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Stone
"Stunning insights into Renaissance aesthetic theory. . . a rigorous and critical assessment of key moments in the Western aesthetic tradition, speaks beyond the audience of philosophers and literary critics . . ." ―Renaissance Quarterly
" Stone challenges the simple opposition of philosophy and art . . . in a style that has the directness of sculpture." ―John Llewelyn
In an elegant and provocative text enhanced by photographs, John Sallis offers an important new theory of philosophy and art. He takes up the various guises and settings in which stone appears and what philosophers have said about the beauty of stone.
" Stone challenges the simple opposition of philosophy and art . . . in a style that has the directness of sculpture." ―John Llewelyn
In an elegant and provocative text enhanced by photographs, John Sallis offers an important new theory of philosophy and art. He takes up the various guises and settings in which stone appears and what philosophers have said about the beauty of stone.
- GenresPhilosophyArtNonfiction
148 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1994
About the author
John Sallis
107 books9 followersJohn Sallis was an American philosopher well known for his work in the tradition of phenomenology. From 2005 until his death, he was the Frederick J. Adelmann Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He previously taught at Pennsylvania State University (1996–2005), Vanderbilt University (1990–1995), Loyola University of Chicago (1983–1990), Duquesne University (1966–1983) and the University of the South (1964–1966).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 10, 2024
Really spectacular explications of Heideggerian and Hegelian aesthetics, in fact I'd go so far as to say that they were perfect. I couldn't recommend about the first 75% of the book highly enough, and frankly I was expecting to give this little monograph on stone top marks.
However, Sallis' baffling inclusion of Shakespeare exegesis at the very end was to me an unwelcome and tedious surprise - I would say that unless you have a particular interest in The Winter's Tale (an interest that I unfortunately do not share) I would forgive you for skipping it. Here are some quotes at random, because this book seems (in spite of my bitching) to be unfortunately underread.
On Mont Blanc, "In its presence one senses, above all, excess. Excess—not as an experienced content, to be expressed then in general in the word, but rather as an exceeding of every content circumscribable in and by experience, of every presence determined by the living present of experience."
"Precisely because the gravestones show the wear of time, they can evoke an awareness of the peculiar temporality of stone: stone is ancient, not only in the sense that it withstands the wear of time better than other natural things, but also in the sense that its antiquity is of the order of the always already. Stone comes from a past that has never been present, a past unassimilable to the order of time in which things come and go in the human world; and that nonbelonging of stone is precisely what qualifies it to mark and hence memorialize such comings and goings, births and deaths. As if stone were a sensible image of timelessness, the ideal material on which to inscribe marks capable of visibly memorializing into an indefinite future one who is dead and gone."
"Yet, as, after the holocaust, a politics of the ghetto has become absolutely unthinkable, the need has become all the more urgent to recognize that assimilation too can be violent, and not only when driven by the forces of an unrestrained capitalism, not only when facilitated by the Gleichschaltung of which technology is not only capable but from which it is also inseparable. One needs to recognize too that assimilation becomes more violent the more the other resists assimilation, the more decisively other the other is or becomes. The question is whether we today can think beyond this all-too symmetrical opposition between the ghetto that would enforce otherness and the assimilation that would enforce sameness."
"Hegel knew of course that the great art of the past would continue to speak to mankind; but its speech would have become foreign, no longer satisfying the highest needs of mankind. Such art would be past in a double sense, doubly an art of the past, stemming from a past age and sufficient to the highest needs of past ages only. Hegel also knew of course that works of art would continue to be created in the future; but he insisted that there would never be, in the most decisive sense, an artwork of the future, but only artworks that, even before being created, would already have become something past. To all art, past and future, Hegel would say and would have humanity say: nicht mehr, “we bow our knees no longer” (A 1:110). Art is something past. Art is vorbei, dead and gone, as far as the highest needs of mankind are concerned. Even if its ghosts return. Even if they spring up from the soil of the future."
[Concerning Hegel’s account of the origin of the work of art] "That origin lies in the determination of man as doubling himself: as spiritual, man is essentially self-doubling (so that he not only is, like things of nature, but also is for himself), and art—like religion and philosophy—is a way in which he actually comes to double himself, to be present to himself in his double.
