British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. }8, No 4, October iggS

HEIDEGGER AND THE ONTOLOGICALSIGNIFICANCE OF THE WORK OF ART

Daniel E. Palmer

I. INTRODUCTION

REFLECTIONS upon works of art occupy a prominent place in Heidegger's writingsfrom the 1930s onward. Heidegger's deep appreciation of and sustained interestin art manifested itself in the substantial space that he devoted in his essays andlectures to circumspect engagement with works of art. The poems of Holderlinand Angelus Silesius, Greek temples and vases, and the paintings of Van Gogh areamong the many artworks that served as catalysts for Heidegger's thought.Indeed, the centrality of questions concerning art in Heidegger's philosophicalinvestigations is indisputable.

And yet, despite the ubiquity of artworks in Heidegger's writings, the exactsignificance of art for Heidegger's path of thought is by no means easilydiscerned. In the epilogue to 'The Origin of the Work of Art' Heidegger himselfaffirms that the preceding 'reflections are concerned with the riddle of art, theriddle that art itself is. They are far from claiming to solve that riddle' (OWA 79).'The intent to which Heidegger develops his interrogations of artworks often onlyemerges slowly, and with great effort on the part of the reader. Nor does the vastquantity of commentary that has accumulated concerning Heidegger and artnecessarily shed much illumination upon Heidegger's valuation of the work ofart. Indeed, the sometimes baffling array of exegeses offered in the secondaryliterature can leave one more perplexed concerning Heidegger's view of art thanwhen one started. Often isolated passages from Heidegger's writings on art areused to reconstruct a Heideggerian response to some traditional point of con-troversy within the philosophy of art. Such undertakings usually fail to consider

' References to Heidegger's writings within the body of the text will be given using the followingabbreviations: OWA, The Origin of the Work of Art,' in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. AlbertHofstadter (New York; Harper & Row, 1971); AWP, 'The Age of the World Picture," in TheQuestion Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row,1977); QCT, 'The Question Concerning Technology,' in The Question Concerning Technology andOther Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); BT, Being and Time, trans.John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); N, Nietzsche, vol. I: TheWill to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper* Row, 1979).

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the larger philosophical context in which Heidegger's remarks upon artworks aremade, and in the process badly distort Heidegger's views.2 On the other hand,there are a number of commentaries that offer excellent analyses of the place ofart in Heidegger's thought and its relation to the history of philosophicaldiscourse upon art, but that are exceedingly technical in nature, presupposing afamiliarity with Heidegger's philosophy that makes them inaccessible to all butthose already within the inner circles of Heideggerian scholarship.3 Thus, in thispaper I will attempt to steer a middle course between these two extremes,providing a reading of Heidegger's interpretation of art that is as simple and asprecise as is possible given the difficulty of Heidegger's writings, and one that alsosituates Heidegger's treatment of art in relation to the entirety of hisphilosophical enterprise. In the first section of the paper I will show thatHeidegger's reflections upon art do not belong within the province of aestheticsor the philosophy of art. Rather, they must be understood in terms of Heidegger'srejection of both the traditional division of philosophy into unique domains ofresearch and, more poignantly, the aesthetic approach to art. In the second partof the paper I will turn from Heidegger's negative appraisal of the typicalphilosophical assessment of art to his own positive estimation of the work of artand its philosophical and cultural significance.

Although a number of Heidegger's philosophical meditations take their pointof departure from a consideration of an individual work of art, Heidegger's mostextended and comprehensive treatment of the work of art occurs in the essay'The Origin of the Work of Art', published in the Holzwtge (Forest Trails)volume. As such, the interpretation of Heidegger's account of art offered below isgarnered in large part from that essay. Nonetheless, it is extremely important toread this essay in conjunction with a number of Heidegger's other works. Inparticular, Heidegger's first lecture course on Nietzsche, 'The Will to Power asArt', delivered during the same period as which the Holzwege essay was beingcomposed, provides some crucial clues for deciphering the import of Heidegger'streatment of the work of art.4 Likewise, another essay from the 1930s contained in

