilgrimage, of course, is a journey undertaken to have doubts dispelled or questions answered. But what if the pilgrimage dispels no doubts and answers no questions? It is these very sentiments that Newman amplified into a broader expression of humanity’s sense of abandonment and, arguably, sought to impart in the Stations. Heidegger’s assessment of God’s withdrawal also parallels Newman’s because the artist asserted that Christ’s cry on the cross receives “no answer.” If we obtain no reply, the implication, for Newman as well as for Heidegger, is that the conversation between the human and the divine has stopped. In the interim, we wait for the conversation to resume. Thrown in the midst of our everyday existence, we forget why or what we are awaiting; we live in forgetfulness of our own forgetting. The sense of “waiting” described by Heidegger may also have another visual analog in the Stations, some of which, in three instances, display a formal property rarely found in Newman’s work. In the Fifth (figure 12.4), Tenth, and Twelfth Stations (figure 12.5), Newman distends some of the stripes with gestural strokes moving from left to right. As already discussed, Newman employed both hard and soft edges, sometimes in concert, to induce various reactions. But the sensations these directional strokes exude are remarkably different, occurring only in the three examples just mentioned. In effect, these additions give the impression that the beams are losing their structural integrity, and that this dissolution, in all three occasions, occurs consistently, with a hard edge on the left and fading on the right. The contrast between this and Newman’s more habitual tendency is sharpest in the Fifth Station, where the fading of the left beam confronts, across an area of empty space, a conspicuously narrow, sharply delineated beam on the right. If we interpret this painting against the framework established in the last section, and construe spaces in Newman’s canvases as equivalents for sensations of time, then the two beams make dramatically different impressions.54 The narrower one suggests a momentary, instantaneous, even purposeful occurrence. If it were a sound, it would be sharp and shrill, perhaps a violin hitting a high note. The thicker one would be darker and deeper, perhaps a double-bass slowly allowing a low note to fade into silence. As such, the left beam suggests a protracted activity having a precise beginning, but no precise ending—something less purposeful, less focused, somewhat akin to the state of

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Figure 12.4. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Fifth Station (1962), oil and pigmented polymer emulsion on exposed canvas, 78  60 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“waiting.” That state begins no sooner than an upcoming event is anticipated, and is marked by a definite (chronological) starting point. But if what is awaited never manifests itself, as in humanity awaiting the reappearance of God, then there is no definitive point at which the state formally ends, explaining the fading of the left beam toward the right. Anticipation lingers until overtaken by impatience, tiredness, or forgetfulness. If Newman intended to evoke physical sensations of time, then he devised each Station to provoke different emotional and temporal responses. Two areas may be strictly segregated, condemned to endure in perpetual isolation, or a beam’s disintegration evokes a situation when waiting extends over time, or when what is awaited is gradually forgotten. In two of the Stations—Seventh and Twelfth (figure 12.5)—and in select examples in Newman’s production (The Gate; The Word II; Uriel; Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue IV; and Black Fire I), another visual characteristic emerges: a change in color at either side of the beam. In the majority of Newman’s work, as already discussed, the background field maintains an even hue, giving the impression that stripes stand before a consistent, uniform expanse. In the two Stations just mentioned, conversely, the fields change color after the beam’s “interruption.” This suggests that either the field itself changes or the beam is abutting a different field. Accepting Newman’s statement that his works

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Figure 12.5. Barnett Newman, The Stations of the Cross: Twelfth Station (1965), acrylic on exposed canvas, 78  60 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Collection of Robert and Jane Meyerhoff. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

evoke physical sensations of time, we conjecture that the shift in hue conveys a particular meaning: that certain events and experiences are so portentous that they transform our entire worldview. Expressions such as “we are past the point of no return,” “things will never be the same,” or “you can’t put the genie back in the bottle” communicate not just change, but irreversible change. Conversely, a painting like Vir Heroicus Sublimis (figure 6.7) gives the impression that, against a uniform stream of time, moments of extreme intensity stand out. Some belong to our past, others we anticipate in the future, but the field uniting them remains continuous. One thinks of Heidegger’s belief that, for the most part, Da-sein lives an ordinary existence, entangled in the they until certain intense moments incite Da-sein to come back to itself. The Seventh and Twelfth Stations (figure 12.5) provoke a different effect: that Da-sein has experienced moments of such exceptional intensity that its entire outlook, its entire life even, has altered. How this different perspective pertains to the overall theme of the Stations is difficult to say. Perhaps Newman—avowing each painting to be “whole and separate in its immediacy,” yet “all together form[ing] a complete statement on a single subject”55—wanted to express the different ways in which God’s withdrawal is experienced: a state of anxious waiting and anticipation, a state in which we are in danger of forgetting what we are waiting for, or a state in which a sudden recognition of awaiting something that never comes changes us irrevocably.

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Either way, the situation remains irredeemably tragic. The very possibility of a conversation between humanity and divinity being reactivated remains highly unlikely. Even if the conversation were to resume, language could hardly constitute its medium; language, Heidegger wrote, is something that belongs to man as a finite being: “To imagine a god expressing himself in speech is utterly meaningless.”56 For some, this sentence may leave the issue of the very medium through which the conversation takes place somewhat nebulous. But we are still left with a powerful residual image: that of Heidegger’s light shining in the soul of the poets or of a god throwing the kindling-lightning-flash into the poet’s soul, an image highly reminiscent of Newman’s description of his zips as streaks of light. Accordingly, the gods would not communicate by means of verbal language (that is an exclusively human mode of communication), but by sparking insight and understanding, which we describe, in our own metaphorical way, as flashes of light. It is perhaps those very flashes of light that Newman was evoking by permitting his darker beams to “contain” a luminous center—for example, the extreme right in Third Station and Shining Forth (To George) (figure 12.6) and the right one in First Station (figure 12.1). With this in mind, one might offer the following reading of Shining Forth (To George) (figure 12.6). If we chose to interpret the appearance of multiple

Figure 12.6. Barnett Newman, Shining Forth (To George) (1961), oil on exposed canvas, 114  174 inches. Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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beams as a reference to multiple human presences—as a parallel to Heidegger’s idea of Mit-Da-sein, the condition of being-with-one-another—then the beam at the extreme right may represent the condition of the poet struck by the light of inspiration, separated from yet still commemorating his companions, represented by the two darker beams on the left. If, conversely, we chose to interpret multiple beams as signifying the same human presence at different points in time, then the lateral expanse of the canvas stands for the states of mind endured, and time elapsed, until the poet at last receives the inspiration that permits the inner light to “shine forth.” Regardless of which interpretation one favors, the diachronic or the synchronic, the large amounts of space separating each beam intimate that, either between the poet and his companions, or between those ordinary moments of existence and those extraordinary flashes of inspiration, great chasms form. The gestural strokes surrounding the beam at the extreme right, moreover, also hint at how uncomfortable, or difficult to bear, the light of inspiration actually is—irrespective of whether poets come to realize their differences from their fellow human beings, or their difference from their own former selves. Either way, since Da-sein is both ontic and ontological, always in the world with other beings and other Da-seins, and ahead of itself in anticipatory resolution, these two alternative, synchronic and diachronic readings are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The two dimensions, as William Richardson put it, “are always simultaneous.”57 Returning to the issue of the relationship between humanity and the divine shutting down, it must be said that, however remote the possibility of the conversation being re-activated may be, God’s withdrawal, according to Heidegger, is not so much God’s as man’s fault. This signals a possible significant divergence with Newman, for whom humanity’s life of toil is attributable to divine jealousy (an idea that, as Matthew Baigell reminds us, runs afoul of traditional Jewish teaching58). For Heidegger, God’s withdrawal is attributable to the poet’s inability to bear his intermediary position and endure the Between. Are these views at all compatible? Possibly. Newman, after all, claimed that man was created to be an artist, a declaration that raises the following question: If so, then by whom was man so anointed, if not by the very God who created him? It somehow makes little sense for God to have created and punished man for the very same aspiration. This contradiction could somehow be eased if Newman’s position were revised along Heideggerian lines—along lines, that is, which would stipulate that man was indeed created to be an artist, but punished for betraying, not fulfilling, this mission. Yet how could man betray his mission? As already indicated: if the poet aspires to become a god or cannot endure the Between. But there may be other ways by which human beings in general, rather than poets in particular, might betray their mission. If language, in the Heideggerian mindset, is a gift from

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the gods, confers Being upon the things we encounter,59 and allows that which already exists to shine,60 then misusing language is tantamount to fostering a forgetfulness and occlusion of Being. Since, for Heidegger, saying is a kind of showing, language bestows presence,61 and shows things as they are in their Being. The rise of modern technology does the reverse; it deflects language from its original function and transforms it into a tool of enframing.62 In that context, the poetic language that allows men and gods to enter into conversation “turns into information.”63 If language has been bequeathed to humanity for the express purpose of having a relationship with Being, humanity’s relinquishing of that same responsibility is tantamount to rejecting God’s gift. This refusal, in turn, also rejects the very means by which man and God enter into conversation. This refusal, it is hard to gainsay, warrants God’s withdrawal—the underlying theme, arguably, of the Stations. Though Heidegger partly ascribed the withdrawal of the gods and the disintegration of poetic language to enframing, he did not connect one directly with the other. But Newman’s and Heidegger’s distaste for manipulative thinking, and their regret over the lack of communion between humanity and divinity, invites speculation as to whether the two issues were indeed related.64 One could interpret paintings such as Covenant (figure 12.7) and The Promise (figure 6.6)— both of which display two stripes in close proximity—as indicative of a primordial relationship between the human and the divine, a relationship where, as the titles indicate, certain responsibilities are established. If humanity stays close to the origin, uses language in a poetic manner, lives authentically in a futural way, and satisfies its ownmost potentiality for Being, then God will continue the conversation. If humanity uses language to control, lives inauthentically and in forgetfulness of Being, the conversation will be short-circuited. The exact nature of the covenant, or the subject of the promise, of course, is unknown. But if the two beams represent the same human presence at two separate moments in time, then Covenant and The Promise evoke two different existential scenarios. In Covenant, the beam on the right is more luminous than the one on the left, perhaps a hint at the greater sense of presence emerging from being a covenantee, or from being faithful to the covenant into which one has entered. The difference between the two beams reflects the different choices that are available: to think Being, accept the commitment and stand in the light of Being, or reject it and recoil into thoughtlessness. In The Promise, value contrasts are also engaged, with the second beam noticeably less luminous than the first. In addition, the former is painted sharply, making the second look frayed and brittle in comparison, a contrast reprised in Here I (figure 12.8),65 although in reverse order. That sculpture, Nan Rosenthal speculates, makes “the distinction between the wavering human hand—its touch—and a geometric straightedge tangibly manifest.”66 Rosenthal is on to something, and the reader will probably

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Figure 12.7. Barnett Newman, Covenant (1949), oil on canvas, 47 3/4  59 5/8 inches. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

anticipate the next interpretive step: namely, that the physical contrast between a wavering versus a straight beam is indicative of a contrast between (or transition from) an “unwavering” to a “wavering” state of mind (Gabriele Schor sees it as the contrast between a “rational” zip and an “emotional one”67). The title, The Promise, adds another dimension: unlike the conversion from a darker to a lighter beam in Covenant, The Promise conjures a failure of nerve. To “waver” means to be irresolute, hesitant, or indecisive—a condition incompatible with the intent to keep a promise. It is almost as if Newman parsed the concept of Da-sein, or, more accurately, subjected it to gradience. The firmer one’s resolve, the more Da-sein is da, “here”; the weaker, the more sein is dispersed, “there.” The distinction between the two edges recalls two voices with different intonations. Although two people pledge to one another: one speaks forcefully, with determination, the other timidly, with hesitation—the intonations giving us an inkling into their state of mind. We “are” more intensely if we keep our word, if we are true to our promise; we “are” less if we do not.

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Figure 12.8. Barnett Newman Here I (To Marcia) (1950), bronze with black patina, overall height—107 3/8 inches, height without base—96 3/8 inches, base—11 1/4  28 1/4  27 1/4 inches. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gift of Marcia S. Weisman. Photograph © 2009 Museum Associates/LACMA © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The extreme blackness of the background also invites commentary. It not only allows the beams to be dramatically silhouetted against its expanse—especially the brightest one—but it is also as if the repercussions of breaking a promise are especially dire. Alone before this black void, the two human presences have nothing but their connection to each other to sustain them. If that fragile connection were jeopardized in any way, their alienation will be all the more oppressive, and borne in utter loneliness and isolation. Unlike the one in Concord, moreover, this pair of zips is off-center, more precariously placed, and (unlike the one in Shimmer Bright) has nothing but a dark abyss before it. In many ways, this structure warrants attention because it applies as much to humanity’s relationship with God as it does to the relationship between two human beings.

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The implication is that, if human beings break a promise, if they abrogate their responsibilities, either to God or to each other, the world darkens, and the world loses any meaning. However subtle, these differences are interpretively significant because, even if Newman and Heidegger saw eye to eye insofar as the conversation between man and God having ceased, it seems, as indicated above, that Heidegger was more inclined to fault humanity for this misfortune. In which case, the existential scenario Newman proposes is more tragic. Were human beings at fault for halting the dialogue, as Heidegger insinuates, the implication is that they have the power to reestablish it by mending their ways. If they would only pay attention to Being and heed the primordial role of language, if only poets would endure the Between without suffering their inequality to the gods, the conversation might resume. But if God’s jealousy, as Newman insinuates, casts humanity out of the Garden, and if God fails to provide humanity with any explanation for its suffering—as symbolized by Christ’s unanswered cry on the cross—then the prospects for the conversation being reestablished are ominous indeed. Yet an alignment between Newman and Heidegger is feasible by postulating God’s withdrawal as a punishment for the inauthentic use of language and for humanity’s exploitation of the earth. When we construe nature as standing reserve, we ignore what entities actually are. In the process, not only is the reality of an entity disguised, but so is the meaning of Being. If enframing holds sway, Being itself withdraws: “Being remain[s] unthought because it withdraws. . . . It harbors itself safely within its truth and conceals itself in such harboring.”68 Heidegger is describing a grievous process wherein human activity provokes the withdrawal of Being no less than that of God. These two events are connected if the conversation between humanity and the divine misfires on account of men abrogating their responsibility to use language poetically and be custodians of the earth. One might speculate that, for Newman, the manipulative use of technology posed an inordinate threat to humanity; for Heidegger, it poisoned the interaction between gods and men. Inspired by Hölderlin, the philosopher describes rivers as the “living spirit of those poets who, standing between men and gods, must first establish the ground of this open between-realm which springs from their being. In this openness alone do gods and men find one another.”69 For Heidegger, then, nature represents this opening. As it unfolds, it is incumbent upon poets to be “open for divinity and humanity. . . . The poet shows this open realm of the between in which he himself must dwell in such a manner that his saying, showing, following the origin, and thus is that which endures, securing itself in the holy [i.e., nature] which is to come into words.”70 Assuming their function as mediators, the poets allow men and gods to enter in conversation, so long as the conversation stays true to the origins, and respects the nature of the holy. The poets, Heidegger continues, build the house into which the gods

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enter as guests: “The poets consecrate the soil.”71 In many ways, this harks back to Newman’s statement that artists should attempt to express “the majestic force of our earthly ties and natures. In so bringing us down to earth they confront us with the problems of man’s spirituality.”72 In Hölderlin’s poetry, moreover, the relation between men and gods is likened to a wedding of heaven and earth. Respect for nature fuels the poets’ ability to express themselves and reside in the true; all of which establishes the appropriate ground for humanity and divinity to meet. For Heidegger, however, our technological-industrial domination has spread over the planet as a whole. As nature is exploited as standing reserve, “the earth and heaven of [Hölderlin’s] poem have vanished.”73 The flight of the gods may thus be attributed to a host of reasons, but humanity’s decimation of the earth may be as much of a contributing factor as its abuse of language. In the following passage, Heidegger mentions these occurrences in close proximity: “the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative.”74 Several pages later, he again collapses these events: “The essential episodes of this darkening are: the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the standardization of man.”75 For men and gods to reunite requires human beings to regain an attitude of humility toward the world. By dwelling poetically, humanity can save the earth and await the divinities.76 Newman, given his diatribes against the scientific drive to conquer, would have sympathized with this view. Accordingly, one may conjecture that the large areas of bare canvas at the center of the Stations represent that unbridgeable gap between the human and the divine. Whether he would have attributed its existence, if only partially, to what Heidegger called enframing and he himself called science’s drive to conquer is difficult to say. But in Heidegger’s philosophy, humanity’s abuse of nature is symptomatic of the world’s darkening, an event to which the flight of the gods is closely connected; in Newman’s, the drive to conquer obviously runs afoul of humanity’s primordial responses of awe before nature, and stymies our spiritual sense of presence.77 The connection between the exploitation of nature and the withdrawal of God is even more intimately interrelated when Heidegger aligns the controlling aspect of modern technology with Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power, and, in turn, with the latter’s famous proclamation that God is dead. As already insinuated, the question of the “death of God” was frequently addressed at the time Newman painted The Stations, a debate to which he referred himself.78 Heidegger, of course, made his own contribution. If Nietzsche’s will to power is acknowledged as the essence of Being, Heidegger interjects, the earth itself becomes “the object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere . . . as the object of technology.”79 Under these conditions, the key question becomes this: What

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happens to Being in an age where the unconditional will to power holds sway? The answer: Being itself is transformed into a value.80 Yet no worse fate can befall Being. When awarded a value, Being “has been despoiled of the dignity of its essence. . . . [E]very way to the experience of Being it itself obliterated.”81 In a culture dominated by technology, everything is assigned a value. The same, Heidegger argues, is true of God. Yet God is degraded (even by believers and theologians) when he is valued, even if he is awarded the highest value. Bestowing value is the very activity that accounts both for the death of God and also for humanity’s killing of God. Assigning values, Heidegger continues, “is radical killing. . . . The value-thinking of the metaphysics of the will to power is murderous in a most extreme sense.”82 Conventional religion and theology, by making God into a value, have killed God. It is obvious that, for Heidegger, many of the questions we have covered thus far represented facets of the same predicament. Human beings become Daseins when they become conscious of Being; this level of awareness stems from their ability to use language and express their condition; language is a gift from the gods so that human beings may enter into conversation with the divine, a responsibility that falls squarely on the poets and artists who best employ this gift and celebrate nature in a way that is respectful, that allows the holy to show itself in its unveiling. From many of Newman’s statements, and from the evocative nature of many of his titles, one can conjecture that the artist would have consented. If Newman believed that artists express “our earthly ties and natures” and confront “the problems of man’s spirituality” by “bringing us down to earth,” Heidegger, while interpreting the poetry of Georg Trakl, dwelled on the idea that the human soul “still seeks the earth; it does not flee from it. This fulfills the soul’s being: through wandering to seek the earth so that she may poetically build and dwell upon it, and thus may be able to save the earth as earth.”83 It is also obvious that Newman, given the attitude of domination he saw as endemic to modern science, would also have subscribed to Heidegger’s negative view of modern technology. What is less clear, however, is whether he would have coupled this idea to God’s abandonment of humanity in the way Heidegger seems to attribute the cessation of the conversation to humanity’s exploitation of the earth and to the pervasiveness of enframing. If Newman’s views come very close to Heidegger’s, they also diverge insofar as Newman attributed the short-circuiting of the conversation to God (if it is legitimate to frame the question in this way) and Heidegger to humanity. Even so, Newman’s proclivity to side with humanity would not have precluded agreeing with Heidegger’s tenet that we live in a time of forgetfulness. Whether he would have gone so far as to ascribe God’s abandonment, if only provisionally, to our having broken our promise and forgotten the nature of our covenant is impossible to say (although The Promise and Covenant are titles Newman used).

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Heidegger himself was inconsistent, occasionally expressing views very close to Newman’s. On the issue of forgetfulness, for example, Heidegger writes, “‘To forget’ can mean that something eludes us and has escaped; but it can also mean that we let it escape and even drive it from our mind. Forgetting is sometimes a losing, sometimes a dismissing, and sometimes even both. . . . But there is still another kind of forgetting, where it is not we who forget something, but rather something forgets us, so that we are the ones who are forgotten.”84 This passage leaves the question open as to whether God has forgotten humanity, or humanity God. Either way, this would still leave humanity in a similar state of abandonment, a state of thrownness. Still, even if Heidegger’s view is that God has withdrawn, and that the conversation has ended, our responsibility as human beings remains to be vigilant, and the plight of our condition that we endure this withholding with resilience and determination.85 We must preserve the truth of Being no matter what may happen to us or to everything that exists. Many of Newman’s statements, arguably, point to a similar conclusion. We cannot fathom the meaning of our existence (as symbolized in the unanswerability of the “human cry” of Christ on the Cross—“God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), yet we have no other choice but to abide and comply (as symbolized in Christ’s lack of protest). It is the very way in which we are forced to resign—even surrender—ourselves to a potentially inexplicable form of subsistence that, for both Newman and Heidegger, gives life its “sense of tragedy.”86

Notes 1. SWI, 140. 2. SWI, 90. 3. SWI, 98. 4. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 287. 5. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowing), 308. 6. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 145. 7. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 287. 8. OWL, 78. 9. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 279–80. 10. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 277. 11. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 280.

