The Collective Gaze Vector of the Authentic Self

When I visited the Caspar David Friedrich (CDF) exhibition at Kunsthalle Hamburg the other day, I had the spontaneous idea to take a photo of a person taking a photo of a painting of a person looking down on a cloudy landscape standing on a ledge (which is, of course, CDF’s most iconic 1818 painting, The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog).

I stood some 20+ minutes in the small but open room, observing the incoming and outgoing flow of fellow visitors, waiting for the optimal moment and perspective to take my shot, while taking care to not invade too much anyone else’s privacy. 

I have neither training nor any practical ambitions in producing visual art myself, thus the more was I surprised when inspecting my photo more closely after returning home: it perfectly materialises the vague creative idea I had in mind, and what’s more, it renders some details explicit, which might have been implicit in my idea, but I only realised after seeing it being materialised.

One of those details is the consistent ‘eleven o’clock’ gaze/ posture vector running from the person taking the photo of the painting, through the person in the photo in the painting as represented on the smartphone screen, looking onto himself within the painting looking onto the Sea of Fog. 

The context of production for this gaze/ posture vector famously is that CDF was not very good at drawing human figures and faces, which is why we see most people in his paintings only from behind.

The ideo-historical context is much wider though. CDF is traded as the literal poster boy of German Romanticism, which also is labelled as “Gegen-Aufklärung” (Counter-Enlightenment). The Enlightenment’s project of making the world available to human reason culminated in Immanuel Kant’s razor sharp distinction between the world’s phenomena (the availability of the things how they appear to us via our senses) versus the noumena (the things in-themselves, which are fundamentally unavailable to us).

This sharp divide between world and subject left a vacuum of experiencing what Martin Heidegger some 100 years later would call the ‘being-in-the-world’. Romanticism was to a large (albeit not the only) part the project of re-establishing a resonant relation between the natural world and the experiencing self.

This resonant world-self relation presupposes the significance of an ‘authentic self’ to begin with - the inherent appreciation of individualism which is one of the central legacies of Romanticism for us today. Again, an idea Martin Heidegger would later adapt in the concept of “Eigentlichkeit” (Own-ness).

Yet another, and in my opinion the most interesting connection between Romanticism and the thinking of Martin Heidegger is the notion of ‘to do something the way people generally do the thing’ (I won’t even try to translate Heidegger’s term “das Man” into English here). As Heidegger writes in his famous chapter on the ‘everday-ness of being-self’ in his 1927 opus magnum, Being and Time:

“We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge … we find ‘shocking’ what they find shocking.”

As The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, many of CDF’s paintings show people looking at natural phenomena. We don’t see the depicted people’s faces, so their emotional states of experiencing those phenomena remain private to us looking at the paintings, they remain experiences in-themselves, unavailable to us.

But what is available to the audience looking at the paintings is that it is perfectly normal to spend time looking at natural phenomena, which essentially is to consume those phenomena. There is an implicit logic that it is very likely worthwile to consume the phenomena, what else reason would there be to repeatedly make it a motiv of paintings, as confirmed by people considering it wortwhile to look at these paintings?

There is a certain irony in the connection between the Romanticist concept of authentic self and Heidgegger’s “how-they-do-it” though: according to Heidegger, resorting to the ‘everyday-ness of being-self’ is a tactic to avoid the potential burden of having an authentic self to begin with. He even writes of the “dictatorship of the how-they-do-it”.

Today it is perfectly normal to find ourselves spending time and money to visit a museum for taking photos of a famous painting, instead of simply experiencing it. This is today how we see and judge art “the way they see and judge”.

And the irony of today is that the most likely reason we engage in this behaviour is to share those photos on social media, for signalling our individual authentic self, for making it available, and thereby contribute to the collective gaze/ posture vector of looking at the world.