An Introduction to Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art

by HerodoteanDreams

Note: citations and page references are taken from David Krell’s Basic Writings.

Introductory Observations: Heidegger is commonly held to be the most impressive thinker of the 1900s. What is most immediately striking about Heidegger is the jarring complexity of the language he uses. He writes this way not only because the language we use today has lost its vibrancy under the crushing weight of commerce and technology, but also because he is in agreement with Nietzsche’s statements about the way grammar and language influence thinking. He aims to shake the way that we think at a foundational level and writing in this way, among other things, slows the reader down. And while normally I go out of my way to consider each thinker on his own terms, for the sake of understanding Heidegger I want to point out right off the bat that he expresses no sense of humor whatsoever in his writing. Philosophy is serious. It is the most noble engagement of man with the unfolding of Being; there is no higher endeavor. Now, this statement must be heavily qualified. What actually is noble, what is highest for man, in a different sense, cannot be stated with finality. What is noble develops organically, its expressions unfold through a process of time. Heidegger is the most intellectually rigorous and most radical member of the school of thought associated with historicism. Finally, his manner of writing is not self-reflexive in the way that many of the most impressive thinkers’ works are self-reflexive. The arguments found in Plato shift and receive further development when the work is subjected to literary analysis; the arguments of Aristotle’s strict divisions fall in on themselves when subjected to their own reasoning; Aristophanes writes himself into The Clouds as a cloud; and Nietzsche directly calls the reader to subject his work to its own analysis—Heidegger’s writing does not have its own implicit drama in this way. However, Heidegger’s arguments are not simply straightforward. They deliberately lead the reader through a chain of reasoning. One can’t just pluck something out of the work and say “this is what Heidegger thinks” because his argument itself is developing or unfolding—and one can’t just pluck out what is said at the end because the development is the argument. He starts with our common, every-day understanding of a subject and works away from it. While this work seems to be about the origin of the work of art, by the end we see that the subject is the “working of the work” and the way in which truth, again something shifting through time, works to shape those that it does shape—and so in this sense the greatest work of art is that which shapes a whole people, the founding.

Heidegger’s Introduction: what is the origin of art? What is the source of its essence? Now, in the thought of Plato and Aristotle there is a sharp distinction between the genealogy of something, how it comes to be, and what is called its “eidetic analysis,” the answer to the question what is X? From the typical Platonic-Aristotelian perspective we are making a mistake by asking about the essence of art in relationship to its origin. So right away we see, in principle, a major disagreement between Heidegger and these Greeks. Now, the artist and the work are mutually inclusive, the one can’t really be thought without the other—at bottom they both originate out of “art”—therefore the inquiry shifts from the origin of the work of art to the essence of art (144). We immediately run up against a problem: logic fails us—logically to know the work of art depends on knowing art but to know art we need to know the work of art. We are stuck in impasse raised by the strength of the demand made in the name of strict logic. This is sometimes called “the Meno problem” in honor of the Platonic dialogue raising this concern. Heidegger’s response is that logic must give way to experience. Life is not logical. Logical constructions are developed, in principle, by the human mind; by contrast, understanding through experience is our access to life. Genuine understanding develops out of our experience of the relationships and mutual influences between that which we experience and ourselves. And in this regard, who doesn’t know what a work of art is? We see them (145) all over the place: in the public, in the sacred, and in the private, that is, our lives are permeated with the experience of art. But our experience of art is, for all that, shallow. Our treatment of art today treats it as something on hand and ready to be used—Heidegger refers to art exhibits; the life of the work of art as we experience it is exhausted. Someone strolls through thousands of years worth of art in a day and then goes and has a drink at a bar. Works of art are just things, like anything else. But art can’t be a thing just like anything else because, in plain English, it isn’t just so many splashes of paint, but out of that arises something else—an image or representation. Heidegger says the work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other. That thing which is an artwork is an image that has to be recognized as an image—so can we abstract from the thingly element that is shared by everything else and move directly to the something other manifested that is crucial to art as art?