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12. “Poetry,” the philosopher writes, “is the establishing of being by means of the word” (“Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 281). 13. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 282. 14. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 282. 15. EHP, 82. 16. EHP, 82. 17. EHP, 86. 18. EHP, 90. 19. EHP, 91. 20. EHP, 92. 21. Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 55. 22. EHP, 92. 23. EHP, 141. 24. SWI, 305. 25. EHP, 160. 26. SWI, 188. 27. SWI, 188. 28. SWI, 190. 29. SWI, 188. 30. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 275. 31. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 275–76. 32. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 270. 33. See Sarah Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 185ff. 34. SWI, 188. 35. SWI, 188. 36. BT, 210. 37. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 287. 38. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 288–89. 39. Pattison, The Later Heidegger, 176. 40. SWI, 159. 41. EHP, 126. 42. EHP, 127–28. 43. EHP, 128. 44. Mark Godfrey, “Newman’s ‘Stations of the Cross,’” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 57–58. 45. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 175.

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46. Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 166. 47. Reise, “The Stance of Barnett Newman,” 58. 48. Reise, “The Stance of Barnett Newman,” 58. 49. Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 166. 50. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 328. 51. SWI, 188. 52. Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 53. Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 243. 54. See Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 198–99. 55. SWI, 190. 56. FCM, 238. 57. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 231. 58. “Barnett Newman’s Stripe Paintings and Kaballah: A Jewish Take,” 40. 59. OWL, 141: “It is only the word at our disposal which endows the thing with Being.” 60. OWL, 144. 61. OWL, 146. 62. OWL, 132. 63. OWL, 132. 64. Even without drawing an analogy explicitly, the philosopher may have blamed the withdrawal of the gods, if only in part, on humanity’s failure to meet its responsibility as the custodian of language. Humanity’s reneging on this responsibility is especially troubling, not simply because language is a gift from the gods, and the means by which the gods manifest themselves to humanity, but also (nay, especially) because of language’s ability to bestow presence and Being. Given the above, it is logical for humanity’s occlusion of language, and for its living in the forgetfulness of language’s function as a revelation of Being, to lead, in turn, to the forgetfulness of Being itself. 65. See Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (1971), 75. 66. Nan Rosenthal, “The Sculpture of Barnett Newman,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 118. 67. Gabriele Schor, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Here’ Series: A Meditation on Sense of Place, or How Can a Sculpture Say ‘I’?,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 150. 68. “The Word of Nietzsche,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 110. 69. EHP, 169. 70. EHP, 169. 71. EHP, 170. 72. SWI, 77. 73. EHP, 200. 74. IM, 38. 75. IM, 45. 76. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 156.

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77. The only Newman painting, arguably, to have a direct reference to nature in its title is Tundra, consisting of single dark red beam before a large orange field. In keeping with Newman’s recollections of his experience in Ohio, and of his claim that the most “important subject matter” was the “declaration of man’s nature against Nature,” one may again speculate that the beam’s contrast against the field stands for that same declaration. The employment of the large orange field is relatively rare in Newman’s mature work, yet when it does reappear, the three works in question—The Third, Tertia, and Triad—all reference a tripartite relationship of some sort in their title. Except for a horizontal versus a vertical format, The Third and Tertia share a near-identical compositional configuration: an orange area bounded by two yellow stripes, with gestural orange stroke upon a white area at the left. Unlike Tertia, The Third includes a smaller area of orange at the extreme right. Triad is obviously related to these two paintings except that the yellow beams have disappeared, replaced by a single, darker stripe in the right-hand section of the canvas. These three works arguably comprise variations on a theme, a series of sorts like the Stations. The theme, however, is difficult to discern from the titles and, as is always the case with Newman, from a direct observation of the works themselves. But if Tundra is placed into the mix, and if we work under the, albeit tentative, assumption, that this painting indeed represents a “declaration of man’s nature against Nature,” then two of the elements in the series (the stripes and the orange field) can be provisionally identified as humanity and nature. The third element in this trinity (i.e., the white area upon which gestural marks have been painted) is far more difficult to identify. But in view of Newman’s interest in things religious and in humanity’s relationship with God, and against Heidegger’s view of the holy (i.e., nature) as the meeting ground between men and gods, then perhaps the triadic relation Newman had in mind was indeed that between humanity, divinity, and nature. Instead of the empty spaces in the Stations, a series meant to represent the end of the conversation between humanity and divinity, The Third, Tertia, and Triad all have luminous color at their center: perhaps evoking that open “between” space of which Heidegger speaks, that open space “in which gods first come as guests, and men build a housing for the true, where they may be able to secure themselves. The poet shows this open realm of the between in which he himself must dwell in such a manner that his saying, showing, following the origin, and thus is that which endures, securing itself in the holy which is to come into words.” 78. “In 1940, some of us woke up to find ourselves without hope—to find that painting did not really exist. Or to coin a modern phrase, painting, a quarter of a century before it happened to God, was dead” (SWI, 191). 79. “The Word of Nietzsche,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 100. 80. “The Word of Nietzsche,” 102. 81. “The Word of Nietzsche,” 103. 82. “The Word of Nietzsche,” 110. 83. OWL, 163. 84. EHP, 117. 85. “[I]n the act of establishing the essence of poetry,” Heidegger writes, Hölderlin “first determines a new time. It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the god that

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is coming. It is the time of need, because it lies under a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming” (“Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 289). 86. Newman and Heidegger would also no doubt agree that, just as humanity’s forgetfulness of Being and proclivity toward enframing have compelled the gods to withdraw, art, in its opposition to the controlling attitude typical of enframing, functions as its antidote. If the poet stands in the “between,” isolated from others who do not have to bear his plight, Heidegger explains Hölderlin’s poetry as evoking both the “absence of the god” and the poet’s responsibility to wait until such time as the god returns: namely, such time as the conversation may be engaged once more. If Newman saw the Stations as symbolizing the human cry that has no answer—“God, why have you forsaken me?”— Heidegger writes that the poet “must remain near the failure of the god [i.e., his absence], and wait long enough in the prepared proximity of the failure, until out of the proximity of the failing god the initial word is granted, which names the High one” (Heidegger, “Remembrance of the Poet,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 265). This responsibility falls upon the shoulders of the poet alone: Heidegger cites Hölderlin’s verse: “Cares like these, whether he wills or no, a singer/Must bear in his soul and often, but the others not” (Heidegger, “Remembrance of the Poet,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 265). This is highly reminiscent of Newman’s statement that “the futility of an artist’s act . . . intensifies the tragedy of his life above the normal tragedy of other men, who, suffering equally with the artists, cannot, in their suffering, permit themselves the despair of self-awareness, this sense of futility” (SWI, 112). Although the poet alone bears this burden of waiting to reengage the conversation with God, this does not absolve the “others” of their own responsibility: namely, to listen to what the poet has to say.

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CHAPTER 13

Epistemology

It is not the contention of this book that the entirety of Newman’s production betrays affinities with Heidegger’s philosophy (the Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? series, for example, has little, if anything, in common with the themes already broached). The contention, rather, is that, although some of the ideas outlined in the preceding pages are, admittedly, not exclusive to Heidegger, one would be hard pressed to find more cumulative points of intersection, more potential parallels, or more analogous uses of language between Newman and any other philosopher. (It is also conceivable, from the other side, that even more connections between Newman and Heidegger remain to be discovered, but that the present author, an art historian with limited command of Heidegger’s ideas, simply overlooked them.) It therefore stretches credulity to assume that one’s philosophy of art developed independently of the other’s philosophy of Being. Many of Newman’s comments on the importance of presence and place postdate the translation of Being and Time in 1962—which also coincides with the talk the artist delivered at Hunter College, conflating his concern with place with the concept of Da-sein. Parallels with Heideggerian thought occur in Newman’s writings even prior to the publication of Brock’s anthology in 1949, the first time Newman could have encountered Heidegger’s philosophy in English, suggesting that he may have acquired a familiarity with Heideggerian notions from secondary sources. In which case, it is likely that Newman found in Heidegger a kindred spirit, a philosopher whose views reinforced, as well as helped him formulate, his own; a philosopher in whose conceptual framework his own ideas could fit. Accordingly, the ubiquitous zip in his canvases would not stand for a human being per se, but for a metaphysical concept such as Da-sein. Neither palpable nor impalpable, neither body nor soul, simultaneously schematic and vivid, abstract yet concrete, sometimes clearly bounded and other times nebulous, the beam provided a way of making spectators aware of their own selves 261

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without necessarily representing a specific person with facial features, protective clothing, or social attributes. In a sense, Heidegger’s way of thinking, with minor adjustments, supplied Newman with an intellectual template for an art form that could legitimately qualify as abstract, yet capable, at least for him, of communicating metaphysical ideas. As Heidegger put it, “That which really is, Being, which from the start calls and determines all beings, can never be made out . . . by ascertaining facts, by appealing to particulars.”1 From a Heideggerian stance, an “evocation” of Being as presence provides an example of “pointing out . . . to let beings be seen from themselves. . . . [P]ointing out designates the being itself, not a mere representation of it, neither something ‘merely represented’ nor even a psychical condition of the speaker.”2 This concept coincides with Newman’s ambition to create works that allow individual spectators to think of themselves not as beings that exist for a specific purpose (i.e., to exploit or be exploited), but who are free to become something more than they actually are. The latitude with which Da-sein can be interpreted, in turn, provides the audience with a license to project a multiplicity of meanings upon the zip. On this account, the economy of Newman’s formal solutions may be highly deceptive, a parallel to the many possibilities available to a futural form of existence. As Michael Tomasello observed, individuals who know each other intimately, and who partake of common forms of knowledge, can abbreviate their communications without shortchanging the richness of their messages: “[T]he meaning conveyed by a one-unit utterance may be as complex as you wish—depending on the joint attentional context within which it is used.” Both the “complexity of what is communicated, as what is communicated,” he continues, “depends not only on what is on the communicative signal explicitly but also on what is in the common ground implicitly.”3 As Newman spent time perusing his work, sharpening its intellectual complexity, mulling over how to devise formal solutions to communicate his ideas, he slowly established an interpretive ground for his art. Unfortunately, he divulged this ground only in the most general of ways. His statements clarify his interest in metaphysical issues, in conveying a sense of presence and place, but without specifying how specific elements in individual paintings induce these sensations. This reluctance impeded the communicative process; whenever we engage in everyday conversation, Tomasello contends, we do two things simultaneously. On the one hand, we “attempt to understand the overall meaning of the utterance: what does the speaker want me to do, know, or feel?” On the other, we engage in what he calls “blame assignment”: “what role is being played by each of the internal constituents of the utterance.”4 Newman may have explained the first, but not the second. This reticence left critics frustrated over their inability to “understand” how Newman’s abstractions communicate the metaphysical meanings he men-

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tioned in his statements. While pondering his work’s implications over the years, Newman slowly established the interpretive ground to understand his art, but by withholding that ground from the public, he unwittingly inhibited the audience’s capacity to engage in “blame assignment.” What is more, he pared down his work, simplifying it to the extreme. And just as individuals sharing a common ground can encode their messages, anticipating and deciphering meanings with a modicum of clues, Newman took this same course on an individual rather than communal basis. As his paintings became progressively simpler, their meanings drifted toward arbitrariness, which, following Tomasello’s analysis of linguistic change, may prevent new learners from understanding these newly “reduced, reanalyzed forms” when they are then “combined in discourse.”5 Looking at a Newman without access to his intentional background, then, is comparable to being transported several hundred years in the future without having kept up with all the myriad of changes our language will inevitably undergo, and finding ourselves at a loss to understand our own fellow native speakers. But if we employ Heidegger’s philosophy as a form of common ground, substituting “projection” for “understanding,” perhaps the implications of Newman’s canvases become at once more concrete and more open. More concrete, because meanings can be assigned to Newman’s work, and more open, because those meanings are fluid and mutable. “To understand,” Heidegger writes, “means, more specifically, to project oneself upon a possibility, in this projection to keep oneself at all times in a possibility.”6 Our existence, in other words, has meaning, not in what we are, but in what we may be in the future: “as long as Da-sein exists, it must always, as such a potentiality, not yet be something.”7 “A constant unfinished quality,” Heidegger contends, “thus lies in the essence of the constitution of Da-sein.”8 Our responsibility, then, is to achieve a portion of this potential. When Newman titled one of his canvases with the imperative Be, he was entreating his audience to do likewise: to exist, to become what it not yet is. Were this indeed Newman’s intent, then his work is not prone to be “understood,” if by “understood” one means extracting a preestablished meaning common to both the employer and consumer of the sign. The meaning, rather, has a certain “unfinished” quality about it, contingent on the individual spectator’s emotional reaction to a particular piece, and on the extent to which he or she may project metaphysical meaning upon it. A painting, then, is a trigger, a catalyst, for grasping and anticipating the possibilities one is yet to satisfy. A portentous question remains, however. If Heidegger’s philosophy inflected Newman as strongly as is claimed here, why did he never mention it in his public writings or statements—with the possible exception of the 1962 lecture at Hunter? In many ways, this question haunts this study from start to finish. And though, admittedly, no definitive answer can be forthcoming, one may offer several provisional explanations. Given the premium placed upon originality in

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the twentieth century, and the way the term “derivative” has become a marker to be shunned above all else, it is almost predictable that, like many modern artists, Newman took precautions to hide rather than reveal his sources. There is no shortage of modernist artists, after all, who disseminated false information about, or took umbrage whenever prototypes were proposed for, their own work.9 Newman was notorious in this regard, quick to take offense if anyone identified influences in his paintings,10 and highly secretive about his own motivations—forbidding his wife from ever discussing his Stations of the Cross series with anyone, lest colleagues like Motherwell or Rothko steal his idea.11 Whether such acute defensiveness also bespeaks a desire to conceal his own philosophical sources cannot be verified, but it supplies an explanation, albeit a tentative one, for his failure, had he been reading Heidegger, to acknowledge this intellectual relationship in his published writings or interviews. All the same, one may object that acknowledging the influence of a philosopher hardly impugns an artist’s originality. Though reluctant to concede having borrowed from Munch and Matisse, the members of the Expressionist group Die Brücke had no qualms about declaiming their admiration for Nietzsche,12 and Pollock’s disclaimer, that resemblances between his work and Native American Art were unintentional,13 did not prevent him from conceding his admiration for Jung and Freud.14 But Newman’s case is different. Different, because Newman’s ambition was to place artistic activity on “the plane of the philosopher,” meaning that he fancied himself a thinker no less than a painter, and was even cast in that very role by many a contemporary. In which case, admitting to falling under the spell of another philosopher would, in his eyes, have tarnished his originality no less than borrowing formal strategies from other artists. Still, there may be more profound, less pedestrian reasons for Newman’s silence. Before investigating these possibilities in the next chapter, it is worth revisiting an issue already mentioned in the introduction: namely, that Heidegger is referenced in this study to discover whether parallels between his ideas and Newman’s are numerous and compelling enough to make the case either for direct influence, or for using the philosopher to advance a reading of Newman’s work. Even if success could be alleged on both counts, such claims should not be taken as an uncritical endorsement of Heideggerian thought. In this book, Heideggerian philosophy functions as a time-bound and culture-specific attempt to address certain phenomenological and ontological questions—not as an unbiased, universal “truth,” or as a model methodology to interpret art in general, or abstract art in particular. If Newman came to appreciate Heidegger’s ideas, it was, primarily, because they reinforced his own, and, secondarily, because of the inordinate force with which they resonated at a specific moment in history. The detonation of atomic weapons, the division of Europe, the discovery of Nazi death camps, and the political and ideological tensions stemming from the Cold

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War made existentialist philosophy particularly attractive in the years during and following World War II. For Robert Motherwell, one of Newman’s New York School colleagues, abstract art also “arose from a feeling of being ill at ease in the universe.”15 For many intellectuals, especially those disinclined to Marxism or psychoanalysis, Heidegger’s notions of humanity being thrown into the world, living in a state of primordial isolation and terror, having to be resolute in the face of death, could not have captured the tenor of the times any more powerfully—times that witnessed the publication of W. H. Auden’s The Age of Anxiety and Rollo May’s The Meaning of Anxiety.16 Existential terms became so fashionable in contemporary parlance that the very first chapter of Arthur M. Schlesinger’s The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom of 1949 was titled “Politics in the Age of Anxiety.”17 Thus, even as key tenets of Heideggerian thought may be valued today (e.g., the critique of collective thinking or of modern technology’s exploitation of the earth), it cannot be gainsaid that existentialist philosophy emerged from, and became most popular during, a particular set of historical conditions. Accordingly, it should hardly be surprising if many of the assumptions upon which Newman and Heidegger built their intellectual systems have slowly fallen into disfavor in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It was iterated in the introduction that, to argue for the legitimacy of employing Heidegger to interpret Newman’s work, the philosopher’s ideas had to be referenced neutrally, even sympathetically, as commenting on some of the objections launched against the thinker’s ideas would invariably interrupt the flow of the argument. Now that these ideas have been laid out and this study is drawing to a close, this restriction may be lifted. Not that all of Heidegger’s ideas need to be subjected to critique in such a limited context, of course, a task requiring full-length studies unto themselves and best left to professional philosophers, but it is appropriate that at least some reservations be mentioned here, particularly if they may extend to Newman’s own philosophy of art. A refrain in Heideggerian thought, for example, is a quest for essences: either of Being, man, language, truth, art, thinking, science, or technology. It is critical, the philosopher declared, that the essence of the “animality of the animal” be distinguished from “the essence of the humanity of man.”18 “Unless we are guided by a developed knowledge of tree-ness,” he also proclaimed, “we can look over thousands and thousands of trees in vain—we shall not see the tree for the trees.”19 “The universal that holds for each thing,” he wrote elsewhere, “is called its essence or nature.”20 Yet the very legitimacy of the old Platonic idea of “essence”—whether such a thing as “tree-ness” (rather than just individual trees) actually exists—has held little credence in twentieth-century thought. Platonic ideas, Ludwig Wittgenstein submits, “are false idealizations. . . . [S]omeone who idealizes falsely must talk nonsense—because he uses a mode of speaking that is

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valid in one language-game in another one where it doesn’t belong.”21 Adorno, from a completely different vantage point, would have concurred: “The newly created Plato [Heidegger],” he writes, “is more Platonic than the authentic one.”22 But the upshot is highly problematic from an epistemological point of view. Any attempt to discern something such as the essence of language, Wittgenstein contends, is a “pursuit of chimeras,”23 a “pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off.”24 (It is not simply how indefensible essentialist claims have proven that bears mentioning; it is also, as Herman Philipse has argued, how much they contradict Heidegger’s other assertions about phenomenology being hermeneutical, and hermeneutics being historical.25) Some of Heidegger’s defenders, such as Parvis Emad, have rejoined that the philosopher’s use of the term Wesen should not be interpreted as essence, but in the “sense of ‘ownmost inner possibility.’ . . . ‘[E]ssence’ distorts the terminological meaning of Wesen, insofar as ‘essence’ is merely one of the several meanings of Wesen and so cannot account for the wholesale presence of a being called Dasein.”26 This observation is quite persuasive when applied to Da-sein, since Da-sein is possibility. One wonders, however, what the “ownmost inner possibility” of a tree might be—or even of an animal, especially as Heidegger consigned animals to a ring of inhibition. If one redefines “essence” to mean one’s relation to Being, this might again apply to Da-sein, since Da-sein’s essence is having such a relation. But how can it apply to animals or trees, who have no such relation? Even if “essence” conjures merely one of the several meanings Heidegger has in mind, the concept, if accepted as only one aspect of Da-sein, would still draw a considerable amount of fire. Relying on Ferdinand de Saussure’s concept of the arbitrariness of the sign, for example, structuralist thinkers have argued that meaning is purely relational, the outcome of differences and oppositions, rather than reflecting the inherent value of positive terms. On this account, a concept such as “tree-ness” would neither exist nor have any intrinsic meaning; it would only qualify as a social convention invented to differentiate “tree” from other descriptive, but no less conventional, terms (e.g., “bush,” “brush,” “shrub,” “flower,” “plant”). The meaning of “tree,” therefore, is flexible and mutable. Flexible and mutable, not because its potential has yet to be fulfilled, but because the meaning of the term alters and changes depending on the term to which it is opposed, a condition that applies, no less forcefully, to all the other terms mentioned. This means, moreover, that no concept has indissoluble authority. The frequency with which words are invented, drop out of usage, or have no equivalent in other languages, reinforces the view that language is an intricate system of arbitrary, conventional signs, neither a transparent reflection of an actual state of affairs in the world, nor of essences that exist independently of the function of the terms themselves.

