Reversal of the World: Heidegger's View of Literary-Artistic Fiction

Heidegger's view of literature and art has an important influence on Western modern aesthetics and literary studies, and he expounds his view of literary-artistic fiction precisely in an extremely tortuous, contradictory, and profound way. On one hand, Heidegger opposes regarding poetry and art as the product of fiction and fantasy; on the other hand, he places poetry and art in “another world” distinct from reality, that is, the non-real world—and this constitutes, in theory, an inner contradiction. Yet within this surface contradiction is contained a profound reflection on literature and art.

I

Heidegger thinks the problem of literature and art against the background of the rapid development of Western modern science and technology and their increasingly gaining cultural dominance. He is pained by the “destitute time” created by modern technology, and holds that modern science differs from the ancient Greek “knowledge” and the medieval “doctrine”: modern science is founded on the “subjectivization” of the human and the “objectification” of all beings. But at the very point where the human becomes subject, the relation between the human and other beings undergoes a fundamental change. For once the human has become the primary and true “general subject,” that means: the human becomes a special kind of being, and all beings must, in dependence on this kind of being—the human—establish their own mode of existence and mode of truth. The human becomes the “center” of all beings, while beings as a whole are determined and represented by the human; the world is thereby grasped as “picture.” “The becoming-picture of the world and the becoming-subject of the human within the realm of beings are one and the same process.” (1) This “age of the world picture” is an age utterly different from any previous age. (2)

In the ancient Greek period, the human was not yet the general subject, not yet the center of all beings. Beings self-disclose and surge forth; they encounter, as that which is present, the human as the one to whom they are present; and the human does not perceive the being of beings through intuition, still less project and construct beings in a subjective manner—he is drawn into the opened domain of beings and is encompassed by this opened domain. There, being is presence, and truth is the state of unconcealment. But once the human has become the modern subject, he begins to demand to become that kind of being who can give measure and standard to all beings, who, through “representation,” “sets” (stellen) beings before himself. “Representation is no longer the ‘self-unconcealing for…,’ but the ‘grasping and seizing of….’ In representation, it is no longer the presencing one that holds sway, but the assault (Angriff) that gains the upper hand… beings are no longer the present ones, but that which is set up over against in the act of representation, that is, the object (Gegenstand). Representation is the advancing, controlling objectification.” (3) The moment the human becomes subject, he regards all beings as object, as object; this necessarily measures, grasps, controls, and transforms all other beings by the human's own measure, and in fact already creates the isolation, opposition, and inequality between the master subject and the object, implying the malady of anthropocentrism's grasping of beings out of subjectivity and its concealing of being. At the same time, when the human's consciousness is posited as subject, the human himself is also conceived by consciousness as object, and likewise inevitably falls into being the object of conquest of the human as subject.

Heidegger holds that technology is by no means the concrete application of science; on the contrary, it is technology that determines science. “Technology is a mode of unconcealment.” (4) But the mode of unconcealment of ancient technology and of modern technology is utterly different. Ancient man absolutely did not use technology to forcibly compel and transform nature, but followed nature, and gained nature's reward in drawing near and caring for nature. Modern technology, however, according to the human's ever-swelling desire, exploits nature without limit, forcibly changing nature's form and conditions. “Modern technology ignores the mysterious being of all beings; it explores the secret of beings in the mode of scientific research and experiment, ‘forcing out’ a certain being of beings in a way that develops, changes, stores, allocates, and converts the energy hidden in beings.” In this challenging setting-upon (the challenging setting-upon), beings no longer come on stage of themselves as the complete mysterious ones, but come forth as the resource set upon and ordered by technology. (5) However, fundamentally, the human cannot truly become the “subject” in modern technological activity; the human, like other beings, cannot escape the destiny of being controlled and ordered by modern technology. Heidegger says it is precisely modern technology that has turned the earth and the atmosphere into raw material, and has also made the human fall into being the human's material. When the technological notion holds sway and spreads, the domain of the individual's independent thought and opinion has long been set aside and disregarded. “Not only is the existence of life technologically objectified in training and use, but physics also vigorously launches all kinds of attacks on the phenomena of life. In the last analysis, this is to hand over the essential nature of life to technological manufacture for disposal.” (6)

