Schmidt, Dennis J. Between Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis. Indiana University Press, 2013, x + 187 pp., 21 b&w illus., $63.00 cloth.

It is generally held that we grasp the meaningful contents of our aesthetic experiences in a manner quite different than we do the meaning of conceptual propositions. Kant's third Critique stands as one of the clearest expressions of that difference. There he argues that the cognition of linguistically articulated contents or schematically determined phenomena, being determined by the rules provided by concepts, can adequately lead to knowledge. In contrast, those concepts are wanting in our aesthetic experiences, making us unable to judge them otherwise than reflectively. As a result, the meaningful appropriation of our aesthetic experiences is thought to fall short of a claim to knowledge and to truth. It is this very exclusion of our aesthetic experiences from the realm of truth that comes under fire in Dennis J. Schmidt's Between Word and Image. Following on the steps of Continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and particularly Gadamer, Schmidt aims to show that artistic images can open on an experience of truth quite distinct from, yet just as valuable as, that occasioned by conceptual knowledge. In the book's final moments, this proposition translates into the claim that artistic images singularly challenge our conceptual appropriation of experience and, more importantly maybe, the modalities of our ethical being in the world. The book's argument is structured by three sets of conceptual couples, each the object of a distinct chapter. Those sets are word and image, Heidegger and Klee, and art and truth. The book's first chapter is devoted to the relation between word and image and is meant to portray how philosophy has historically failed to deal properly with the question of the image's significance. Schmidt's overall argument in this section is that philosophy has traditionally judged of the image's capacity to present meaningful contents relatively to that of the concept, thus both missing and obfuscating its true value. As the latter's capacity to present universal truths was thought to largely exceed that of the image, the philosophical interest in images eventually limited itself to think the nature of the singularly pleasant experiences they elicit. Here, Schmidt first points to fairly classic Platonist arguments that have often been used to support this view. He then moves to considerations regarding the practice of ekphrasis, held by many as a clear example of the concept's superiority in the presentation of meaning. He touches notably on the poetic descriptions of the “impossible” representations on Achilles’ shield that are described in Homer's Iliad. Those cases of ekphrasis, he tells the reader, were held by authors like Augustine and Lessing as proof that only the poetic word had the power to fully render the truth of what was at stake, while paintings could at best hope for partial representations. Against this philosophical inclination to judge of the image's significance and truth relatively to the operations of conceptuality, Schmidt will want to argue that a hermeneutical approach more attuned to the image's specific “textuality” can reveal how visual artworks in fact participate in the advent of truth. In order to prepare the field for such an endeavor, the second half of the first chapter offers an “excentric history” detailing three key moments in the way philosophy has dealt with the question of the artistic image. The first moment, situated in Greek Antiquity, is described by Schmidt as opening the question of the image that it later obfuscates by a perspective that sees “through” the image, so to speak, in the direction of the original reality it merely imitates. The underlying thesis, of course, is that the value of the image is derived from and necessarily less than that of the reality it represents. As we come to see later in the book, the reduction of artistic images to the imitation of objective reality is precisely what modern art seeks to refute, thereby challenging philosophy's traditional understanding of what is made present in artistic images. The second moment of Schmidt's excentric history runs from Kant to Nietzsche and marks the return of the image as a real philosophical problem. With Kant, artistic images cease to be understood as mere imitations and become the expression of a freedom that defines us. Determined by a productive imagination, visual artworks present the appearance or the trace of the subject's suprasensible nature that no concept can ever reveal. Banking on this conception of art, Nietzsche will eventually see in the “appearing” of painting, or the way it “shines,” the expression of the will to power and, more particularly, that of Kunstbetrieb. As a consequence, visual art loses its purported necessary ties with the beautiful object, and the aesthetic experience becomes open to new meaningful possibilities. Those possibilities importantly describe this history's third moment, which is set to begin around 1889. This period is characterized by the