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Analogously, structuralist thinkers have declared the “self,” a concept obviously crucial to both Newman and Heidegger, to be an ideological construct, the product of complex social relationships rather than an essence with legitimate ontological status. In a notable example, Roland Barthes’s essay “The Structural Analysis of Narrative,” literary characters are denied integral or autonomous status. “Structural analysis,” Barthes declares, “has shown the utmost reluctance to treat the [literary] character as an essence.”27 This approach, Barthes continues, defines “a character not as a ‘being’ but as a participant.’”28 Literary characters, in other words, even those in Greek tragedy, have neither “Being” nor “essence.” To sharpen his point, Barthes refers approvingly to A. J. Greimas’s recommendation that characters be defined “not according to what they are but according to what they do.”29 In this scenario, meaning stems from the ways in which the character’s actions are inscribed within a network of relations permissible within the fabric of the narrative as a whole. Even on the basis of this cursory account, it is easy to see Heidegger and Barthes arguing at cross-purposes. Intriguingly, the structuralist denial of essences parallels several statements made by Abstract Expressionist artists. Robert Motherwell, for one, expressed the view that meaning is not “in” the elements themselves, but “the product of the relation between elements.”30 Likewise, Hans Hofmann wrote that a “thing in itself never expresses anything. It is the relation between things that gives meaning to them and formulates a thought.”31 For de Kooning, “There’s no way of looking at a work of art by itself; it’s not self-evident—it needs a history.”32 And Rothko, though he never explained why, insisted that his works only be shown in groups, presumably because he realized how difficult interpreting his abstractions would prove in isolation. Displaying an entire group of paintings, conversely, would help spectators locate an individual work’s singular resonance within the gamut of the artist’s expressive range. In keeping with our Western proclivity to associate darker colors with negative and lighter colors with positive emotions, Rothko reasoned that providing a selective assortment of pieces might encourage his audience to read the darkest painting as the most tragic and the lightest as the least tragic. Once such points of reference are established, spectators would be able to locate intermediary paintings toward one end of the scale or the other, providing invaluable assistance in the interpretation of individual pieces. If this were indeed Rothko’s motivation, it would supply an acknowledgement, if only a tacit one, that meaning is relational, that it does not lie “in” the painting itself but is construed differently by individual spectators in different contexts. The upshot is that no painting signifies by itself, independently of the relations a beholder construes among a multiplicity of paintings. From this perspective, Newman’s statements that “painting itself speaks for itself,” that his work was “concrete and self-evident,” or that “the self, terrible

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and constant,” was, for him, the subject matter of painting, could hardly be more different. These comments echo Heidegger’s conviction, that “to gain access to the work [of art], it would be necessary to remove it from all relations to something other than itself, in order to let it stand on its own for itself alone.”33 They also corroborate Yve-Alain Bois’s observation that Newman’s aesthetics are “radically anti-structural,”34 though it cannot be gainsaid that the artist’s fastidiousness about exhibitions betrays a marked tension between his verbal statements and his actual practice.35 If a painting “speaks for itself,” if its meaning is “concrete and self-evident,” it should, theoretically speaking, communicate irrespective of context or exhibition conditions—a radically anti-structural idea. Heidegger’s account of language, likewise, could not be more different from Barthes’s or Saussure’s. One might even say that the whole expressionist or existentialist enterprise—to communicate directly and without mediation to the observer, or to have the human being assert its existence in the midst of an irrational universe, respectively—is largely inimical to the structuralist project. No less contentious is Heidegger’s assertion that “[s]peaking is a listening to the language which we speak.”36 Although most linguists work under the assumption that only human subjects speak—not language—Heidegger intimates that language itself does speak: “What do we hear there? We hear language speaking. But—does language speak itself? How is it supposed to perform such a feat when obviously it is not equipped with organs of speech? Yet language speaks.”37 To attribute speech—as Heidegger does—to language as well as to a human subject is, arguably, to engage in a kind of pathetic fallacy.38 Yet Heidegger insists that language “needs human speaking.”39 On one level, of course, Heidegger is correct—were it not for human beings, language would not exist—but to say that language “needs” human speaking is somewhat confusing. Numerous modes of communication exist that are exclusively written or that do not require speaking (e.g., sign language, Morse code). Language, moreover, is just an intellectual concept; it cannot experience the “need” for anything—only living beings experience “needs.” Yet this is hardly the only example of Heidegger projecting human characteristics onto abstract ideas. Being also “needs” humanity—accounting for Heidegger’s insistence that man is the shepherd of Being, and that without man, Being falls into oblivion. Admittedly, it makes sense to say that if human beings neglect to ponder the question of Being, Being falls into oblivion. But Heidegger’s terminology suggests that Being itself (although it is not a being) has some form of autonomous agency, that, in direct response to human action, it either withdraws or comes into presence.40 This is difficult to grasp, especially as Heidegger also declares Being to be the primary reality—invested with such a mystical, religious aura that some commentators claim Heidegger conceives of it in terms analogous to God.41 One could again

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see a philosopher such as Wittgenstein bashing Heidegger for speaking nonsense. Neither language, he would rejoin, nor Being “need” human activity because only animate beings “need.” On this point, Rockmore observed, “Since we know no more about Being than about the thing-in-itself, claims for a link to its ‘withdrawal’ cannot be based on direct knowledge, or experience, or anything other than an apparently ‘mystical insight’ into what is.”42 The same applies to the terms Heidegger employs to describe presence and un-concealment. “What is presently present in unconcealment,” Heidegger contends, “lingers in unconcealment as in an open expanse. Whatever lingers (or whiles) in the expanse proceeds to it from unconcealment and arrives in unconcealment. But what is present is arriving or lingering insofar as it is also departing from unconcealment towards concealment. . . . It endures in approach and withdrawal.”43 Heidegger’s use of words such as “lingers,” “proceeds,” “arriving,” “departing,” and “endures” to clarify what comes into presence, though obviously metaphorical, again invokes a certain degree of self-determination. The very term “presencing” also connotes agency: “What is for the time being present, what presently is, comes to presence out of absence. . . . Everything present in unconcealment in this way presents itself to all others, each after its own fashion.”44 Though necessary for this process, Da-sein acts only as a facilitator; man, the philosopher writes, “is that present being which, illuminating, apprehending, and thus gathering, lets what is present as such become present in unconcealment . . . [but] it does not mean that what is present is nothing but an object wholly dependent upon the seer’s subjectivity.”45 On the one hand, Heidegger argues that Being and language “need” man, but, on the other, that the presencing of Being exists outside of, or precedes, a subject/object relationship. Oblivion, the philosopher writes, should be experienced “as a pure event,” not “on the basis of the comportment of man in the sense of the later ‘forgetting.’”46 Man should not, he adds, “posit himself as ‘subject’ in the modern sense and declare Being to be his representation.”47 Rather than being the result of a subject/object relationship, it is “the essence of [aletheia] that makes it impossible for something like the subject-object relationship to arise.”48 Heidegger thus asserts that Being “needs” man, the being called upon by Being to bring and experience the unconcealed out of its concealment. But he also describes that which comes into presence as doing so independently of a human subject, as if it were endowed with agency and free will: “What has arrived [in presence] may even insist upon its while [where it lingers] solely to remain more present, in the sense of perduring. That which lingers perseveres in its presencing. In this way it extricates itself from this transitory while. It strikes the willful pose of persistence, no longer concerning itself with whatever else is present. It stiffens—as if this were the way to linger—and aims solely for continuance and subsistence.”49

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But Heidegger’s commitment to associate “truth” and “falsehood” with concealment and un-concealment makes it difficult to construe this relationship independently of a subject/object dynamic. If something is concealed or un-concealed, it is so for someone, not in the abstract, not as a “pure event.” Heidegger seeks to wiggle out of this dilemma by claiming that Da-sein is not a subject, that Da-sein is transcendence (albeit in finite form). Since subjectivity is ontic and Da-sein is ontological, then Da-sein cannot be a subject. But on what grounds do we accept this premise? To follow Heidegger’s argument here requires conceding it in advance. His explanations are the more obscure since his own examples reinforce the reading of occlusion as pertaining to a human subject. “The cupboard placed before the door,” he writes, “not only disguises the door by covering over—i.e., concealing—the wall which at this place has an opening, but rather, the cupboard can be disguising to the point that it pretends there is no door at all in the wall. The cupboard disguises the door, and by being placed before it, it distorts the ‘actual’ state of the wall.” In this way, the “essential relation between the ‘false,’ as the opposite of the true, and concealing as the opposite of disclosure (the occurrence of unconcealedness) now becomes clear.”50 Not at all. The cupboard does not disguise the door as a pure event; whoever moved the cupboard in that location, or witnessed its displacement, knows all too well that a door stands behind it. As do any individuals who have foreknowledge of the room, which means that the door is hidden only to those who are not in the know. Nor does it mean that the cupboard necessarily hides the wall. “You look at a face,” Wittgenstein writes, “and say ‘I wonder what’s going on behind that face?’—But you don’t have to say that. The external does not have to be seen as a façade behind which the mental powers are at work.”51 If structuralists rejected the idea of essence, deconstructionists set an even more radical rejection of Heideggerian premises into motion. It is common knowledge, of course, that Jacques Derrida was heavily indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy—he disavowed the feasibility of his own project “without the opening of Heidegger’s questions”52—and is often portrayed as a defender of the philosopher against charges of his Nazi involvement. But he also criticized the major premises endorsed by his predecessor, and characterized the thrust of his work as a radical “departure from the Heideggerian problematic.”53 More specifically, Derrida dismissed the quest for origins (or original meanings) as deluded and the notion of presence as an epistemological illusion. He even described deconstruction as “putting into question the major determination of Being as presence, the determination in which Heidegger recognized the destiny of philosophy.”54 Though Derrida admired Heidegger, calling his work “the most ‘profound’ and ‘powerful’ defense of what I attempt to put into question under the rubric of the thought of presence,”55 the deconstructionist signature concept of différance—the

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idea that meaning is never recoverable in a stable or definitive way—stands, for all intents and purposes, as a blatant negation of presence. “The play of differences,” Derrida writes, “supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself.”56 The spatial connotations of différance can also be construed as a direct refutation of Heidegger’s concept of de-distancing. Once différance is set into motion (and, for Derrida, there is no situation wherein différance is inactive), presence becomes an epistemological impossibility. In fact, Derrida came to see the whole notion of presence in such a derogatory light that the expression “falling prey to the metaphysics of presence” has become the rhetorical weapon of choice whenever deconstructionists aim to disparage their ideological opponents. And this is just the beginning. Once the phenomenon of différance is assumed to permeate all acts of signification, most key Heideggerian notions (e.g., any quest for origins and authenticity) are unmasked as philosophical chimeras. Meaning, Derrida insists, is disseminated into such a “nonfinite number of semantic effects [that it] can be led back neither to a present of simple origin . . . nor to an eschatological presence.”57 Not only the “concept of origin,” but also the value of “original authenticity,” by extension, is abrogated.58 Speaking of authenticity, Wittgenstein would have seriously questioned that other keystone of the Heideggerian system. One can no more be authentic or resolved, he would have argued, than one can invent a private language; the reason being that speaking a language is contingent on following a predetermined set of codified rules, rules that are public and whose appropriate usage can be independently corroborated. Individuals speaking a private language have no such recourse; in other words, they cannot discern the difference between following a rule and only thinking they are following a rule. And the same, Wittgenstein would have posited, applies to the assessment of one’s own mental states: we simply cannot distinguish being in a certain state of mind from only thinking we are in a state of mind. Analogously, Heidegger claimed that one’s way of Being could be authentic or inauthentic, but how could we differentiate being authentic from only thinking we were being authentic? If Heidegger allowed Da-sein to judge its own truth, its own authenticity, Wittgenstein would have rejoined that this task lies beyond Da-sein’s capabilities. Heidegger claims, for instance, that when Da-sein understands its possibilities, it is being summoned “to its ownmost possibility of existence. It has chosen itself.”59 The meaning of Da-sein, Heidegger insists, “is not something different from it, unattached and ‘outside’ of it, but is self-understanding Da-sein itself.”60 But, again, the Viennese logician would have asked: By what metric does one measure authenticity? What is the difference between choosing one’s self and only thinking one is choosing one’s self, understanding one’s self and only thinking one is understanding one’s self?

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Similarly, we have already related Adorno’s objection to the arbitrariness of Heidegger’s distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity.61 As the categories that fall within the definition of authenticity are assigned to Da-sein itself, and those that fall without it to Da-sein when it is not itself, one cannot help but wonder on what grounds, other than purely arbitrary ones, are Da-sein’s essential and inessential properties determined? It is not simply the arbitrariness with which these characteristics are attached that elicits Adorno’s negative commentary (characteristics that are “fished out” and miraculously “exhibited as something concrete”62); it is also their broader political implications. Heidegger’s description of humanity’s thrownness in the world, its state of abandonment and homelessness, gives nothing to man other than “powerlessness and nothingness as his substance.” And for all his pronouncements about the historicity of Da-sein, its being thrown in a concrete, factical situation, Heidegger’s analyses of historical conditions have neither specificity nor concreteness. Heidegger transposes his scenarios “into the pure essence of Man. It becomes affirmed and eternalized at the same time.” It therefore follows, Adorno posits, that human misfortunes “are to be accepted, not to be changed.” Heidegger’s views are pernicious because they encourage surrender, not resistance, to injustice. We endure our nothingness as our way of Being and “revere actual, avoidable, or at least corrigible need as the most human element in the image of Man.”63 One need not necessarily agree with Wittgenstein and Adorno, of course, or endorse all structuralist and deconstructionist precepts, to see how problematic Heideggerian ideas have proven in our present intellectual climate. And even if Heidegger were applied in a purely historical way—in full cognizance of the culture-specificity of his ideas, and connected to Newman only because the artist held similar views—it must be conceded that, given their similarity in outlook, any disparagements of Heidegger would extend to Newman as well. On this score, the artist’s belief in the self-evident transparency of his art, in his works’ inherent embodiment of the ideas he invested in them, is especially vulnerable to critique. No less so, because his own admission of taking a year to understand Onement I patently contradicts it—though Newman, apparently, did not notice the contradiction.64 The problems do not end here. In a previous section, Newman’s claim that the first man was an artist was deemed sustainable with the proviso that the assertion be understood to mean that only Homo sapiens, say, not Neanderthals, create art. Newman’s other, related claims, however—that “man’s first speech was poetic before it became utilitarian,” that “man first built an idol of mud before he fashioned an ax,” or that “man’s hand traced the stick through the mud to make a line before he learned to throw the stick as a javelin”—are not. In fact, while axes were actually invented one and half million years ago, not to mention more primitive stone tools that existed about a million years before

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that, the first examples of art can only be dated back some seventy thousand years. Many primate species employ tools of some sort and chimpanzees even wield sticks as javelins, though they do not have the intellectual capacity and manual dexterity to draw lines in the sand in a symbolic or representational way. Newman’s contention, therefore, that the aesthetic precedes the utilitarian is unsustainable. This misstep has broader implications. Specifically, it undermines Newman’s and Heidegger’s account of verbal expression. In other words, functionality’s precedence over the aesthetic tends to contradict Newman’s view that man’s first speech was poetic before it became utilitarian or Heidegger’s that poetry makes language possible. The question of language is, of course, more delicate than that of art, if only because the relationship between vocalizations and physical artifacts is not purely symmetrical. For one thing, unlike works of art or written (graphic) forms of language, phonic vocalizations leave no lasting traces according to which chronological priority may be established. Still, it is safe to assume that, just as human beings are alone in creating art, they are also alone in composing poetry. It is not for nothing that the biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon calls human beings the “symbolic species,” and that some cognitians refer to the human mind as the “analogical mind.”65 All the same, humanity’s monopoly on art does not automatically mean that human speech was poetical before it was utilitarian. On the contrary, poetry’s heavy reliance on metaphor makes Sweetser’s argument already related in chapter 1 difficult to gainsay: namely, that if metaphorical expressions employ the physical to express the psychological, it is far more likely that expressions describing literal conditions preceded those employing similar conditions to impart abstract or conceptual ideas. Considering Shakespeare’s line “Juliet is the sun,” the contention that the word “sun” was first used to refer to objects of extreme affection and then expanded its meaning to refer to radiant celestial bodies seems counterintuitive. It remains far more persuasive, in conformity with Sweetser’s position, to construe poetry as extrapolated from literal speech than vice-versa. Newman might have rejoined that his description of original man shouting consonants in yells of awe and anger has nothing to do with Shakespeare, only with the emission of some primal scream. Admittedly, crying out in an expressive way requires far less effort than manipulating and fashioning materials aesthetically or symbolically. Human children, for example, laugh or cry without any prompting from adults, though they need some degree of instruction to learn language. It stands to reason, therefore, that Newman is justified in claiming chronological priority for such displays of emotion over utilitarian attempts to communicate. But in reducing expressivity to such outbursts, Newman is hardly identifying anything unique to humanity: animals also howl, wail, shriek, screech, or yelp.

