Introduction

The Hermeneutic Consequence of Art’s Ontological Bearing

Santiago Zabala

Gianni Vattimo sees the phenomena which Hans Belting and I address from a perspective wider by far than either of us occupies: he thinks of the end of art under the perspective of the death of metaphysics in general, as well as of certain philosophical responses to aesthetic problems raised by a technologically advanced society.

—Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art (1997)

The recent publication of Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo has induced us to translate and publish this early book of Vattimo’s because the festschrift confirms not only that the Italian intellectual is one of the most important living philosophers but also that his early works deserve to be presented to Anglo-Saxon readers as much his later ones.¹ Although we are all well acquainted with Vattimo’s understanding of postmodernity (educed in The End of Modernity, The Adventures of Differences, and Beyond Interpretation) and his interpretation of religion (in Belief; After Christianity; The Future of Religion, with Richard Rorty; and After the Death of God, with John D. Caputo),² Weakening Philosophy—through its critical essays by philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Nancy K. Frankenberry, Richard Rorty, Umberto Eco, Jean-Luc Nancy, and many others—has shown that Vattimo’s philosophical position is not limited to his theory of postmodernity and his reformulation of the Christian message, but is also deepened by the studies he produced in the late 1960s, such as Art’s Claim to Truth.³ During these years, Vattimo taught aesthetics in the University of Turin and published many books on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and aesthetics that laid the way for all these better known later texts and, most of all, for the formulation of his philosophy: "pensiero debole," weak thought, which he first expounded in 1979. Weak thought is nothing other than the knowledge, acceptance, and recognition that philosophy, after the deconstruction of metaphysics, cannot capture the ultimate essence of its objects but must comply with a multiplicity of interpretations. As for religion, weak thought helps us to deal with the consequences and obligations of the death of God, that is, to weaken those ecclesiastic dogmas that stand as obstacles to the faith of believers and the agnosticism of nonbelievers. But how did Vattimo reunderstand philosophy as the modern description of static essences in order to recognize its postmodern, interpretative nature?

The answer to this question can only be found in those early texts by Vattimo, such as Art’s Claim to Truth and the recently collected and translated Dialogue with Nietzsche, where weak thought took shape through an accurate analysis of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Luigi Pareyson, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who have always been at the center of Vattimo’s intellectual career.⁴ But the current study on aesthetics not only prepares for weak thought and the well-known postmetaphysical interpretation of religion but also delineates, for the first time, Vattimo’s own aesthetics, which is hardly known to the English-speaking audiences. Just like Dialogue with Nietzsche, Art’s Claim to Truth is not simply a translation of the second edition of Gianni Vattimo’s Poesia e ontologia of 1967, but a new edition, with two new chapters and a new order given to the original contents. All this has been done, with Vattimo’s consent, because we felt the new chapters allowed a division of the book into three parts, Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, and Truth, which indicate and constitute the core of Vattimo’s aesthetic philosophy.

The best introductions to edited books are not those that summarize for the reader what she is about to read, but the ones that enable the reader to familiarize herself with the themes, authors, and vocabularies that constitute not only the structure of the book but also its thesis. This is valid not only for those introductions written by a collection’s author (as in Vattimo’s Nihilism and Emancipation),⁵ but also for introductions written by the editors themselves (as in Rorty and Vattimo’s The Future of Religion)⁶—which is the case here. Having said this, instead of summarizing all the essays that constitute this book, my brief introduction will try to delineate the book’s main thesis by an examination of those authors upon whom Vattimo bases his aesthetic investigations: Martin Heidegger, Luigi Pareyson, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. An introduction to these classic thinkers will enable the reader not only to work her way through Vattimo’s aesthetical intuitions but also to understand the two themes (ontology and hermeneutics) that constitute the book’s thesis: truth as the hermeneutic consequence of art’s ontological bearing. This presupposes that art’s ontological bearing (indicated by Heidegger) requires an interpretative process (delineated by Pareyson) that constitutes its truth (as Gadamer explained), which becomes the goal of art after the end of metaphysics. Although Heidegger, Pareyson, and Gadamer have specifically laid out their own aesthetic theories in their own texts, such as Off the Beaten Track (1950), Aesthetics (1954), and Truth and Method (1960), Vattimo uses their theories to overcome metaphysics, and this overcoming, according to him, is the necessary condition for understanding not only the general conceptual transformation of artworks in the twentieth century but also outstanding works of art, such as Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, David Lynch’s films, or Alfredo Jaar’s projects, which are so often criticized as unaesthetic or incapable of fulfilling art’s traditional function.⁷ These artists’ works are not only good examples for the reader to keep in mind in the different parts of the book (the Fountain for Heidegger’s ontological bearing of art, Mulholland Drive for art’s interpretative form according to Pareyson, and Let There Be Light for Gadamer’s truth of art), but also indications that art’s function is not to fulfill, perform, or entertain the demands of the public but, on the contrary, to require from the public an interpretation that allows the work’s ontological truth to come out, hence, truth as the hermeneutic consequence of art’s ontological bearing.