manner in which cultural, political, and technological forces started modern art on a path of open resistance to the authority of logos. This was mostly exemplified in the manner artists came to reject the imitative model of artistic representation. As a consequence, modern art opened the possibility of thinking anew our relation to artistic images, of abandoning traditional metaphysical prejudices, and thus became a challenge to the contemporary philosophers, one that the remainder of the book means to explore. At the outset of the second chapter, in which Schmidt tries to establish Heidegger's philosophical response to Klee's visual art, the author explains how his hermeneutic of the image is situated at the heart of Continental philosophy's project to overcome traditional forms of discourse in a return to the things themselves. While this passage clarifies the distinctive particularities of Schmidt's philosophical endeavors in Between Word and Image, it also helps the reader less familiar with Continental thought to understand the fundamental questions that structure this kind of approach to art. Returning to the chapter's main ambition, Schmidt then sets out to investigate the sparse traces and indications of Heidegger's interest in Klee in order to nuance the philosopher's well known pessimism toward the realizations of modern visual art. This is accomplished in a number of steps. He first clarifies how Heidegger refused to engage with modern art on the basis that it was still determined, on the one hand, by metaphysical conceptions that needed to be overcome and, on the other hand, by a mode of production that participated in the technologization of the world. Heidegger had indeed claimed on many occasions that it was impossible for modern art to bring about the possibility of a radically transformed world in the way that Hölderlin's poetry had in the previous century, for example. Yet, this pessimistic view of modern art was seemingly interrupted, however briefly, by a series of notes on Klee's paintings that Heidegger wrote between 1956 and 1960. Though insufficient to rigorously establish Heidegger's interpretation of Klee's visual works, Schmidt argues that these notes at the very least indicate that the philosopher had truly entertained the possibility that modern art could participate in opening the space of an understanding of our world that abandoned the old and narrow traditional metaphysical ways. Central to Schmidt's argument is the claim that this possibility was made accessible to Heidegger by his encounter with Klee's paintings and not through a knowledge of his writings. In other words, it was the images themselves that pointed Heidegger in the direction of this possibility, a point that serves to strengthen the validity of Schmidt's hermeneutic of the image. It remains, however, that Schmidt's demonstration nonetheless revolves almost exclusively around a careful comparison of some of Heidegger and Klee's respective writings. Hence, Schmidt first highlights some of Klee's thoughts bearing on modern art as he expressed them in his diaries, his Schöpferische Konfession (1920), and his 1924 lecture On Modern Art (published posthumously in 1945). He eventually centers his attention on Klee's conception of the visual artwork as a trace of the creative movement and forces generative of a world, whether natural or historical. What is central to the experience of artistic images, according to Klee, is not the aesthetically pleasing presentation of worldly objects but the manner in which they let the very genesis of things and intelligibility appear. The reader already familiar with Heidegger's theses on art will easily anticipate Schmidt's next move, which is to show how these themes strongly resonate with those explored in his later writings as well as in The Origin of the Work of Art. But if their views were so similar, asks Schmidt, how can we reconcile Klee's faith in modern art with Heidegger's explicit pessimism toward its capacity to occasion such an experience? Though he concedes that Heidegger will ultimately hold on to his pessimist attitude, Schmidt argues that it was at the very least challenged by Klee's work, a challenge that was recorded in the notes he took when he first encountered the painter's work in 1956. These notes, writes Schmidt, explicitly indicate that Heidegger interpreted the paintings as accomplishing a “presencing” of “production” [Hervorbringen]. “Production” here describes the dynamic of the intelligible appropriation and creation of being, the very movement that Klee voiced as genesis. This opinion was reasserted two years later, in 1958, on the occasion of a seminar led with Japanese Zen master and philosopher Hoseki Shin'ichi Hisamatsu. While he then reaffirmed his pessimism toward modern art's general capacity to give presence to “production” [Hervorbringen], he simultaneously mentioned Klee's work as a possible exception. This possibility was, however, rapidly abandoned, remarks Schmidt, as Heidegger makes clear in Technik und Kunst (1961) that art in the age of technology has succumbed to a paradigm of reproduction. The third and