The Silence of Thinking: Heidegger and Klee

ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG NO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE 55 THE SILENCE OF THINKING: HEIDEGGER AND KLEE SUMMARY GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA This brief essay challenges the 20thcentury philosophical perspective that portrays silence as a refuge in a world threatened by nuclear catastrophe and cultural upheaval. Heidegger situates silence within a metaphysical framework, viewing it as an essential gateway to Being—an act of listening that transcends language. However, this view risks romanticizing the unspoken depths while neglecting the urgent, unarticulated truths of the world. Heidegger’s elevation of silence as a sacred portal to Being, as a retreat that preserves the divine and inexpressible amidst modern crises, detaches silence from the pressing political and ethical realities of our time. To counter this poeticization of world-making, we argue that Klee’s concept of Gestaltung (formation)—a continuous, transformative process—stands in stark contrast to Heidegger’s notion of a static, contemplative silence. It emphasizes dynamic growth, rooted in the inexhaustible entanglement of the visible and the invisible, of form and formlessness. “that tremendous silence (larger than life) which was later to come to us repeatedly out of space, whenever we approached the frontiers of our existence at any point” Rainer Maria Rilke, Puppen “The inner life: one is almost ashamed to pronounce this pathetic expression in the face of so many realisms and objectivisms.” Emmanuel Lévinas, “Nameless”, in Proper Names 1. Silence occupies a paradoxical position in the 20th century. It is as if human language is suddenly no longer able to describe the world in a meaningful way, and the world itself has become inexpressible. While Adorno famously argued that most of the significant forms of verbal and artistic expression have become inadequate to describe the reality of the world— stating that “all postAuschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage”1— it was Wittgenstein who emphasized the active nature of silence and its expressive power. According to Wittgenstein, we cannot fully know silence; nevertheless, silence affects our lives. In this sense, we need to experience what silence does rather than attempting to define its inherent nature or essence. As Pierre Hadot explicates in his essay on Wittgenstein and the limits of language: “Near the end of his Tractatus, Wittgenstein speaks of his text as consisting of a series of propositions which need to be transcended. He compares them to steps on a ladder, which must be thrown away upon its ascendance in order to see the world correctly. They must ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG 56 be discarded, since they will ultimately be recognized as nonsensical. […] It is the very heart of the opposition to every form of transcendence and of the ineffable which gives rise to the possibility of affirming that there is an ineffable, that I can see some thing which transcends the limits of the world.”2 The unspeakable breaks into discourse not as an outer boundary, not like a sea circling the land, but as an inner crisis—an immanent, subterranean river that breaks through the surface and transforms the earth into an archipelago. It is as if an immanent silence breathing within the discourse no longer merely marks the end of the discourse or the limit of reason, but instead becomes its intimate revolt—a relationship in which language is not “the servant of meaning,” for here “no one commands and no one obeys.”3 What we mean is not something that exists independently outside of language; it is not “lying before us, outside all speech, as sheer signification. It is only the excess of what we live over what has already been said.”4 Therefore, consciousness is not a guardian that orders the world but an act of listening that can be carried out “solely and constantly in the mode of keeping silent,”5 because the world can no longer be regarded as a mere representation or as something that can be placed in front of us. Since it has itself become inexpressible, it does not demand explanations from us but rather that we listen to it. As Heidegger claims in Being and Time, “in reticence, therefore, is this silent discourse understood appropriately in wanting to have a conscience.”6 2. Silence takes many forms. Heidegger never mentioned the word “Hiroshima” in his published works, although he wrote several times about what he called “the atomic age” in his Winter Semester lecture course at the University of Freiburg in 1955–56, entitled Der Satz vom Grund.7 But as early as 1946—one year after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—, Heidegger wrote a letter to his friend Jean Beaufret, in which he responded to Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous speech Existentialism is a Humanism—delivered on October 29, 1945, at the Club Maintenant in Paris. Heidegger’s letter, originally completed in December 1946, was expanded and published separately in 1949 by the German publisher Vittorio Klostermann under the title Über den Humanismus. It represents Heidegger’s attempt to answer Beaufret’s question as to whether it was still possible to ascribe meaning to the word “humanism” after the terrible events of those years— whether the ideals of the humanist tradition were still sufficient for this.8 According to Heidegger, in this era, “one no longer thinks; one occupies oneself with ‘philosophy’ […] such occupations publicly offer themselves as -ism s.”9 In this sense, language becomes the implementation of an artificial system of institutions that “falls into the service of expediting communication along routes where objectification—the uniform accessibility of everything to everyone— branches out and disregards all limits.”10 It is in this way, Heidegger concludes in his letter, that language “comes under the dictatorship of the public realm, which decides in advance what is intelligible and what must be rejected as unintelligible.”11 Language thus becomes a mere instrument of the will, an instrument of domination over beings. From this perspective, thinking becomes a system of explanations that domesticates the inexplicable, by reducing it to causes and explanations; “as if it were already decided,” writes Heidegger, “that the truth of Being allows itself to be esNO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG 57 tablished through causes and explanatory grounds.”12 But before man can speak—Heidegger warns future readers of the letter—, he must first “let himself be claimed again by Being, taking the risk that under this claim he will seldom have much to say,” because in order “to be able to speak of ‘humanity,’ man must first learn to exist in the nameless.”13 In the same year as Letter on “Humanism” (1946), Heidegger wrote Wozu Dichter? (What Are Poets For?)—an essay in which he proposes a peculiar reading of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems that disrupts the idea of a hierarchical order of beings. “Man on the one hand, plant and beast on the other” are brought into a common dimension that Heidegger calls das Offene (the Open)14—they are thrown into the worldly event of an opening. In this world, we live in an age that Heidegger, quoting the famous verses of Friedrich Hölderlin, calls the “destitute time” (“dürftige[r] Zeit”)15, an age in which “the divine radiance has become extinguished in the world’s history.”16 If Hölderlin is for Heidegger “the poet of poets,” it is because in his poetry, language is not merely an available tool but the event of the world becoming language. Poetry, by naming the gods, does not simply “come about when something already previously known is furnished with a name; rather, by speaking the essential word, the poet’s naming first nominates the beings as what they are.”17 3. The name “Paul Klee” does not frequently appear in Heidegger’s writings. It is only mentioned in marginal texts or on specific occasions, such as in the short seminar on Die Kunst und das Denken held on May 18, 1958, at the University of Freiburg, which was given by Heidegger in collaboration with the Japanese philosopher and Buddhist Shin’ichi Hisamatsu.18 Alongside this, there remains a collection of Heidegger’s notes on Klee, presumably dating from the 1950s.19 It therefore seems unusual that the philosopher from Meßkirch suddenly chose two works by the Swiss artist to open his 1962 lecture Time and Being: Heilige, aus einem Fenster (Saint, from a Window), 1940, 56, and Tod und Feuer (Death and Fire), 1940, 332. Heidegger said on this occasion: “If we were to be shown right now two pictures by Paul Klee, in the original, which he painted in the year of his deaththe watercolour Saint from a Window, and Death and Fire, tempera on burlap—we should want to stand before them for a long while and should abandon any claim that they be immediately intelligible. […] Not so with the thinking that is called philosophy. That thinking is supposed to offer ‘worldly wisdom’ and perhaps even be a ‘Way to the Blessed Life.’ […] Here, too, we should then have to abandon any claim to immediate intelligibility.”20 In a chapter of the book that collects his dialogues with Heidegger and explores Heidegger’s relationship to art, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet dedicates a section to Klee and recounts the many occasions on which Heidegger paid great attention to the artist. Thus, we read in Petzet’s account: “The encounter with Klee’s work in the quiet of the old house had apparently affected Heidegger more strongly than I had anticipated. […] Heidegger would occasionally call me over in order to ask some question or to express his amazement. He was not captivated by the gems that immediately catch one’s eye. Rather, the inconspicuously restrained pieces were the ones where Heidegger spent more time and to which he returned again and again, in order to experience them anew.”21 NO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG 58 The notes Heidegger made during his visit to Klee’s exhibition revealed a deep admiration for his work, so much so that Heidegger even considered writing a second part of The Origin of the Work of Art inspired by Klee’s art. Indeed, a few years after the exhibition, Heidegger wrote in a letter dated February 21, 1959: “What I tried to say at the end of the essay on art is insufficient—language! […] In Klee something has happened that none of us grasps as yet.”22 Tellingly, regarding Heidegger’s peculiar relationship of intimate estrangement with Klee’s work, Petzet recalls that the vision of the small gouache Ein Tor, 1939, 11, plunged Heidegger into “deep silence.”23 4. Sichtbar machen, “to make visible”—this expression by Paul Klee reveals the background from which the visible emerges and the entanglement of the visible and the invisible, of form and formlessness. The question of visibility— and thus of form—is not perceived statically, in its finished state, but dynamically, in its becoming. The “making visible” evokes the original dimension of the phenomenon—that manifestness which, according to Heidegger, should involve a “phenomenology of the inapparent (Phänomenologie des Unscheinbaren).”24 In this perspective, according to Heidegger, Klee transcends Western art, which is defined by representation (Darstellung). Heidegger suggests in his handnotes that Klee’s creations are not “images” but rather “states” (“nicht Bilder, sondern Zustände”)25. As Klee repeatedly writes in his notes, form as rest or as the death of the formgiving movement would be the end of the process of formation26. But the creative principle is never exhausted in the actual work, it lives on in it. In Klee’s lectures and notes we read the recurrent idea that what is essential is not form but formation (Gestaltung), a transformative force comparable to a vegetative resurgence. An unfinished form that holds heterogeneous energy systems together—like a root27 that participates in different realms. Contemplating Klee’s paintings, Agamben writes, “we do not really ask how the work on the opus and the work on oneself have found unity, but rather how we could even envisage their separation.”28 Through this transformation, for Agamben, “who is recreated is in fact not the author registered at birth but […] a being whose abode is ‘just as much with the dead as with the unborn’ and who is, for this, ‘closer than usual to creation.’”29 This process of formation is vividly expressed in Klee’s work, arising from a silence that has persisted for millennia. It is particularly evident in the watercolour Monument im Fruchtland, 1929, 41, inspired by Klee’s journey to Egypt in 1928/29—a land perpetually in flux between desert and fertility, whose mythology is obsessed with the “perpetuum mobile, with that connection between Death and the Sun, in a never-ending circle.”30 Artistic creation is thus an eternal present, which in Klee’s work is represented by the Angel—the messenger of the invisible as the invisible. Its function is not so much to reveal what is hidden or to manifest what is inaccessible, but rather to signal and preserve it. If we want to hold together polarities as different as word and silence, manifestation and invisibility, then for Klee the Angel is the “necessary” figure of this representation.31 If one of the two polarities were to prevail, this would lead to the extermination of the Other; if “silence were to come again to a ruined civilization, it would be a twofold silence, loud and desperate with the remembrance of the Word.”32 NO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG 59 5. As we have seen, in his Letter on “Humanism”, Heidegger attempted to examine the nature of action and its inhuman mutation in a world ravaged by violence—and, paradoxically, he deliberately refrains from naming the atomic bombings and the extermination camps. At the beginning of the 1950s, he shifts his focus to the problem of “thinking”: at a time when the “devastation of language,”33 Heidegger writes in the Letter, spreads everywhere, making it imperative to learn how to think. In Was heißt Denken?, the published version of a lecture course he delivered during the winter and summer semesters of 1951–1952 at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger states that “human beings learn by bringing their activities into correspondence with that which is addressed to them … by attending to what there is to be considered.”34 Even if, in modernity, he writes, “what is most considerable shows itself in this: that we are not yet thinking. Still not