More serious is that, faced with this real crisis, the human has no self-awareness. The human supposes that he can, by the help of science and technology, let all beings be unconcealed, and order all kinds of “things purchased by technology” according to his own measure and will; the human, full of qi and vigor, seems to have become the master of the earth. The rampancy of technology effectively conceals and hides the destiny that the human and other beings are controlled by technology. “The humankind on this earth is, together with the consolidation of the status of the essence of modern technology and of this technology itself, prompted to take the whole world as a single, ultimate-world-formula-guaranteed, and therefore calculable, standing-reserve (Bestand) to be ordered. Toward such an ordering-prompting, everything is assigned into a single, unique tugging. The sinister scheme of this tugging is to level into a flat plain the construction of that infinite relation.” (7) Modern technology seems to be the “world-formula” that guarantees the human a future; it does not hesitate to vow that it will lead the human step by step into the realm of happiness. Yet in fact, the human and the world, the human and himself, had an originally infinitely rich connection, which, because of modern technology, has been unified and instrumentalized. The destiny of the human and the world is concealed; the human has forgotten himself, has lost his own essence. “Today it is precisely the case that, no matter where, the human no longer encounters himself, that is, his essence.” (8)

II

Then how can the human be saved from this crisis? Heidegger's path of salvation is by no means a return to the idealized ancient Greece, but art and poetry. “Because the essence of technology is not any technological factor, the fundamental meditation on technology and the decisive analysis of technology must be carried out in a certain domain—a domain that, on one hand, has a kindred relation with the essence of technology, and on the other hand has a fundamental difference from the essence of technology.” “Such a domain is precisely art.” (9) In Heidegger's view, it is precisely in the activity of art and poetry that the concealed destiny is opened, that, between the human and beings, the subject-object relation is broken free of, and the infinitely rich and extremely natural connection is recovered; the being of beings again begins to surge, and the earth in turn returns all the surging ones into hiddenness. And so the world is no longer the thing we ourselves suppose to be very near, to be graspable and seizable, no longer comes forth as a “world picture” standing before us and letting us minutely measure it. “The world worlds”; the world again becomes the world itself, becomes the existence intimately related to, and mutually fused with, the human, the hidden and mysterious existence, becomes the non-objective existence that the human all along belongs to. “The art-work, in its own way, opens up the being of beings. This opening-up, that is, unconcealment (Entbergen), that is, the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art-work, the truth of beings sets itself into the work. Art is precisely the truth setting itself into the work.” (10)

Because art and poetry open up the being of beings, art and poetry are the happening of truth; therefore art and poetry have an extremely profound reality. Based on this recognition, Heidegger often expresses self-contradictory views on the fictionality of art and poetry.

On one hand, Heidegger explicitly denies the fictionality of art and poetry. He says: “Poetry is by no means a whimsical fiction of any arbitrary thing, by no means the simple representation and the leisurely floating of the unreal domain. As the clearing, poetry is the thing that unfolds in the unconcealed state and the thing thrown beforehand into the rift of form; it is what lets the unconcealed open domain, among beings, make beings glow and resound.” (11) This is to say, poetry (including art) is by no means fiction, by no means the fantasy of the unreal, but, on the contrary, poetry is the unconcealment of being, the opening-up of being, the truth setting itself into the work; it is deeply rooted in reality. This view denying the fictionality of art is closely related to Heidegger's view of the world and his view of art. In Heidegger's view, the predicament that modern society creates for humankind has its root precisely in the human's “subjectivization” and the world's “becoming-picture.” It is precisely such a process that changed the original intimate relation between human and beings, and also made the world be concealed. The reason Heidegger cherishes art is that art preserves the intimate relation between human and world of the ancient Greek period, that is, the state in which the subject had not yet formed and subject and object had not yet split. Only in this state, in which subject and object are without distinction and without splitting cutting, can art bring beings into the unconcealed opened domain. And so, beings begin to glow and resound, being again begins to surge, truth sets itself into the work. Art is precisely the self-happening of truth—this is Heidegger's view of the essence of art. Therefore, in expounding the problem of art and poetry, Heidegger again and again stresses the reality-basis of art and poetry, and raises objections (12) to “subject,” and to such things as “imagination,” “fantasy,” “fiction,” and “value” that are related to the “subject” and built upon the activity of the “subject.”