Thing and Work: Heidegger turns to the first of three parts: Thing and Work. This section serves as a useful introduction to the thought of Heidegger in general, as the moves he makes in this section are crucial to his thinking broadly conceived. So perhaps we have gotten off on the wrong foot by addressing the subject of our inquiry as a thing in the first place. Can everything be reduced to a thing? Motion and human experience resist reduction to such a lifeless and stationary understanding of that which is vibrant and in motion. (147) We first point the finger at Kant: German idealism, by distinguishing our experience from an inaccessible “thing in itself” has had the effect of discrediting experience and motion in the name of things. Our experience of technology is in tune with this kind of thinking, and it has even, in speech, taken over that which most resists the reduction to “thing”: death and judgment—the language of the thing has gone so far as to take over that which is sacred—But God is not a thing! Man is not a thing! Heidegger appeals to the experience of our passions—are you all so under the sway of scientific-Cartesian-Kantian thinking that you could conceive of God and man as a thing! We who have a spark of what is genuinely human feel differently. To be a thing is to be a mere thing—and for Heidegger the reduction to thinghood is rooted not in German idealism or the modern turn to scientific thought or anything that happened in the Middle Ages but implicates and has its origin in Greek thought itself. Between Heidegger and the Greeks, according to the self-understanding of Heidegger, everything that followed the Greeks is derivative of Greek thought.

Greek thought, that is, Greek experience of the Being of beings in the sense of presence. Greek thought was directly connected to experience and for this reason had a kind of—this isn’t exactly the best way to say it but I can’t think of a better term—Greek thought had a kind of legitimacy that was lacking in the thought that followed. Yes, the Greeks are held responsible for the reduction to thingness but this was their genuine experience. This experience calcified in the Romans and this calcification process is reflected in the Latin language, which is to say that as thought is calcified in language, the problem of grammar rears its head. The way thought and language are tied up together means that what was once a genuine experience becomes solidified in and through language. Again, this is part of the reason why Heidegger writes in the confusing way in which he does—to shake up your linguistic experience and therefore free your thought from historically calcified tradition. “Occasionally we still have the feeling that violence has long been done to the thingly element of things and that thought has played a part in this violence, for which reason people disavow thought instead of taking the pains to make it more thoughtful. But in defining the essence of the thing, what is the use of a feeling, however certain, if thought alone has the right to speak here?” This is Heidegger’s response to Romanticism—by emphasizing feeling over thinking it puts its finger on the problem but doesn’t come up with an adequate solution, because to do so one would need to think through the way in which language has become corrupted.

 Could we appeal to experience directly (152)?—Not so long as our appeal to direct experience is still captured by calcified language. Heidegger turns to the problem of language by turning to the matter/form dichotomy familiar to readers of Plato and Aristotle. “Form as shape is not the consequence here of a prior distribution of the matter. The form, on the contrary, determines the arrangement of the matter” (154). Heidegger accuses this dichotomy as being fundamentally subject to the classification of the useful: “Usefulness is the basic feature from which this being regards us, that is, flashes at us and thereby is present and thus is this being. Both the formative act and the choice of material—a choice given with the act—and therewith the dominance of the conjunction of matter and form, which are all grounded in such usefulness. A being that falls under usefulness is always the product of a process of making (154). This is the connection between Greek thinking and all other thinking up to the age of technological development—the dichotomy of matter/form is fundamentally rooted in a teleological conception and teleology is fundamentally utilitarian. And Biblical faith is easily captured by this manner of thinking because the Biblical God is a Creator God (155): “The inclination to treat the matter-form structure as the constituion of every being receives an additional impulse from the fact that on the basis of a religious faith, namely, the biblical faith, the totality of all beings is represented in advance as something created, which here means made” (155). A particular religion rather than a particular political order intensifies our being captured by this fundamentally Greek way of thinking. Biblical creation does not necessarily imply the matter/form dichotomy, but when Biblical thought meets Greek thought, above all, in Thomism, “then faith is expounded by way of a philosophy whose truth lies in an unconcealedness of beings which differs in kind from the world believed in by faith.” The form/matter distinction, once it captures Biblical thought, is cemented in the Western tradition and reaches its peak in the thought of Kant (156). So we first pointed the finger at Kant, went back to the Greeks, and then built our way back to Kant—the root of the degradation and distance from motion and experience is grounded in Greek thought and reaches its ultimate calcification in Kant. In summary, the human relationship to production has so permeated thought since the Greeks that we have to revaluate the most common, for example, mere shoes.

