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Matherne, Heidegger Lexicon Entries Kunst (Art), Riß (Rift, Design), and Anschauung (Intuition) Entries To appear in the Heidegger Lexicon, ed. Mark Wrathall, Cambridge University Press Samantha Matherne (UC Santa Cruz) 1. Kunst, Art According to Heidegger, in order to understand art, we cannot take our cue from the aesthetic tradition; rather, we must analyze art in terms of its relation to truth and ontology. To this end, he defines art as the historical happening of truth in which beings are unconcealed to us by means of a work of art. On his view, it is only within this framework that one can hope to give a proper account of three important aspects of art, viz., its essence, creation, and appreciation. In addition to defending a positive account of art, Heidegger devotes much of his discussion on this topic to a critique of aesthetics. As Heidegger presents it, aesthetics is driven by the idea that subjective experience is the key to understanding what the essence, appreciation, and creation of a work of art involves: The way in which man experiences art is supposed to inform us about its essential nature. Experience is the standard-giving source not only for the appreciation and enjoyment of art but also for its creation. Everything is experience (GA5: 67/50). Teasing this claim out, he suggests that aesthetics takes the essence of a work of art to depend on it being an object of subjective experience: “Aesthetics treated the artwork as an object, as indeed an object of aesthesis, of sensory apprehension… [which] [t]hese days… is called an “experience”” (GA5: 67/50). Meanwhile, he maintains that aesthetics analyzes the appreciation of a work of art in terms of the feelings and experiences the object gives rise to in a subject, e.g., the feeling of pleasure, which defines beautiful art in the classic 18th century aesthetic tradition. Finally, concerning the creation of a work of art, Heidegger claims that aesthetics takes it to involve something akin to handicraft, i.e., the skilled activity through which a craftsperson takes some matter and gives it form in light of an end or purpose. Indeed, he argues that this conception of artistic creativity becomes so influential that “the conceptual pair “matter and form” came to be the really principal schema for all inquiry into art” (GA43: 99/N1 82, see also GA5: 12/9). Heidegger raises several objections to this aesthetic approach to art. To begin, he argues that aesthetics is misguided in applying the form-matter distinction to art because this distinction is not one that “belongs, originally, to the sphere of art and the artwork,” but rather to the sphere of equipment (GA5: 12/9). Unlike equipment, which depends on our ends and purposes, he asserts that there is something about a work of art that is “self-sufficient… which has taken shape by itself and is never forced into being” and in this regard is more like another type of being, viz., a mere thing (GA5: 14/10). Moreover, Heidegger argues that any analysis of a work of art solely in terms of its relation to subjective experience is problematic because it feeds into two worrisome tendencies that dominate the modern era, viz., subjectivism and enframing [Gestell]. Subjectivism, for Heidegger, involves the disposition to carve up the world into subjects and objects and to take the former to be the measure of the latter. Meanwhile, enframing is the more extreme form subjectivism takes in the technological era in which beings come to be defined not just in relation to the subject, but to the subject’s will. Accordingly, in enframing all beings come to be regarded as resources, the value of which we can calculate in relation to our will. According to Heidegger, aesthetics falls under the sway of both of these tendencies. In the first place, its commitment to subjectivism is evident in the fact that it places art within the framework of subjects and objects: [in aesthetics] [t]he artwork is posited as the “object” for a “subject”; definitive for aesthetic consideration is the subject-object relation… The work becomes an object in terms of that surface which is accessible to “lived experience” (GA43: 91/N1 78). Furthermore, he indicates that the influence of technology and enframing is manifest in rise of the “art business” [Kunstbetriebes] and the fact that works of art come to be defined in relation to that business, e.g., as objects to be enjoyed by the connoisseur, preserved by the curator, criticized by the critic, etc. (GA5: 26/19). Heidegger raises a number of objections against aesthetics on the basis of the tendencies towards subjectivism and enframing in it. To begin, aesthetics falls prey to Heidegger’s more general objection to these tendencies, viz., that they encourage an overly anthropocentric understanding of beings. Rather than understanding beings on their own terms, according to their own essences, he objects that subjectivism and enframing erroneously lead us to define beings solely in terms of their relation to human beings. For Heidegger, then, aesthetics goes wrong insofar as it overlooks the ways in which works of art manifest something that is not entirely of human making. Furthermore, he objects that by treating a work of art as an object of subjective experience or as a resource, aesthetics overlooks the true value of a work of art. “For us today,” he says, “the beautiful is the relaxing, what is restful, and thus intended for enjoyment. Art then belongs in the domain of the pastry chef” (GA40: 140/IM 146). However, on Heidegger’s view, this misestimates the value of what a work of art as ‘great art’ could be: Great art and its works are great in their historical emergence and Being because in man’s historical existence they accomplish a decisive task: they make manifest, in the way appropriate to works, what beings as a whole are…. Art and its works are necessary only as an itinerary and sojourn for man in which the truth of beings as a whole… opens itself up to him…. [A]rt is great because it is an “absolute need” (GA43: 100/84). As this passage indicates, he thinks great art accomplishes a decisive task in history because it answers an absolute need, viz., to understand the truth of beings as a whole. However, echoing Hegel’s claims about the end of art, Heidegger maintains that although there used to be great art, e.g., in Greece, “when aesthetics achieves its greatest possible height, breadth, and rigor of form, great art comes to an end” (GA43: 100/N1 84, see also GA5: 67-60/50-2). By Heidegger’s lights, by approaching art from within the subjectivist and enframing perspectives, aesthetics mistakenly limits the potential of a work of art to the realm of pastry when it, in fact, once did and perhaps could once again play a decisive historical role in our understanding of the truth of beings. On this point, Heidegger does not appear to share Hegel’s conviction that great art must remain a thing of the past. Rather, he leaves open the possibility that art might one day again be great; indeed, he even indicates that art might be what saves us from the grip of technology: Could it be that [poetic] revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power…? Whether art may be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of the extreme danger, no one can tell (GA7:36/QCT 35). At the very least, he acknowledges that art has a possibility higher than that which aesthetics accords it and leaves it open whether it can once again play a decisive role in history, revealing to us the truth of beings as they are in their own essence. Contrary to the aesthetic tradition, Heidegger thus thinks that a proper analysis of the essence, creation, and appreciation of art is one that relies neither on the framework of subjects and objects, nor on the enframing perspective of technology and that, instead, restores the possibility that art can be great insofar as it historically reveals to us the truth of beings. Defending such an account is something that Heidegger undertakes with his first major essay on art, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935-6) and that he refines over the years, especially in his lectures and writing on poetry, e.g., his lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘Germania’ and ‘The Rhine’ (GA39, 1934-5), Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry (GA4, 1936-68), ‘Why Poets?’ (1946), and ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’ (1951).1 In order to develop the details of Heidegger’s account, it makes sense to start, as he does in the ‘Origin’ essay, with a discussion of the essence of art. Heidegger begins this essay by drawing a distinction between a work of art and art. Whereas a work of art is a particular type of being that we can come across in experience, e.g., a painting, he claims that art is what serves as the ‘origin’ of a work of art, i.e., the “source of its nature [Wesen]” (GA5: 1/1). He, in turn, defines art as “a happening of truth,” which involves “the setting-itself-to-work of the truth of beings” [das Sich-ins- Werk-Setzen der Warheit des Seienden] (GA5: 21/16). By ‘truth’ in this context, Heidegger has in mind the Greek conception of truth as aletheia, which involves the “unconcealment of beings”; in which case, when truth happens in art, he thinks the truth of beings is unconcealed (GA5: 21/16).
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