But the key to the problem is: how, after all, does art and poetry bring beings into the unconcealed opened domain? How does it maintain that state in which subject and object are without splitting? Why does entering art mean entering the realm of subject-object fusion, entering the realm of clearing? Why does art and poetry become such a realm? In Heidegger's view, since modern times the splitting of subject and object has been unavoidable. So long as one lives in daily reality, one cannot escape the objectification of the world by the recklessly-entangling science and technology. “What threatens the human in the human's essence is this notion: that the manufacture of technology makes the world have order, and that any order is leveled into the uniformity of manufacture. Therefore, from the start, it has destroyed a possibly-emerging order and the source of acknowledgment.” (13) Within the human's essence is precisely hidden the human's own crisis, namely: deliberately pursuing order, and pursuing a uniform-standard order through science and technology; this unstoppable impulse is precisely a trap the human sets for himself. In modern society, the human lives within the encirclement of technology, lives within the order established by modern technology, cannot break free of the state in which subject and object split, cannot break free of the destiny of being objectified and controlled. The human has nowhere to flee, nowhere to hide. The only way out is to flee reality and enter another world—and this world is precisely art. And so art becomes a unique world in which the human breaks free of reality-relations. If one uses daily habit and regards the daily reality-relations as “real,” then the art-world of non-real-relations can only be the unreal world, the “fictional world.” Following Heidegger's line of thought, art too can only, as the unreal fictional world, become the human's refuge. For in the unreal fictional realm, the human finally breaks free of the various reality-relations, reality-conditions, and reality-limits, including reality's division of labor, role norms, and the entanglement of science and technology; the human regains freedom. He can freely share the joys and sorrows and life-experience of any role, fuse into one with any being, and freely open his own heart. When the human, in the fictional world, breaks free of all reality-limits, and unfolds his own existence in a new way, those original prejudices and biases and the sought mediocrity may be set aside and disregarded; he experiences the world with a new attitude, and he is in a brand-new free playful relation with the world. And so, before him, beings recover rich diversity, and the world unfolds infinite possibility.

Therefore Heidegger says: “The more solitarily the work is fixed in form and stands on its own, the more purely it appears to be released from all relation to the human; then the more simply does the impulse, this ‘that-it-is’ of the work's existence, enter into the open, and the more essentially is the uncanny sheltered. Yet this manifold impact has no violent meaning; for the more purely the work itself enters into the openness opened up by its own self-opening, the more easily does the work move us into this openness.” (14) And at the same time it moves us out of the ordinary mediocrity. Submitting to this moving-out process means: changing our relation to the world and the earth, and then restraining our generally-current behavior and evaluation, cognition and viewing, in order to remain by the truth that happens in the work. Only this restrained state of remaining lets the created thing become that which it is, the work. (15) Only the work that is “solitarily fixed in form and stands on its own,” only the work that breaks the habitual connection with the human, only the work that is in another dimension utterly different from reality—only then can the work finally become an independent, self-sufficient, self-regulating, complete world. And only when the work becomes a self-sufficient world distinct from the real world does it possess a power to change our daily mode of existence, to change our relation to the world and the earth, and to change our daily behavior, evaluation, cognition, and viewing. Literary-artistic fiction lets the human live in the work-world, freely close to all beings, freely playing, freely fusing, freely harmonizing. Originally, the relation between human and beings became unified, instrumentalized, and split because of modern technology; now it recovers a free, rich, full, harmonious relation; and so beings are opened, and truth manifests. On the surface, Heidegger denies the fictionality of art and poetry; but in fact, he leaves only one path: entering the unreal fictional world. So, in discussing the appreciation of van Gogh's painting, he says: “Drawing near this work, we suddenly enter another world, whose savor is utterly different from our habitual existence.” (16) Art is not real; it belongs to “another world” different from reality; it gives our existence a new mode of existence “distinct from our habitual” one. But this first requires the art-work to “be released from all relations to things outside itself, so that art exists only for itself and according to itself.” And the artist plays just such a role: he is not a “subject” who is fantasizing, but only one who pours forth and feels; “the work must, through the artist, enter into itself and purely stand on its own.” (17) In any case, art must be independent and self-regulating; it breaks free of all reality-relations and “purely stands on its own”; it is outside the dimension of reality. Therefore, in discussing Hölderlin's poetry, Heidegger again says: “Making poetry is by no means that kind of activity that directly participates in reality and changes reality. The poem is like a dream, and not any reality; it is a word-game (Spiel in Worten), and not any serious act. The poem is harmless, without effect.” (18) These expressions of Heidegger's cannot but constitute a contradiction with his denial of fiction.

