“I am not Athenian or Greek, but a citizen of the world.” — Socrates
If we are to assume that Heidegger’s philosophy has a “goal,” we might consider it as being to think towards postmodern thought. Since Being and Time (1927), Heidegger has challenged modern thought and subjectivity with his notion of Dasein as having a fundamental being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s “middle-period” essay, The Origin of the Work of Art (1935), not only demonstrates his critique of modern aesthetics and metaphysics, but also elucidates a path toward thinking beyond subjective enframing. As insightful as this essay is, however, Heidegger’s philosophy of art does not explicitly account for how Dasein encounters a flag per se. Flags are interesting and relevant to Heidegger’s philosophy because they serve as reliable devices to people in understanding their history, identity, and meaning altogether. This essay will demonstrate the “strife” between the “earth” and the “world” in Heidegger’s philosophy, and how flags operate as unique disclosive entities, contrary to what the contemporary reduction of art to aesthetics may lead us to believe.
We will begin by contextualizing what Heidegger’s theory of art actually is, so that we can then see how flags are disclosed to us. Heidegger writes that art is contemporaneously understood as “just a word to which nothing real any longer corresponds.” He is not saying here that art does not exist, rather that “it may serve as a collective notion under which we bring what alone of art is real: works and artists.” Heidegger notes the circular logic within asking about the origin, or nature [Wesen], of a work of art: the origin of any given artwork is no doubt the artist who crafted that work. Yet, that artist is only an artist given that there is an artwork to constitute their status of being a creator of art. Heidegger clarifies by explaining that the “artist and work are each, in themselves and their reciprocal relation, on account of a third thing, which is prior to both: on account, that is… of art.” Heidegger is saying that art is something present within the work and the artist, and it is not something to be isolated and investigated separately from artworks: he writes that “art presences in the art-work.” When we analyze an artwork as a work, we are simultaneously analyzing the artistic nature of that work.
This is how Heidegger handles the hermeneutic circle in art analysis—he writes that the “usual understanding demands that this circle be avoided as an offense against logic.” The “usual understanding” of the circle asserts that there is a problem with approaching an investigation into art as a “comparative study” or by looking at specific artworks to find some common quality among all of them that is art. After all, any selection of works to be analyzed and compared would already have been presupposed as art in its selection. Heidegger, however, also understands that we cannot derive the meaning of art from “higher concepts,” as “such a derivation, too, already has in view just those determinations which are sufficient to ensure that what we are offering as works of art are what we already take to be such.” This means that any higher concept from which we would derive the meaning of art suffers from the same issue as above, as the higher concept would need to account for already existing artworks as art. What the “usual understanding” and the derivative view both miss, however, is exactly the “real thing” that Heidegger wants to investigate, not some abstract concept of “art” compiled out of instances of artworks. Instead of avoiding this circle like we may be inclined, Heidegger affirms that “we must move in a circle.” By “moving in a circle,” Heidegger means that analyzing works of art does not bring us back to square one, and instead operates like a spiral or spring, where each revolution around the artwork to the nature of art and back gives us a contextually deeper mode of reflecting further on the work and its nature.
Any good reading of Heidegger should also recognize the implicit rejection of the subject-object divide within his philosophy, and it is especially so in his understanding of art. Now that we know how Heidegger goes about uncovering the nature of art (that is, by investigating the works), we must look at his method of analysis, as it is this method, intrinsically rejecting subjectivity, that exemplifies his greater understanding of metaphysics that situates art. In Heidegger’s philosophy, we cannot separate the artist from the work, not only in the sense that they are necessarily linked in the arising of each other, but also that to do so (that is, separating the “subject” of the artist from the “object” of the artwork) diminishes the importance and meaning that art has in our lives. We can begin by keeping in mind a seemingly simple phrase: Dasein’s world consists of things. Heidegger writes that “it is the things of nature and usage that are normally called things.” “Mere things,” however, are things that are “lifeless in nature and in human usage.” On the one hand, we have “things,” such as a guitar, a car, a church, or a soccer ball. On the other hand, “mere things” are “the stone, a clod of earth, or a piece of wood.” We must be careful not to conflate Heidegger’s use of the word “thing” as another way of saying “object” in line with the modern philosophical tradition. One key example of this is when Heidegger writes, “a human being is not a thing… We are reluctant to call even the deer in the forest clearing, the beetle in the grass, or the blade of grass ‘things.’” In the subject-object framework, all things external to the subject’s mind are “objects.” Even the subject’s body is an object, as Descartes understands his body to be just as dubitable as the chair he is sitting on. For Heidegger, things exist in the world and are not reducible to “objects;” in a similar sense to how Heidegger describes the word “Dasein” as different from the Cartesian subject in Being and Time, we can consider a “thing” to be different from an “object” as thing is a type of description of that thing’s “is-ness,” and not a boiled down reduction to a general “object.”