yet, although the state of the world grows continuously more considerable.”35 The word that the philosopher seeks in not impoverished from this “not yet”. On the contrary, for Heidegger, “thinking is surely a peculiar affair,” because although “the word of thinkers has no authority,” since it “knows no authors, in the sense of writers”—it nonetheless “changes the world.”36 It does so within the ever darker depths of an enigma, “depths which as they grow darker offer promise of a greater brightness.”37 With this gesture, characteristic of Heidegger, thinking reaches its limits and is consigned to a state of expectant silence, rooted in the premonition of a reconnection with Being.38 This event can only occur through a catastrophe: a rupture that annihilates all historical determinations of thinking and opens up the possibility of accessing the matter of thinking itself, and what matters in it, “[d]ie Sache des Denkens.”39 For Heidegger, only this catastrophe—the end of all meaning ascribed to thinking so far—can point the way to an unforeseen, other beginning. Yet, catastrophe is not merely termination, the end of a process of destruction. As Gilles Deleuze suggests in his lectures on painting held between March and June 1981, “another catastrophe” is possible, a catastrophe that strikes the act of painting itself40—from which a chaos emerges that Klee would have called “cosmic”. Cosmic, in this sense, is the radical contingency in which all temporal and spatial dimensions, measures, and scales are interwoven in an ongoing, fertile process of trans-formation. It is a realm in which the flux of the world flows into a fragment of matter—a seed. As Klee noted, this seed bears nothing primitive or immature41; rather, it embodies the tension of conflicting directions and forces that coexist—similar to an embryo that harbours the promise of the future, “but also has memory of other, ancestral existences.”42 This perspective challenges the notion of a predetermined destiny governed by primal laws. Instead, the parts of this embryonic unity can unfold along divergent trajectories, generating perpetual polarization—a dynamic tension that sustains the continual emergence of the new. NO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE 1 Adorno 2004, p. 367. 2 Hadot 1970, p. 52. 3 Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 83. 4 Ibid. 5 Heidegger 1962, p. 296. 6 Ibid. 7 Heidegger 1996, p. 29. 8 See Heidegger 1993. 9 Heidegger 1993, p. 221. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 223. ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG 60NO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE 13 Ibid. 14 Heidegger 2001, p. 104. 15 Ibid., p. 89. Heidegger delivered this lecture in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s death. In the introduction, Heidegger takes up the question raised by Friedrich Hölderlin in his elegy Brod und Wein: “wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” Albert Hofstadter, in his translation of Martin Heidegger’s essay, renders Hölderlin’s question as: “what are poets for in a destitute time?” 16 Ibid. 17 Heidegger 2000b, p. 59. 18 Cf. Heidegger 2000a. 19 Heidegger’s notes on Klee were compiled in 1993 by Günter Seubold. He describes the notes as follows: “Heideggers Klee-Notizen umfassen 17 Blatt, in den Formaten DIN-A5 und kleiner. Sie sind im allgemeinen in deutscher Schreibschrift beschrieben, mit blauer Tinte und blauer Farbmine, einzelne Wörter sind rot bzw. blau unterstrichen; z. T. sind die Zettel auch mit Skizzen zu Werken Klees versehen. Es dominiert die Ellipse, die Frage und das Stichwort. An keiner Stelle aber findet sich ein zu einer Sinneinheit zusammengestellter Abschnitt. Keiner dieser Zettel ist mit Datum versehen, einige aber sind mit Sicherheit – wie sich indirekt erschliessen lässt – erst nach 1956 niedergeschrieben.“ (Seubold/Heidegger 1993, p. 7) 20 Heidegger 1972, p. 2. 21 Petzet 1993, pp. 147–148. 22 Ibid., p. 150. 23 Ibid., p. 148. 24 Heidegger 2002, p. 80. 25 Heidegger 2017, p. 12. 26 Cf. Klee 1979. 27 For a “vegetative” view of Klee’s work that analyses the composition as a paradoxical coexistence of the organized and the accidental, of sterility and fertility, see Boulez 1989. 28 Agamben 2017, p. 135. 29 Ibid. 30 Mulder 2015, p. 37. 31 Massimo Cacciari writes in The Necessary Angel: “The forms of angelic communication differ in principle from those of sensible apprehension and sight. The Angel witnesses the mystery as mystery, transmits the invisible as invisible, without ‘betraying’ it to the senses”. Cacciari 1994, p. 2. 32 Steiner 1986, p. X. 33 Heidegger 1993, p. 222. 34 Heidegger 1968, pp. 3–4, translation modified. 35 Ibid. 36 Heidegger 1984, p. 78. 37 Ibid. 38 Cf. Badiou/Tusa 2019, p. 44. 39 Cf. Heidegger 1972. 40 See Deleuze 1993. In particular, the lecture of March 31, 1981. 