III

If we analyze one layer deeper, it is not hard to see that Heidegger's self-contradictory expressions on fiction stem from his view of truth. For Heidegger, the real and the fictional are inverted. Heidegger rather admires the words of Panthea in Hölderlin's poem-drama The Death of Empedocles: “…To become himself—this is life; we others are but the dream-illusion of life.” (19) The human lives in reality; he can never escape the social-historical context, can never break free of the various role-demands and reality-norms; he can only be a specific role in a specific environment, or be a doctor, a writer, a friend, a lover, a husband, a son, and so on; he can only exist in a certain real way. The human is the historical, social, real human. But in Panthea's view, in all this reality the human is not his true self, but only “dream-illusion”; only becoming “himself,” a non-historical, unreal one—as Engels said, the “female anthropoid ape”—counts as the true life. In Panthea, life and dream, real and unreal, reality and non-reality have already been inverted. Heidegger says: “The art-work is by no means the reproduction of those beings that are ever-present at hand; on the contrary, it is the reproduction of the universal essence of the thing.” (20) In Heidegger's view, art and poetry have profound reality precisely because they manifest the “universal essence.” The real and unreal, the reality and non-reality of all things, are measured and judged by this.

Although Heidegger devoted himself to critiquing metaphysics, in essence he did not truly break free of metaphysics. Just as Plato held that the idea is the eternal, true, real, while reality is only the “shadow” of the idea, Heidegger likewise values the “universal essence” and disdains the concrete beings around as the “representation” or “world picture” caused by the splitting of subject and object. Differing from Plato, Heidegger did not regard “representation” and “world picture” as the “shadow” of the “universal essence,” nor regard art and poetry as the “shadow of a shadow”; rather, on the contrary, he directly links art and poetry to the “universal essence,” hooking them on, and re-invites into the sacred temple the very thing—art and poetry—that Plato expelled, holding that it is precisely art and poetry that manifest the “universal essence,” so that art and poetry truly possess reality, more real than “those individual beings ever-present at hand.”

Evidently, what Heidegger wants to oppose is the “fiction” built on the imagination and fantasy of the “subject,” holding that this departs further from the “universal essence.” What he stresses is that people should concentrate on the work, fuse with the work-world, go on to reach a state of intoxication in which the self and the thing are both forgotten, the boundaries are dissolved, and the daily relation with the real world is cut off. By the help of such a state, existence is opened, truth manifests, and art and poetry have true reality. However, such a realm, which is split from the real world and purely immersed in the work, can only be a “fictional realm,” only different from the subject-imagination fiction that general aestheticians speak of. One may say that the fiction that general aestheticians speak of is “fiction with self” (a realm with self), while the “another world” that Heidegger speaks of is “fiction without self” (a realm without self), as ancient China's Laozi and Zhuangzi used “emptiness and stillness” and “sitting in forgetfulness” to embody the “Dao.” Both views of fiction commonly stress transcending reality and breaking free of reality-relations, only that the way of transcending differs. This difference stems from Kant and Husserl: Kant stresses that aesthetic imagination is the subject's transformation of the object-world, and creates another nature; Husserl, in turn, advocates the phenomenological intuition of not interfering with the external world, and the intentional structure of phenomenology itself has already set aside the problem of the subject. Heidegger inherits precisely Husserl's line of thought of phenomenological intuition. From this we can also see the inner connection between Heidegger's aesthetic thought and Chinese classical aesthetics.