Examples of writers that attribute an aesthetics to Heidegger or try to situate his discussions of artin relation to more traditional issues in the philosophy of art include: Joseph J. Kockelmans,Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985); Sandra Lee Bartky, 'Heid-egger's Philosophy of Art', in Thomas Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (Chicago:Precedent Publishing, 1981); William S. Hemrick, 'Heidegger and the Objectivity of AestheticTruth', The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 5 (1971), pp. 120-130; and Wayne D. Owens, 'Heidegger'sPhilosophy of Art', Britishjoumal of Aesthetics, vol. 29 (1989), pp. 128-139.Some excellent examples of the latter that have aided my own understanding of the place of art inHeidegger's thinking include: Andreas Grossmann, 'Hegel, Heidegger, and the Question of AnToday', Research in Phenomenology, vol. 20 (1990), pp. 112-135; Hans-Georg Gadamer, 'The Truthof the Work of Art', in Heidegger's Ways, trans. John Stanley (Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 1994), pp. 128-139; and Otto Poggler, 'Heidegger on Art', in Karsten Harries and ChrisophJamne (eds), Martin Heidegger Politics, Art, and Technology (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994),pp. 106—124.

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the Holzwcge volume, 'The Age of the World Picture', supplements Heidegger'streatment of art in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in some important ways.Other works from various points in Heidegger's career will also be brought in asnecessary to accurately explicate Heidegger's claims concerning the nature of art.Therefore, while the interpretation of Heidegger's conception of art that I willnow turn to focuses primarily upon 'The Origin of the Work of Art', it willalways be done so with an eye toward its basis in the deeper unity that pervadesHeidegger's philosophical corpus.

II OVERCOMING THE TRADITION- HEIDEGGER'S REJECTION OF AESTHETICS

Abiding by the habitual norms of philosophical discourse, one would approachHeidegger's Holzwege essay as a work in aesthetics or the philosophy of art. Inwhich case, we would seek to find within Heidegger's meditations upon the workof art responses to such customary aesthetic issues as the nature of aestheticexperience, the cognitive status of art, or the formal criteria for distinguishingworks of art from other forms of human expression. And it is certainly true thata number of commentators have taken this route, fabricating a uniquelyHeideggerian philosophy of art, or juxtaposing Heidegger's reflections withtraditional aesthetic theories in order to demonstrate how they can supplementand enrich those speculations. However, before even directly consideringHeidegger's statements concerning art in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' weshould be extremely wary of such tactics. There are two primary reasons to avoidsuch an approach to Heidegger's consideration of art from the outset. The firstinvolves Heidegger's fundamental conception of the task of philosophy itself,while the second turns on Heidegger's more specific rejection of the aestheticapproach to art. I will treat each point of contention in turn.

Despite the diversity of issues and figures in philosophy that Heidegger'sthought traversed, and despite the shifts of emphasis that took place in his ownthinking over time, there is nevertheless a more profound leitmotif thatencompasses all of Heidegger's philosophical efforts. That is, Heidegger's entirephilosophical oeuvre is unified by the centrality of the Seinsfrage, the question ofthe meaning of Being that Heidegger always took to be the central question ofphilosophy.5 Already in Being and Time Heidegger's critique of the philosophical4 The first Nietzsche course was given during the winter semester 1936-1937, whereas 'The Origin

of The Work of Art' was first written in 1935, and was revised by Heidegger in 1936 as theNietzsche course was in session.

5 Of course, the later Heidegger came to reject the label philosophy altogether and referred to hisefforts as a thinking that was outside the scope of more traditional philosophical enquiries.However, this has more to do with his increasing awareness of the extent to which all previousphilosophy had been determined by a faulty conception of Being than with any fundamentalchange upon his part concerning the matter for thought, whether it is called philosophy or not.Heidegger himself remarks in die 1953 'Author's Preface to die Seventh German Edition' of Beingand Time that 'the road it has taken remains even today a necessary one'.

