Between Word and Image

Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis

Dennis J. Schmidt

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253006226
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

A groundbreaking examination of word and image through the lenses of modern art and Continental philosophy: "Probing and lucid" (Stephen H. Watson, University of Notre Dame). Engagement with the image has played a decisive role in the formulation of the very idea of philosophy since Plato. Identifying pivotal moments in the history of philosophy, Dennis J. Schmidt develops the question of philosophy's regard of the image by considering painting?where the image most clearly calls attention to itself as an image. Focusing on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer and the art of Paul Klee, Schmidt pursues larger issues in the relationship between word, image, and truth. As he investigates alternative ways of thinking about truth through word and image, Schmidt shows how the form of art can indeed possess the capacity to change its viewers.

CHAPTER 1

UNFOLDING THE QUESTION: AN EXCENTRIC HISTORY

As soon as one begins to speak about an image, one is entangled in complications. This is the case no matter how one approaches the image: critically, theoretically, appraisingly, admiringly, confusedly—it does not matter, since the problem is rooted in the difference between words and images. Philosophy is no exception and does not escape these complications. Quite the contrary, philosophy seems to have a special difficulty in confronting the image, since philosophy lives in and is oriented to and by the logos, by words, and since it tends to take the legitimacy of this orientation as self-evident. The authority of the logos defines the very idea of philosophy and, since it is invariably assumed that the logos cannot be grasped by an image, the superiority of the logos over the image also belongs to this definition of philosophy. The logos is understood, but never seen. Even if there is a sort of “seeing” involved in philosophy, this “look” to what we call the “idea” is not the same as the look to the image. Consequently, if one is self-conscious, if one is honest, then one must hesitate before this difference between the image and the word so that once one raises the question of the image from the perspective of philosophy, the peculiar presuppositions that govern and define the project of philosophy themselves come into question. The question of the image recoils back upon philosophy and its own presumptions. Once this happens, one learns that one needs to be careful about presuming that words and images translate into one another so that one can indeed speak of images and still do justice to them such that the nature of the image shines through the words. Despite this need for hesitation and self-reflection that should emerge right from the outset of any philosophical engagement with the question of the image, what is striking is just how easily the differences between words and images are effaced, how readily we are persuaded of the gifts of language and the power of language to articulate something true in what is said. This means that the first task of any effort to speak of images is to turn language back upon itself such that its own character begins to become a question. In order to begin, it is necessary to understand that the question of the image is not simply a question for philosophy but rather a question that goes straight to the heart of the very possibility and idea of philosophy. And yet, the “blindness” of language before itself remains its first and foremost trait: language is always poorest at speaking and articulating itself. This “blindness” of language, this poverty of its own nature, is what the encounter with the image can bring to light.

One of the most telling ways in which we can understand what this poverty of language means is found in the way that the word conceals within itself the enigma of the image. Insofar as it can be written—one might even argue that it needs to be written—the word exposes its own concealed iconographic nature. It is no accident that the question of writing, of script, is almost entirely absent from the history of philosophical reflections upon both word and image. Philosophy is a discourse wedded to the ideality of language, that is, to its capacity for abstraction and concept-formation. As such, it has an inherent tendency to suppress the iconographic element of the word in which the ideality of language is tethered to the concretion of the image. Hegel calls the kinship of the word and ideality upon which philosophy is founded the “divine nature” of language.¹ Plato, emphasizing the other side of this philosophical coin, calls writing “the corpse of a thought”² and so warns against the peculiar death that awaits thinking once it is translated into script. Of course, Plato's hesitations about writing and his rejection of painting as a way in which we learn something of the world both emerge out of this impulse to suppress the inscription of this iconographic potential of the word. The legacy of Plato is, in this case as in so many others, strong: though the history of philosophy is a history of written texts, there has been virtually no effort to confront the iconographic character of the language of those texts. But without writing, without that translation of the ideality of language into material form, even history as we know it would not be possible. Memory alone, memory without writing, could never yield history in the same sense and as the same mystery as that which emerges as a history forged in and by texts. Nonetheless, reflections on texts and on history have passed over this decisive event. This oversight, this poverty and blindness of language with respect to itself, is the first matter that needs to be engaged if one is to speak of the image. And so one soon learns that the problem of speaking the image begins with the first word and that it is the limit of the word that comes forward with ineluctable force and that needs to be recognized if there is to be a real philosophical engagement with the image.