Now, in the return to what a different thinker would call pre-scientific or pre-philosophic experience, Heidegger chooses as a paradigmatic case for such a return the example of peasant shoes. This example might seem to be selected merely because Heidegger appreciates the art of Van Gogh, but this return to experience or to the recapture of the vibrancy associated with genuine language is consistently illuminated in the thought of Heidegger by the example of the worker as one immediately rooted in a relationship with the earth. Philosophy is the highest as that which thinks through the historical experience of uncovering, but the peasant is the example to illustrate rootedness because of the peasant’s direct connection with that which is uncovered—as distinct from lifeless commercial-technological cosmopolitanism. More interestingly, the peasant is the foil to this rootless cosmopolitanism rather than the soldier or the political statesman. Heidegger aims to breathe life back into language and experience; a shoe, or an axe to a lumberman for that matter, is not merely some lifeless thing—the poetic description of the shoe (159) draws this out. We are closer to the phenomena as they come to us in experience. The language of things, which seems to be more precise as it is the language of science and reason, is less precise in that it abstracts from genuine experience. Now, Heidegger consistently illustrates this point by appealing to the peasant as someone close to the earth and his equipment as something not at all lifeless—this leaves Heidegger vulnerable to a criticism: namely, that, although he aims to move back the genuine phenomena, by focusing on the peasant type he himself abstracts from the political. For example, a good democrat and an aristocrat see a voting booth in distinctly different ways. What is at stake in this challenge is that by focusing on the peasant rather than the soldier or statesman, Heidegger abstracts from politics and, paradoxically, overemphasizes the particularity of politics in the unfolding of truth. I’ll say more about this challenge to his thought at the end, but you should observe here that it is not an accident or a coincidence that the example he chooses, the shoe of the peasant, is as far removed from a particular political situation as could be imagined. Regarding art, the shoe of the peasant speaks to him as distinct from the portrait of a statesman or the depiction of a battle. Returning to the text and the end of the first section, (161) the artwork lets us know what shoes are in truth. Art uncovers truth and helps or allows us to see a so-called thing as what it really is or is in truth, that is, “a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work” (162). Art draws the truth out: the essence of art would then be this: “the truth of beings setting itself to work.” It should be emphasized how strange this understanding of art is—it abstracts from beauty; until the epilogue, the end of this first section is the only section of the work in which Heidegger speaks of beauty—only to reject it (and he never speaks of the noble in this work). It isn’t that his work abstracts from beauty but that beauty abstracts from the truth, understood as Heidegger understands the truth. Beauty is a bastardized concept reserved for aesthetics, that is, beauty is linked to the productive view that is being rejected. The work of art is “not the reproduction of some particular entity that happens to be at hand at any given time; it is on the contrary, the reproduction of things’ general essence”—for example, the Van Gogh painting drew out the general essence of the shoe. Heidegger ends the section by pointing to a crucial aspect of his thought: “truth is set into the work. What truth is happening in the work? Can truth happen at all and thus be historical? Yet truth, people say, is something timeless and supertemporal”—if, as we will see, truth is a kind of unfolding of being, then the truth lacks stability, it is not as our logically and grammatically trained minds take it to be, but rather something changing or flowing (163).

The Work and Truth: (164) So where are we? We have learned that the “thing concepts” of our ordinary daily language are inadequate and that the attempt to access a work by considering its “thingly structure” or even the attempt to abstract from this “thingly structure” is misguided because a whole different way of thinking is needed to access the work of art. In the second section, work and truth, Heidegger elaborates on what he means by truth and in this way draws out how to understand a work in the light of truth (166).