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tradition took place in terms of an attempt to raise anew the question of themeaning of Being (J3T 21), which he asserted to be the fundamental questionof philosophy (BT 29, 50). While since antiquity philosophers had simply pre-supposed the givenness of the various realms of entities accessible to humancognition, Heidegger sought to enquire into the grounds of our accessibility toentities, how it is possible for them to show up for us at all. He thus definedBeing as 'that which determines entities as entities (BT 25).' And this, Heideggerdiscovered, consists in the intelligibility embodied in the shared social andhistorical practices that allow various sorts of entities (tools, persons, institutions,numbers, etc.) to show up as significant for us in our concerned everydaycomportment.

While we will return to a fuller exposition of Heidegger's conception of Beingand its bearings upon his understanding of art later, it is important to see for themoment that Heidegger's investigations into any particular type of entity,whether it be an artwork or a cultural artefact, are always carried out in relation tothe Seinsfrage and the original source of their disclosure. As such, from early on inhis career Heidegger rejected the usual partitioning of philosophy into distinctsubdisciplines. Such a practice reflects a naive acceptance of beings as they arealready accessible to our understanding and works to further cover over the morefundamental issue concerning the source of their accessibility, what Heideggercalls their mode of Being. Heidegger reaffirms this priority of the Seinsfrage ineven stronger terms in his Nietzsche lecture where he states that 'in philosophythe Being of beings is to be thought' (N 35). Somewhat later, in 'The Letter onHumanism', Heidegger explicitly repudiates the compartmentalization ofphilosophy into discrete spheres of enquiry.6 From beginning to end, Heidegger'sthinking revolved around this one basic question of the meaning of Being.7 Thus,to interpret the Holzwege essay as a work in the philosophy of art would be tobetray Heidegger's own conception of the nature of his philosophical project.When Heidegger investigates art he does not do so to.determine its characteristicsas a specific and isolated region of human experience, but as a possible clue todecipher the meaning of Being. That this holds true for 'The Origin of the Workof Art' is confirmed by Heidegger in his 1967 Addendum to the essay in which hestates that it 'deliberately yet tacitly moves on the path of the question of Being.Reflection on what art may be is completely and decidedly determined only inregard to the question of Being' (OWA 86). We shall thus find that Heidegger'streatment of the work of art in the Holzwege essay is developed decisively in termsof the Seinsfrage.

See Martin Heidegger, 'Letter on Humanism', trans. Frank Capuzzi, in Basic Writings, ed. DavidFarrell Krell (New York; Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 208 and 239.For a more thorough treatment of the place of the question of Being in Heidegger's thought, seeDorothea Frede, 'The Question of Being: Heidegger's Project', in Charles Guignon (ed.), TheCambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 42-69.

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398 HEIDEGGER AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WORK OF ART

More important, however, than Heidegger's general repudiation of thetraditional partitioning of philosophy into distinct domains of research is hisspecific critique of the aesthetic approach to art.8 Heidegger's rejection ofaesthetics as a means of investigation into the work of art is closely tied to hiscritique of Western metaphysics and, in particular, its latest incarnation, modernsubjectivism. Indeed, in 'The Age of the World Picture' he lists 'the event of art'smoving into the purview of aesthetics' (AWP 116) as one of the essentialphenomena of the modern period. In order to understand Heidegger's claimsconcerning aesthetics and its treatment of art, it is necessary to provide a briefsketch of Heidegger's reading of the history of Western metaphysics. Heideggerclaims that since almost from its inception the Western interpretation of beingshas been dominated by a substance ontology. That is, entities or things are takento be self-subsisting and independently existing objects that stand over and abovedetached, observing subjects. As the basic building blocks of the universe,substances are interpreted as the only things that exist in their own right and allother phenomena are interpreted in terms of their causal interaction. Oddlyenough, as Heidegger points out in 'The Age of the World Picture',9 this extremeobjectivism that founds the ancient and medieval experience of beings setsthe necessary stage for the subjectivism that marks the modern era. For at thethreshold of modernity Descartes merely accepted that reality must be conceivedof primarily in terms of independently existing substances which are only causallyrelated, and took the natural step in asserting that if this is so, then we can neverreally be assured of the real nature of such substances or things-in-thcmselves aswe only have access to their causal effects (sensory experiences) upon us. Onlyour own perceptions, the effects that said objects have on our faculties, areimmune from doubt. The ancient supposition that entities are to be viewed withdetachment as independently subsisting objects corresponds essentially with themodern claim that only our subjective experiences are indubitable and thus theonly secured region for philosophical enquiry.10

