We have to decide what the Poets say when they intuit what remains. In Holzwege (Heidegger 1950), we notice an oscillation between two very different aesthetics.
For the first, it is stated that when Van Gogh portrays a pair of clogs, the work of art has let us know what shoes really are, and this entity manifests itself in the nonconcealment of its being—in other words, in this representation the being of the entity attains the stability of its appearance. Therefore there is a truth, and there is a being (Sein) that says it by appearing, and by using as a vehicle that Dasein called Vincent—just as for certain heretics Christ was allegedly incarnated passing through the Virgin quasi per tubum, but it was the Word that took the initiative, not its fleshly and accidental go-between.
But a second aesthetic emerges when it is said that a Greek temple appears—and I translate—as an epiphany of the Earth, and through this quasi-numinous experience «the work keeps open the opening on the World.» Here the work is not the mediator through which the Sein reveals itself; it is (as we were saying) how art makes a tabula rasa of the inauthentic ways in which we encounter the entities, and it invites and provokes us to reinterpret the Something in which we are.
These two aesthetics are irreconcilable. The first affords a glimpse of an orphic realism (something outside us that tells us how things really are); the second celebrates the triumph of questioning and hermeneutics. But this second aesthetic does not tell us that being is revealed in the discourse of the Poets.11 It tells us that the discourse of the Poets does not replace our questioning of being but sustains and encourages it. It tells us that precisely by destroying our consolidated certainties, by reminding us to consider things from an unusual point of view, by inviting us to submit to the encounter with the concrete and to the impact with an individual in which the fragile framework of our universals crumbles. Through this continuous reinvention of language, the Poets are inviting us to take up again the task of questioning and reconstructing the World and of the horizon of the entities in which we calmly and continuously thought we lived, without anxieties, without reservations, without any further reappearance (as Peirce would have put it) of curious facts that cannot be ascribed to known laws.
In this case the experience of art is not something radically different from the experience of talking about Something, in philosophy, in science, in everyday discourse. It is at once a moment and a permanent corrective. As such it repeats to us that there is no divorce between Seiende and Sein. Here we are still, talking about Something, asking ourselves how we talk about it and if there can be a moment in which the discourse stops. The implicit answer is no, for no discourse stops only because we say to it, «You are beautiful.» On the contrary, it is precisely at this point that that discourse asks us to be taken up again in the work of interpretation.
1.8 A Model of World Knowledge
Let us start off again from the strong assumption that being is said in many ways. Not in four, ascribable to the parameter of substance, not by analogy, but in radically different ways. Being is such that diverse interpretations of it may be given.
But who talks of being? We do, and often as if being were outside us. But evidently, if there is Something, we are part of it. The result is that by opening ourselves to being, we also open ourselves to ourselves. We categorize the entity, and at the same time we realize ourselves in the I think. In saying how we can think of being, we already fall victim, for linguistic reasons—at least in the Indo-European languages—to a dangerous dualism: a subject thinks an object (as if the subject were not part of the object of which it is thinking). But since the risk is implicit in the language, let us run it. Then we shall make the necessary corrections.
Let us attempt therefore a mental experiment and construct an elementary model that contains a World and a Mind that knows and names it. The World is a whole composed of elements (for the sake of convenience, let us call them atoms, without any reference to the scientific sense of the term, but rather in the sense of stoicheia) structured in accordance with reciprocal relations. As for the Mind, it is not necessary to conceive of it as human, as a brain, as any res cogitans; it is simply a device for organizing propositions that serve as a description of the world. This device has elements that we might call neurons or bytes, or stoicheia, but again for the sake of convenience let us call them symbols.
A word of warning, which is fundamental if we are to have a guarantee against the schematic nature of the model: if the World were a continuum and not a series of discrete states (and therefore segmentable but not segmented), it would not be possible to talk of stoicheia. If anything, it would be the Mind that, because of its own limitations, would not be able to think of the continuum except by segmenting it into stoicheia—thereby rendering it homologous with the discrete nature of the Mind’s system of symbols. Let us say then that the stoicheia, rather than real states of the World, are possibilities, tendencies on the part of the World to be represented through discrete sequences of symbols. But in any case it shall be seen that this rigidity on the model’s part will already be called automatically into question by the second hypothesis.
By World we mean the universe, in its «maximal» version: it contains both that which we hold to be the present universe and the infinity of possible universes—we do not know whether unrealized or realized beyond the extreme limits of the known galaxies, in Giordano Bruno’s space of an infinity of worlds, perhaps all simultaneously present in different dimensions—the whole that encompasses both physical entities and ideal objects or laws, from Pythagoras’s theorem to Odin and Thumbelina. In the light of what we have said about the precedence of the experience of being with regard to the question of its origin, our universe can therefore include God too, or any other original principle.
In a reduced version of the experiment, we could also think of the simple material universe, the one known to physicists, historians, archaeologists, and paleontologists: the things that are in being now, plus their history. If we prefer to understand our model as maximal, it is to elude the dualistic impression that it may give. In the experiment, both the atoms and the symbols can be conceived as ontologically homologous entities, stoicheia made of the same stuff, as if in order to represent three spheres, atoms of the world, a mind were capable of arranging a sequence of three cubes, which in their own turn are simply atoms of the same World.
The Mind is only a device that (upon demand, or through spontaneous activity) assigns a symbol to every atom, so that every one of the Mind’s sequences of symbols may stand for (it does not matter to whom) a procedure of interpretation of the World. In this sense we overcome the objection that in our experiment a Mind is put in opposition to a World, as if a Mind, whatever it may be, could not in its turn belong to the World. We can conceive of a World capable of interpreting itself, which delegates a part of itself to this purpose, so that among its infinite or indefinite atoms some stand for symbols that represent all the other atoms, exactly in the sense in which we, human beings, when we talk of phonology or phonetics, delegate some sounds (which we emit as actuated phonations) to talk of all phonations that may be actuated. To make the situation more visible and to eliminate the misleading image of a Mind that disposes of symbols that are not atoms of the world, we can think of a Mind that, confronted with a series of ten lighthulbs, wants to explain all their possible combinations to us. This Mind only has to light up various sequences of lightbulbs in series, the switching on of the lightbulbs standing for symbols of those real or possible combinations that the bulbs as atoms could realize.
In that case the system would be, as Hjelmslev would have put it, monoplanar: operations carried out on the continuum of the universe, by digitally activating some of its states, would be at the same time «linguistic» operations that describe possible states of the continuum (activating states would be the same as «saying» that those states are possible).
Put another way, being is something that, at its own periphery (or at its own center, or here and there in its mesh), secretes a part of itself that tends to interpret itself. According to our inveterate beliefs, this is the task or the function of human beings, but this is presumption. Being could interpret itself in other ways, certainly through animal organisms, but perhaps vegetable