41 For a very revealing insight on the paradoxical nature of the seed as “Kräftezentrum”, see the excerpt from Klee’s Unendliche Naturgeschichte quoted in Hildebrandt 2011, p. 223. 42 Tusa 2024, p. 119. Adorno 2004 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, transl. by E. B. Ashton, New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Agamben 2017 Giorgio Agamben, The Fire and the Tale, trans. by L. Chiesa, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Badiou/Tusa 2019 Alain Badiou and Giovanbattista Tusa, The End, transl. by R. Mackay, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Boulez 1989 Pierre Boulez, Le Pays fertile: Paul Klee, texte préparé et présenté par Paule Thévenin, Paris: Gallimard, 1989. BIBLIOGRAPHY ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG 61 Cacciari 1994 Massimo Cacciari, The Necessary Angel, trans. by M. E. Vatter, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994. Deleuze 1993 Gilles Deleuze, Sur la peinture: Cours mars-juin 1981, édition préparée par David Lapoujade, Paris: Minuit, 2023. Hadot 1970 Pierre Hadot, “Reflection On The Limits Of Language: Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”, trans. by J. A. MacFarland, in: CrossCurrents, vol. 20, no. 1, 1970, pp. 39–54. Heidegger 1962 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1962. Heidegger 1968 Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, transl. by F. D. Wieck and J. G. Gray, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1968. Heidegger 1972 Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. by J. Stambaugh, New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972. Heidegger 1984 Martin Heidegger, “Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)”, in: Early Greek Thinking: The Dawn of Western Philosophy, transl. by D. F. Krell and F. A. Capuzzi, New York: Harper & Row, 1984, pp. 59–78. Heidegger 1993 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism’”, transl. by F. A. Capuzzi with J. G. Gray, in: Basic Writings, ed. by David F. Krell, San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1993, pp. 217–265. Heidegger 1996 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, transl. by R. Lilly, Bloomington (IN): Indiana University Press, 1996. Heidegger 2000a Martin Heidegger, “Wechselseitige Spiegelung – Gespräch zwischen Shinichi Hisamatsu und Martin Heidegger am 19. Mai 1958”, in: Gesamtausagabe, Bd. 16, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000, pp. 776–780. Heidegger 2000b Martin Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry”, in: Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, transl. by K. Hoeller, Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000, pp. 51–65. Heidegger 2001 Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?”, in: Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. by A. Hofstadter, New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2001, pp. 87–139. Heidegger 2002 Martin Heidegger, Four Seminars, trans. by A. Mitchell and F. Raffoul, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. Heidegger 2017 Martin Heidegger, Notizen zu Klee / Notes on Klee, compiled and translated by María del Rosario Acosta López, Tobias Keiling, Ian Alexander Moore and Yuliya Aleksandrovna Tsutserova, in: Philosophy today, vol. 61, no. 1, 2017, pp. 7–17. Hildebrandt 2011 Toni Hildebrandt, “‘Bildnerisches Denken’. Martin Heidegger und die bildende Kunst”, in: Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks. Ein kooperativer Kommentar zu Heideggers Kunstwerkaufsatz, edited by David Espinet and Tobias Keiling, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 2011, pp. 219–234. Klee 1979 Paul Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, ed. by Jürgen Glaesemer, facsimile edition of the original manuscript of Paul Klee’s first lecture series at erstem Vortragszyklus at the Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar 1921/22, Basel: Schwabe, 1979. Merleau-Ponty 1964 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, transl. by R. McLeary, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. NO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE ZWITSCHER-MASCHINE.ORG 62 Mulder 2015 Etty M. Mulder, The fertile land. Pierre Boulez—Paul Klee: Identifications, Maarn: Stichting Pierre Boulez, 2015. Petzet 1993 Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues With Martin Heidegger, trans. by P. Emad and K. Maly, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Seubold/Heidegger 1993 Günter Seubold, Martin Heidegger, “Heideggers nachgelassene Klee-Notizen”, in: Heidegger Studies, Vol. 9, 1993, pp. 5–12.. Steiner 1986 George Steiner, Language And Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman, New York, NY: Atheneum, 1986. Tusa 2024 Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica: Traces of Georealism, Bristol and London: Tenement Press, 2024. NO. 18 / 2025 GIOVANBATTISTA TUSA / HEIDEGGER AND KLEE