Heidegger's aesthetics

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”

First, here are notes expressing the simplest minimum that I expect the student to grasp from this difficult article.

1. In order to show what a thing is, Heidegger writes of a painting by Vincent Van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes.

The shoes are equipment; they serve in their use (not as an object of consciousness or the theme of a theoretical inquiry).

The work of art has its thingly character; it is made, but the made thing, the painting, allows something else to manifest: the earth and the world of the peasant woman who wears the shoes, and who lives her faith, her labor, and the anxiety of her mortality.

2. The ancient Greek temple imitates nothing, yet the sacred precinct, in its materiality, opens an ontological space, a world, in which the earth and its creatures manifest as what they are. The great decisions of individuals and political communities in their life-and-death struggles are made there. [It was not uncommon for a political leader considering whether or not to go to war to go to the oracle at Delphi to ask the priestess for some word, however mysterious, that would contain the wisdom necessary to indicate the right path.]

3. Truth is not only a matter of the conformity of a statement (proposition, judgment) to the fact or reality being spoken. Truth as correspondence in that sense depends on a deeper sense of truth: the unhiddenness of the thing spoken of. The Greek word for truth, aletheia, can be translated “unhiddenness.” The idea is that there is a disclosure, a manifestation of the thing in question.

Thus we cannot speak properly of a thing by relying on rumor or cultural prejudice or the common opinion of those with whom we typically agree. We must open ourselves to the revelatory phenomenon itself, so to speak. That unhiddenness is never complete; there always remains something hidden from the gaze of a person bounded by the world of their epoch in history. For example, in the modern world, technology reigns supreme, and even the human being is regarded as a tool for use, serving the human will-to-power (Nietzsche’s phrase for our dominant drive), as we see, for example, in the title of certain industrial departments or academic courses: human resource management.

Even in this time where being is forgotten, where the even the question of the meaning of being is forgotten, we can still be authentic by facing our mortality, by not pretending to pave over our anxiety, and by taking up the life-and-death struggles that are proper to our people and our time in history.

Heidegger (1889-1976) left Roman Catholic seminary—and religious faith—and pursued philosophy, the question of being, and—for some years—the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. By the time in 1933 when he became Rector of the University of Heidelberg, he was caught up in the Nazi movement, and he never let go of some of the basic convictions that animated his allegiance to that movement. For all that, he remains one of the few most influential European philosophers of the 20^th century.

II. Here is something of an outline of the selections from "The Origin of the Work of Art" included in our text.

We can observe that, in an obvious sense, the artist is the origin of the work; but we can also say that the work is the origin of the artist as such (without the work the artist would not be an artist). What underlies this mutual originating?

Art is the origin of both artist and work. This is what is to be understood. What can this mean? What is art? Sometimes the term seems empty. If we define art by showing examples, we presuppose that we already know something of art in order to gather our collection in the first place. There is a circle here that is unavoidable. We must enter into the circle.

What is art? Have a look. There is a thingly character, which is an enduring aspect of the work: “the architectural work is in stone, the carving is in wood, the painting in color, the linguistic work in speech, the musical composition in sound” (256). It is common to think of the work in its thingly character as a base for the symbolic function of the work, in virtue of which it points beyond itself. But have we understood the concept of a thing adequately?

Thing and Work. [Ten pages from the article are omitted in our text. These pages chronicle the attempts of the history of metaphysics to define the thing, e.g., as substance, with matter and form.] In the history of Western metaphysics, the previously dominant conception of the thing was based upon a certain interpretation of equipment, e.g., table (something we can use, something “ready to hand.”). To get beyond the history of Western metaphysics, we need another ontological interpretation of “the equipmental being of equipment.” We’ll take this interpretation from Van Gogh’s painting of a woman’s shoes. The world of the woman comes forth in this work (257), the ways of her life upon the earth. “The artwork let us know what shoes are in truth”; “in the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself into work” (259).

This thought departs from the aesthetics of beauty and seems to revert to a theory of “imitation,” but a Greek temple imitates nothing; nevertheless, “truth is set to work in such a work, if it is a work” (259); e.g., “Roman Fountain” (260).