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Animal vocalizations, however, cannot be considered “words” or “language” in the strict sense of the term.66 Even the rich repertoire of calls that animals command to warn their kin against threats, some of which even distinguish terrestrial from arboreal from aerial predators,67 do not legitimately qualify as “speech.” Implicit in Newman’s assertion that man’s first speech “was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication” is the assumption that speech is simply the matter of connecting sounds and meanings (signifiers and signifieds). That is only part of the story. To qualify as words, Terence Deacon argues, sounds must be insertable in complex, infinitely expandable sentences that permit unlimited creativity, but whose structures are underpinned by logical and combinatorial rules such as grammar and syntax. These rules, in turn, predetermine whether certain combinations are permissible or not, a restriction inapplicable to animal cries or outbursts.68 Human beings, of course, also employ cries and outbursts, and may have transformed some of these when inventing cursing. Obscenities, according to Pinker, “emerge from a deep and ancient part of the brain, like the yelp of a dog when someone steps on its tail, or its snarl when it is trying to intimidate an adversary.” “It is as though,” he continues, “the human brain were wired in the course of human evolution so that the output of an old system for calls and cries were patched into the input of the new system for articulate speech.”69 But even expletives referring to copulation and defecation, though they can stand on their own, qualify as words precisely because they are insertable in an infinite variety of sentences. Current debates on the origins of language thus provide useful clues as to whether expression or communication has primacy in human vocalization. Perhaps the linguistic situation is the mirror opposite of art. If some animals use tools, but only human beings create art, it is possible that, while animals make expressive calls, only human beings communicate complex meanings with clarity and efficiency. It has been observed, for example, that chimpanzees sometimes have trouble intuiting the intentions of their kin. To the consternation of scientists, chimps in captivity can be trained to point to objects though they hardly ever do so in the wild. The reason, according to animal behaviorists, is that chimps are far more likely to obtain the desired response from a human than from other chimps. Even apes that successfully learn sign language, and effectively communicate with humans, are incapable of communicating with one another by the same means. What transpires, according to Christine Kenneally, is “a sign-shouting match; neither ape was willing to listen.” What may be singular to humanity, then, are not vocalizations that express certain states of mind (a wish or a fear) as much as structured vocalizations organized in such as way as to communicate a complexity of intentions to another being—a being capable of comprehending and responding to them. “At its most fundamental,” Kenneally concludes, “language is an act of shared attention, and without the

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fundamentally human willingness to listen to what another person is saying, language would not work.”70 Newman may have declared that man’s first words were cries of helplessness at his tragic state, not a request for a drink of water. But the consensus among present-day psycholinguists is that one hardly needs language to cry out in helplessness, one can howl or yelp like an animal. One does need something analogous to language, however, to cooperate toward a common goal, build complex social networks, and, yes, request a drink of water. On this account, what seem most human are not expressive shrieks, but acts of cooperative and utilitarian communication. As Michael Tomasello put it, “Communicating information helpfully . . . is extremely rare in the animal kingdom, even in our closet primate relatives.”71 If a young chimpanzee is crying and searching for its mother, other chimps, though fully aware of its distress and of the mother’s whereabouts, will not direct the youngster to her location, or the mother to hers. This does not mean that chimpanzees are malevolent, only that their “communicative motives do not include informing others of things helpfully.”72 At some point in human evolution, Tomasello continues, individuals who could “engage with one another collaboratively with joint intentions, joint attention, and cooperative motives were at an adaptive advantage.”73 Which, of course, could not necessarily be said of hominids who simply yelled in anger and frustration. In fact, Tomasello’s description of primate vocalization as “mainly individualistic expressions of emotions, not recipient-directed acts”74 approximates what Newman ascribed to “man’s first speech.” In that case, just as Newman was right to identify the aesthetic and poetic as exclusively human, but wrong to see it as preceding the utilitarian in material objects and linguistic communication, he may have been right to see the expressive as preceding the communicative in primal outbursts, but wrong to identify it as exclusively human. The ambition to identify certain qualities as exclusively human, as we have seen, is also a refrain of Heideggerian philosophy. “Apes, too, have organs that can grasp,” the thinker was quoted as saying in an earlier section, “but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft.” In Heidegger’s mind, only man has language and only man can think: “only when man speaks, does he think.”75 This claim, although it delineates an area where Heidegger would actually have agreed with Saussure, Barthes, Derrida,76 and the early (though not the later) Wittgenstein,77 has also come under fire by present-day cognitians. Though it cannot be denied that language affects thought—as already related previously, it is easier to recall objects for which verbal labels or conceptual categories exist—this does not mean that there is no thought without language. Steven Pinker provides a number of reasons to discard this claim: we often have thoughts we cannot immediately verbalize, we

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work with ideas that have no verbal analogs, we recall the meanings of statements without remembering the exact wording, we quickly recognize the utility of words in other languages for which no equivalent in our own exists, and we mostly think, not in complete sentences, but in something cognitians call “mentalese.” Languages, in addition, are continuously evolving, adding words (or borrowing them from other tongues) and filling lexical gaps as new ideas, concepts, or tools are invented.78 As Pinker put it elsewhere, “the language of thought must be distinct from language itself.”79 It is no less evident, the cognitian Jean Mandler asserts, that babies “do not wait until the onset of language to start thinking.”80 Human infants, Tomasello adds, communicate meaning through gestures before acquiring language and deaf infants unexposed to sign language communicate complex meanings by inventing gestures on their own.81 These observations are not likely to surprise anyone who interacts with small children. But why stop there? The complex mental operations of animals also reinforce the view that language is no prerequisite for thought. The latest research, according to Christine Kenneally, confirms that some “complicated mental processing [is] going on in the heads of animals that do not have human language.”82 The more we study animals, she continues, “the more we realize that many different species have a lot to think about and their ways of thinking are quite sophisticated. Despite centuries of believing otherwise, we now know that it’s possible to have a complex inner and social life without syntax and words.”83 Some animals have a sense of self 84 and some bonobos and orangutans, since they can plan for future events, even have a cognizance of time.85 Suddenly, the ring of inhibition to which Heidegger had consigned the existence of animals is revealing a number of cracks. No doubt, the philosopher had something other than the everyday mental operations of animals in mind—or even of human beings, for that matter—when he declared that no thought exists without language. If thinking were redefined, not as cogitation, but as the pondering of Being, then Heidegger would be justified in asserting such pondering to exist only within the framework of language, just as he would be when bemoaning the unfortunate fact that most of us “are still not thinking.” But even if we concede this point, problems still arise. Let us assume, following Emad, that, for Heidegger, the “essence of language” is not essence in the conventional sense, but the “ownmost potential” of language, which, to his mind, would mean allowing man to speak Being and permit the possibility of “thinking” (i.e., the interrogation of Being). This reading would tally with Heidegger’s statement cited above that “a constant unfinished quality thus lies in the essence of the constitution of Da-sein. This lack of totality means that there is still something outstanding in one’s potentiality-for-being.” In this case, the potential that is ours to fulfill is more preordained than open-ended; it would perhaps be more accurate to describe it as a responsibility rather than a potential:

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that we be the shepherds of Being. For Heidegger, language is a gift from the gods, given to man as an all-or-nothing proposition, something we can employ properly or improperly, just as, for Newman, it is inconceivable that Adam “was put on earth to be a toiler, to be a social animal.” The notion that language and thought exist for a predetermined purpose, however, is difficult to countenance—not to mention that language is a gift of the gods86 (although Egyptian, Babylonian, and Hindu myths also make the same point). The idea that language is a monolith has been completely discredited in recent years.87 Its emergence cannot be likened to some miraculous “Big Bang,”88 a single, extraordinary leap forward; nor has a single “language gene” been identified in the human brain as unique to our species. In fact, although the majority of linguists have long ignored investigating the origins of language, a consensus now seems to be building around an idea first proposed by Darwin: namely, that language evolved,89 that it combined traits also in evidence in other species, though not to the same degree of refinement, nor in the same combination. Language, after all, not only requires a brain predisposed to apprehend its syntactic rules and sequential complexity, but also a physical ability to hear and differentiate sounds, and a capacity to vocalize them in return. These abilities (and there are more besides) do not represent a single skill but a variety of aptitudes, some of which, as already intimated, appear in other animals, though they are present in human beings to a more refined degree and in a combination amenable to the development of language. Ideas from linguistics, cognition, or genetics may seem miles away from those of Newman and Heidegger. But if we concede that language evolved, rather than appeared fully clad as Athena from the head of Zeus, we must also concede that it appeared, like everything subject to evolution, without a preordained purpose and independently of some predetermined plan. If evolution occurs as random mutations give an organism an advantage in the specific environment it happens to inhabit, enhancing its chances of reproducing and passing on this same advantage to its offspring, these changes could in no way have been preordained or even predicted. There is nothing to suggest that the development of language is any different: that it was an inevitable consequence of evolution, or that human beings could not have existed without it.90 Just as birds with longer beaks may hold a particular advantage in the environmental conditions in which they find themselves, language gave Homo sapiens a host of advantages as well. But there is nothing to suggest that human existence itself, in its present state, is an inevitable consequence of evolution.91 In fact, the very expression “in its present state” is rather deceptive insofar as human beings are still subject to random mutations and therefore continuously “evolving.” Accordingly, who is to say what our “ownmost potential” is? Is it to ponder the question of Being, or to be an artist not a toiler? Why not something else? If, like everything in the

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universe, our species is still in flux, who is to say that an “ownmost potential” even exists since there may be nothing “ownmost” about us at all? This same issue arises when Newman titled some of his works, Be, or when Heidegger described the self being brought “to itself as the self that is there and has taken over the being-there of its Da-sein. For what purpose? To be that Da-sein.”92 For all of Newman’s pronouncements against dogmaticism, and Heidegger’s about the open-endedness of Da-sein, one may safely assume—if Newman’s assertions about human beings being sublime only insofar as they are aware, or Heidegger’s about the looming dangers of inauthenticity, provide any indication—that Newman’s and Heidegger’s exhortations are imperatives. Inasmuch as Newman was attracted to performatives, to speech acts that do something as well as say something, he, like Heidegger, seemed to conflate states of mind or levels of awareness with deeds and accomplishments. To be a Dasein, Heidegger submits, is to have fulfilled a “purpose.” But Pinker makes the intriguing argument that there are fundamental differences between states and accomplishments, primarily because states are continuous and largely independent of voluntary control. One is sick as long as an illness lasts and one cannot simply relieve oneself of the illness by design. That is why, Pinker argues, states do not harmonize well with imperatives or adverbs associated with effort, such as “deliberately” or “carefully,” and also why we hold individuals criminally responsible for actions rather than for states (e.g., for purchasing or selling addictive substances, not for being addicted to them). Conversely, activities and accomplishments are voluntary, harmonize well with imperatives, with adverbs associated with effort, and are subject to criminal penalties.93 Both Newman and Heidegger, it seems, conferred the status of accomplishments to states of mind, as if “being sublime” or “being a Da-sein” were voluntary activities, achieved by effort, and subject to imperative commands. Yet, since people are largely held responsible for actions rather than states, impugning those who do not attain the same levels of awareness, who do not measure up to the standards artist and philosopher have arbitrarily imposed upon them, strikes one as somewhat unjust—an injustice, however, that betrays a great deal about the peculiar mindset of the artist and philosopher with whom these pages have been preoccupied. Indeed, though some may think that this whole discussion over the distinction between states and actions is trivial or inconsequential, a matter of mere semantics, one may posit that it was the very blurring of this distinction that gave Newman and Heidegger a license to conflate philosophy and politics, going so far as allowing the former to subsume the latter. Upon reflection, might it not be the conferring upon mental states the import of practical action that led both painter and philosopher to assume, somewhat unrealistically, that “resolve” or “awareness” alone would lead to salutary political change? If mental states, like practical actions, can be deliberate, can harmonize with

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imperatives, and have contents for which we ourselves are morally responsible, then states may indeed be construed as political through and through. But, as Pinker convincingly argues, such is not the case. Unfairly underestimating the value of others, it seems, is the flip side of unfairly overestimating one’s own.

Notes 1. What Is Called Thinking?, 66. 2. BT, 144–45. 3. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 224. 4. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 304. 5. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 305. 6. Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 277. 7. BT, 215. 8. BT, 219–20. 9. To convince others that their stylistic innovations had been devised independently of the influence of artists such as Matisse and Munch, for example, members of the German Expressionist group Die Brücke were not above predating their own works. Even Picasso, irritated at the countless questions asked of him about the influence of “art nègre” upon his art, replied, “Connais pas!” (“Never heard of it!”). 10. See Newman’s reaction to Clement Greenberg’s suggestion that he had been influenced by Clyfford Still: “When I did see Still and his work, my concept and style had already been formed” (SWI, 204). Or to William Rubin’s suggestion that he had been influenced by Max Ernst’s frottages (SWI, 233–37). 11. Rich, Seriality and Difference in the Late Work of Barnett Newman, 170. 12. See Lucius Griesbach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Cologne: Taschen, 1999), 11. 13. “Jackson Pollock: A Questinaire,” Arts and Architecture, February 1944, reprinted in Pepe Karmel (ed.), Jackson Pollock: Interviews, Articles, Reviews (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 16. 14. Jackson Pollock interviewed by Selden Rodman, in Rodman’s Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 82. 15. Robert Motherwell, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” 5 February 1951, in Stephanie Terenzio (ed.), The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 85. 16. See, for example, George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 17. Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). 18. FCM, 179. 19. IM, 80. 20. Heidegger, “Language,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 187. 21. Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, 48e. 22. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p.125.

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23. Philosophical Investigations, 44. 24. Philosophical Investigations, 45. 25. Herman Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 121. 26. Parvis Emad, On the Way to Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 15. 27. Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in ImageMusic-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 105. 28. Roland Barthes, 106. 29. Roland Barthes, 106. 30. Robert Motherwell cited in E. A. Carmean, Art at Mid-Century: The Subjects of the Artists (Washington, D.C: National Gallery of Art, 1978), 103. 31. Hans Hofmann, “The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts,” in Sam Hunter, Hans Hofmann (New York: Abrams, n.d.), 39. 32. George Scrivani (ed.), The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning (Madras and New York: Hanuman Books, 1988), 171. 33. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstader, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 39. 34. Yve-Alain Bois, “On Two Paintings by Barnett Newman,” October 108 (Spring 2004): 4. 35. See Lawrence Alloway, “Notes on Barnett Newman,” Art International 13 (Summer 1969): 34–35. 36. OWL, 123. 37. OWL, 124. 38. See Rainer Marten, “Heidegger and the Greeks,” in The Heidegger Case, 179ff. 39. OWL, 125. 40. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 419: “It is Being that maintains the initiative in the coming-to-presence of beings.” 41. See Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being. 42. Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 95. 43. EGT, 37. 44. EGT, 37. 45. EGT, 38. 46. P, 130. 47. P, 137. 48. P, 34. 49. EGT, 42. P, 139: In the modern age, Heidegger continues, the original conception is occluded and it is “impossible to recall the primordial essence of appearance in the sense of emergence . . . [and] the essential relation between [physis] and [aletheia] also remains concealed.” 50. P, 32, 33. 51. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, trans. C. G Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 127e. 52. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 9.

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53. Derrida, Positions, 54. 54. Derrida, Positions, 7. 55. Derrida, Positions, 55. 56. Derrida, Positions, 26. 57. Derrida, Positions, 45. 58. Derrida, Positions, 54. 59. BT, 265. 60. BT, 299. 61. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 123. 62. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 125. 63. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 65. 64. Newman’s failure to detect this contradiction may have dire consequences for any attempt to interpret his work. Any firm belief in the self-evident nature of his art may not only have led him to provide no interpretive assistance to his audience, but also have blinded him to the necessity of establishing a code to which his audience would also have access. As a result, he may have been led, unwittingly, by his own intellectual assumptions into establishing a private idiom so abstruse as to be ultimately comprehensible only to himself. The term “idiom” is used rather than “language” because, in his Philosophical Investigations, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein seriously called the idea of private languages into question. On his account, private languages do not exist because languages are communal rather than individual. And since languages are rule-governed, adherence to those rules must be subject to some form of communal agreement and arbitration. But in private languages, communal agreement is irrelevant, and the possibility of independent arbitration to confirm proper adherence to the rules is unavailable; as a result, the speaker of a private language could never completely distinguish following a rule from only thinking he or she were following a rule. On these grounds, Wittgenstein feels he has no choice but to discount the possibility of a private language because a private idiom does not legitimately qualify as a language at all. If we transpose this situation to Newman’s work, then either Newman’s work is a language, in which case it must have a code that can be explained in terms of socially agreed-upon conventions, or (and this is the most likely scenario) Newman’s work is an exclusively private endeavor, in which case it does not qualify as a language. If we accept the second option, which Michael Leja seems to have endorsed when he employed the expression “Newman’s solo tango,” then the failure of Newman’s work to communicate in the manner he had wished can be squarely laid at his own doorstep. To this way of thinking, it is not the spectator’s lack of sensitivity and attunement that is to blame for the failure of communication, it is the artist’s delusions about the self-evident nature of his art. 65. See Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain (New York: Norton, 1997); and Dedre Gentner, Keith J. Holyoak, and Boicho N. Kokinov, The Analogical Mind: Perspectives from Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 66. See Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 31. 67. Kenneally, The First Word, 113ff. 68. Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 31–32. 69. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 18.

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70. Kenneally, The First Word, 129. 71. Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 5. 72. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 5. 73. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 8. 74. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 19. 75. What Is Called Thinking?, 16. 76. For an account of structuralism and poststructuralism’s view of language, see, for example, Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972). 77. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1995), 57, Wittgenstein wrote that “the limits of language . . . mean the limits of my world.” In the Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 11, conversely, he wrote, “There are countless kinds . . . of use of what we call ‘symbols,’ ‘words,’ ‘sentences.’ And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games . . . come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten.” 78. See, for example, Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995). 79. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 4. 80. “Preverbal Representation and Language,” in Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, Lynn Nadel, and Merrill F. Garett (eds.), Language and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 365. 81. Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication, 328. 82. Kenneally, The First Word, 94. 83. Kenneally, The First Word, 103. 84. V. M. Janik, L. S. Sayigh, and R. S. Wells, “Signature Whistle Shape Conveys Identity Information to Bottlenose Dolphins,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (2006): 8293–97. 85. Nicholas J. Mulcahy and Josep Call, “Apes Save Tools for Future Use,” Science 312 (2006): 165–78. 86. The very idea that language is a gift of the gods is even used as an expression of disparagement among contemporary students of linguistics; see G. W. Hewes, “Primate Communication and the Gestural Origin of Language,” Current Anthropology 14 (1973): 5–24. 87. See Terence William Deacon, The Symbolic Species, 147. 88. See Philip Lieberman, The Biology and Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 89. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), 89. 90. See Kenneally, The First Word, 268–69. 91. See Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (New York: Harmony Books, 1996), 216. 92. FCM, 143. 93. Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, 207.

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CHAPTER 14

Politics

The object of the previous chapter was not to resolve the differences between Heidegger, Newman, and thinkers such as Saussure, Wittgenstein, or Derrida— not to mention the findings of present-day linguists, cognitians, and geneticists. The point, rather, was to expose the truth-value of Newman’s and Heidegger’s statements to some form of scrutiny. As if these epistemological controversies did not muddy the waters enough, the other contentious but inescapable issue facing any engagement with Heidegger is the philosopher’s political involvement with National Socialism. Perhaps the disclaimer—that Heidegger’s ideas were recognized as time-bound and culture-specific, and used in this study only to assess their suitability in clarifying aspects of Newman’s work—makes the whole issue of Heidegger’s politics somewhat moot. But if the convergences argued for in this book are at all persuasive, they do raise a rather uncomfortable question: namely, if Heidegger considered his ideas, for however long a time, compatible with Nazi ideology, and if these same ideas may have influenced (or established compelling parallels with those expressed by) Newman, what does this say about the political implications of Newman’s own worldview? This is not a trivial question because, just as some view Heidegger’s philosophy as irremediably tainted on account of his engagement with National Socialism, others have been keen to associate Newman’s work with a nefarious political agenda. As is well known, Abstract Expressionism has been accused of complicity with America’s imperialist foreign policy during the Cold War, of functioning as a “tool of bourgeois ideology,” of “disguising the conditions of authoritarian domination” in the United States,1 and of dominating its own sphere of activity with McCarthyist ruthlessness.2 Newman’s own statement, for example, “We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions,” was interpreted by Max Kozloff as a “quest for unlimited power, to 283

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which painters of high resources bent their backs . . . the declaration of a total moral monopoly.”3 Those sympathetic to this mode of criticism may view this book as supplying ammunition for their cause. Commenting on Newman’s statements at the World Fair of 1967, Serge Guilbaut contends, “Father Newman’s voice in that international environment could not be but thunderous, and his impact could not be, despite his constant references to freedom, other than authoritative, if not authoritarian. What started in his mind and work as a desire for liberation from society’s shackles in the late 1940s became in the 1960s a sign for the power of the United States at a time when ‘American freedom’ was constantly used as a generic term, thrown in the face of communism along with ultramodern American kitchens.”4 If Abstract Expressionism was complicit with a right-wing agenda, it stands to reason, so the argument would go, that Newman echoed positions articulated by a philosopher attracted to Nazi ideology. Even if this line of argumentation might suggest another possibility of connecting Newman and Heidegger, it shall not be pursued here. Though Heidegger’s connections with the Nazi party are beyond question, conflating New York School abstraction with bourgeois ideology, American Cold War propaganda, and McCarthyism is feeble at best. This view, in fact, has received no more powerful a riposte than in David Craven’s Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period. Craven documented how closely aligned the Abstract Expressionists were with Leftist periodicals such as Dissent: A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion and New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought, as well as the extent to which intellectuals in Latin America, where the U.S. government sent exhibits of New York School painting, construed Abstract Expressionism as culturally and politically subversive. Especially helpful in cementing his repositioning of Abstract Expressionist ideology at the margins of American mainstream culture were the declassified FBI files Craven obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These files clearly demonstrated how artists of the New York School (i.e., Rothko, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Krasner, Reinhardt, and Norman Lewis) were targets of surveillance by the FBI throughout the Cold War period. The reason: suspicion of un-American and seditious activities. But Craven’s reclaiming of Abstract Expressionism for the Left raises a pressing question: If Newman and Heidegger saw eye to eye on so many philosophical points, how could one align himself with National Socialism and the other with a fierce, anarchist individualism? Is it conceivable for two intellectuals to have so much in common philosophically, yet be so far apart politically? Newman, for one, would not have countenanced any cleavage between his political anarchism and his philosophical views on art. Likewise, when asked in 1936 whether his commitment to Nazi ideology stemmed from his philo-