Now of course from early on Heidegger devoted his energies to repudiatingthis picture of reality and its effects upon Western metaphysics. In Being and Time

That Heidegger's investigations of art during this time turned upon a rejection of the aestheticviewpoint is also confirmed by the title of his 1935—1936 colloquium with Kurt Bauch on'Overcoming Aesthetics in the Question of Art', which, unfortunately, we have no record of.Sec, for instance, p. 128 where Heidegger speaks of'the necessary interplay between subjectivismand objectivism'.This, for Heidegger, cumulates in the phenomenology of his own teacher, Edmund Husserl, whoexplicitly took mental contents as the only proper objects for philosophical investigation. Thus,although Heidegger called his method in Being and Time phenomenological, this should not beconfused with the orthodox phenomenology of Husserl. Indeed, Hubert Dreyfus argues inBeing-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA; MITPress, 1992) 'that Being and Time could be understood as a systematic critique of Husserl'sphenomenology1 (ix).

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he convincingly argued that in our everyday involvement in practical affairsentities are not encountered as objects existing independently of our concerns,that is as wrhandcn or (present-to-hand), but first and foremost are disclosed aszuhandcn or (ready-to-hand) for the various skilful tasks that we perform. Theintelligibility that accrues to entities in virtue of such simple day-to-day blindcoping simply cannot be explained in terms of a substance ontology." Likewise,our involvement with entities does not primarily consist in a detached viewing inwhich we consciously represent them, but in an absorbed involvement in whichwe make use of, without consciously noticing, things in light of the tasks at hand.Heidegger called the interpretive understanding of things embodied in suchhistorical and cultural practices an understanding of Being, and the embeddedentity that gained access to other entities in virtue of such a background of sharedsocial practices Daseitt, which roughly refers to the fundamental structure of thehuman way of being. While Heidegger was later to accent the unified cultural andhistorical interpretation of entities more and more, and the individual Dasein andits practical comportment with entities less and less, the idea that the source ofintelligibility of entities is founded in a set of cultural and historical practices thatwe are socialized into was an insight that Heidegger never abandoned.

Having briefly delimited Heidegger's reading of the history of Westernmetaphysics and its reliance upon a faulty substance ontology, we can now seeHeidegger's rejection of the aesthetic view of art in terms of two themes cogentto this larger story. First, while aesthetics emerged as a separate discipline only inthe eighteenth century with Alexander Baumgarten, given Heidegger's reading ofthe history of metaphysics we should expect that the stage for this transforma-tion was set long before. And indeed in 'The Will to Power as Art' Heideggerbegins his discussion of the history of aesthetics by noting that the wordaesthetics was formed in the same manner as were those of logic and ethics:'aiesthetike episteme: knowledge of human behavior with regard to senses,sensation, and feeling, and knowledge of how these are determined1' (N 78).Aesthetics, Heidegger goes on, is thus concerned with how objects determine asubject's feelings. As such, Heidegger claims 'the artwork is posited as the"object" for a "subject"; definitive for aesthetic consideration is the subject-objectrelation, indeed as a relation of feeling' (N 78). Not surprisingly, aestheticspresupposes the substance ontology that is characteristic of Western metaphysics.