“Things,” then, are a type of being in the world, specifically Dasein’s world. The way Dasein engages with things is through what is called equipmentality, and we will see how things (specifically artworks, and further, flags) “belong to the earth” and have reliability, or “find protection in the world.” Heidegger writes that the “definition of the thing is derived from an interpretation of the equipmentality of equipment.” He is surmising this by tracing the ‘history of the thing’ in order to think through modernity, beginning by looking at the Latin translations of Greek ontological concepts and how they demonstrate each underlying metaphysical system; he writes that “the rootlessness of Western thinking begins with this translation.” Heidegger looks at the word Hypokeimenon [ὑποκείμενον], which for the Greeks meant “the core of the thing… [that] was its ground and was always there.” Working in tandem is the Symbebekos [συμβεβηκός], being “that which always appears and comes forth along with the core.” These Greek words would go on to be translated into their Latin counterparts, Subjectum (or “subject”) and Accidens (“predicate”) respectively. The Greeks understood the thing as it appears to us to be the “actual” thing, as its core (the Hypokeimenon) appears truthfully or sincerely as (or “along side”) its “properties” (the Symbebekos). In its translation from Greek, the Latin loses the truth that is preserved within the relationship between the thing’s appearance and core into something that is essentially an ungraspable substance that is walled off by its perceptible qualities. Heidegger, seeking to think through this binary, does not simply propose that we return to the Greek understanding, but rather that we recognize the insight within it, and think past modern aesthetics by analyzing the thing’s “matter-form distinction.”
Heidegger writes that “the thing is formed matter” to mean that things exist with a “materiality.” He describes their materiality as being the source of their “permanence” or “constancy,” and simultaneously their “mode of sensory pressure – color, sound, hardness, massiveness.” This means that materiality is what persists within matter perceived as form over time; the form is the thing’s content. Things as “formed matter” is insightful in that the form is coming from the matter, as opposed to an object’s qualities being arbitrarily correlated with it, yet Heidegger writes “form and content are the commonplace concepts under which anything and everything can be subsumed.” Form is a thing’s structure and “sense,” or logical and perceptible nature. Heidegger writes that “if one correlates form with the rational and matter with the irrational … the rational to be the logical and the irrational the illogical, and if, finally, one couples the conceptual duality between form and matter into the subject-object relation, then one has at one’s disposal a conceptual mechanism that nothing can resist.” It is here that Heidegger puts forth the intersection between earth and world. The world being the form, or a thing’s appearance and equipmental being to us, and the earth being the persisting matter. Heidegger uses the analogy of a forest clearing, stating that “world… is the clearing of the paths of the essential directives with which every decision complies. Every decision, however, is grounded in something that cannot be mastered, something concealed… World and earth are essentially in conflict… only as such do they enter the strife of clearing and concealing.” When we encounter a work of art, such as Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes, we find it as a thing existing in our world with certain “allegory and symbol.” The painting is both a physical thing made of paint, consisting of a canvas, set in a certain frame on a wall, and its representation of things, which we understand or relate to as we do equipment. In being a painting, however, there is an element of understanding the equipmental representation of the shoes “as shoes” that we cannot relate to as equipment; we can only imagine a “pair of shoes in general” and not as a specific equipmental entity in our world. Further, “there is nothing surrounding this pair of farmer shoes to which and within they could belong; only an undefined space.” Surrounding the farmer shoes is “nothing,” or perhaps formless matter, in the sense that there is no equipmental method for exhaustively relating to the shoes, nor a representational way of painting “shoes in general.” Obviously, there is “something” aesthetically surrounding the shoes, paint with color, but the surrounding of the shoes has no explicit representation, only indeterminate being where the earth within the work impedes on our world. “The work lets the earth be an earth.”