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sophical outlook, Heidegger, Karl Löwith recalled, agreed “with me without reservations, and added that his concept of ‘historicity’ formed the basis of his political ‘engagement.’”5 This rather chilling admission may dispel any illusions Heidegger’s admirers harbor about the possibility of separating his philosophy from his politics. By now, the documentation of the philosopher’s political activities, though far from complete, cannot be denied. In a nutshell, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and paid its membership dues until 1945. Upon taking up the position of rector at Freiburg University in 1933, he made unambiguous declarations in support of Hitler and his regime. He endorsed the Führer principle, tried to implement this doctrine during his tenure as rector, collaborated with radical student groups, signed his correspondence “Heil Hitler,” and informed the authorities about political opponents (even encouraging students to do the same). Whenever he praised Nazi ideology, he married that praise to his own “philosophical” terminology. After the war, he was barred from teaching as a result (a decision reversed in the term 1950–1951).6 None of this is in dispute; the information is unassailable. When it comes to interpreting the meaning and implications of this information, however, Heidegger scholars could not be more divided. On one side, the philosopher’s supporters paint the Nazi period as an unfortunate but brief misjudgment on Heidegger’s part. They emphasize his resignation from the rectorate barely a year after taking the post and his ostensible withdrawal from all political activity thereafter. Heidegger may have had a fleeting enthusiasm for National Socialism, they intimate, but this shortlived infatuation was limited to 1933–1934 and, in the end, irrelevant to his philosophy. On the other side, detractors paint Heidegger as a committed Nazi deluded enough to think that he could provide spiritual guidance to the movement’s leaders,7 and who, even after multiple pleadings from admirers after the war, never brought himself to apologize for his involvement or condemn the regime he steadfastly supported. If Heidegger grew disillusioned with National Socialism, they say, it is because its leaders betrayed what he construed to be the “essence” of the movement, an ideal to which Heidegger remained faithful his entire life.8 What is more, his politics cannot be separated from his philosophy; in fact, his philosophy can only be viewed as inherently political. To overlook this aspect of Heidegger’s thinking is to misrepresent it.9 If these positions are black and white, Heidegger scholarship also evinces every shade of gray. Since it concerns a philosopher deemed to be among the most important of the twentieth century, and involves the careers of countless expositors, the debate has turned acrimonious, with intellectual motives and academic qualifications under a continual microscope, and accusations of “misunderstanding Heidegger” flying from all sides. Under these conditions, it would hardly be appropriate, or advisable, for an art historian to weigh in on such matters. All

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the same, if saying anything invites the accusation of being presumptuous and uninformed, saying nothing invites that of being cowardly and evasive. To find a median between these two equally unattractive options, the issue might perhaps be addressed, at least within the context of this study, in terms of providing a set of alternatives: a best-case and a worse-case scenario. The best-case scenario might read something like this. Given Heidegger’s hostility toward democracy,10 and his repeated claims for the special place of the German people and language in European culture,11 it would hardly be unreasonable to qualify him as a German nationalist. His interpretations of Hölderlin’s poetry, for example, written in the mid-1930s, are redolent with the kind of “blood and soil” themes typical of Volkish writings. In fact, Heidegger used the same terms himself: “the spiritual world of a Volk is not its cultural superstructure . . . it is the power that comes from preserving at the most profound level the forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk.”12 The essay “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in fact, appeared in the extreme right-wing periodical Das Innere Reich, where only faithful National Socialists were allowed to publish.13 It is safe to assume, therefore, that Heidegger was attracted to Hölderlin no less for his celebration of the national homeland than for his attention to themes such as nature and poetry.14 Hölderlin’s “Homecoming,” he writes, “ is not a poem about homecoming; rather, the elegy, the poetic activity which it is, is the homecoming itself, and still it comes to pass as long as its words ring like a bell in the language of the German people.”15 After World War II, Heidegger disavowed his writings’ patriotic or nationalistic connotations, insisting that he was motivated exclusively by the home’s relationship to Being—that is, the question as to whether Da-sein is at home in the world or not16—but this revisionist disclaimer is hardly convincing. Eulogizing the sanctity of the homeland while denigrating technology and industrialization (undercurrents that run throughout Heidegger’s texts on Hölderlin) were widely held to have decidedly nationalistic connotations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. German Volkish thinkers—thinkers acknowledged to have laid some of the groundwork for National Socialism—used the natural landscape and agricultural laborer as emblems of the German nation, and as foils to the “Jewish” cosmopolitanism of modern urban centers. The entire discourse of Volkish writers, in fact, was permeated with anti-Semitic rhetoric.17 Jews were branded as wanderers, disconnected from any national homeland, a people whose hybrid language, Yiddish, was denigrated as nothing more than a gross bastardization of German. From the other side, German nationalists concocted a connection between the Teutons and the ancient Greeks, according to whose legends the Hellenes were autochthonous, born of their soil, indigenous to the lands they were populating, a self-serving way of legitimizing any claims to territory, whether taken by force or not. It was also (as in many cultures) a clever mode of exclusion: whoever was not Greek was a barbarian.

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Ever since the eighteenth century, numerous German intellectuals fell under the spell of Hellenic culture, and although much of this fascination was scholarly or aesthetic, as in Winckelmann or Goethe, much was far from politically innocent. Many German nationalists drew intimate parallels between Greek autochthony and the rootedness of the Germans, a people held together, not by arbitrary borders, but by their enduring and inherent connection to their native land. Many even saw the Greeks as the Aryan ancestors of the German race, thereby reinforcing the exclusionary practices engendered by the Greeks. In 1937, for example, the Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler proclaimed that the “immediate relation between Greek and German culture confirms the accuracy of the racial view of history.”18 Although Heidegger rejected biological explanations, since they invariably fall within the compass of enframing, he endorsed these specious cultural connections notwithstanding, frequently referencing the exceptional links between German and Greek language and philosophy. In 1942–1943, he professed that “German humanity is that historical humanity which, like the Greek, is called upon to poetize and think.”19 As late as 1966, he still pondered “the special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks.”20 That special relationship, of course, included these two cultures’ mutual rootedness and connection to the earth. “Our questioning,” Heidegger insists, “brings us into the landscape we must inhabit as a basic prerequisite, if we are to win back our roots in history.”21 As Charles Bambach has persuasively argued, similar themes abounded in National Socialist writing, a context into which Heidegger’s pronouncements, if we allow for the variations and wranglings typical of academic discourse, fit very snugly. Heidegger’s celebration of the German homeland “is counter-racial,” Bambach proposes, “yet racial nonetheless, because it is still a version of German rootedness as a form of political metaphysics.”22 Thus, against Hannah Arendt’s assertion that Heidegger’s thinking “does not spring from the century he happens to live in. It comes from the primeval,”23 others have justifiably held a widely different opinion. “The word national [völkisch] was very close to [Heidegger],” recalled Max Müller, one of his pupils. “His deep respect for the people [Volk] was also linked to certain academic prejudices, for example the absolute rejection of sociology and psychology as big-city and decadent ways of thinking.”24 Along similar lines, Hans Jonas observed that a “certain ‘Blood-and-soil’ point of view” inflected Heidegger’s appreciation of the German landscape, an appreciation connected to his “ideological affirmation,” which, to Jonas’s mind, betrayed a kind of “primitive nationalism.”25 In Being and Time, these themes appear in the form of the collective destiny to which authentic and historical (presumably German) individuals submit, yet chose freely. Again, these themes exude German national sentiments, the very kind that were widely voiced prior to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.

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Whether one can automatically conflate Being and Time with Nazi ideology, however, is a more difficult question, especially as Nazi ideology, like any ideology, is not perfectly homogenous, with adherents jockeying for position, hoping to persuade others that they, rather than their personal rivals, represent the purest version of the faith. Many thinkers on the Left also decried modernity and worker alienation.26 And crafting a concrete political philosophy from such nebulous concepts as “resoluteness,” “authenticity,” “destiny,” “historicity,” or “potential for Being,” is no easy matter.27 Revealingly, Herbert Marcuse remembered that neither he nor his fellow students suspected Heidegger of harboring Nazi loyalties and experienced shock upon discovering their teacher’s later political engagement. Re-reading the texts retrospectively led Marcuse to different conclusions, of course, as it would for anyone already predisposed to find corroborating evidence for a preordained point of view; yet, initially, he and other pupils completely overlooked the political implications of Heidegger’s work.28 Similarly, Löwith recalled that Heidegger’s disciples were surprised at his decision to become rector: “He had previously almost never expressed his opinions about political issues, and it did not seem that he had a firm opinion concerning them.”29 These recollections suggest that either the political implications of Heidegger’s philosophy, intended from the outset, were voiced in so cryptic a manner that the majority of his audience misunderstood them; or, that, once committed to National Socialism, Heidegger retrofitted his German nationalism to coincide with Nazi ideology. Jürgen Habermas, another of Heidegger’s pupils, was actually quite surprised that Being and Time was “suddenly” given a “collectivist turn,” that “Dasein was no longer this poor Kierkegaardian-Sartrean individual hanging in the air,” but now made to represent “the Dasein of the people, of the Volk.” Even Löwith observed that, in 1927, when Being and Time first appeared, “I doubt that any of us would have imagined that ‘one’s ownmost’ death, radically individualized . . . would be travestied six years later in a celebration of a National Socialist ‘hero.’”30 (As late as 2007, Korab-Karpowicz writes that Being and Time “remains at first sight apolitical.”31) After his rectorial address, Habermas contends, Heidegger “gave to Being and Time a national-revolutionary reading. . . . [H]e reinterpreted one substantive point in his theory, without touching any single category of the whole framework.”32 On this account, it is not so much that Heidegger misinterpreted his own work, as some have claimed,33 as he recast its German nationalism in his own mind to fit Nazi ideas, or projected upon it the issues significant to him at that moment. How much tweaking was necessary is impossible to define with absolute precision, but one can assume that the task was not excessively difficult. The process may not have been all that different from Newman’s when constructing the meaning of Onement I. Up to this point, of course, we have been using Heidegger to interpret Newman, not Newman to

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interpret Heidegger; however, since turnabout is fair play, it may be worthwhile, without striking an equal balance, to return the favor. Simply because Newman took a year to understand this image does not mean that he misinterpreted it upon completion, only that he progressively re-interpreted it until he finally conceptualized the meaning evoked in the title. But that meaning was not an arbitrary imposition; it must have been percolating in Newman’s mind for some time, and intimately tied to his intellectual interests and preoccupations. Similarly, it was conceivable for Heidegger to have written Being and Time with an agenda consistent with an extreme form of right-wing German patriotism, the same kind of patriotism that, although not necessarily identical to Nazism, nonetheless helped prepare its eventual accession to power. Enthralled with the new regime after 1933, he appropriated the very terminology of Being and Time in political speeches, opportunistically aligning it with the demands of the moment, convincing himself that those new meanings were intended from the start. It may be instructive to mention, if only parenthetically, that psychological studies have demonstrated how individuals who alter their opinions tend, retrospectively, to downplay the extent of the change, and persuade themselves that they held their present beliefs all along.34 The same could have occurred to Heidegger, as when he maintained, in conversation with Löwith, that his concept of historicity provided the basis of his political engagement. Thus, while German nationalism and Nazi ideology undeniably overlap, one cannot automatically take it as a forgone conclusion, as some have claimed (and Heidegger himself), that his philosophical tenets offered him no “other alternative” but to support Hitler.35 Besides, such assertions are completely unverifiable, and the possibility of Heidegger choosing another way cannot be categorically excluded. He never countenanced the Nazis’ biological racism (which, as Emmanuel Faye argues, would not have made him any less sympathetic to their racial laws36), and, for their part, some Nazis saw Heidegger’s political ideas as an idiosyncratic, “private” form of National Socialism.37 The sword cuts both ways, of course. Even if reading Being and Time as an inherently Nazi document strikes some scholars as excessively reductive, seeing an unequivocal denunciation of Nazism, as many of the philosopher’s defenders allege, in statements postdating his tenure as rector is no less so. During the height of National Socialism in the summer of 1935, for example, Heidegger expressed reservations. Delivering a lecture at Freiburg, he asked, “When mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as a triumph—then, yes then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts us like a specter: What for?— Whither?—And what then?”38 In Mindfulness, written in 1938–1939, between his resignation from the rectorate and the full onset of World War II, he decried the ways in which “dictators eagerly exploit the ‘youth’ that suits them because ‘youth’ brings along the required ignorance which guarantees that lack of respect

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and that incapability for admiration that are necessary for carrying out, under the guise of a new awakening, the planned destruction and thereby evading all decisions.”39 In 1941, moreover, the philosopher disparaged how soldiers and workers were being heralded as model individuals. Just two pages later, asking whether workers and soldiers “also know the being of beings,” he answers with a categorical “no.”40 Soldiers and workers, of course, were often hailed by many right-wing ideologues as the backbone of the German nation—and by Heidegger himself in the rectorial address, calling on German students to submit to military and labor service.41 Here, however, a certain distance begins to form between Heidegger and the regime, a distance also evident in Heidegger’s growing ambivalence about Nietzsche, whose concept of the will to power he originally celebrated and then rejected as a contributory force behind enframing.42 This distance is equally apparent in Heidegger’s critique of technology, although, for Heidegger and the Nazis, this proved a rather complex game to play. As Michael Zimmerman put it, Nazi ideology is complicated insofar as “it attempted to combine the rhetoric of preindustrial values with the praxis of total industrialization.”43 Heidegger, as we know from his readings of Hölderlin, favored the former but not the latter. Yet the situation is quite murky; during the war, he was not above praising new technology if it assisted the Reich’s victories on the battlefield: “starting from the perspective of bourgeois ‘spirituality’ and culture, one would like to consider total ‘motorization’ of the Wehrmacht, from top to bottom, as unlimited ‘technicism’ and ‘materialism.’ In reality, this is a metaphysical act.”44 (Given his sensitivity to language, Heidegger’s use of term “metaphysical” in this context is baffling, especially as, in his later work, he came to use the word pejoratively.) Thus, if Heidegger’s praise of the worker and technology provides an index of his approval of National Socialism, and his censure of the same an index of his disapproval, then the “essence” of work or technology, in the end, is simply held hostage to Heidegger’s particular attitude at any given point in time. Similarly, in 1933, he argued that self-examination was contingent on self-assertion,45 while, in a later essay on poetry, he ascribed the death of man’s nature to “purposeful self-assertion in everything.”46 As much as his defenders see resounding condemnations of National Socialism in timid statements about mass rallies, or soldiers not understanding the Being of beings, these comments, though worlds apart from the rectorial address, fall woefully short. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary may be right that the excerpt from Mindfulness cited above is a not thinly disguised attack on the Hitler Youth, but whether that same short passage means that Heidegger’s “political error of the 1930s needs to be reexamined in a manner that is no longer prosecutorial or journalistic but fully considers his beinghistorical stance toward politics” is another issue.47 It is impossible to ascertain a person’s motivations with absolute certainty, and given Heidegger’s intense

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distrust of the Soviet Union, he may have had the Komosol in mind as much as the Hitler Youth when condemning a regime’s manipulation of the young. On the other hand, his loathing of any art form that foregrounds the “masculinity of man . . . with huge muscles and genitals, blank faces that are tense with brutality,”48 seems obviously targeted at Nazi rather than Soviet public art, which shied away from full male nudity. Even if we concede that a distance gradually formed between Heidegger and the Nazi regime, a celebration of one’s native soil, and of the special status and destiny of the Germans, did not fade from the Heideggerian philosophical landscape. Just as he proclaimed, in 1935, that his “questioning brings us into the landscape we must inhabit as a basic prerequisite, if we are to win back our roots in history,”49 as late as 1955, Heidegger again paid tribute to his homeland, asking, “Is there still a life-giving homeland in whose ground man may stand rooted, that is, be autochthonic?” Despite bemoaning that the “rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at its core,” Heidegger nevertheless holds out the hope that an openness to mystery, and a form of meditative thinking, may allow “a new ground and foundation [to] be granted again to man.”50 This consistency of outlook would reinforce the view that, as many Nazis suspected, Heidegger truly did endorse a “private form of National Socialism,” one whose ultimate metaphysical fulfillment had yet to arise, and for whom humanity still had to await. According to Carl von Weizäcker, Heidegger’s circle “devised Freiburg National Socialism. Under their breath they say that the true Third Reich has not yet begun at all, that it is yet to come.”51 All of which suggests that Heidegger’s retreat from the political arena may have represented less of a disapproval of National Socialism than a disappointment over its inability to reach its philosophical potential, or, at least, the potential Heidegger envisioned for it, explaining his oft-discussed remark about the “inner truth and greatness of this movement.”52 But just as consistencies may be drawn in Heidegger’s positions, radical tensions also exist. Nowhere are these more acute than in Heidegger’s admission that the connection between his philosophy and politics was predicated upon the concept of historicity. In Heidegger and the Political, Miguel de Beistegui submits that Heidegger’s very concept of historicity does not mesh comfortably with his concept of authentic Being; in fact, one may propose that these two ideas are virtually incompatible. Heidegger would have disputed this verdict, of course, but as esoteric as this discrepancy may be, it is mentioned here neither to delve in matters of interest only to Heidegger scholars nor to exonerate him from his Nazi connections, but to seek an explanation for Newman and Heidegger’s alignment on one front, and divergence on another. In effect, one could argue that this divergence is attributable to the very tension de Beistegui exposes. Since authenticity comes close to Newman’s own perspective, it is perfectly logical,

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then, that historicity—the concept de Beistegui claims is fundamentally incompatible with it—provided, on Heidegger’s own admission, the basis of his commitment to National Socialism. This bifurcation at the heart of Heideggerian thought may therefore explain how Newman and Heidegger could have much in common on one level, and nothing on another: Newman, in other words, could have endorsed the idea of authenticity while rejecting that of historicity, in which case his adherence to some Heideggerian notions would hardly have required relinquishing his anarchist loyalties. Heidegger, after all, exhorted Da-sein to confront its own history no less authentically than the finitude of time: historicity and temporality are related.53 The waters muddy, however, when the authentic historicity of a singular Dasein is extended to a people as a whole. “[I]f fateful Da-sein essentially exists as being-in-the-world in being with others,” the philosopher writes, “its occurrence is an occurrence-with and is determined as destiny. With this term, we designate the occurrence of the community, of a people. Destiny is not composed of individual fates, nor can being-with-one-another be conceived of as the mutual occurrence of several subjects. These fates are already guided beforehand in beingwith-one-another in the same world and in resoluteness for definite possibilities. In communication and in battle the power of destiny first becomes free. The fateful destiny of Da-sein in and with its ‘generation’ constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence of Da-sein.”54 This passage is perplexing, de Beistegui contends, because Heidegger’s concept of history was extrapolated from Da-sein’s ability to face “its own death as its ownmost and unsurpassable possibility . . . independently of the way it is with others. In anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein is made present to its own being in such a way that it can take it over wholly and be free for it.”55 Richard Wolin expressed a similar view: “The opposition between voluntarism and fatalism in Being and Time is never reconciled. Heidegger tries to have it both ways and fails.”56 The inconsistency revolves around Heidegger’s connecting the authentic occurrence and fateful freedom of Da-sein “with its generation” when he had always stressed that Da-sein’s authenticity was to be found in its individuality. How, for instance, can Heidegger describe fate as being “already guided before hand” when he always associated absence of choice with the inauthenticity of the they (“The they evades choice”57). As early as his lectures on the phenomenology of religion in 1920–1921, Heidegger identified the unum (the singular) with the authentic and the multum (the many) with dissolution, scattering, and dispersion.58 How, moreover, can the confrontation with death, upon which authentic temporality is predicated—with its concomitant ability to allow Dasein to be futural, to be free, to recognize its possibilities—be transposed from an individual to an entire generation? And how can a community contemplate its own annihilation, its own “possibility of no-longer-being-able-to-be-there,”59