This is not to say that Heidegger rejects that things arc the way they arc when we treat them assubsisting objects. That is to say, Heidegger is not arguing that scientific investigation of the world,which embodies this view of beings, cannot discover real properties of objects that arc independentof human projection. Heidegger's point is simply that the significance that things have in virtue ofour everyday involvement in the world cannot be fully explained in terms of such an ontology.Thus, one can be a Heideggenan and yet remain a realist about the independent existence ofentities and their individual characteristics. A similar argument is made by Theodore Schatzki in'Early Heidegger on Being, the Clearing, and Realism', in Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall(eds), Heidegger: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 81-98.

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400 HEIDEGGER AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WORK OF ART

Accepting that our involvement with entities must be conceived in terms ofself-subsisting objects and their causal interaction upon our subjective faculties,aesthetics merely results from the further stipulation that such objects determineus in various manners. Aesthetics then takes its domain as the realm of sensationor feeling and confines itself to examining the manner by which such feelings areconveyed through the mediation of the object. Notice how closely the formationof aesthetics conforms to the larger picture of the history of metaphysics thatHeidegger has given. First, the artwork itself is taken as being an independentlysubsisting object standing over and against the experiencing subject. Theirinteraction is then conceived of causally, in terms of the ability of the object tocause some sort of sensuous experiences in the subject. Again, as the objectin-itself remains veiled from human cognition, aesthetics naturally turns itselfover completely to an examination of the experiencing subject.12 In the process,the work of art itself is rendered superfluous.

In order to reawaken the question of art, Heidegger wishes to turn our atten-tion back to the work of art itself in order to see if this founding determination ofthe artwork as an object can truly capture its mode of Being. As Heideggerremarks in the 'The Origin of the Work of Art', the usual interpretation of thework of art as an object corresponds 'with the destiny in accordance with whichWestern thought has hitherto thought the Being of beings' (OWA 32). As wehave said, this means that the artwork is seen above all as an object, 'a thing towhich something else adheres' (OWA 20), its aesthetic qualities merely added on,or the result of its causal interaction with experiencing subjects. In an effort toclarify the nature of the work of art, Heidegger insists that we must enquire intothe usual conceptions of the thing in order to see if they can really capture thereality that is the work of art. We must ask if the alleged substantive element ofthe work can really be understood in terms of the usual interpretations of thethingness of the thing.

In the Holzwegc essay Heidegger examines the three most prominent, influ-ential, and interrelated interpretations of the thingness of the thing in Westernphilosophy. These are: the thing conceived as a substance with its attributes, asthe unity of the manifold of sense-perceptions, and as formed matter. The firstapproach is closest to the substance ontology that we demarcated earlier, takingthe thingness of the thing to consist in the self-persisting substance that underliesthe various accidents that accrue to it. While Heidegger's remarks upon thisreading of the thing are sparse in the Holzwege essay, it should be obvious to us bynow why Heidegger thinks that this interpretation does not capture the reality ofthe thing. The idea, once again, is that we never encounter the thing apart fromthe effects that it has upon us, and thus the substance in-itself remains an

12 Of course, the decisive point in this development is customarily traced to Kant's Critique ofJudgment.

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unknown substratum posited by the intellect. Such a conception of the thing, asit is outside the realm of our experience, does nothing to explain the intelligibilityof entities that we encounter in our everyday affairs. The second interpretationfollows from the first in a manner that should also be familiar to us now. Failingto arrive at the underlying substance, this view of the thing merely reverts to ourprivate experiences and defines the thing as a construct of discrete senseimpression. Again, Heidegger's treatment of this interpretation is brief in 'TheOrigin of the Work of Art', but can be easily reconstructed in light of his otherwritings. Basically, Heidegger's critique of this version stems from a pheno-menological examination of our actual experience. If we simply describe our livedexperience of things, apart from any philosophical theory, we find that we neverencounter the alleged sense impressions that things are supposed to beconstructed out of. What we discover is that what is given in actual acts ofperception is not some posited sense impressions, but the things themselves. AsHeidegger says 'we hear the door shut in the house and never hear acousticalsensations' (OWA 26). Summarizing his critiques of the first two conceptions ofthe thing, Heidegger states 'whereas the first interpretation keeps the thing atarm's length from us, as it were, and sets it too far off, the second makes it presstoo hard upon us. In both interpretations the thing vanishes' (OWA 26). Neitherof the first two interpretations can account for the thingness of the thing as wediscover it in our everyday experience.

Heidegger develops the third interpretation of the thing, as formed matter,more fully, as he feels that it is the one that has most influenced aesthetics and thephilosophy of art. And indeed, what could be more obvious than the idea that'matter is the substrata and field for the artist's formative action' (OWA 27)?Here, Heidegger's tactic involves an excavation of the origin of the form-matterschema in order to find out if it founds the determination of the thingness of thething or if it is derivative of another understanding of Being. What Heideggerwants to show is that far from being original, the form-matter interpretation ofthe thing is itself derived from the mode of Being of equipment.13 Forgenealogically we find that discussion of the form of an object has its basis inteleological concepts such as purpose and usefulness that refer us to the ends thatan object serves, and thus to human concern. The distinction between form andmatter can only arise in regard to our more basic involvement with entities asequipment. It is as equipment that we ordinarily experience entities within ourdaily, practical tasks, and it is only when the equipment breaks down that webecome conscious of it as an object existing independently of our concernfulcoping. Thus, the interpretation of the thing in terms of form and matter arisesonly within the purview of our experience of equipment. As Heidegger puts it, on13 Thus, Heidegger's reasoning here is similar to his argument in Being and Time that it is as

equipment that we first encounter things and that other modes of understanding arise out of, andare parasitic upon, this fundamental experience of beings.

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4O2 HEIDEGGER AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WORK OF ART

this interpretation 'the mere thing is a sort of equipment, albeit equipmentdenuded of its equipmental being. Thing-being consists in what is then left over'(OWA 30). While we will return to the question of the being of equipmentshortly, what is important for our purposes here is to see that this lastinterpretation of the thing is parasitic upon a previous experience of things asequipment. Far from capturing the fundamental characteristic of beings that thethingness of the thing was supposed to refer us to, this reading itself dependsupon a previous disclosure of entities as equipment. All of the three inter-pretations of the thing that are pervasive in Western thinking have been foundinadequate to explain the being of the work of art.

Approaching 'The Origin of the Work of Art' circuitously from the viewpointof its relation to traditional aesthetics and the philosophy of art, we have seen thatwhatever place Heidegger assigns art in his thinking it cannot belong within theparameters of these disciplinary matrices. First, the centrality of the Seinsfrage inHeidegger's thought prohibits us from approaching his reflections on art fromany standpoint other than that of the question of Being. Second, Heideggerexplicitly rejects the aesthetic approach to art. The aesthetic view of art is firmlyentrenched within the subject-object dichotomy that is characteristic of Westernmetaphysics and prejudices the enquiry into art in terms of its substance ontologyand valorizing of subject experience, completely overlooking the artwork itselfand its unique mode of Being in the process. Having delimited Heidegger'sDestruktion of the customary modes of enquiry into the Being of the work of art,we are now in a position to examine properly Heidegger's own positiveinterpretation of the artwork and the salutary position it holds in his thinking.

III. RETRIEVING ART: HEIDEGGER ON THE ONTOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE WORK

If Heidegger is not examining the work of art in order to provide answers to thetraditional questions posed in the philosophy of art, then to what purpose does heraise the question of art? The response to this query is perhaps best broached byreturning to Heidegger's treatment of equipment in 'The Origin of the Work ofArt'. Having shown that the usual interpretation of the thing-being of the workin view of the conceptual categories of form and matter is itself derived from themode of being of equipment, Heidegger insists that 'we shall follow this clue andsearch first for the equipmental character of equipment' (OWA 32). And as he didin Being and Time, Heidegger here too stresses that to capture the Being ofequipment we must steer clear of the traditional conceptual baggage ofphilosophy and 'simply describe some equipment without any philosophicaltheory' (OWA 32). The essence of equipment can only be disclosed by turning tothe manner in which equipment manifests itself in our preconceptual experience.Oddly enough, it is at this point in the essay that Heidegger first turns to an actualwork of art, Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes. What does Van Gogh's

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painting show us concerning this pair of shoes, as one of the most simple types ofequipment? Heidegger writes:

This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread,the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before theimpending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equip-ment belongs to the earth, and is protected in the world of the peasant woman. Fromout of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.(OWA 34)

Certainly a perplexing commentary, and furthermore, as Meyer Schapiro hasdemonstrated, not even accurate as a description of the shoes that Van Gogh infact painted.I4 What can we possibly make of such a curious entry into the realmof art?

Here we must be mindful lest we allow Heidegger's admittedly difficult andevasive language lead us to mistake his use of Van Gogh's painting as a bit ofnostalgic romanticism or pious mysticism. What is the mode of Being ofequipment that Heidegger feels the painting allows us to discern? Heideggerterms it reliability. And what does reliability consist in? Here we do well to turnback once again to Being and Time where Heidegger argued that equipment nevermanifests itself as objects standing over and against us as conscious subjects.Rather, equipment is disclosed as available to us in our concerned coping with thetasks at hand in a cultural and historical world. It is not as an object for ourconscious inspection that we discover equipment, but as available for the sake ofthe job to be completed: the hammer does not appear as a bare thing with variousobjective properties, but as available for the task of pounding nails for the sake ofbuilding a house to shelter our family. As reliable, the equipment remains outsidethe purview of our conscious consideration, Heidegger's peasant woman 'knowsall this without noticing or reflecting' (OWA 34). Again, it is only when thehammer breaks that we become cognizant of it as an independent object withqualities that are not relevant to our practical concerns. When functioning asequipment, there are simply things to be done, tasks to be completed, and asreliable die equipment disappears into its use.

We thus cannot understand the mode of Being of equipment by taking adetached, theoretical stand toward individual pieces of equipment. Equipment isdisclosed as equipment only within a network of other equipment within thecontext of the tasks and concerns of our everyday coping. Yet because of this,

In 'The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh', in Marianne Simmel(ed.), The Reach of Mind (New York; Springer Verlag, 1968), pp. 103-210, Schapiro points out thatdie shoes that Van Gogh actually painted were his own. However, as we will see, this fact in itselfdoes not, contrary to what Schapiro diinks, invalidate Heidegger's treatment of die painting, for onHeidegger's view it is not the intention of die artist or die representational referent that determinesdie value of the work of art

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4O4 HEIDEGGER A N D THE SIGNIFICANCE OF T H E WORK OF ART

when we are actually involved with equipment we do not become explicitly awareof its mode of Being, for we are simply absorbed in the task at hand. It is only inthe light of the artwork that we come to see the equipment as equipment. Bysetting forth a simple pair of shoes, not as an object for scientific investigation oras a failed piece of equipment, but simply by bringing forth a piece of equipmentin its simple stability, Van Gogh's painting gives us access to its mode of Being, itssure reliability for those whom it serves. The artwork shows forth the world andthe earth to which the equipment belongs, two terms that we must nowinvestigate if we are fully to understand Heidegger's treatment of the work of art.

As we have seen, Heidegger thinks that Van Gogh's painting sets forth themode of Being of the equipment it portrays. The Being of the entities sodisclosed consists in the world to which they belong and the earth from whichthey emerge. Now the concept of world was present in Heidegger's philosophysince Being and Time. In 'The Origin of the Work of Art', Heidegger reaffirms itsstatus, stating that:

world is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the evernon-objective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessingand curse keep us transported into Being. (OWA 44)

The world does not refer to the physical body on which we dwell, or to the sumof the objects to be found in the universe. Rather, Heidegger's use of the term ismuch closer to another colloquial usage familiar to us all, as when we speak of the'business world' or the 'world of entertainment'. Expanding on this sense of theword, Heidegger uses world to refer to the referential framework of practices thatgive entities their significance. The world is not an object, but the context ofinvolvement that allows entities to appear as significant for us in various ways,just as being involved in business practices provides a holistic background contextin which various kinds of things come to light as significant for the businessperson.