This is why Heidegger so often speaks of the “strife” between the earth and world, which also reveals the reliability within things. He explains that “it is the reliability of equipment which first gives the simple world its security and assures the earth of its freedom of its steady pressure.” Our understanding of something, such as shoes, has its origin in our understanding of shoes as equipment that we use in our day-to-day life. Heidegger also notes that “the piece of equipment is half thing … and half work.” To sum up, as we encounter the work, we meet its equipmental form that is “supported” by the undisclosed earth. By “earth,” Heidegger does not mean the “merely astronomical idea of a planet;” in fact, it is exactly the opposite of that, as he writes that the “earth is that which cannot be forced.” The name and class we have given our planet is only a type of “frame” [Gestell]. He looks to the Greek word Phusis [φύσις], being “physics” or “nature,” as Phusis is what “lights up that on which man bases his dwelling.” to understand what he means, we can think of the famous saying by Heraclitus: “nature loves to hide.” Nature does not “hide” in that it is always inaccessible, but rather there is a persisting “hidden-ness” to nature despite our capture of it; that is to say, our contemporary understanding of physics does capture truth within nature, but does not exhaustively totalize nature’s being. “Earth is that in which the arising of everything that arises is brought back… and sheltered.” This “sheltering” and “resistance” is demonstrated in Heidegger’s analysis of the Greek temple of Hera at Paestum. Grass, people, and most ordinary tools will wear away and lose their equipmentality over time; a bike chain will get rusty if left unattended, a deck’s wood will start to rot after years of weather, and an old sofa becomes itchy to lay on as its fabric deteriorates. The temple, however, “holds its place against the storm raging above it… The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of the air.” Because the temple can “survive” the storm (and how other things cannot), we can recognize its reliability among its making-present the normally invisible air. But, the temple also has a being in the world not as a representation, but in its ability to “world-make,” as it is through the collective engagement with the temple (and overtime enduring many storms, no doubt) that the Greek People can find an identity of what it means to be Greek. Heidegger explains how “the temple first gives to things their look, and to men their outlook on themselves.”
Let us take the United States flag to be analyzed. The flag has 50 white stars on a background of blue, with 13 alternating red and white stripes. Each star represents a different US state, and the 13 stripes represent the 13 original colonies. The red is said to represent the bravery of soldiers and the blood they have spilled in defending the nation; the white represents purity and innocence, and the blue as vigilance, perseverance, and justice. These different aesthetic elements are compiled (with each respective representation of color, for instance) into one “symbol” that is the flag to represent the United States. When we see this flag, we think of the US. But there is no “one flag” that is the flag, like there is any individual Van Gogh painting or Greek temple. Flags are meant to exist as many instances of this one symbol—nations have their flag displayed at restaurants, sport events, and schools to show a unity between these places as all being under this one symbolic identity. Although the flag is created by someone, just as a work by the artist, the flag’s meaning is the disclosure of the being of the people who represent it and who it represents.
The representation of the people in the flag is not unlike Van Gogh’s representation of shoes, as there is no “general citizen” of the US that the flag stands in for but nonetheless represents. The US Pledge of Allegiance, for instance, exclaims “I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America… one nation, indivisible.” When citizens see the US flag, they see their history within the flag—the United States did not always have 50 states, and the flag did not always have 50 stars accordingly. When citizens encounter the 50 stars alongside the 13 stripes, they catch a glimpse of their national identity’s history and origin, and its contemporary being as its self-evident change. But the “actual flag,” that is, the one hanging on the wall, or the one raised outside the embassy, is the medium for its symbol and has a being in the earth and world intersection, like all artworks. There is an ambiguous spur to political action within the flag’s history and presence, disclosed in its form and symbol; one person’s spur to political action may mean some greater fight for social change or equality, while perhaps someone else sees a call for a conservative return to form. What these two reactions to the flags are, is not to be understood through a subject-object aesthetic system: these are not arbitrary “opinions” a “subject” has on an “object.” They are specifically political devices or equipment that have a similar being to artworks in how they disclose meaning for us, and simultaneously evade any final constitution of what it means to be “under” the flag, as a person under the flag encounters it. The person who encounters the American flag, similarly to the temple, “gets their outlook” from the flag, and within the recognition of the flag’s history, the undetermined political future beckons from it. When Heidegger describes unconcealment, or the truth disclosed to us in art, as “never a state that is merely present but rather a happening,” we can hear flags as being that happening of the people in the nation, being what it represents. The US flag, regardless of whatever virtue or justice the colors and signs are described as to represent, also represents its current poverty, its success, its failure, and its alternate-history; in looking at the flag, we see the history of who has or has not been president, the slaves and their liberation, and its wars and periods of peace. The flag is representing while, before, and after historical events happen.
We see now that uncovering the nature of art holds metaphysical implications for being as a whole. Our understanding of the being of entities determines our understanding of the world, and art is no exception. If we are to approach art from the subject-object framework, flags become aesthetic objects and nothing more. Instead, with Heidegger’s philosophy, we can begin to think of flags as things that meaningfully represent the people that represents the flag. In thinking past aesthetics, we can not only use this familiar circle in the flag and its people to better understand how identity arises and is sustained, but perhaps we can then think up a post-modern flag, one that represents people justly in their polysemic being as citizens of the world.
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