 Works have a life of their own; when they are placed in the collection of a museum that is a good indication that the life of the work is over. Heidegger speaks of works having their own world. The normal way to say this would be that works always have a particular context, that is, they are always a part of and shape the conventions of a people. Live works shape a “world”—and world-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone. As an aside, this claim poses a grave challenge to anyone who would like to revitalize Christianity or return to the Greeks in any fashion. At any rate, a work is not an object—when a work is placed in a museum it becomes an object but loses its “work-being” or life. (167) “The work belongs, as work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up by itself.” To show what he means by this, Heidegger refers us to the Greek temple. In the first section, he referred us to Van Gogh’s painting of a shoe to teach us how to move away from thinking in terms of thinglyness, but it is clear enough that that piece of art (a shoe) would not serve as a proper example of what is meant by a work opening up a unique realm. A work can make us understand the phenomenological essence of a thing, but that is nothing compared to the work that opens up a unique realm; for example, Van Gogh’s painting is paltry compared to a Greek temple. The paradigmatic example for work under these circumstances, the Greek temple, is carefully selected because it is religious (and isn’t Christian). Art’s example is religious because religion more than anything else “gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people.” A work of art understood in this paradigmatic sense governs the whole life and way of seeing and experiencing of a people. In Heideggerian language it “sets up a world”—if the whole is fundamentally motion or flowing, if the earth continually swallows its expressions up, a work holds this unfolding in place and allows a world to show itself. (170) “World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those utterly essential decisions of our history are made, are taken up by and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds.” In Nietzschean and Platonic language, the world is roughly a horizon or the cave—and there is no escaping these to a kind of higher level timeless truth—truth is always the unfolding of the world. Truth is irreducibly conventional and timebound. Heidegger prefers the peasant woman, because she is particularly close to this unfolding: she “has a world because she dwells in the overtness of beings. Her equipment, in its reliability, gives to this world a necessity and nearness of its own.” Even our trash world of art museums is a world: “Even this doom, of the god remaining absent, is a way in which the world worlds.” This claim gives rise to another challenge to the thought of Heidegger. He is clearly revolted with commercialism and a world of scientific technology that reduces everything to lifeless objectivity. By what does he take his bearings to make this judgment? On the one hand, he seems to appeal to some standard that would suggest that lifeless technological commercialism is always bad and even bad because its is ugly or base; however, if the worlding or unfolding of worlds is something irreducibly timebound, then on what grounds does he condemn? That is, he implies that moral judgments are irreducibly timebound and yet he is able to take an apparently extra-worldly stance to condemn our trash world—that he does so in the language of gods and absence of gods may obscure this challenge.

However this may be, what a work does is make space for the divine, it liberates “the free space of the open region and establishes it in its structure.” (171) So to work-being there belongs the setting up of a world and the thingness or material of the work is simply the best medium to allow this process to happen. (172) “The work moves the earth itself into the open region of a world and keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth.” In normal language, the work draws structure out of fundamental chaos, and fixes this structure in place for a people, for a time. Heidegger prefers the artist to be a kind of organic conduit for the establishment of a world out of the earth. Commercial scientific technology is revolting because of its rejection and defiance in the face of this fundamental chaos. The rationalizing associated with technological progress is the attempt to arrest this unfolding and fix it in place. Heidegger denies that this is in principle possible and passionately speaks out against it in the name of the unfolding of earth: “It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth thus shatters... impotence of will.” The work sets up a world and sets forth the earth. And while up until now, that this is a temporal-historical process has been hinted at or implied, at the tail end of this section the temporality of this process is stressed. (174) “The world is the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing.” Again, truth is the way in which this process establishes itself. (175) Our normal conception of truth denies this: the normal conception of truth is that the truth consists of features held in common at all times. It is the generic and universal concept—but if truth is essentially an unfolding process, then truth can not be a universal concept. Truth is the unconcealment of beings, but as a historical process, the unconcealment and concealment of beings is not static but itself in motion. If Heidegger has come to this awareness over and against the history of the West, this too is simply part of the process of unconcealing and presumably will be concealed as the motion of time continues. Again, one wonders whether Heidegger lives in a privileged time or in a time that is of no fundamental difference from any other. Has the fundamental working of the relationship between world and earth or convention and chaos finally been revealed or is this claim itself a mere expression of time-bound revelations or somehow both? However this may be, (178) Beings can be as beings only if they stand within and stand out within what is cleared in this clearing. Only this clearing grants and guarantees to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not—and gives us access to the being that we ourselves are. Thanks to this clearing, beings are unconcealed in certain changing degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, only within the sphere of what has been cleared. Each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to this curious opposition of “presencing, in that it always withholds itself at the same time in a concealment.” Again, (179), “The unconcealment of beings—this is never a merely existent state, but a happening. Unconcealment (truth) is neither an attribute of matters in the sense of beings, nor one of propositions.” That is, it is one of motion. (180) “Earth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth only so far as truth happens as the primal strife between clearing and concealing”—Which is to say that works, works of art broadly conceived—not only including temples (religion) but also including political foundings (the establishment of a goal or an answer to the question what is noble for a people), govern or shape the way a people experience life but the work itself is generated out of something that is at bottom inaccessible to man.