[Hegel's reaction to some mountains, in what one would consider the bona fide sublime] "In the thought of the permanence of these mountains or in the kind of sublimity that one ascribes to them, reason finds nothing that impresses it, that elicits from it astonishment and wonder. The look of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the monotonous and, in the end, boring representation: it is so [es ist so]."
"And yet, Christian worship is not only tranquil enclosedness but also elevation above the finite, and this elevation is what, beyond all purposiveness, determines the independent architectural character of the cathedral, which is built so as to express elevation toward the infinite, its spires soaring into the heavens."
"The way in which the eye is thus led up the pillar to the vault, the architectural form designed thus to lead the worshipper’s vision, corresponds to an aspect of Christian spirituality no less than does the enclosedness of the cathedral: "The pillars become thin and slender and rise so high that the eye cannot take in the whole form at a single glance but is driven to wander over it and to rise until it begins to find rest in the gently inclined vaulting of the arches that meet—just as the mind [Gemut] in its worship, restless and troubled at first, rises above the soul of finitude and finds rest in God alone."
"The temple could indeed provide an example in reference to which one might reopen the question of the concept of architecture as such, putting into question the bond of this concept to that of enclosure: first of all, by rethinking enclosure as a mode of spacing, of shaping the space within which something like the epiphany of a god could occur; but then, also by considering whether it is only a matter of the enclosing shape into which the stone is configured or whether the essential character of the open interior of the temple is perhaps also determined by other features of the stone, independently of their relevance to the capacity of the stone to enclose, such features (here one would need eventually to undermine such language of quality) as its hardness, the texture of its surface, its heaviness."
"What is meant in the name, namely, the manifest, is itself manifest as one climbs over the elemental stone and over the stone that remains of ancient temples and other sacred edifices. The manifest, the open, the shining are no longer mere names, mere meanings—not for one who responsively traverses the open space of the stony mountain slopes, bathed in the blazing light of the Greek sun and its reflection from the elemental stone of the mountain itself, one who from that height gazes upon the surrounding country, glistening under the brilliance of the light, and upon the things of the countryside made manifest in their presence by that shining."
"In Delphi, what engages Heidegger is neither the ruins of Apollo’s temple nor the treasuries along the Sacred Way, but rather the place, "the greatness of the region itself," which surpasses "all human building."
"It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being."
"Even if the shining of the temple’s stone seems to require—and in a sense certainly does require—the shining sun, still it is the shining of the artwork that opens and sustains the space of air and sky in which things can come to the light of day and recede into the darkness of night. [...] It is through the shining of the artwork that there is an open place in which things can come and go, coming up, blossoming, yielding fruit in the bounteousness of summer, receding, withdrawing almost as in death, in the starkness of winter."
"It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it" (UK 33). Thus does earth escape, despite all devastation, the calculative assault of technology. Thus also could stone, since it is most properly of the earth, mark a certain limit of technology?"
However, Sallis' baffling inclusion of Shakespeare exegesis at the very end was to me an unwelcome and tedious surprise - I would say that unless you have a particular interest in The Winter's Tale (an interest that I unfortunately do not share) I would forgive you for skipping it. Here are some quotes at random, because this book seems (in spite of my bitching) to be unfortunately underread.
On Mont Blanc, "In its presence one senses, above all, excess. Excess—not as an experienced content, to be expressed then in general in the word, but rather as an exceeding of every content circumscribable in and by experience, of every presence determined by the living present of experience."
"Precisely because the gravestones show the wear of time, they can evoke an awareness of the peculiar temporality of stone: stone is ancient, not only in the sense that it withstands the wear of time better than other natural things, but also in the sense that its antiquity is of the order of the always already. Stone comes from a past that has never been present, a past unassimilable to the order of time in which things come and go in the human world; and that nonbelonging of stone is precisely what qualifies it to mark and hence memorialize such comings and goings, births and deaths. As if stone were a sensible image of timelessness, the ideal material on which to inscribe marks capable of visibly memorializing into an indefinite future one who is dead and gone."
"Yet, as, after the holocaust, a politics of the ghetto has become absolutely unthinkable, the need has become all the more urgent to recognize that assimilation too can be violent, and not only when driven by the forces of an unrestrained capitalism, not only when facilitated by the Gleichschaltung of which technology is not only capable but from which it is also inseparable. One needs to recognize too that assimilation becomes more violent the more the other resists assimilation, the more decisively other the other is or becomes. The question is whether we today can think beyond this all-too symmetrical opposition between the ghetto that would enforce otherness and the assimilation that would enforce sameness."