Although there have been many different theories of aesthetics since Alexander Baumgarten first gave the concept a modern meaning in 1735, most of them have either been limited to a philosophy of art or to the aesthetic nature of objects that are not art. This same distinction has been further divided in representationalism and formalism. This book situates itself beyond both understandings of aesthetics and, more important, as Arthur C. Danto correctly observes in my epigraph, under the perspective of the end of metaphysics.⁸ While Danto’s view of the development of the history of art is inspired by Hegel, who claimed that art, through its growing consciousness of itself, eventually becomes philosophy and thus comes to an end, Vattimo instead interprets this end as an emancipation from the objectivistic-representational nature that limited art’s creations. Such emancipation has repercussions not only on art but also on all the other disciplines, such as science (psychology) and politics (woman’s rights), that contributed to liberating our culture from oppression. This is why, for Vattimo, the death of art also refers to the constitution and modification of social structures and more specifically to the social conditions in which the artist lived throughout the nineteenth century,⁹ when the artist lost that direct contact with the restricted public that used to commission his works. In other words, for Vattimo the end of metaphysics also depends on the philosophical responses raised by its society or, as Danto says, by that technological society it inhabits. But how did Vattimo acquire this postmetaphysical perspective from Heidegger?

Vattimo’s philosophy, weak thought, situates itself after Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, that is, after the description of Being as "parousia or ousia, which ontologically and temporally means presence, Anwesenheit."¹⁰ According to this metaphysical perspective, knowledge is nothing other than the correct apprehension of "something objectively present in its pure objective presence [Vorhandenheit], which, as Heidegger explained in Being and Time, Parmenides already used as a guide for interpreting Being.¹¹ As we can see, it was at the dawn of Western European thinking that Being was determined by time as presence, allowing it to be thought exclusively in terms of its relation to beings and their cause. This left the difference between Being and beings, the ontological difference, obscured, limiting the conception of Being exclusively to terms of its relation to beings as their cause: Being is only the permanent nominal presence determined as objectness. In this condition, Being has been forgotten in favor of what is called the condition of the possibility," that is, the rational ground of beings, creating a metaphysical-scientific way of looking not only at the world but also at its artistic production. But where is mankind situated in this aesthetic relation?

Heidegger, in order to avoid the traditional tripartition of man into body, soul, and spirit—that is, in order to avoid locating its essence in a specific faculty, in particular that of Reason, of the rational animal—coined the term Dasein, which is not the world, nor the subject, nor a propriety of both, but the relation, the in-between, which does not arise from the subject coming together with the world, but is Dasein itself. The central feature of Dasein, along with thrownness¹² and fallenness,¹³ is existence¹⁴ because it has to decide how to be. It is this essential characteristic that makes Dasein not a rational being but, more profoundly, a relationship to Being upon which humanity must decide if it wants to exist as a metaphysical describer of objectivity or a postmetaphysical interpreter of Being. The best example of the describer of objectivity can be found in Descartes, for whom the world consists of objects that are already there as such even before they are investigated, that is, as if Dasein could only understand its own being in terms of that being to which it is essentially, continually, and most of all closely related—the ‘world’ … in terms of what is objectively present.¹⁵ If this were the case, our thought would only have to re-present objects in search of objective accounts, but such a philosophy would imply that we all have an impossible God’s-eye view for which the truth of things exists in the form of a timeless presence. This is why metaphysics can be defined as the age of the world picture,¹⁶ where the world is reduced, constituted, and presented as images.

As we’ve seen, metaphysics, and more specifically Descartes’s conception of ontology, depended upon the images of the world reproduced by modern sciences, which aimed at a timeless description and representation of the way the world really is. If Dasein conceived itself on the basis of what is objectively present, this would imply it is finished, determined, and completed as an object might be; instead Dasein, as long as it exists, always remains open for the future because it implies "Möglich-sein, being possible, possibilities. Heidegger insisted upon this ontological nature of objects, representing not the world as it is but rather as it could be, that is, by questioning the fact that it exists since in contrast to the rest of the objects of the world, as we already said, Dasein has a relationship with its own Being, called existence." It is a self-relationship, hence a Being-relationship.