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in the same way as an individual, especially if Heidegger himself had described death as an exclusively individual experience: “Death does not just ‘belong’ in an undifferentiated way to one’s own Da-sein, but it lays claim on it as something individual. The non-relational character of death . . . individualizes Da-sein down to itself.”60 How, then, can Heidegger mention the “German Dasein” or the “Dasein of a nation”61 in speeches professing his loyalty to the Nazi regime,62 when, in Being and Time, he maintained that the “being of this being [Da-sein] is always mine”?63 In fact, he also insisted that, in describing Da-sein, one “must always use the personal pronoun along with whatever we say: ‘I am,’ ‘You are.’” And since Da-sein is never to be understood “as a case and instance of a genus of beings objectively present,” Heidegger affirms that “Da-sein is always my own.”64 On this account, the very expression “German Dasein” is difficult to comprehend. Heidegger could be using the term in the ordinary sense of “existence,” and the condition of Da-sein as being-in-the-world means, admittedly, that Dasein is always in a state of being-with. But, as de Beistegui persuasively argues, it is precisely the world of everydayness, the world of the they “from which Dasein was precisely to cut itself off if it ever were to grasp itself as a potentiality-forbeing-a-whole.”65 Authenticity, insofar as it results from an awareness of one’s own finitude, Heidegger continually reminds us, is an individual rather than collective achievement. In fact, when he encouraged a state of readiness toward the oppressiveness of our existence, and an acceptance of the burden of our Da-sein, he felt that, to endure this condition authentically, we must “guard against the misunderstanding that we can ever hope to approach what is essential through some general collective enthusiasm for what is in fact inessential. What is at issue in this challenge is rather that each and every Dasein should comprehend this necessity for itself out of the ground of its own essence.”66 On this basis, de Beistegui is entirely justified in asking, “How can we move from this solipsistic encounter with one’s self to a shared temporality, a co-history?,”67 as is Tom Rockmore in declaring that Heidegger’s endorsement of the Führer principle “contradicts the idea of free thought, which is a necessary condition of his philosophy.”68 How indeed could the person who associated the they with fallenness and dispersion, with escapism and inauthenticity, have declared, during the Nazi period, “The individual, whatever his place, counts for nothing. The destiny of our nation within the state counts for everything”?69 The contradictions between the concepts of authenticity and historicity, of individual versus collective destinies, are impossible to bridge. Perhaps they reflect the way National Socialist ideology, in anchoring the legitimacy of the State sometimes in its Führer, and sometimes in the German people, is equally contradictory.70 Likewise, Heidegger’s interpretations of Hölderlin may reflect the nationalistic associations attached to

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the German homeland and landscape, but the most salient underlying themes— the suffering of the poet and the flight of the gods—impart a mood of melancholy and resignation hardly compatible, as Fred Dallmyr reminds us, with the triumphalism of Nazi propaganda.71 Similar tensions bedevil other passages in Being and Time. After associating “fate” with the individual and “destiny” with the group, Heidegger conflates both in the expression “fateful destiny.” “The fateful destiny of Da-sein in and with its ‘generation’,” he writes, “constitutes the complete, authentic occurrence of Da-sein.”72 This tension prompts Rockmore to contend that the sentence “violates [Heidegger’s] distinction between fate and destiny.”73 Even if Heidegger had not stressed the individuality of Da-sein so stringently, it would still be problematic to collapse individual and collective destiny, a collapse that—oddly enough in view of Heidegger’s hostility toward psychoanalysis—is reminiscent of Freud. “The contrast between individual psychology and social or group psychology,” Freud wrote, “loses a great deal of its sharpness when it is examined more closely.”74 But most present-day social psychologists, though they disagree as to which component is most influential, clearly distinguish the individual self from the collective self 75—thereby corroborating an important observation made by Emile Durkheim: “Every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false. . . . The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which members would were they isolated. . . . If we begin with the individual in seeking to explain phenomena, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.”76 If Durkheim is right, then one cannot legitimately transfer terms that apply to an individual (authenticity or resoluteness) to an entire group. In Parmenides, Heidegger, oddly enough, did precisely that: he asserted that if aletheia “as unconcealedness determines all beings in their presence (and that means, for the Greeks, precisely in their Being), then certainly the [polis] too, and it above all, has to stand within this determination by [aletheia].”77 How aletheia determines the Being of both individuals and the polis, he did not say. Although these questions may only interest Heidegger specialists, they are mentioned here, not so much to expose tensions in Heidegger’s reasoning as to help explain how even a philosopher sympathetic to Nazi ideology could have appealed to Newman. To stress how difficult the task may be of extracting the political implications of Heidegger’s texts should not, therefore, be read as a surreptitious way of legitimizing them. On the contrary, even if we accept the worstpossible-case scenario—that presented, say, by Johannes Fritsche, that Being and Time can only be read as a right-wing, fascist document, or that of Emmanuel Faye, that Heidegger was committed to Nazism and introduced its most pernicious racial and militarist ideas into his philosophy—how such a philosophy

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could have influenced a Jewish intellectual must still be explained. If placed within the historical context from which it emerged, and, more importantly, if compared to the rhetoric of the time, Fritsche submits, Heidegger’s concept of historicity reveals its author’s insidious political loyalties. The concept of anticipatory resoluteness toward death, according to Fritsche, is less of a metaphysical exercise than a literal, running ahead toward death, not unlike the so-called “heroes of Langemark,” those young men who volunteered and stormed the trenches in World War I as a sacrifice for the nation. The idea of Da-sein as futural, whose meaning lies in its possibilities, needs to be understood in a larger context. Fritsche interprets Being in Time to mean that while ordinary Da-sein is ensnared in the social present (the collectivism of the they), authentic Da-sein understands its destiny as allied to the spirit of community. The schism between society (Gesellschaft) and community (Gemeinschaft) was politically charged at the time Heidegger was writing: society was deemed artificial and disconnected from the small-town communities whose age-old character reflected the heart of the German nation, but whose strength had been sapped and leveled down in contemporary culture. By means of a call to conscience, Da-sein understands its fate to lie with the Gemeinschaft, a fate that has already been defined in the past.78 This fate stands as the heritage and tradition handed over to Da-sein that, once recognized, permits authentic Da-sein to separate itself from its inauthentic contemporaries. Da-sein subjugates itself to this communal destiny, but of its own free will and as an autonomous subject. Since this subjugation is voluntary, it allows Da-sein to remain free even as it takes upon itself the destiny of its generation: the destiny of the German people to be heroic in battle. Fritsche’s compelling interpretations rely on a close reading of Heidegger’s language and on carefully contextualizing his ideas within the German political culture of the period. His readings also suggest that, in Heidegger’s thought, the originary status of ancient Greek philosophy is dislodged by the German Volk; that instead of being essentially futural, with the meaning of its existence residing in possibilities (in the plural), Da-sein has only one authentic possibility (namely, a communal destiny prescribed for it in advance79). For all of Heidegger’s pronouncements about Da-sein being nothing other than possibility, Da-sein, if Fritsche is correct, actually represents a prescribed surrender to a national will. Fritsche further maintains that the they symbolizes the Weimar Republic, while authentic Da-sein the subjugation of the individual to National Socialism. If this is how Heidegger meant Being and Time to be read, which, of course, is a point of heated contention in the literature, then a text such as Mindfulness might signal an extraordinary about-face: “The appeal to ‘destiny’,” Heidegger now writes, “means arming being’s abandonment of beings vis-à-vis beings. The appeal is at the same time the empty victory of the heroism of man as ‘subject’, which lacks decision. . . . The ‘affirmation’ of destiny is the exit

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into metaphysics that has no exit—into the metaphysics which exhausts itself in all its possible expressions and reversals and thereby has become totally entangled in itself.”80 Whether these citations betray fundamental contradictions in Heidegger’s system, or if an explanation still exists that reveals that system as coherent, cannot be resolved here. These tensions are nonetheless significant because, as intimated above, even if Fristsche’s account has not swayed Heidegger’s fervent admirers, his reading still raises doubts as to how Newman could possibly have been influenced by such a philosophy. It is, of course, impossible to ascertain whether Newman, if he read Heidegger, detected the discrepancies de Beistegui and Rockmore mentioned, or the meanings Fritsche uncovered. (In Brock’s anthology, the word Volk is translated simply as “people,” thereby losing its sharper, more nationalistic, political connotations.81) For his part, Fritsche makes the useful remark that the underlying connotations of Being and Time frequently go unnoticed in the United States because “it is extremely difficult for Americans to understand Heidegger’s notion of historicality and authentic Dasein. For there could not be a more marked difference than the one between the ‘German’ rightists notions of Held [i.e., the hero or heroic] and fate on the one hand and the ‘American’ understanding of what it means to be authentic on the other.”82 Even Jean-Paul Sartre, who studied in Berlin during 1933, claimed that “Heidegger has never been an ‘activist’— at least not as he expressed himself in his philosophical works,”83 and, as already mentioned, Herbert Marcuse discerned no trace of Heidegger’s loyalties in his teachings or philosophy prior to the Nazi takeover. To this day, a political scientist such as Fred Dallmayr, who had always resisted reading Heidegger—for fear of what he may find—was pleasantly surprised, finding himself struck by “the complete absence of any sinister fascist overtones.”84 Of course, Emmanuel Faye could not disagree more. His readings are no less damning than Fritsche’s. For him, Heidegger’s celebration of beginnings is simply a short-hand for the Nazi seizure of power; the only people that may be considered historical and authentic are the German people; the polemos that brings about the emergence of Being is a veiled reference to the military conflict through which the Reich will destroy its enemies; for man to belong to the earth is Heidegger’s valorization of the blood and soil rhetoric of Nazi ideologues; Heidegger’s attention to language is but an attempt to purify culture from foreign (i.e., Jewish) influences; the overcoming of disorder by the advent of Being is the individual’s subordination to the state; Heidegger’s privileging of Hellenic culture is predicated on the assumption that the Germans are the only spiritual heirs of the Greeks, and even the elegiac references to classical temples in the essay on the work of art are not-so-subtle allusions to the Grecian architecture of Albert Speer’s Nuremberg stadium, from whose podium Hitler declared the new racial laws.

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No less than Fritsche, Faye compares Heidegger’s texts to the most virulent Nazi pronouncements of the time; in that context, he argues that their full implications emerge in sharpest focus. What is more, Faye contends, Heidegger was careful to disguise his true meanings prior to 1929, gradually revealing them only after he had secured Husserl’s succession at Freiburg.85 “What I think,” he allegedly proclaimed, “I will say when I will be professor ordinarius”86 (not exactly what one would expect of an authentic Da-sein). His thoughts, he shared only with intimate friends, Hans Georg Gadamer among them, a favorite student and protégé. “[W]ell before 1933,” Gadamer claimed, Heidegger displayed “an obvious sympathy for Nazi radicalism.”87 But even in the period after Hitler’s ascension as Führer, during which his ideological loyalties were unambiguous, his teaching more pointed and his positions harder, Heidegger injected so much of his philosophical terminology into his writings—Faye employs the term “ontologize” to describe this highly idiosyncratic process88—that their full meanings and political implications still require decryption. (Even the “impenetrable” logic of the rectorial address, according to Bambach, “must have been difficult to follow.”89) Thus, even if we accept the worse-case scenario, and recognize Fritsche and Faye’s interpretations as correct, it is hardly unreasonable to propose that Newman could easily have missed the more disturbing political allusions these scholars were at pains to uncover. This proposition should hardly be construed as a slight to the artist, especially if Sartre and Marcuse overlooked them as well, and if Heidegger extolled the individuality of Da-sein so frequently as to supply enough ammunition even for anarchists to construe his ideas as reinforcing their own. Even “in the German literature concerning politics in Being and Time,” Fritsche concedes, “no interpretation with a claim as strong as mine can be found.”90 It is entirely conceivable, therefore, that Newman, as Richard Rorty recommends,91 read Heidegger selectively, choosing to focus on the singularity of Da-sein, the concepts of presence and place, the relationship between truth and freedom, the denunciation of technology, the connection between art and authenticity, and so on, while rejecting any celebration of Germany’s national destiny (assuming that idea even registered with him).92 It is also highly plausible that Newman, informed by Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, read Heidegger’s concept of “resolution” as “courage,” not in the soldierly sense, but in the sense of having “strength of mind.” As a democratic idea of courage replaced the aristocratic one, Tillich writes, “Soldierly fortitude was transcended by the courage of wisdom.”93 Like Heidegger, Tillich recognized that the self is individual and yet connected to a wider community. Yet Tillich unambiguously privileges the individual. “While it obviously demands courage to be as oneself,” he explains, “the will to be as a part seems to express the lack of courage, namely the desire to live under the protection of a larger

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whole. Not courage but weakness seems to induce us to affirm ourselves as a part.”94 Like Durkheim, Tillich refuses to ascribe personal characteristics to collective groups, or to deny individual variation and disparities within their midst. In fact, he specifically decries Fascism, Nazism, and Communism as modern threats to the courage to be “as oneself.” This form of courage confronts individual doubts and take upon itself the possibility of meaninglessness, as well as the inescapability of death. But collectivist totalitarianism does not tolerate individual doubt, imposes a collective agenda upon the individual’s worry over the futility of existence, and supplants the individual’s fear of death by insisting on the collective’s survival. Newman would surely have sympathized with this account, particularly as Tillich attributes the “expulsion and prohibition of most of the modern forms of artistic expression in the neocollectivist countries” to their intolerance of individual anxiety and doubt, and rejection of any “expressions of the courage to be as oneself.”95 All of which suggests that Newman would probably have interpreted Heidegger’s idea of “resoluteness” in this sense; even recently, it was claimed that, “if there is any political theory implied in [Heidegger’s] writings, it is certainly not one that can be associated with fascism or Nazism.”96 Again, this is not to assert that Heidegger’s thought should be read accordingly, only that, given his own predilections, Newman was likely to have done so. It is also possible, of course, that Newman detected an underlying current of German nationalism in Heidegger’s work, enough for him to pass over any potential influence in silence, but not enough to trump an overarching interest in his philosophy of existence (Tillich, after all, described existentialism as “the most radical form of the courage to be as oneself”97). All of these options are plausible because Newman could have done to Heidegger what he did to the Minimalists, or what the Minimalists did with him: namely, to interpret, or even misinterpret, a set of ideas in view of his own concerns. In the aesthetic domain, creative misinterpretation is often the order of the day, with artists frequently appropriating select elements from each other’s work irrespective of how they functioned in their original context. But even in this specific case, a disconcerting implication remains. If Bambach’s arguments are accurate, and if Heidegger never renounced his belief in the special mission of the Germans as the saviors of the West, a theme consistently sustained throughout his writings, then Newman could have unknowingly annexed ideas that can only qualify as highly politically charged, despite their author claiming otherwise. Even the most seemingly innocent Heideggerian notions Newman could have adapted—to search for beginnings, to give the spectator a sense of place, to distrust technology’s abuse of the planet, to think of meaning in terms of time—were motivated by a fidelity to an exclusionary right-wing form of German nationalism. The beginning is actually the Greek origin to which only its true inheritors (the Germans) have access by virtue of their unique status as

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the metaphysical people; the very “da” of Da-sein denotes, not just any sense of place, but a knowledge of one’s geo-political origins; the landscape to be protected from the encroachment of a rapacious modernity is the native soil of the German homeland; and the historical being of Da-sein whose meaning resides in the future is simply a “metaphysical” version of a mantra often employed by many ultra-nationalistic, xenophobic groups: that the future cannot be established without knowledge of the past (“the past” being code for the restricted national or ethnic heritage to which one belongs).98 That Newman could have unwittingly absorbed such ideas is distressing, but not surprising given the difficulty of Heidegger’s prose. Even scholars like Fritsche, Rockmore, and Faye, who argue that Heidegger was not just an enthusiastic National Socialist, but also that his philosophy is inherently political, driving his actions in the public sphere, have adduced evidence to support their thesis. If we exclude unequivocal texts such as the rectorial address,99 the political edge in Heidegger’s philosophy is often communicated obliquely; it cannot simply be “read off” the page anymore than meaning can be immediately deduced from a Newman canvas. The scholars just mentioned paid close attention to the nuances of Heidegger’s language, and contextualized that language against his activities and statements made during the same period—and also against what they surmised was the philosopher’s intent. No less importantly, Heidegger’s meanings become clearest, they submit, as his ideas are placed within their appropriate historical setting, and when his terminology is carefully compared to that employed by others whose language was less ambiguous. That these acts of contextualization were necessary, and that these scholars proceeded with a view to persuade others of the appropriateness of their reading, testifies to the difficulty of their interpretive enterprise, even for trained philosophers.100 The same condition applies no less to art. While Newman saw his art as politically revolutionary and transgressive, scholars such as Kozloff saw it as a conservative and reactionary “quest for unlimited power . . . [and] the declaration of a total moral monopoly.” Just as Kozloff misread Newman, Newman could have misread Heidegger. Or, to put it more accurately, the darker political overtones of the philosophy may have registered no more with him than with many of Heidegger’s students and admirers. Otherwise, any links to Nationalism in general, and to German Nationalism in particular, would surely have been anathema to him. In an essay titled “What about Isolationist Art?” Newman viciously attacked the narrow provincialism and explicit nationalism of American Regionalist painting,101 which, he intimated, was comparable to Nazi propaganda. “Both are expressions of the same intense, vicious nationalism,” he wrote. “Let us not delude ourselves that isolationism is just another populist movement that made the fatal error of lining up with Hitler. . . . To those who think that the identity between isolationism and Hitlerism is an exaggeration,

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an examination of the methods used by the isolationists in the field of painting . . . will prove enlightening . . . the ‘great lie,’ the intensified nationalism, the false patriotism, the appeal to race, the calling of names, the reemphasis of the home and homey sentiment.”102 Such statements may give the impression that Newman would have been unlikely to misconstrue the political implications of Heidegger’s philosophy, but no more so than Sartre or Marcuse. In the end, even if we accept that Heidegger’s philosophy had inflected Newman’s, many reasons exist for Newman’s failure to mention this influence, although we will never know which proved most decisive: a would-be philosopher reluctant to admit borrowing ideas from another thinker, a revulsion at a coarse German nationalism communicated in that thinker’s texts, or the detection of an irreconcilable tension between two of the thinker’s key concepts—the individuality of Da-sein versus the extension of this idea to a community, a people, or a nation. If the latter, Newman could have remained faithful to one idea and rejected the other. Though Heidegger may have detected no such inconsistencies, this tension was noticed, as we have seen, by numerous scholars. If Newman noticed it as well, he may have concluded that Heidegger had not only contradicted himself but also betrayed one of the most fundamental tenets of his own philosophy. A discrepancy of such magnitude, even if unrelated to Heidegger’s National Socialist connections, would have given Newman little, if any, motivation to admit being a Heideggerian. On the other side—if we accept the proposition that Newman missed or overlooked the darker implications of Heidegger’s language—it is easy to see why he could have found such a philosopher so beguiling. Ever the individualist, Newman may have hunted for philosophical sources different from those that fascinated his Abstract Expressionist colleagues such as Rothko, who was especially drawn to Plato, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.103 And though the French existentialists—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus—visited the United States after World War II and piqued the interest of many among the American intelligentsia, they also undermined the very seriousness of their ideas by making a sensation in the popular press. As the French philosophers cheerfully enjoyed their newly found celebrity, enhanced by articles discussing intimate details of their lives in Life, Time, Harper’s, and the New York Times Magazine,104 some American intellectuals began to express doubts about the gravity and sincerity of their pronouncements. William Barrett, for one, confessed that the “present vogue of French Existentialism does create a certain embarrassment in some of us, for like all fashions this too often seeks the adventitious, the easy and sensational.”105 Along the same lines, William Phillips recalled the following exchange with de Beauvoir: “I once asked her, half-jokingly, what kind of angst she felt most, and she replied, with the heartiness of an athletic woman, that she felt none at all, she was happy and well adjusted, never even missing an hour of

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sleep. I said nothing, but wondered about the anxiety the Parisian existentialists talked about and what connection it had with the anguish of someone like Kierkegaard.”106 Since Newman committed no more to print about Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir than he did about Heidegger, his critical appraisal of these respective thinkers, or his opinion of the splash they caused in the popular press, cannot be ascertained. Yet Heidegger would have represented something else entirely. His impact on the American intellectual landscape took far longer to crystallize. And for Newman, a painter who recalled that “some of us woke to find ourselves without hope—to find that painting did not really exist. . . . It was that awakening that inspired the aspiration . . . to start from scratch, to paint as if painting never existed before,” Heidegger would have provided a model of a first philosophy, as testified in his interest in the beginnings of language, thought, and creativity. His view of humanity being thrown in the world, his stress on emotive states such as alienation, anxiety, and terror all coincided with Newman’s own feelings of helplessness in the years during and following World War II. Heidegger’s focus on Being, and on the concept of Da-sein, permitted extending the artist’s range of concerns into the metaphysical domain without losing sight of the tangible, everyday plight of the human being in the world, a being bound and anchored to a community, but also disconnected and separate. The metaphorical language employed by Heidegger also lent credence to a poetic view of things, and supplied an analog for the ways in which physical space could be used to convey such intangible ideas as presence, place, and even time. By relying on the spectator’s projection, space could even represent the openness and expanse of individual possibility, the constraints on that possibility, the eventual extinguishing of the self, or the cleavage between humanity and divinity. In other ways, the issue of Heidegger’s potential influence on Newman goes beyond a simple reliance on a philosopher’s ideas to interpret an abstract artist and intersects some basic questions in interpretive theory: whether meanings can be derived from the formal properties of works of art or philosophical texts, or whether those meanings need to be deduced from inferences about an intentional, cultural, or historical context. Are those inferences reliable, and on what basis are such judgments determined? How are contradictions in an artist’s statements or in a philosopher’s work to be addressed, especially if they cannot be resolved? And can influence be established even among individuals of vastly different ideological and political loyalties? Although these issues can be finessed with differing degrees of persuasiveness, as has been suggested throughout, Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialist politics raise other kinds of questions for which no clear answers can be provided. What is the relationship between philosophical theory and practice? Can one legitimately separate the philosopher from the philosophy? To what

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extent does philosophy have any bearing on ethics and politics in the public sphere? Are we justified in expecting more from a philosopher than from an ordinary individual? Given Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies, the correspondences between his philosophy and Newman’s also touch upon, if only indirectly, a more haunting question: How could a philosopher for whom thought was the greatest responsibility of the human being be so thoughtless and deluded as to have endorsed Nazi ideology? And although much ink has been spilled, and will be spilled, either to explain or to express dismay over how one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century could have been sympathetic to such a reprehensible and destructive ideology as National Socialism, this question remains as perplexing as ever—no less because so much of the philosopher’s work seems so incompatible with it.

