Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
To be quiet for a moment

2.

Nevertheless, I need to make just one definitonal remark. Of course we can describe the meanings of »Erkenntnis« in a myriad ways - even something like »sensual experience« or »sense perception« may come to mind here. But I think such excentric meanings don't sound right in relation to the German word »Erkenntnis«. There are two elements, in a definition of »Erkenntnis«, on which I want to insist, and they both make the concept look quite un-fancy. Firstly, I think that whenever we use this word we think of a world-appropriation - or the illusion thereof - by concepts (or, at least, of a world capable of being transformed into concepts). Secondly, the word always seems to suggest that these concepts, that this knowledge is (or was once) new. If I now ask myself how I want the relation between »Kunst« and »Erkenntnis«, I will say (unsurprisingly, for Siegfried at least, I bet) that I hope that art can give me a break from Erkenntnis - so much so indeed that I am prepared to hail and celebrate as ‚art« whatever will give me such relief. For, seen from an individual angle, it is extremely difficult not to produce new concepts all the time. Interpreting the world conceptually, revising old interpretations, fine-tuning new ones - this, after all, is how we spend our lives (and this remains true even if hardly any of those individually new concepts that we produce will ever make it into a dictionary or, perhaps, into a written text). It goes without saying - for the following assumption belongs to the most standardized and most rancid discourse of western Humanism - that by constantly producing Erkenntnis in the form of new concepts, we constantly transform ourselves (which transformation at least we intellectuals are expected to cherish unconditionally). In contrast, what I so hope to get from art (or from whichever source), is to be quiet for a moment, to be without the need of producing new concepts all the time and of transforming myself yet again. The great Spanish poet Federico García Lorca seems to speak about this very desire - with considerable irony for the opposite desire - in his poem »Muerte« (»Death«) from »Poeta en Nueva York«:

How hard they try!
How hard the horse tries
to become a dog!
How hard the dog tries to become a swallow!
[...]
And I, on the roof's edge,
what a burning angel I look for and am!
But the plaster arch,
how vast, how invisible, how minute,
without even trying.

So what I am talking about is (in Lorca's words) how much I envy the plaster arch. But do I have to die, as the title of that poem seems to suggest, in order to quit producing Erkenntnis and in order to quit transforming myself?