final chapter of the book endeavors to pursue the openings abandoned by Heidegger. To that end, Schmidt turns to Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy and sets out to explore the manner in which the artistic image may guide us toward a novel conception of truth. For, as he points out, contrary to his mentor, who despaired to ever see the promise of art fulfilled by modern artworks, Gadamer thought it fit to install his hermeneutic at the very heart of their challenge to philosophy. The first moment of this ultimate chapter looks into the role played by the ontological valence of the artistic image in structuring Truth and Method's argument. This allows Schmidt to gather the key propositions made so far in Between Word and Image and to translate those in a more Gadamerian conceptuality. Particular attention is therefore given to Gadamer's arguments against “aesthetic consciousness,” to the interpretative play the authentic experience of art calls for, to the insufficiencies of an understanding of the image as “copy” (Abbild), and, finally, to the autonomous capacity of the artwork to give presence to the manner in which we appropriate our world and its intelligibility. This then leads to the chapter's second moment, where Schmidt follows Gadamer in his reinterpretation of mimesis. His ambition there is to avail himself of a new vocabulary more suited to describe the relation of artistic images to truth. Here, Schmidt draws from Gadamer's later essays, notably Art and Imitation (1986), and the manner in which he appeals to Kant, Aristotle, and Pythagoras in defining the artistic image as the repetition of an ordering energy that makes itself visible and recognizable as such. Finally, Schmidt links the meaning of the image to the revealing of gesture, another concept borrowed from Gadamer's later philosophy. He characterizes “gesture” as the original idiom of appearance, an elemental and visible form of language that indicates meaning in the world and thereby accomplishes its first ordering. Correspondingly, the artistic image turns out to be the materialization or inscription of gesture and its experience an invitation to dwell and answer to its address by actively following, and thus accomplishing, its indications. In the book's final moments, Schmidt makes a bit more precise the manner in which “gesture” is meant to express how we meaningfully relate to beings in our world otherwise than by relying on the intelligibility we have secured for them through the use of determinate concepts. As such, “gesture” structures our being in the world in a way that preserves the possibility that what it indicates could always be different from what one signals it to be. Contrary to the concept, “gesture” remains short of a mastery of “otherness,” of a reduction under a definite meaning, and therefore opens the space where one must truly be attentive to the manner in which what is “other” calls upon us and questions our understanding of the world. In a nutshell, Schmidt, following on Gadamer but going a bit further than him, wants to argue that “gesture” fundamentally structures the authentic opening of our ethical being in the world. And as visual artworks stand as the visible trace of “gesture,” their experience ought to engage us in direction of a better understanding of our ethos and its true demands. This last line of thought, however, is offered only as a “promise.” That is, Schmidt is found to say that the artistic image could help us in that direction once philosophy has properly reflected on the true significance of the image, but Between Word and Image is only meant to indicate the intellectual space where that reflection should begin. The analytic reader ill disposed toward Continental philosophy will likely not find much in this book to change her view of that field. That being said, the first half of Between Word and Image stands as a fairly comprehensive and accessible overview of Continental philosophies of art and may thus aptly serve as an introduction to some of its central themes and problems. On the other hand, Schmidt will likely prove most interesting to the continental reader in his analysis of Heidegger's reaction to Klee's paintings and his propositions on furthering Gadamer's hermeneutic of the image. On this subject, however, I must repeat my worry that Schmidt works at too great a distance from the images that “spoke” to Heidegger. While the book contains twenty one figures, eleven of which present paintings by Klee, the references to these images are sparse and often laconic. For example, while Schmidt tells us there is reason to believe that Heidegger was “deeply affected” (p. 96) by three particular paintings by Klee, his comments touching on these images hold in the space of a rather modest paragraph. Meanwhile, his interpretation of Klee's words is extensive and absolutely central to his argument. As a result, what was meant as a hermeneutic of the image rather often takes the appearance of an intelligent and promising dialogue with the philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer.

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