Truth and Art: So how are we to understand the creative aspect involved in the creation of a work? We can begin to answer this by taking our bearings by what creation is not—creation is not making and the creator is certainly not alienated from the creation in the way that a factory worker is from the product. The Greeks conflated making and creating because they treated both as techne—but at least they understood techne as a way of letting a being come into its own. This equivocation within the Greek concept of techne was later calcified in language as production. Heidegger aims to uncover what is involved in creation. Creation is one of the ways in which truth unfolds—again, it is a happening that is fundamentally historical. “One essential way in which truth establishes itself in the beings it has opened up is truth setting itself into work Another way in which truth occurs is the act that founds a political state. Still another way in which truth comes to shine forth is the nearness of the that which is not simply a being, but the being that is most in being. Still another way in which truth grounds itself is the essential sacrifce. Still another way in which truth becomes is the thinkers questioning, which, as the thinking of Being, names Being in its question-worthiness. By contrast, science is not an original happening of truth, but always the cultivation of domain of truth already opened, specifically by apprehending and confirming that which shows itself to be possibly and necessarily correct within that field. When and insofar as a science passes beyond correctness and goes on to a truth, which means that it arrives at the essential disclosure of beings as such, it is philosophy” (186-7). The truth is brought to light by the political founding, religious establishment, battlefield death, works of art narrowly understood—anything other than science! Anything noble brings out the truth, but the content of the noble is purely historically determined—and Heidegger doesn’t use the language of nobility. It cannot be thought of in terms of correct or incorrect. “The establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never before and will never come to be again.” It is radically particular. “As a world opens itself, it submits to the decision of a historical humanity the question of victory and defeat, blessing and curse, mastery and slavery. The dawning world brings out what is yet undecided and measureless, and thus discloses the hidden necessity of measure and decisiveness.” In plain English, truth is the particular content of nobility and beauty that is itself governed by something irreducible and changing in time. The creation of a work fixes the truth in place, but this fixing can only last for so long. It lasts for as long as there are “preservers,” as long as there are those who “stand within the openness of beings that happens in the work”—in plain English—as long as there are people who live according to the established sense of nobility developed by the political founding, religion, narrow artwork, etc. In Heideggerian language, as long as men stay “resolute”—to be resolute is to adhere to the given standard of truth with all of one’s being. It is prudence in the Aristotelian sense without the content of moral virtue associated with Aristotelian prudence. The Aristotelian moral virtue by which prudence takes its bearings, in Heideggerian terms is just one particular unfolding of the truth and as such is no more or less valid than any other unfolding. So: Aristotelian prudence abstracted from the particularity of a given unfolding or conception of nobility becomes resoluteness—a kind of grim determination to adhere to one’s given standard even in the face of the awareness that it is only one standard of no fundamental dignity. And again, art is the fixing in place of self-establishing truth, something itself irreducibly grounded in openness to the earth or, in normal language, instinctual or just given. Even language itself must be thought of along these lines.