Notes 1. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 117. 2. D. Shapiro and C. Shapiro, “Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting,” in F. Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 144. 3. Max Kozloff, “American Painting During the Cold War,” in F. Frascina (ed.), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, 112. 4. Serge Guilbaut, “Voicing the Fire of the Fierce Father,” in Voices of Fire, 140. 5. Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung und Carl Ernst Poeschel Verlag, 1986), 57; My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 60; see also de Beistegui, Heidegger and the Political, 11. 6. See, for example, Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). 7. See Otto Pöggeler, “Den Führen führen? Heidegger und kein Ende,” Philosophische Rundschau 32 (1989): 26–67. 8. See Joseph Margolis, “Discarding and Recovering Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Case, 413. 9. See Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger and the Nazis,” New York Review of Books, June 16, 1988, 47. 10. Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us,” reprinted and translated from Der Spiegel, May 31, 1976, in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 104. 11. See, for example, IM, 38–39. 12. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 33–34. 13. Philipse, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being, 153. 14. See Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 129ff. 15. EHP, 44.

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16. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” Basic Writings, 217ff. 17. See, for example, George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1998), or Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974). 18. Alfred Baeumler, Politik und Erziehung (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1937), 65. 19. P, 167. 20. Martin Heidegger, “The Spiegel Interview,” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 63. 21. IM, 39. 22. Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 5. 23. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in M. Murray (ed.), Heidegger and Modern Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 303. 24. Max Müller, “A Philosopher and Politics: A Conversation,” in Günther Neske and Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 178. 25. Hans Jonas, “Heidegger’s Resoluteness and Resolve,” in Neske and Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 200. In My Life in Germany, Löwith wrote, “Heidegger had twice been offered a chair in Berlin. . . . He declined both offers, and with his second rejection he gave a semblance of a reason—of it having something to do with being ‘rooted in the soil’ of his intellectual existence. . . . [P]hilosophy in its essence was in no way distinguishable from the work of the farmer. . . . [Heidegger’s ideas’] affinity with National Socialist ideology was not difficult to discern” (32, 33). 26. See Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács: From Romanticism to Bolshevism (London: New Left Books, 1978). 27. See Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), x. 28. “Heidegger’s Politics; An Interview with Herbert Marcuse,” in Robert Pippin (ed.), Herbert Marcuse, Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988), 99. 29. Löwith, My Life in Germany, 34; see also “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 175. 30. Löwith, My Life in Germany, 38. 31. W. J. Korab-Karpowicz, “Heidegger’s Hidden Path: From Philosophy to Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 61 (December 2007): 306. 32. Jürgen Habermas, “Life-Forms, Morality and the Task of the Philosopher,” in Peter Drews (ed.), Habermas: Autonomy and Solidarity (London: Verso: 1986), 195–96. 33. See Alphone de Waelhens, “La philosophie de Heidegger et le nazisme,” Les temps modernes 2, no. 35 (1947): 115–27. 34. See Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy DeCamp Wilson, “Telling More Than We Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (May 1977): 231–59. 35. Martin Heidegger, “Der Spiegel Interview,” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 44.

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36. See Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie. Autour des seminaires inédits de 1933–35 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 161ff, 228ff, 291ff. 37. See Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger’s Political Self-Understanding,” in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 214. 38. IM, 38. 39. Mindfulness, 14. 40. Basic Concepts, 32, 34. 41. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 35. 42. Domenic Losurdo, “Heidegger and Hitler’s War,” in The Heidegger Case, 149ff. For a useful discussion of Heidegger’s intellectual relationship to Nietzsche, see Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, esp. 247ff. According to Faye, however, Heidegger’s turn against Nietzsche dates to after the German defeat in World War II (Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, 122). 43. Michael Zimmerman, “Ontological Aestheticism: Heidegger, Jünger, and National Socialism,” in The Heidegger Case, 61. 44. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 48, 333, cited in Domenic Losurdo, “Heidegger and Hitler’s War,” in The Heidegger Case, 148. 45. Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” 30. 46. “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 114. 47. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary, “Translators’ Foreword,” in Mindfulness, xi. 48. Mindfulness, 26. 49. IM, 39. 50. Discourse on Thinking, 52–53, 55, 56. 51. Carl von Weizäcker, “Begegnungen in vier Jahrzehnten,” in Günther Neske (ed.), Ernnerungen an Martin Heidegger (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 245ff. 52. IM, 199. 53. Perhaps a review of Heidegger’s concept of historicity would make this point clearer. Da-sein, the philosopher argues, is not historical because it exists “in time,” in a sequence of events that will eventually belong to the past. Da-sein is historical, rather, because, as a consequence of its being-in-the-world, it has a past, a past to which it has a relation. Just as Da-sein is not “present” the way physical objects are present in space, Da-sein is not “in time” the way other objects are “in” time. To think of history as the accumulation of past events, for Heidegger, is a vulgar interpretation of time and history. Being historical in an authentic manner is only possible for Da-sein because Da-sein has a relationship to its own temporality. “The interpretation of the historicity of Da-sein turns out to be,” Heidegger insists, “basically just a more concrete development of temporality” (BT, 350). In other words, the same questions that pertained to the authentic understanding of temporality (i.e., an awareness of death) also pertain to an authentic understanding of historicity. If it was a confrontation with the inevitability of its fate, of the finitude of its existence, that allowed Da-sein to be futural and to think of itself as possibility, it is also a similar confrontation that accounts for authentic historicity. Heidegger puts it this way: “Only a being that is essentially futural in its being so that it can let itself be thrown back upon its factical There, free for its death and shattering itself on it, that is, only a being that, as futural, is equiprimordially having-been, can hand down to itself its inherited possibility, take over its own thrownness and be in the Moment for ‘its time.’

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Only authentic temporality that is at the same time finite makes something like fate, that is, authentic historicity, possible” (BT, 352). In other words, if we endorse an inauthentic view of temporality, we will inevitably endorse an inauthentic view of historicity: our fate will be concealed from us, and we will be lulled into the complacency of the theyself, remaining blind to our own possibilities. If we grasp authentic temporality, on the other hand, an authentic historicity is within our grasp. “The temporality of authentic historicity,” Heidegger writes, “undoes . . . the habituation of the conventionalities of the they. . . . Authentic historicity understands history as the ‘recurrence’ of what is possible and knows that a possibility recurs only when existence is open for it fatefully, in the Moment, in resolute retrieve” (BT, 357–58). 54. BT, 352. 55. Heidegger and the Political, 14–15. 56. Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 62. See also Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1988), 207: “Collective inauthenticity received detailed description throughout [Being and Time], but the reader learns of the possibility of authentic community only in its last sections and in vague terms.” 57. BT, 357. 58. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 151, 152, and 153. 59. BT, 232. 60. BT, 343. 61. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”: Gesamtausgabe 39 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1980), cited in Richard Wolin, “Introduction,” Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 9. 62. Martin Heidegger, “Decleration in Support of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State,” November 11, 1933, in Richard Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 52. 63. BT, 39. See also IM, 28–29. 64. BT, 40. 65. Heidegger and the Political, 17. 66. FCM, 172. Heidegger could not have put it any less forcefully than in FCM, 296: “Da-sein—as I understand it—is always mine.” 67. Heidegger and the Political, 18. In Heidegger’s Confusions, 29–30, Paul Edwards notices another blatant contradiction in Heidegger’s thought between the dependence on beings upon Being. As Edwards points out, although it is clear that, for Heidegger, beings cannot exist without Being, his statements as to whether Being could exist without beings were less than consistent. 68. Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 65. 69. Martin Heidegger, notification to all faculties and academic staff, 20 December 1933, Freiburg University Archives, cited in Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, 240. 70. See Faye, Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, 215.

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71. Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, 145. 72. BT, 352. 73. Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 60. 74. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Stratchey (New York: Norton, 1959), 1. 75. See Constantine Sedikides and Marilynn B. Brewer (eds.), Individual Self, Relational Self, Collective Self (Ann Arbor, MI: Taylor & Francis, 2001). 76. Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1962), 104. 77. P, 89. 78. See Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 46ff. 79. See also Guenther Stern (Anders), in “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” 357. 80. Mindfulness, 23. 81. The same is true of the recent publication of Contributions to Philosophy, where Heidegger claims that “a very high order of Being [Seyn] has to be achieved if a ‘völkisches prinzip’ is to be mastered and brought into play as standard for historical Dasein,” but “völkisches prinzip” is translated as a “people principle.” Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 30. For the original German, see Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur philosophie (Vom Ereignis) Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 65 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 42. 82. Johannes Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), xiii. 83. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), 38. 84. Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger, 5. 85. See Faye, Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, 34ff. 86. Heidegger cited in a letter from Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß to Erich Rothacker, December 1, 1954, cited by Volker Böhnigk, Kulturanthropologie als Rassenlehre. Nationalsozialistische Kulturphilosophie aus der Sicht des Philosophen Erich Rothaker (Würtzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 131. 87. “Hans Georg Gadamer,” interview with Philippe Forget and Jacques Le Rider, 19 April 1981 Entretiens avec Le Monde. 1. Philosophies (Paris: Editions La Découverte, 1984), 237. 88. See Faye, Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, 275, 371. 89. Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 86. 90. Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s Being and Time, 207. Intriguingly, Guenther Stern (Anders), in “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” comes close to Fritsche’s reading. Stern writes that existence, according to Heidegger, “consists of usurping death, of making it a ‘momentum’ of life, of becoming a ‘Sein zum Tode’ (being toward death)—a self-transformation whereby, in a way death, despite its ever-present threat, is made rather harmless, for now it is becoming a property or an attribute of life itself” (354). He continues: “[T]his retreat parallels that of Germany’s retreat into herself after the defeat, the loss of her fleet and her colonies in

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1918. It goes together with suspicion and xenophobia that, later on, facilitated his falling in line with National Socialism” (359). 91. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), 191–92. 92. Just as difficult as the discrepancies in Being and Time are to reconcile, debate has arisen as to whether its passages on communal destiny date Heidegger’s National Socialist sympathies to the 1920s, or whether the philosopher retrospectively tailored his own philosophy to fit the new ideology. 93. Tillich, The Courage To Be, 11. 94. Tillich, The Courage To Be, 89. 95. Tillich, The Courage To Be, 101–2. 96. W. J. Korab-Karpowicz, “Heidegger’s Hidden Path: From Philosophy to Politics,” Review of Metaphysics 61 (December 2007): 307. 97. Tillich, The Courage To Be, 123. 98. The last assumption would also explain Heidegger’s disparagement of Americans as an “ahistorical” people, not because Americans have a shorter history than Europeans, but because Americans, by dint of being immigrants, have no long-standing, autochthonous relationship to the soil they inhabit. 99. Curiously, some of these texts were available as early as 1965 in an anthology titled Martin Heidegger: German Existentialism, translated and introduced by Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical Library). Whether Newman ever came across this anthology is unknown. 100. In “Heidegger’s Resoluteness and Resolve,” Hans Jonas remembered, “In 1933, when he gave that infamous rectorial address, justifiably called treacherous in a philosophical sense and actually deeply shameful for philosophy, I was simply appalled and spoke with friends about it and said: ‘That from Heidegger, the most important thinker of our time.’ Whereupon I heard the reply: ‘Why are you so surprised? It was hidden in there. Somehow it could already be inferred from his way of thinking.’ That was when I realized, for the first time, certain traits in Heidegger’s thinking and I hit myself on the forehead and said: ‘Yes, I missed something there before’” (Neske and Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, 200–201). 101. See “What About Isolationist Art,” in SWI, 20ff. And even if many of Newman’s interests cannot be extricated from, and undeniably reflect, key aspects of American culture in the first half of the twentieth century (e.g., an interest in the “primitive,” in the “self,” and in subjectivity), Newman himself abhorred any art whose only goal was to reflect “its time.” His desire to see American art break free from European influence did not prevent him, of course, from being highly influenced by European modernism himself, nor from voicing preference for a Pan-American aesthetic just as he sought to transcend any form of chauvinism, American or otherwise. His fascination with non-Western art, moreover, did not prevent him from imposing specifically Western prejudices upon nonWestern art. The view that the distortions of normative anatomy and proportions in the work of many non-Western artists can be ascribed to their sense of “terror” before nature or unknown forces has now been exposed as a gross misreading, as a blatant example of Western paternalism. These logical and epistemological problems notwithstanding,

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there is nothing in Newman’s intellectual biography that rises to the level of, or can even remotely compare to, Heidegger’s endorsement of Nazism. 102. SWI, 23–24. 103. See, for example, Claude Cernuschi, “Mark Rothko’s Mature Paintings: A Question of Content,” Arts Magazine 60 (May 1986): 54–57. 104. “Existentialism,” Time, 28 January 1946, 28; Albert Guerard, “French and American Pessimism,” Harper’s Magazine, September 1945, 276; Bernard Frizell, “Existentialism: Postwar Paris Enthrones a Bleak Philosophy of Pessimism,” Life, 7 June 1946, 59; and John Lackey Brown, “Chief Prophet of Existentialism,” New York Times Magazine, 2 December 1946, 20. See also Cotkin, Existential America, 91ff, and Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 20ff. 105. Barrett, What Is Existentialism?, 7. 106. William Phillips, A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 127.

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Index

Abel, Lionel, 3 Abraham, 2, 215–16, 224–25, 228 Abstract Expressionism, 2–3, 11, 113, 267, 283–84. See also New York School Achilles (character), 127–28, 130, 224 Achilles, 50, 127 Adam (biblical figure), 41, 43, 92, 240, 241, 277 Adam, 24n95, 35, 36, 38–39, 44 Adorno, Theodor, 28, 77, 124, 266, 272 Aeneas, 125 Aeneid, 125 Aeschylus, 50, 97, 98, 129–30 Agamemnon, 128 aletheia, 61, 66, 93, 169, 170, 195, 225, 269, 280n49, 294. See also truth anarchism, 2, 5, 134, 136, 144, 284, 292, 297 Anaximander, 50, 86n31, 96 Andre, Carl, 152, 153, 155 angst, 94, 115, 122, 300 Anna’s Light, 225 Antigone, 128 anxiety, 11, 18, 94–95, 101, 103, 105, 110n11, 115, 133, 136, 140, 145, 149–50, 153–54, 157, 161–62, 180, 218, 238, 265, 298, 301

Arendt, Hannah, 2, 3, 4, 28 Aristotle, 50, 210 atomic bomb, 103, 264 Auden, W. H., 265 Austin, J. L., 187 authenticity, 31, 90, 112, 114–15, 122, 123, 124–25, 130, 134, 135, 139–41, 143, 145, 157, 159, 174, 180, 190–92, 194–95, 197, 198, 209–10, 211, 213, 214–15, 223–24, 227–29, 231n61, 239, 240, 241, 249, 271–72, 278, 287–88, 291–97, 304, 305n53 Baeumler, Alfred, 136, 287 Baigell, Matthew, 36, 248 Bambach, Charles, 287, 297, 298 Barrett, William, 2, 3, 69–70, 72n38, 300 Barthes, Roland, 267, 268, 275 Basic Concepts, 40 Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 40 Be, 87, 95, 174, 176, 216, 228 The Beginning, 32, 34, 226, 227 Being and Time, 2, 3, 6, 10, 12, 40, 88, 123–24, 143, 239, 261, 287–89, 293–95, 296, 297, 307n92 being-in-the-world, 77, 79, 112, 114, 115–16, 133, 135, 140, 143, 200n50, 232n66, 292, 293, 304n53

325

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INDEX

being-with, 111, 113, 115–16, 119, 125, 143, 180, 195, 248, 292 Black Fire I, 8, 237, 245 black fire/white fire, 238 Blücher, Heinrich, 3 Boehm, Gottfried, 30 Bois, Yve-Alain, 1, 35, 90, 206, 241, 268 Boroditsky, Lera, 207 Bourgeois, Louise, 125, 126, 127 Brock, Werner, 3, 4, 10, 21n37, 94, 95, 205, 259, 261, 296 By Two’s, 119 Camus, Albert, 300, 301 Canaday, John, 2, 19n12 choice, 25n115, 42–43, 115, 128, 133–34, 135, 136, 143, 210, 223, 249, 292 Christ, 208, 239, 241, 244, 252, 255 Churchill, Canada, 141 The Command, 159 Comrie, Bernard, 207, 214 Concord, 116, 117, 119, 122, 143, 222, 251 Covenant, 2, 249, 250, 254 Craven, David, 284 Dallmayr, Fred, 128, 294, 296 Darwin, Charles, 277 Da-sein: attunements of, 94, 104, 137, 149, 150, 158, 160, 180, 197; authenticity/inauthenticity of, 90, 114, 123, 124, 134, 140, 145, 157, 159, 191, 231n61, 272, 292, 293, 295, 296; awareness and self-awareness of, 45, 67, 70, 76, 77, 81, 84, 92, 94, 95, 141, 159, 161, 191, 194, 200n51, 211–12, 225, 226, 269, 271, 278; being-with-others or -withthe-world, 92, 111, 113, 116, 119, 125, 135, 143, 222, 248, 286, 292, 293; boredom of, 154; calling of, 159; choice of, 240; entanglement of, 114, 137, 246; everydayness of, 112, 231n61; greatness/heroic character

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of, 106, 130, 161; individuality of, 87, 92, 96, 98, 99, 105, 113, 115, 124–25, 174, 203, 224, 229, 292–93, 294, 297, 305n66; intensity of, 145, 157, 216, 228; German nature of, 288, 293, 300; linguistic capacity of, 186, 188–89, 193, 209, 236; mortality of, 135, 215, 216, 218, 225–26, 292; mystery of, 79, 139, 142, 161; Newman’s mention of, xii, 3–4, 7, 75, 194, 261; oppressiveness of, 93, 102, 161, 293; potential or possibility of, 89, 130, 136–37, 146, 178, 191, 200n51, 206, 218, 223, 263, 266, 271, 276, 292, 295; spatiality of, 70, 75, 77, 79–82, 83–84, 88–90, 112, 121, 122–23, 205, 211, 232n66, 237, 299; temporality of, 129, 203–6, 209, 211–13, 304n53; thrownness of, 150, 200n50; translations of, 18; transparency of, 102, 104, 124, 136, 161; transposition of, 195; truth of/ relation to truth, 101, 136, 194, 270, 271; uncanny nature of, 152, 156, 160 Davis, Gene, 1 Day Before One, 44, 46, 95 Deacon, Terrence, 273, 274 death, 18, 35, 95, 107n45, 135, 138, 166, 172, 176, 212, 215–16, 218, 220, 221, 223–24, 226, 228, 232n72, 288, 292–93, 295, 298, 304, 306n90. See also finitude Death of Euclid, 176, 177, 182n76, 197 de Beauvoir, Simone, 300–301 de Beistegui, Miguel, 71n17, 291–92, 293, 296 De Bolla, Peter, 67, 206 de-distancing, 82–84, 88, 121, 271 de Duve, Thierry, 76 de Kooning, Willem, 2, 26 de Man, Paul, xi Derrida, Jacques, xi, 4, 270–71, 283 destiny, 128, 130, 134–36, 143, 209, 287, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 307n92 Die Brücke, 264, 279n9