"Hegel knew of course that the great art of the past would continue to speak to mankind; but its speech would have become foreign, no longer satisfying the highest needs of mankind. Such art would be past in a double sense, doubly an art of the past, stemming from a past age and sufficient to the highest needs of past ages only. Hegel also knew of course that works of art would continue to be created in the future; but he insisted that there would never be, in the most decisive sense, an artwork of the future, but only artworks that, even before being created, would already have become something past. To all art, past and future, Hegel would say and would have humanity say: nicht mehr, “we bow our knees no longer” (A 1:110). Art is something past. Art is vorbei, dead and gone, as far as the highest needs of mankind are concerned. Even if its ghosts return. Even if they spring up from the soil of the future."
[Concerning Hegel’s account of the origin of the work of art] "That origin lies in the determination of man as doubling himself: as spiritual, man is essentially self-doubling (so that he not only is, like things of nature, but also is for himself), and art—like religion and philosophy—is a way in which he actually comes to double himself, to be present to himself in his double.
[Hegel's reaction to some mountains, in what one would consider the bona fide sublime] "In the thought of the permanence of these mountains or in the kind of sublimity that one ascribes to them, reason finds nothing that impresses it, that elicits from it astonishment and wonder. The look of these eternally dead masses gave me nothing but the monotonous and, in the end, boring representation: it is so [es ist so]."
"And yet, Christian worship is not only tranquil enclosedness but also elevation above the finite, and this elevation is what, beyond all purposiveness, determines the independent architectural character of the cathedral, which is built so as to express elevation toward the infinite, its spires soaring into the heavens."
"The way in which the eye is thus led up the pillar to the vault, the architectural form designed thus to lead the worshipper’s vision, corresponds to an aspect of Christian spirituality no less than does the enclosedness of the cathedral: "The pillars become thin and slender and rise so high that the eye cannot take in the whole form at a single glance but is driven to wander over it and to rise until it begins to find rest in the gently inclined vaulting of the arches that meet—just as the mind [Gemut] in its worship, restless and troubled at first, rises above the soul of finitude and finds rest in God alone."
"The temple could indeed provide an example in reference to which one might reopen the question of the concept of architecture as such, putting into question the bond of this concept to that of enclosure: first of all, by rethinking enclosure as a mode of spacing, of shaping the space within which something like the epiphany of a god could occur; but then, also by considering whether it is only a matter of the enclosing shape into which the stone is configured or whether the essential character of the open interior of the temple is perhaps also determined by other features of the stone, independently of their relevance to the capacity of the stone to enclose, such features (here one would need eventually to undermine such language of quality) as its hardness, the texture of its surface, its heaviness."
"What is meant in the name, namely, the manifest, is itself manifest as one climbs over the elemental stone and over the stone that remains of ancient temples and other sacred edifices. The manifest, the open, the shining are no longer mere names, mere meanings—not for one who responsively traverses the open space of the stony mountain slopes, bathed in the blazing light of the Greek sun and its reflection from the elemental stone of the mountain itself, one who from that height gazes upon the surrounding country, glistening under the brilliance of the light, and upon the things of the countryside made manifest in their presence by that shining."
"In Delphi, what engages Heidegger is neither the ruins of Apollo’s temple nor the treasuries along the Sacred Way, but rather the place, "the greatness of the region itself," which surpasses "all human building."
"It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being."
"Even if the shining of the temple’s stone seems to require—and in a sense certainly does require—the shining sun, still it is the shining of the artwork that opens and sustains the space of air and sky in which things can come to the light of day and recede into the darkness of night. [...] It is through the shining of the artwork that there is an open place in which things can come and go, coming up, blossoming, yielding fruit in the bounteousness of summer, receding, withdrawing almost as in death, in the starkness of winter."
"It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it" (UK 33). Thus does earth escape, despite all devastation, the calculative assault of technology. Thus also could stone, since it is most properly of the earth, mark a certain limit of technology?"
November 1, 2018
Class book. Left with the sensation that I'm missing the point.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews