Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art"



Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art"

Introduction

Heidegger ?rst turned to extended thinking about art in the mid-1930s. In close proximity to each other he produced the lectures on Hölderlin's 'Germania' and 'The Rhine' (GA 39) of 1934-5, the Introduction to Metaphysics (IM) of 1935, in which art receives considerable attention, 'Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry' (HE) of early 1936, the ?nal (of three2) versions of 'The Origin of the Work of Art' of late 1936, and The Will to Power as Art (N I) (the ?rst volume of the four-volume Nietzsche study) of 1936-7.

Of all these works, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (hereafter 'The Origin') has received by far the greatest amount of attention, an attention which can only be described as obsessive. (Its reverie on Van Gogh's painting of shoes - a testament to Heidegger's early love of Van Gogh but almost completely irrelevant to, indeed, as we shall see, inconsistent with, the real thrust of the essay - has given rise to a baroque foliage of secondary literature that has had progressively less and less to do with Heidegger.) Discussions of Heidegger's philosophy of art usually con?ne themselves to this work, taking it to be the full and ?nal statement of that philosophy.

This, as already intimated, is for several reasons a highly unfortunate assumption. First, because the only hope of producing an intelligible reading of this tortuously enigmatic work lies in integrating it into the surrounding texts of the same period of thinking. Second, because, as mentioned, it is only the beginning of Heidegger's 'path of thinking' about art. And third, because it contains fundamental de?ciencies. As, inter alia, the forty-two mostly sharply self-critical footnotes Heidegger insisted on including in the ?nal, Gesamtausgabe edition of the work make clear, later Heidegger was well aware of these de?ciencies. In this chapter I shall be concerned to understand ?rst the work itself, and then the most important of Heidegger's own criticisms of it.

One of these is of particular signi?cance since the subsequent development of his 'path' is, I shall suggest, largely determined by his awareness of the di?culty raised by the criticism and the attempt to rectify it.

Hegel and the 'death of art'

In the 'Epilogue' to 'The Origin' (completed at an unknown time between 1936 and the 1956 'Addendum', as well as in chapter 13 of The Will to Power as Art, Heidegger indicates the fundamental concerns of the essay by positioning it in relation to Hegel's celebrated thesis of the 'death of art'. As Heidegger presents it, Hegel's thesis can be represented in terms of the following four propositions.

Art in its 'highest vocation' - 'great' art, Heidegger calls it is art in which 'the truth of beings as a whole i.e. the unconditioned, the absolute, opens itself up' to 'man's historical existence'; to, that is, a given, historically located, culture. Great art (but not of course all art, or even all art of ...