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IN DEX Dido, 125 Dionysus, 50 Dissent: A Quarterly of Socialist Opinion, 284 Dreyfus, Hubert, 80, 82 Durkheim, Emile, 294, 298 Emad, Parvis, 266, 276, 290 End of Silence, 10, 159–60, 191, 237 enframing, 168–69, 178, 180, 189, 192, 197, 198, 249, 252, 254, 259, 287 Ernst, Max, 279n10 essence, 15, 31–32, 37, 41–42, 46, 49–51, 68, 94, 98, 99, 101, 106, 134, 137–38, 141, 142, 150, 157, 168–69, 170, 186, 195, 211, 232n72, 236–37, 253–54, 263, 265–67, 270, 272, 275, 276, 285, 290, 293, 303n25 Euclid, 176, 178 Euclidian Abyss, 166, 176–77, 179, 182n76 existentialism, 2–3, 11, 72n38, 112, 134, 156, 265, 268, 298, 300–301 Farias, Victor, xi fate, 18, 97–98, 107n45, 129–30, 134– 36, 143, 172, 254, 292, 294, 295, 296, 304n53 Faye, Emmanuel, 289, 294, 296, 297, 299, 304n42 FBI, 284 Femme volage (Bourgeois), 125, 126, 127 Ferber, Herbert, 125, 126 “The First Man Was an Artist,” 87, 165 finitude, 135, 215, 292, 293, 304n53. See also death freedom, 18, 30, 40, 42–43, 92–93, 94, 105–6, 128, 133–46, 147n46, 161–62, 167, 178, 191, 218–19, 223, 232n72, 284, 292, 297 Freud, Sigmund, 96, 98, 264, 294 Fried, Michael, 163n31 Fritsche, Johannes, 294–97, 299 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 6, 40, 81, 108n57

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327

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 297 The Gate, 245 Gea, 171, 172, 174, 176 Gelassenheit, 67 Gelven, Michael, 11, 40, 88–89, 94, 178 Genauer, Emily, 150 Genesis, 32, 35, 43, 47, 71n20, 94, 235, 240 Genesis—The Break, 32, 33, 40 Genetic Moment, 116, 118 George, Stefan, 188 Giacometti, Alberto, 174, 175 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, 2 Godfrey, Mark, 150, 241 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 287 Gottlieb, Adolph, 13, 42, 62, 116, 166, 225, 233n90, 284 Greenberg, Clement, 279n10 Greene, Marjorie, 134 Greimas, A. J., 267 Guilbaut, Serge, 284 Guston, Philip, 36, 37 Habermas, Jürgen, 288 Harrison, Charles, 37 Heidegger, Martin: Adorno on, 124, 266, 272; American reception of, 2–3, 21n33, 265, 296, 300, 301, 306n90; anti-Semitism of, 21n36; on art, 6, 12, 37, 43, 91, 99–101, 165, 167, 169, 170, 174, 176, 190, 192–93, 268; on atomic bomb, 103; on Being/existence, 4, 11–12, 18, 30, 36, 41–42, 44, 45–47, 50–51, 58, 60, 62, 65–66, 67, 68–69, 71n20, 94, 99–100, 108n57, 112, 113, 115, 122, 134, 140, 145, 152, 156, 174, 176, 191, 193, 196, 206, 211, 218, 228, 232n66, 232n72, 235, 240, 249, 262, 269, 276, 295; on biology, 38, 172, 276; Derrida on, 270–71; interpretations/translations of Greek thought, 28, 29, 30, 50, 51, 58, 59, 60–61, 64, 66–67, 72n26, 75–76, 96, 99–101, 109n103, 122, 128, 129, 138, 157, 169–71, 173–74,

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328

INDEX

186, 195, 225–26, 228, 232n72, 236, 287, 294; on Greek tragedy, 97, 99–100, 128, 130, 135; on individuality, 83; on language, 13–14, 15–16, 17, 27, 28, 30–31, 47, 49–50, 58, 66, 69, 79, 86n31, 88, 92, 93, 185–86, 188–91, 193, 235, 238–39, 247, 249, 254, 268–69, 273, 275–77, 295, 299; on logic, 165–66, 197; on Marxism, 142, 166; on the Moment, 41, 213–14, 231n61, 305n53; Nazi connections of, 4–5, 123–24, 137, 142, 143, 145, 283–98, 299, 302, 303n25, 307n100; on Nietzsche, 4, 22n40, 136, 253–54, 290; potential connections with Newman, 2–4, 7, 9–10, 13, 17, 60–61, 75, 87, 123, 137, 161, 252, 261, 263–64, 284–85, 291–92, 298–99, 300, 301; on origins, 31–32, 35, 40, 47, 49–51, 59, 68, 104; on poetry, 12, 13, 15, 43, 47, 93, 167, 185–86, 189, 235–37, 241, 247, 252, 254; on presence, 57–58, 60, 69, 77, 96, 98, 176, 203, 211, 225, 227, 269; on psychology/ psychoanalysis, 97, 98; on Spinoza, 4, 21n38; on religious questions, 35, 43, 47, 130, 235, 236, 237–39, 240–41, 243–44, 247, 248–49, 252, 254–55, 258n77, 259n86, 277; on teaching, 112, 198; on temporality, 129, 203–4, 205, 209–13, 224, 227–28, 230n18, 304n53; on science and technology, 84, 142, 165–70, 171, 253–54, 290; translations of, 18, 88, 266. See also Da-sein Hector, 127 Heraclitus, 50, 52n12, 65, 66, 225–26, 228, 233n90 Here I (To Marcia), 10, 69, 88, 90, 114, 119, 251 Here III, 78 hermeneutics, 64–65, 72n47, 194, 266 Hess, Thomas, 1, 43–44, 47, 166, 186, 218, 227

Book 1.indb 328

historicity, 272, 285, 288, 291–92, 295, 304n53, 305n53 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 123, 285, 289, 296, 297, 299 Hitler Youth, 290–91 Hofmann, Hans, 267 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 13, 15, 41, 128, 186, 198, 236, 237, 238, 239, 252–53, 258n85, 259n86, 286, 290, 293 “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” 3, 42, 286 Homer, 50, 186, 235 Horizon Light, 205, 228 Husserl, Edmund, 4, 297 inauthenticity, 90, 112, 114, 115, 123, 124, 125, 134, 138, 140, 143, 159, 161, 180, 189–90, 210, 213, 214–15, 224, 227, 239, 249, 252, 271–72, 278, 292, 293, 295, 305n53, 305n55 Introduction to Metaphysics, 40, 71n22, 88 James, William, 206 Jaspers, Karl, 3, 68 Jesus. See Christ Johnson, Mark, 206, 207 Jonas, Hans, 287, 307n100 Judd, Donald, 9, 155 Jung, Carl Gustav, 264 Kalary, Thomas, 290 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 64 Kappel, Hubert, 3 Kenneally, Christine, 274–75, 276 Kierkegaard, Søren, 288, 300, 301 Klee, Paul, 4, 12, 171 Klein, Stefan, 153–54, 206 Komosol, 291 Korab-Karpowicz, W. J., 5, 288 Kozloff, Max, 180n16, 283–84, 299 Krasner, Lee, 284 Krell, David Farrell, 60, 93 Kropotkin, Peter, 2, 18, 144, 145

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IN DEX Lakoff, George, 206, 207 L’Errance, 138, 139, 213, 214 “Letter on Humanism,” 66 letting be, 137–38, 142–43, 144, 152, 156, 165, 167, 169, 171, 193, 211 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 4 Lewis, Norman, 284 Lewison, Jeremy, 1, 2 The Line (Guston), 36 logos, 30, 66, 67, 108n57, 188 Louw, Roelof, 10, 218, 223 Lovitt, William, 14, 28 Löwith, Karl, 3, 4, 20n24, 68, 80, 111, 124, 285, 288, 303n25 Lyotard, Jean-François, 1, 2, 150, 152, 154, 156, 169, 241 Magic Flute, 191 Makom, 29, 30, 75, 76, 237 Malevich, Kazimir, 160 Mandler, Jean, 15, 276 Manheim, Ralph, 88 Marcuse, Herbert, 4, 288, 296, 297, 300 Marden, Brice, 1 Matisse, Henri, 264, 279n9 Marxism, 5, 142, 166 May, Rollo, 265 McCarthyism, 283–84 McLaughlin, John, 7, 8, 9, 196 Mindfulness, 72n41, 289–90, 295 Minimalism, 9, 152, 155–56, 163n18, 164n31, 298 The Moment, 10, 32, 34, 40, 41, 44, 69, 71n20, 212, 216, 227 Mondrian, Piet, 6, 176 Morris, Robert, 155–56 Motherwell, Robert, 264, 265, 267, 284 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 191 Müller, Max, 287 Munch, Edvard, 264, 279n9 The Name, 47, 48, 186, 236 National Socialism/Nazism, 4–5, 123–24, 137, 142, 143, 283–98, 299, 302, 303n25, 307n92, 308n101

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329

Neanderthals, 38, 53n52, 272 Newman, Barnett: and Abstract Expressionism, 1–2, 3, 83, 96, 125, 130, 195; and aesthetics, 6, 38, 167, 186, 190, 201n60, 268, 272–73, 275; anarchism of, 134, 144, 292; and the effect and meaning of art, 7, 12–13, 16, 30, 37, 44, 62, 64, 65, 67–68, 69, 75, 80, 82–83, 84, 90, 93, 95, 99, 110n103, 112, 116, 119, 120–21, 125, 139, 145, 150, 156, 159–60, 163n18, 170, 177–80, 182n59, 189, 194, 195, 196, 200n47, 203, 205–9, 214–15, 216, 219, 221–23, 227–29, 243, 245, 250, 262–63, 272, 281n64, 289; on art and reality, 192; and beauty, 62, 66, 99, 101, 188; on collectivity, 116, 205; critical response to his work, 2, 150, 152, 158, 169; and criticism, as scientific, 28, 197–98; destruction of early work, 52n30; knowledge of existentialism, 2, 5, 10; on Greek art, 50, 62, 99, 101; on Greek tragedy, 50, 98, 99, 100, 128, 130, 134–36; on the heroic, 125, 127–30; ideas on and relation to language, 14, 15, 27–28, 29, 31–32, 47, 66, 79, 85n26, 92, 93, 108n57, 185–86, 189, 191, 236, 238, 273–75, 277, 281n64; on individuality, 83, 87, 94, 96, 111–13, 115, 116, 121, 122, 124, 136, 143, 159, 180, 186, 190, 205, 213, 298; intentions of, 7, 9, 17, 35, 39, 57, 61, 80, 105, 114, 149–50, 153, 157, 211, 223, 255, 263; desire to maintain originality, 264, 279n10; on Marxism, 142, 166; and Minimalism, 7, 9, 152, 155–56; and nature, 59, 62, 77, 80, 87, 89, 171– 74, 193, 218, 226, 238, 253, 258n77; on non-Western art and cultures, 37, 39, 50, 62, 66, 69, 79, 99, 101, 104, 125, 140, 161, 176, 188; and philosophy/philosophical ideas, 3–4, 10–13, 60, 65, 70, 88, 99, 112, 142,

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330

INDEX

225, 240, 243, 261, 265, 297, 300–301; and politics, 133, 134, 137, 142, 144, 278, 283–84, 297–98, 299–300, 307n101; potential knowledge of Heidegger, 3–4, 6, 42, 61, 137, 261, 291–92, 296, 297–98, 300, 301; on process, 68, 176; and psychoanalysis, 96, 98; on religion, 27, 30, 32, 35–36, 40, 43, 47, 235, 238–39, 241, 243–49, 252–55, 259n86; and Schapiro, 91; on science and technology, 165–67, 168, 176, 252, 253; on the self, 11, 18, 58, 59, 77, 83, 88, 92, 96, 98, 105, 111, 113, 122, 123, 141, 214, 267; statements on time, 203–6, 210–11, 212, 214, 223, 224, 228, 245–46; and Surrealism, 138; on teaching art, 7, 45, 198; on thought and awareness, 41, 42, 45–46, 58, 60, 68, 88, 90, 106, 114, 122, 215, 240, 278; use of titles, 10–11, 23n69, 69, 88, 109n103, 114, 159, 163n18, 186–87, 191, 224, 225, 237, 254, 278 New Politics: A Journal of Socialist Thought, 284 New School for Social Research, 3 New York School, 3, 265, 284. See also Abstract Expressionism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 4, 22n40, 113, 136, 239, 253, 264, 290, 300, 304n42 the Nothing, 93–95, 105, 108n57, 110n111, 116, 150, 180, 272 Not There-Here, 78, 88, 90, 139 Novalis, 84, 88 Now I, 238 Now II, 238 Oedipus Rex, 100 Ohioan Indian mounds, 57, 59, 61, 66, 67, 77, 81, 83, 87, 193, 203, 212, 226, 238, 258 O’Keefe, John, 204 “On the Essence of Truth,” 3, 147n34

Book 1.indb 330

Onement I, 3, 9, 12, 17, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 37, 46, 65, 76, 87, 90–91, 95, 98, 109n103, 139, 163n18, 174, 176, 179, 182n59, 196–97, 207, 220, 227, 232n72, 272, 288 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 42, 148n65, 149 ousia, 58, 71n10 Outcry, 191, 216, 217, 218, 232n73 Pagan Void, 32, 33, 44, 46, 95 Panofsky, Erwin, 91 Parmenides (philosopher), 50, 60, 100, 182n60, 174 Parmenides, 294 parousia, 58, 71n10. See also presence Patroclus, 128, 142 Pattison, George, 170 Pavia, Philip, 3 Philipse, Herman, 266 Phillips, William, 300–301 physis, 29, 49, 167, 171–73, 280n49 Picasso, Pablo, 279n9 Pinker, Steven, 14, 76, 87–88, 208, 212, 274, 275–76, 278, 279 Plato, 50, 99, 110n103, 265, 266, 300 poeisis, 169 poetry, 6, 12, 13–14, 15, 17, 31, 41, 43, 47, 93, 100, 142, 165, 169, 185–86, 188–91, 192, 194, 198, 229, 235–36, 240, 253, 254, 258n85, 259n86, 273, 286, 290 polis, 75–76, 122, 144, 294 Pollock, Jackson, 116, 117, 264 presence, 1, 18, 36, 44, 51, 57–70, 71n10, 72n26, 75–76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83–84, 86n31, 88, 92, 93–94, 95, 96, 98–99, 101, 104, 108n57, 109n103, 111, 114, 116, 119–20, 122, 125, 139–40, 143, 154, 156, 157, 159–60, 167, 169, 170, 174–76, 177–78, 179, 180, 188, 190, 191, 193–94, 203, 206, 211, 212, 218–19, 220, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 232n72, 249,

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IN DEX 251, 253, 257n64, 262, 266, 268–69, 270–71, 294, 297, 301 Primordial Light, 109, 225 Profile of Light, 239 Prometheus (character), 129–30 Prometheus, 50, 127, 224 The Promise, 119, 249–51, 254 Queen of the Night, 191 Regionalism, 299 Reinhardt, Ad, 160, 284 Reise, Barbara, 121, 243 resolution/resolve, 11, 27, 29, 30, 91, 103, 124–25, 127, 133, 140, 159, 177–78, 180, 191, 209, 213, 214, 224, 241, 248, 250, 278, 297 Rich, Sarah, 243, 244 Richardson, William, 47, 76, 248 Right Here, 88 Rockmore, Tom, 137, 269, 293, 294, 296, 299 Rorty, Richard, 297 Rosenberg, Harold, 1, 35, 137 Rosenthal, Nan, 249 Rosenzweig, Franz, 4, 20 Rothko, Mark, 13, 61, 83, 96–97, 98, 116, 118, 130, 166, 264, 267, 284, 300 Rubin, William, 279n10 Runkle, Gerald, 134 Safranski, Rüdiger, xii, 140, 143, 145, 146, 161, 232n66 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 3, 288, 296, 297, 300, 301 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 266, 268, 275, 283 Schapiro, Meyer, 91, 116 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 265 Schneider, Pierre, 7 Schoenfeld, Ann Alexander, 144 Schreyach, Michael, 218 Searle, John, 14 Shakespeare, William, 96–97, 273

Book 1.indb 331

331

Shiff, Richard, xii, 21n34, 65, 112, 142–43 Shimmer Bright, 109n103, 119, 222, 223, 225, 251 Shining Forth (To George), 109n103, 247 Songs of Orpheus, 171, 176 Sophocles, 50, 97, 100, 128 Speer, Albert, 296 Spinoza, Baruch, 4, 21 Stambaugh, Joan, 18, 88 Stamos, Theodoros, 172, 173 The Stations of the Cross, 2, 12, 150, 151, 235, 238–39, 241, 242, 243–47, 249, 253, 258n77, 259n86, 264 Steiner, George, 12, 13, 31, 73n70, 134, 192, 199n20, 204, 231n61, 233n85, 235–36 Stern, Guenther, 77, 141, 147n46, 200n49, 306n90 Still, Clyfford, 178, 179, 279n10 Sugarman, Richard, xi Surrealism, 138 Sweetser, Eve, 14, 15, 16–17, 27, 28, 31, 49, 79, 80, 186, 273 Sylvester, David, 35 Tamayo, Rufino, 42, 101, 102 techné, 129, 167, 169, 170, 171 Temkin, Ann, xii temporality. See time terror, 11, 18, 101–6, 114, 122, 125, 140, 149–50, 161–62, 180n16, 209, 238, 265, 301, 307n101 Tertia, 220, 258n77 Thetis, 127–28 the they, 112–13, 114–15, 121, 123, 124–25, 133, 135, 140, 144, 157, 159, 161, 167, 191, 200n50, 213, 224, 228, 231n61, 292–93, 295, 305n53 The Third, 219–21, 258n77 Third Reich, 291 The Three, 221, 222 Tillich, Paul, 2–3, 25n115, 107n45, 297–98

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332

INDEX

time, 15, 18, 64, 72n26, 82, 135, 152, 163, 197, 203–29, 230n18, 231n39, 231n61, 231n66, 244–46, 248, 249, 258n85, 276, 292, 301, 304n53 Tomasello, Michael, 77, 262, 263, 275, 276 tragedy, 18, 30, 44, 92, 96–97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 115, 127, 134, 135–36, 190, 235, 255, 259n86, 267 Trakl, Georg, 12, 254 truth, 6, 12, 32, 35, 40, 50, 60, 61–62, 65–67, 71n20, 75, 94, 96, 99, 101, 106, 109n103, 133, 136, 138–39, 141, 142, 145, 158, 165, 167–68, 169, 170–71, 191–92, 193, 194–95, 196, 199n20, 211, 215, 224, 225, 232n72, 235, 252, 255, 264, 265, 270, 271, 291, 297. See also aletheia Tundra, 258n77 Turner, Edith, 244 Turner, Victor, 244 Ulysses (character), 128, 130 Ulysses, 127, 128, 129 Untitled, 39 Uriel, 128–29 Van Gogh, Vincent, 4 Vietta, Egon, 3, 137

Book 1.indb 332

Virgil, 125 Vir Heroicus Sublimis, 91, 121, 125, 143, 208, 246 The Voice, 10, 47, 48, 159, 160, 189, 191 Voice of Fire, 237 Weimar Republic, 287 Weizäcker, Carl von, 291 “What Is Metaphysics?,” 3 White Fire, 237 Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue IV, 245 Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue series, 261 Wiesel, Elie, 4 The Wild, 216, 217, 218, 227, 232 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 287 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 265–66, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 281n64, 282n77, 283 Wolin, Richard, 292 The Word I, 47, 186, 187, 226, 236, 237, 245 World Fair (1967), 284 Yellow Edge, 221–22 Zeus, 127, 277 Zimmerman, Michael, 290

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About the Author

Claude Cernuschi, professor of art history at Boston College, received his MA and PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He has authored Jackson Pollock: Meaning and Significance; Jackson Pollock: “Psychoanalytic” Drawings; Not an Illustration but the Equivalent: A Cognitive Approach to Abstract Expressionism; and Re/Casting Kokoschka: Ethics and Aesthetics, Epistemology and Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Dr. Cernuschi has also contributed essays to Birth of the Modern Style and Identity in Vienna 1900; Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault; Pollock Matters; A New Key: Modern Belgian Art from the Simon Collection; Cosmophilia: Islamic Art from the David Collection; Matta: Making the Invisible Visible; Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin; Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol and Expression; and Re/ Dressing Cathleen: Contemporary Works from Irish Women Artists. He has also published articles in the Art Bulletin; Art History; Word & Image; Religion and the Arts; German Quarterly; Physics Today; the Archives of American Art Journal; the Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Source: Notes in the History of Art; and Arts Magazine.

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