[lit-ideas] Re: "Petit Bourgeois" Strawson (Was: "Nazi" Heidegger
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:16:44 -0600
I accept Senor Speranza's correction of my misguided characterization of the
Huns as Nords. I know it would offend the Danes to be thought Hunnish, and no
doubt it offends the Huns to be thought the sons of the sons of Scyld Scefing
(even though they adopted Nordic mythology as the Romans did the Greek).
Never mind all that. Let's talk about class: bourgeoisie, petit-bourgeoisie,
proletariat, lumpenproletariat. Let's talk about culture as class-determined.
No, let's don't. Let's talk about me. I am proletariat watch me grow! No,
no, now, let's be serious. I am proletarian with bourgeois pretensions. I
know some bourgeoisie with proletariat pretensions. They're forgiven that.
I'm not. Such is life.
Heidegger waxes poetic in his essay "The Origin Of the Work of Art" claiming
that the nature of art is "the truth of beings setting itself to work." The
work is not the reproduction of an entity that happens to be present. It is
"the reproduction of the thing's general essence". Working from Van Gogh's
painting of a pair of peasant's shoes, Heidegger writes: "The peasant woman
wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all
the more genuinely so, the less the peasant woman thinks about the shoes while
she is at work...or is even aware of them. She stands and walks in them. That
is how shoes actually serve....As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in
general...we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment
in truth is. From Van Gogh's painting we cannot even tell where these shoes
stand. A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet --
From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome thread
of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there
is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and
ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the
dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of
the fieldpath as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the
earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in
the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by the
uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having
once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and
shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the
earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this
protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself."
Well, obviously Heidegger never worked the fields or he'd never dare
romanticize that peasant's struggle in service to his poetic puffery. It's an
instance of bourgeois slumming in pursuit of a "realness" that he finds
lacking in his life. No, I'm not a real psychologist, but I play one when I
need to. Coming from a place much closer to peasantry than Heidegger did, I'd
say Van Gogh's shoes scream the peasant's most heartfelt sentiment: "Kill the
rich!" But then, that would only get me killed so I won't say that.
Mike Geary
Memphis
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