Overcoming the weight of time: cézanne and klee through heideggerian ground-attunement and be-yond

Abstract

This paper takes on the meaning and ways of dealing with the "weight of time", through Heideggers ground-attunements (Grundstimmungen) as they are rhythmically, and in different ways, at work in both Cézanne and Klees works. Cézanne is identified as occupying two ground-attunements, one – boredom – authentically and the other – sorrow – defectively. This places him in a rhythm whose poles go from Nothing to the Whole, from total absence to total presence, in a negation of values that gives a temporal experience of the Whole through Nothing. He then moves to the Grundstimmung of mourning, in which he effects a recoiling and a sounding of depth, where he meets the earthly as permanence beyond the long-duration-expressing rhythm of boredom. He is, however stuck in the telluric forces, and the "point" at which he effects his movement toward such forces remains unproductive, for geometric. That is precisely where Klee distinguishes himself, not limiting his work to going toward depths, recoil, recollection, i.e. the earth-as-permanence, but moving from and through the "dynamic" point of chaos, upward through φύσις, and thus reaching the second pole of the ground-attunement of sorrow, i.e. "joy", something he is able to do only after entering that of melancholy, which Heidegger, following Aristotle, identifies as philosophys own. Moreover, this paper will show that Klee does not only learn to bear the weight of time by anchoring himself in permanence and openness; he goes beyond Heideggers Grundstimmungen by taking the direction of cosmic time as the very experience of a man in his time-bound presence, his finitude.