Heidegger’s ontological recovery of Being showed how aesthetics after metaphysics cannot limit the problem of art by assigning it to either an a priori that legitimates it or to a simple alternative description of the world of art. Rather, aesthetics must seriously consider the question of the very fact of art. The recovery of ontology brought forward by the German master in Being and Time did not evolve, according to Vattimo, in the realm of philosophy only, but also in the artistic revolutions of the avant-garde of the nineteenth century, such as expressionism, surrealism, and dada. These revolutions arose to defend the fundamental meaning and importance of art for history and human existence; in other words, the artists rebelled against the aestheticism that is latent in every metaphysical theory that ignores the question of art’s meaning as such. What constituted the elements for aesthetic reflection were no longer beautiful objects but rather the fact that in general there are works of art that do not satisfy any needs and whose existence is not required by any motive that could justify them. This is why Duchamp’s Fountain is probably the best example of art’s ontological bearing; it created a new world through the originality, novelty, and founding force of the work alone, that is, only for the virtue of art as such. The Fountain’s novelty consists in its suspending the public’s habitual relationship not only with the world of art (within the boundaries of the museum and images of the world in paintings and sculptures), and also with the objects of the world (after all, Fountain was a real urinal, simply turned over onto its back and signed). It is only on the basis of Heidegger’s destruction of Being as something objectively present that Duchamp was able to emphasize the ontological bearing of art because his Fountain is a transfiguration of the commonplace,¹⁷ as Danto correctly states. It is also the first incarnation of Heidegger’s ontological bearing of art. But how can such a work of art, which emphasizes only its ontological bearing, be created, evaluated, or even enjoyed?

The ontological bearing of art requires that we overcome traditional aesthetic-optical admiration and enter into dialogue with art because our consciousness has always consisted of spiritual contents that may only be realized in linguistic discourses. But why would ontological bearing allow us to enter into discourse with the new work of art if we cannot do so with, for example, a beautiful representation of a landscape? If the world, as Heidegger explained, is a system of meanings into which we are always already thrown, and a work of art founds a new world insofar as it founds a new system of meanings, laws, or links, then that work of art that represents a (recognizable) landscape we could see with our own eyes does not found anything new but only represents once again that system of meanings in which we are already thrown. Instead, a work of art such as the Fountain, which founds a new system of meaning, not only projects a new world but also becomes a new proposal, a way to arrange the world in a different manner. These are the sort of works of art that will oblige the public to enter into dialogue in order to possess and to be possessed by the work at the same time. After metaphysics, a work of art is beautiful if its wholeness is rigorously dominated by its own internal law, the law, explains Vattimo, giving order to its structure, so that each part appears in its necessary links to the whole and the whole is revealed in each of its parts.¹⁸ This internal law not only explains the single structure of each work of art but also demonstrates why all those attempts to find a canon of the beautiful in the past have failed; the internal laws of individual works do not allow for reduction to a norm that might transcend them and on the basis of which they could be evaluated.

It is through the destruction of metaphysics that Dasein becomes the postmetaphysical interpreter of Being, forced to enter into dialogue with the work of art instead of recognizing the static perfection that it represents. Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics, that is, the recognition of the ontological bearing of art, has not only allowed us to "question of the very fact of art," but most of all demanded an interpretative process that is required to enter into dialogue with the work. In this process, where the work of art becomes a point of departure rather than a point of arrival, we can finally stop asking what art means, what it refers to, or even if it is beautiful, in order to begin asking what it wants to say. But in order to enter into this dialogue it is necessary to understand the meaning of hermeneutics for ontology, that is, its consequence. It is through Pareyson’s hermeneutics that Vattimo delineates not only the process for the work’s interpretation but also its formation. Before venturing into Pareyson’s theory of interpretation and how it is related to Vattimo’s aesthetic thesis, let’s recall where it is situated in the history of hermeneutics.¹⁹