Here, it is by no means a matter of denying the concealment of the “world picture” that Heidegger expounds, nor of denying the unconcealing “openness” that art and poetry possess. It is precisely art and poetry that endow the human with freedom, that let the human, in a brand-new way, rebuild a rich connection with the world. On this point, Heidegger does indeed grasp the true essence of art and poetry; it is art and poetry's openness that manifests the “universal essence.” Even the “essence” that Heidegger speaks of is not the unique, eternal essence that essentialism speaks of, but refers to the manifestation of truth, a source-like authentic state—more concretely, the ancient Greek's reception of being before subject-object split had yet formed. But that state is only his idealized aestheticization of ancient Greece. In fact, there is no such clearing-state that manifests the “universal essence.” When the human has not yet become an individual, when subject and object have not yet differentiated, there can only be a chaotic state and a state of ignorance, and no aesthetic in any true sense can occur. Heidegger keenly saw the danger of anthropocentrism and the malady of the world's becoming-picture hidden in the splitting of subject and object, and ignored the important significance of the human's subjectivity for the human and for art and poetry; he did not see that only when the human is subject, while at the same time being able to put down this subjectivity and likewise regard other beings as subject—that is, establish the “intersubjectivity” relation—does aesthetic in the true sense occur, and the independence of art and poetry become possible. It is precisely the human's subjectivity-demand that prompts art and poetry finally to break free of the various constraints of religion and so gain independence. Without the human's subjectivity, there is also no independence of art and poetry. Likewise, art and poetry, as “fiction,” set up their own domain, separate themselves from the real world, and open up a poetic territory, providing infinite possibility for the human's existence and the human's freedom, and become the existential dimension that nurtures the human's subjectivity. The human's subjectivity and the independence of art and poetry are mutually generated. “Fiction” dissolves reality's law-constraint on the human, eliminates the separation between human and world, fills the gulf between subject and object, and also opens up the world, letting the human fuse and communicate with the world unrestrained, letting a world intimately close to the human's mind, corresponding to it, manifest itself, letting an infinitely rich, unfathomably changing world manifest itself. Art and poetry create for the human a fictional world distinct from the real world, and lead the human away from reality, abandoning reality, finally returning to the human a more vivid, genuine reality, a reality truly belonging to the human. However, it does not lead us to explore that fictional “universal essence.” Heidegger has too deep a nostalgic complex; he always involuntarily endows the “origin” with purity and sacredness, and intends, by the help of art and poetry, to “return home,” to return to that idealized ancient Greek age. In the activity of art and poetry, the human too experiences rich changes: when the human unfolds imagination and creates an aesthetic world, the human is full of the desire for free creation, full of longing for a free aesthetic world—he is an active free subject; and once entering the created aesthetic world, intoxicated in the aesthetic world, and fusing with this world, the human's subjectivity is dissolved—he is in a no-self-and-no-thing fused realm. But it is precisely the dissolution of subjectivity, the fusion of human and world into one, that again enriches the human himself, extends himself, and presents to him a freer, more independent, more creative subject. Therefore, this precisely is the construction process of the human's subjectivity.

Don Ihde, in commenting on Heidegger's view of modern science and technology, points out: “The importance of Heidegger's relevant exposition lies in the fact that he recognized, long before Kuhn, that technology is not merely a simple aggregation of things, but a way of seeing the world and disclosing the world. At least on the point of the Western-dominant regarding of nature as a resource serving the human, Heidegger is correct.” (21) In the modern era where technology increasingly gains cultural hegemony, Heidegger proposed another mode of connection between human and world, and stressed the importance of art and poetry for the human; this indeed plays a corrective role. And his exposition of literary-artistic fiction both embodies profound insight and shows the limitation of his thought.