This hesitation, a sort of stutter of language, a hesitation of reticence, should characterize the beginning of any philosophical reflection upon the image. As the self-concealing character of language emerges, as its own iconographic potential comes into view, the complications that belong to the effort to engage the image philosophically emerge as well. However, complications notwithstanding, the need to speak of images, to struggle toward the peculiar translation of such speech, is irrepressible: just as the word permits—or even needs—its own translation into an image, so too one might argue that the image harbors within itself the need for its own translation into the word. This drive to language, to be brought into speech, will belong to the image in the work of art as its own concealed nature. This is evident most acutely in the intensification of the image and of the word found in the artwork. Here one can begin—almost.

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Until relatively recently, certainly until Lessing (1775), a sense of the essential translatability, or at least the basic and uncomplicated compatibility, of words and images has defined much of the philosophic history of attempts to come to terms with the image. This is an ancient assumption that one finds already in Simonides, the first literary critic of the Western world, when he said, “Painting is silent poetry, while poetry is painting that talks.”³ One finds similar remarks throughout the history of reflections on the arts. For instance, one finds in Horace the comment that “poetry is like painting; one work seizes your fancy if you stand close to it, another if you stand at a distance.”⁴ Or Augustine: “Though painting is without sounds, it would reproduce, nonetheless, the faces of the sorrowful, the groaning, and the weeping, as best it could.”⁵ In this long and dominant tradition, words and images, and so the summit of their possibilities that develop in the work of art found in poetry and painting, are understood as reflections of the same. On the basis of this presumed sameness, an assumption arose that speaking of images was not problematic from the start, and so in the history of philosophy, we find no real hesitation about speaking of the image in the work of art or about sitting in judgment of its value and meaning since the language of philosophy is but another, higher summit still of the possibilities of the word.

The oldest tradition that speaks from out of this assumption of the homogeneity of words and images is found in the genre of ekphrasis. The word ekphrasis referred to the manner in which images could be said to “speak” and hence enabled language to speak of images without a fundamental distortion.⁶ it is a tradition in which a real fluency and an untroubled sense of the possibilities of translation were understood to define the effort to speak of images. It is also a tradition that has, in the end, invariably deferred to the word as possessing a greater capacity for and surer relation to meaning and intelligibility than one finds in the image. Sameness defines the relation of word and image here, but so does the superiority of the word with respect to its capacity to articulate what it presents.

The first example of ekphrasis is generally said to be Homer's description of Achilles’ shield in book 18 of the Iliad. There is much that is odd about this passage, not least of all the fact that Homer, who was said to be blind, would be the one to inaugurate a tradition that would be so definitive for how we speak of the visual arts.⁷ it is also unusual in that the shield described in this passage presents mostly benign images, images of life, even of a happy life. Normally, the shield one carried into battles never bore such peaceful images; rather, such shields were covered with threatening images, images of a Gorgon or some other terrifying figure intended to frighten those one was fighting. They were designed to show the enemy the threat that the shield protected: “behind this shield is hidden your death and the image approaching you is its arrival.” However, the image that Homer describes on the shield of Achilles is a quite peculiar, even singular image—an image of the whole of life—of the heavens and earth, sun, and stars; of dances and wars; of pastoral life and city life; of marriage, death, and birth. These images do not serve as comments upon the war for which the shield is designated; quite the contrary, they refer to life more than to death, and in the fullness of that life, war, such as the one in which this shield appears, is but a small and fleeting moment. These images represent nothing but themselves. In fact, they do not represent anything at all, since these images are “alive”—they are the scene of life itself; they are not its representation. Finally, this “image” on Achilles’ shield is also an image that never existed except in Homer's words. One might also say that it is quite simply the description of a painting that cannot exist as an image:

