Dasein - Monoskop

224 PART III
from our vantage point are Heidegger's comments on Picasso. Petzet
reports that whereas he himself "was often only too quickly excited"
about Picasso, "Heidegger sometimes expressed doubts". Petzet also
relates the incident of a student saying to Heidegger "that what he
does when speaking of the necessary 'destruction' in philosophy is
nothing but Picasso's decomposition of the object". Heidegger "answered
with silence and smiled ambiguously". 350 Petzet also reproduces
a letter by Heidegger in which Picasso is discussed: "Picasso
and 'the artistic power'—that is beyond doubt. But I still do not
see how this artistic power is able to point out even the essential
place for the art of the future". 351 And on yet another occasion Heidegger
noted that "the whole of modern art ... is of a metaphysical
nature" . 352
To understand these comments we only need to remember here
that the later Heidegger in fact calls the way of thinking that begins
with Plato and Aristotle, and that in our day and age has led to
Logistik, the typewriter and other technology, 'metaphysical'. This
is the way of thinking that includes above all the idea that language
is at our disposal, and that language can be manipulated,
and re-interpreted. Since cubism is precisely the aesthetic variant of
this latter idea, Heidegger—from his standpoint—cannot but regard
modern art as "metaphysical". Small wonder that he "smiled ambiguously"
when his philosophical work was regarded as analogous
to the artistic work of Picasso. He probably would have smiled the
same way when asked whether his "thought of Being" was parallel
to the ontology of Aquinas, to the phenomenology of Husserl, or the
possible worlds semantics of Hintikka or Montague.
It is no counterevidence against this interpretation that, as Petzet
reports, Heidegger was willing to exclude one modern artist from
the verdict 'metaphysical': Paul Klee. Heidegger writes that with
respect to Klee he has to admit "not to understand what happens,
namely that art changes". And Petzet relates Heidegger's worry
that "he would now have to write a second part of 'The Origin of
the Work of Art'". 353 First of all, Heidegger's difficulties in coming
to grips with fundamental changes in the language of art should not
come as a surprise to us. Indeed, some of these difficulties were
exactly what we above were led to assume for the art as the uni-