Although hermeneutics, which today has become the "koiné" of contemporary thought,²⁰ has its etymological origins in the Greek god Hermes, the reputed messenger and interpreter of the gods, it first developed systematically as biblical exegesis and then in a theoretical framework to govern such exegetical practice.²¹ But starting in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, theologians and philosophers extended it into an encompassing theory of textual interpretation in general, regardless of the subject matter, which could be God, the Bible, nature, science, or even art. From the narrow interpretation of sacred texts, hermeneutics became that modern concern of interpretation in general. Essential for Pareyson were Friedrich Schleiermacher’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories of interpretation. For them there are no things (facts) out there that could subsequently receive a certain shape by our (subjective) understanding of them; that is, neither the interpreter not the interpreted depend on preestablished agreements but only on an involvement that occurs during knowledge’s natural interpretive process. While Schleiermacher recognized how one always understands a work at first as well as and then even better than its author, Nietzsche instead insisted that there are no facts, but only interpretations, and this is also an interpretation. Both found in hermeneutics the ontological dimension that Heidegger would then transform in the ontological relation that I point out above: Dasein as the in-between that does not arise from the subject coming together with the world, but in a relationship with its own Being. This is why for Heidegger Dasein is in a hermeneutical relation,²² that is, in an involvement in the world that takes the form of an interpretative process. Pareyson, following Heidegger in one of his fundamental books, Truth and Interpretation, explains that the original ontological relation is necessarily hermeneutic and every interpretation has a necessary ontological nature, meaning that of truth there is nothing but interpretation and interpretation is only of truth.²³ But how does this process take place in order to acquire, for example, comprehension of a work of art? Pareyson explains this process through the interpretative act, which is at the core of his philosophy.

The Italian master delineated his hermeneutics in the early 1950s in two of his major books: Existence and Person (1950) and Aesthetics (1954).²⁴ He defined interpretation as the form of knowing in which receptivity and activity are inseparable, and where the known is a form and the knower a person.²⁵ In these texts he also demonstrated how the comprehension of a work of art does not consist in a panoramic contemplation of the work but only in an interpretation of the artistic process through which it has been formed. It is important to point out that by artistic process Pareyson does not refer to those technical aspects of the work such as, for example, the actors selected for the film, the screenplay, or the type of special effects used, even though these are, most of the time, the only elements of the work analyzed by critics. Instead, the artistic process that Pareyson has in mind is that interpretative process through which the artist has formed the work by pursuing his initial idea. At first this idea does not have a form, but then, little by little, within its forming process (through the artist’s procedure) it gains a form that will constitute the internal law I mentioned above. The artistic process gives form to an idea that was unformed and hence indefinite, until it becomes recognizable through the internal law that the completed work indicates. Now, if the work of art is not the result of a sudden intuition of the artist but of that formed process, then, in order to interpret it, one must rethink its formation. This is why Gadamer, in Truth and Method, following Pareyson explained that an aesthetic object is not constituted in the aesthetic experience of grasping it, but the work of art itself is experienced in its aesthetic quality through the process of its concretization and creation.²⁶

For Pareyson the work of art is the perfection of a formation because the act of forming is a making that, in making, invents a new way of making.²⁷ This theory, which he posited in Aesthetics, has received applause directly from artists because it recognizes the originality that belongs to each creation and how it cannot be presupposed by any law that could eventually be applied at ease, as Schleiermacher and Nietzsche noticed. Pareyson’s theory invites the artist not only to form his work with his own procedures, which will vary through the production of the work, but also to recognize how his own making will also generate (invent) new procedures. A film such as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a good example of this theory not only because the movie does not follow a linear narration that would imply a previously dictated screenplay, but most of all since it actually started out as a pilot for a TV series and only during its process became a film.²⁸ In other words, the film Mulholland Drive was formed only during the making of something else (the pilot) and was not presupposed but only formed little by little through a concretization and creation, that is, through a perfection of a formation. Now this perfection of formation is not a simple act of creation but also an act of interpretation because the materials of the film (actors, screenplay, and special effects) are somehow already present in the course of the process in which the formed form is revealed. All these elements converge to generate the forming form, that intimate law of the productive process that, though only completely created at the end of the work, already somehow exists in the course of the process. Just as the production of the film already constitutes an interpretation by Lynch, his interpretative act is, above all, formative, where the form of the film is not only created but also grasped. Aesthetic experience, according to Pareyson, is not only the pleasure attained from the beauty of the made form but also the interpretation that recovers its formation. Such recovery is what often pushes spectators to contemplate the same work of art various times.

What Pareyson’s hermeneutics theory underlines is that making is nothing else than pure creativity, that is, creation of forms during the same act of making. But isn’t this common to all human making? After all, even a driver does not adhere to the letter of the traffic laws he is supposed to follow because there might be roads or situations in traffic that must be managed in different ways. These different and new situations will oblige him not only to invent new driving approaches but also to create his own style of driving, which is a permanent component of all practices and productions. It is interesting to notice that although styles are always recognizable, they are impossible to imitate without falling into mere replications because they always include new variables that make them unique within their own procedures. In fact, making is common to all human making, but