And first Hephaestus makes a great and massive shield, blazoning well-wrought emblems all across its surface, raising a rim around it, glittering, triple-ply with a silver shield-strap run from edge to edge and five layers of metal to build the shield itself, and across its vast expanse with all his craft and cunning the god creates a world of gorgeous immortal work. There he made the earth and there the sky and the sea and the inexhaustible blazing sun and the moon rounding full and there the constellations, all that crown the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades, Orion in all his power too and the Great Bear that mankind also calls the Wagon: she wheels on her axis always fixed, watching the Hunter, and she alone is denied a plunge in the Ocean's baths. And he forged on the shield two noble cities filled with mortal men. With weddings and wedding feasts in one and under glowing torches they brought forth the brides from the women's chambers, marching through the streets while choir on choir the wedding song rose high and the young men came dancing, whirling round in rings and among them flutes and harps kept up their stirring call—and the people massed, streaming into the marketplace where a quarrel had broken out and two men struggled over the blood-price for a kinsman just murdered.⁸

The reason that this “painting” cannot exist is that it is, in the words of Alexander Pope, the “complete idea of painting, and a sketch for what one may call a universal picture.”⁹ In other words, it is a painting that is possible only as an idea and so possible only in words. What is spoken of in this “description” is so alive that it could be presented only as a living image, as an image that was itself alive. The description is not of the frozen moments but of movements, of events as they are happening. The shield does not simply represent its themes’ dances, songs, and festivals, the course of seasons and the stars—things that are kinetic and, by their own definition, do not stand still; rather, this shield enacts and is what it “depicts.” The image described as decorating Achilles’ shield is eventful and not in the least a “representation.” Homer describes this “painting” as an act full of life. Today one is tempted to think of it almost as a form of cinema avant la lettre.¹⁰ Despite what Pope has shown to be its impossibility, the challenge of actually painting this image has excited the imagination of many artists from ancient times to the present who have tried to create such a painting (and of scholars who have sought to outline the dimensions of such a shield); nonetheless, there is a sense in which any particular image must fail. It is an image, drawn in words, that cannot be repeated in a painted image. It belongs essentially to the realm of images that only the ideality of words can summon. No painted image could ever realize it. The problem with realizing this image that Homer describes is twofold: any attempt to represent such a shield cannot present the whole of what is described (see figure 1), but any attempt to repeat the character of the movement of life that appears on the shield does so by sacrificing something of the detail that animates that description (see figure 2).¹¹

Lessing discusses those Homeric words that create a painting in his Laocoön, which is one of the founding texts of modern aesthetics. It is also a text that begins to develop the differences between poetry and painting, between words and images, in a way that eventually opens up onto the twentieth century's question about the appropriateness of words that attempt to get images to “speak.” Lessing is the first to make the argument that the arts each have their own nature and integrity, the basis of an approach to art in general. Simply by thematizing the assumption that words and images are essentially compatible, an assumption that for the most part was simply unexpressed until then, Lessing opens the door to even stronger challenges to that assumption.¹² However, even though he rejects the notion of a sameness between painting and poetry, Lessing still remains bound to the tradition that holds the view that words offer more to thinking than images can ever offer and so one form of art, poetry, has a superiority with respect to all of the others. The difference between words and images is recognized now, but there still is not parity between them. Lessing gives one key reason for this judgment when he says:

Homer treats of two kinds of beings and actions, visible and invisible. This distinction cannot be made in painting, where everything is visible and visible in but one way…. For example, when the gods, who are divided as to the fate of the Trojans, finally come to blows, the entire battle is represented in the poem as being invisible. This invisibility gives the imagination free rein to enlarge the scene and envisage the persons and actions of the gods on a grander scale than the measure of ordinary man. But painting must adopt a visible scene…Painting carries out this reduction. In it everything that in the poem raises the gods above godlike human creatures vanishes altogether. Size, strength, and swiftness—qualities which Homer always has in store for his gods in a higher and more extraordinary degree than that bestowed on his finest heroes—must in painting sink to the common level of humanity.¹³

Despite this privilege of poetry among the arts, Lessing grants painting a sufficient independence that the question of the capacity of the word to address the image is now raised as a real question and with a new seriousness. The problem of speaking about painting gained real traction at this point. Indeed, this newly sharpened question of the relation of word and image, of language and art, defined the most radical approach to the enigma of art yet: Kant's Critique of Judgment. Kant's discussion of the communi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction - The Genesis of the Question
• Chapter 1 - Unfolding the Question: An Excentric History
• Chapter 2 - Heidegger and Klee: An Attempt at a New Beginning
• Chapter 3 - On Word, Image, and Gesture: Another Attempt at a Beginning
• Afterword: The Question of Genesis for Now
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index