Language is the most fundamental way of accessing the beings as they are disclosed to us but language itself can become calcified and block access to this disclosure. Language that blocks access is mere communication and our trash world of commercialism and scientific technology even aims to block access to the unfolding of truth. “Projective saying is poetry: The saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their strife and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods” (198). What Heidegger means can be understood in relation both to Christianity and Greek rationalism. Greek rationalism moves away from particulars and attempts to understand the whole by grouping the various beings into classes and attempting to come to understand these classes. Christianity fundamentally rejects this rational endeavor by emphasizing the radical importance of at least two unique historical events: the birth and death of Christ. If this historical event is of radical and fundamental importance, then the Greek way of understanding through class analysis is fundamentally flawed in a way that could not have been foreseen by it; by contrast, if the Greek procedure of generalizing into classes can comprehend the particularity of any given event, then the Christian claim is at least called into question. This is the antagonism between philosophy as a way of life (Greekness) and Christianity—or for that matter any other claim made on behalf of authority or radical particularity. Heidegger’s challenge to the Greeks is, from the Greek perspective, essentially the same as that of the Christian challenge. Just as Christianity claims one, two, or at most a few moments of radically historical singularity and meaning, so Heidegger expands the importance of certain historical moments to include not just the Christian tradition or slices of time from within that tradition but to all historical traditions—and perhaps to all moments as such. Heidegger’s challenge to Christianity is that it places too much emphasis on one slice of time instead of every slice of time. When Heidegger’s thought is pushed to the extreme, one is left with a radical relativism that denies that it is possible to take one’s bearings by any standard whatsoever. Heidegger ends the third section by emphasizing the political founding. The greatest work of art is the political founding that shapes the way in which an opening of truth shows itself as that which is to be preserved by a people.

Conclusion: Heidegger concludes his work with an epilogue, which readdresses his refusal to speak of art in terms of beauty. “The truth of which we have spoken does not coincide with that which is generally recognized under the name and assigned to cognition and science as a quality, in order to distinguish from it the beautiful and the good, which function as names for the values of nontheoretical activities. Truth is the unconcealment of beings as beings. Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance—as this being of truth in the work and as work—is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to truth’s propriative event. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object. The beautiful does lie in form, but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the beingness of beings” (205-206). The beautiful or the noble is for Heidegger fundamentally a historical expression of historical truth. The Greek challenge to Heideggerian historicism starts to gain real ground when one realizes that Heidegger abstracts from politics in his phenomenology or his return to understanding in the light of human experience. Heidegger does acknowledge that our political order shapes our beliefs—again, the founding is the strongest work of art; it is what guides our conception of morality and that conception is radically particular, in the way that a given language is radically particular. But just as we can understand something about language by considering languages, so it seems to be the case that there are only a finite number of types of regimes. And, while each regime expresses a particular conception of nobility, so each type of regime expresses a particular type of morality—and there is only a small number of possibilities when considered in this light. In Nietzschean terms, if aristocracy or democracy is an instinctual decision, it is nevertheless one between two fundamental types. Once one sees what the type aims at, then one can evaluate and judge expressions of that type. Heidegger’s radical historicism claims that there is no way to take one’s bearings or to judge a particular conception of nobility over and against another conception of nobility. The Greek challenge to Heideggerian radical historicism is that by abstracting from politics, it over-emphasizes the radical particularity of conceptions of what is noble, and therefore itself is under the grip of a particular expression of what is noble, no less than Christianity is. The Greek challenge would further suggest that this is linked to Heidegger’s lack of a sense of humor and the straightforwardness or lack of self-reflexivity characterized by Heidegger’s pedagogy. Which is all to say that to the Greek, Heideggerian radical historcism fails to ask with sufficient seriousness the question What is noble? By contrast, as far as I can tell, the Christian response to Heidegger’s radical historicism is reaffirmation of faith in the radical importance of Jesus.