To begin an inquiry into art by starting with what seems most obvious—the thingly character of the work (presupposing traditional concepts of the thing) is an approach that runs aground. Instead we need to approach the concept of thing by beginning with the concept of the work and how truth happens in the work.

The Work and Truth

The origin of the art work is art.

It would seem as though, to see the work, we must see it in isolation from everything else, for example, as in great art, where the artist does not obtrude, does not manifest in his or her idiosyncrasies, but disappears in the work. But works cannot be themselves when ripped out of their world context, and placed in foreign museums; nor can they be themselves when the world they inaugurated has passed away (262).

Consider, for example, a Greek temple, which once focused the world of the people and which, by its contrasts, brings forth the earth as such, as nature (physis). A people’s relation to divinities, to the holy, and the drama of the great decisions of a historical people are focused in the temple. The work sets up a world.

The work is not like a tool in which material remains in the background and is used up; in the work the rock and metals and colors and tones and word appear as what they are (unlike the way they are made to appear through science, which is interested in technical objectifying and in mastery in which everything becomes a resource for the purposes of human will).

Between world and earth, between the holy and the unholy, between opponents, there is a striving. Understand the striving deeply. The self-assertion of nature in the work is “never a rigid insistence upon some contingent state, but surrender to the concealed originality of the sources of one’s own being” (267-68).

To see how truth happens in the work we need a deeper concept of truth. It refers to what is essential, but essence is not understood in terms of “Platonic” forms. Nor is truth merely a matter of correctness, of conforming to the way things are; this derivative conception of truth presupposes the deeper conception: that things are unconcealed, that they appear as what they are (rather than in terms of how we can manipulate them to serve some manufacturing purpose, e.g., referring to a forest in terms of board-feet).

Beings stand forth, appear as phenomena, in the lighted clearing which is not itself a being, but “like the Nothing which we scarcely know” (270). Disclosure, unconcealment, is never total, since there is always a measure of concealment, sometimes in the form of refusal to manifest, sometimes in the form of dissembling (a person may manifest as closed, or may play a fake role). There is always more to the being of beings than what comes to truth as a-leth-ia: un-hidden-ness. Art is one of the few essential ways in which truth happens. Van Gogh’s shoes enabled the world of the woman to come to light; the Greek temple enables the world of that historical people to come to light. The poem, “The Roman Fountain” lets beings as a whole come to light. “This shining, joined in the work, is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness” (272).

The question, the inquiry, advances now, asking about the creation of the work: “How does the impulse toward such a thing as a work lie in the nature of truth? Of what nature is truth, that it can be set into work, or even under certain conditions must be set into work, in order to be as truth?” In other words, what is it about truth that impels the creation of art works? And why does truth need art to be itself?

Definitions: “the world is the clearing of the paths of the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies” 271.

“Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent” (263).

Truth and Art

Art works are created, not, however, simply through craftsmanship by a particular artist, but as the knowing bringing forth of beings into unconcealedment. Art is something that Being lets happen; it is not simply an affair of one of the many beings (275).

Truth “does not exist in itself beforehand, somewhere among the stars, only later to descend elsewhere among beings” (275).

Truth happens in art, in the founding of a political state, in “the nearness of that which is not simply a being, but the being that is most of all”; in “the essential sacrifice”; in “the thinker’s questioning” (275).

“Truth is never gathered from objects that are present and ordinary” (278).

If we have a deep enough understanding of language, we can say that all art is essentially poetry, bringing something that is into the Open. [Contrast the all-too-common way of speaking that merely passes along conventional impressions of things (partisan, e.g., politically dismissive speech or gossip or a taken-for-granted, in-group consensus about what things are—with no regard for letting those things appear for who or what they are).

“A work is in actual effect as a work only when we remove ourselves from our commonplace routine and move into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring our own nature itself to take a stand in the truth of what is” (280).

III. Statements of core themes in review

Truth means, above all, unhiddenness, unconcealment.

Unconcealment is never complete; there is always something concealed.

Truth is only secondarily the truth of a statement that corresponds with the truth of a thing.

Truth happens as the primal conflict between clearing and concealing.

Art is truth setting itself into work.

In art the truth of a being or thing sets itself into work.

In art truth as the unconcealedness of beings as a whole happens.

Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness.

To be a work means to set up a world (in the light of which earth manifests as what it is).