While the concept of world is familiar to readers of Being and Time, the conceptof earth that first appears in the Holzwege essay represents a new development inHeidegger's philosophical vocabulary. If the world is what gives us access toentities, what discloses beings as significant within a historical setting, then earthis that which 'remains undisclosed and unexplained . . . by nature undisclosable'(OWA 47). While earth is new piece of terminology for Heidegger, it nonethelessstill has its roots in the fundamental ontology of Being and Time.15 For while there

15 See Joseph P. Fell, 'The Familiar and the Strange: On the limits of Praxis in the Early Heidegger',in Hubert Dreyfus and Harrison Hall (eds), Heidegger A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992),pp. 65-80, which points out that while Heidegger maintained that we cither encounter entities asready-to-hand or present-to-hand in Being and Time, he was also careful to point out that thingshad an 'otherly' aspect to them that thwarted all of our attempts to penetrate them, whetherpractically or theoretically.

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Heidegger stressed the world that grants an understanding of Being, that givesthings their intelligibility, he also noted that every such understanding of Beinggranted in a world also represents a concealment of beings. In revealing entitiesthrough our involvement in one set of historical and cultural practices, we alsoclose off other possibilities for encountering entities, just as by analogy beinginvolved in the world of business allows the businessperson to access things inone way, say as potentially profitable, while closing off other ways of seeing them,say as having a spiritual value. Every understanding of Being embodies bothaspects of unconcealment and concealment. As Heidegger puts in 'The Origin ofthe Work of Art':

thanks to this clearing [opened by a world], beings are unconcealed in certainchanging degrees. And yet a being can be concealed, too, only within the sphere ofwhat is lighted. Each being we encounter and which encounters us keeps to thiscurious opposition of presence in that it always withholds itself at the same time in aconcealedness. (OWA 53)

The Being of entities disclosed in the artwork consists in a world, the context ofinvolvement provided by a set of historical practices that grants entities theirintelligibility, and the earth, representing the concealment of beings that everyunconcealment brings with it, those aspects of entities that remain hidden fromour purview in any world disclosure.

We have still not clearly shown how it is that the work of art discloses theworld and earth. The use of a painting might lead one to suspect that it is throughrepresentation that the work of art achieves this, by simply showing some entityin the context of the world in which it is normally encountered. Yet Heideggerexplicitly denies that it is only representational works that can function in thisdisclosive manner, and his discussion of a Greek temple, which portrays nothing,may provide some further help in understanding how the work of art works tobring forth the world and earth in their reciprocal conditioning. Heideggerremarks that:

the building encloses the figure of the god . . . and gathers around itself the unity ofthose paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory anddisgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.(OWA 41-42)

The temple pictures nothing, and yet by standing forth above the dwellings ofthe Greek citizen it provides the focus for all of their daily pursuits. The worldof the ancient Greeks was a world of deities and heroes, gods and mortals, andthe temple unifies this understanding of Being in serving as a central point ofreference for all of their activities. It is a concrete symbol for the relation that theyhave to the soil and the heavens. Hubert Dreyfus notes that the work of art thusacts as

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a cultural paradigm [that] collects the scattered practices of a group, unifies them intocoherent possibilities for action, and holds them up to the people who can then actand relate to each other in terms of that exemplar.16

The lives of Greek citizens, their birth and death, strife and struggle, areorganized around the solid existence of the temple that stands before them giving'things their look and to men their outlook on themselves' (OWA 43). Likewisethe medieval icon acted as a tangible focal point for the world in which the life ofthe peasant was carried out. Even contemporary works such as Warhol'sreproductions of commercial products can be seen in terms of their ability todisplay in a concrete manner the world in which the modern industrial consumerdwells, and the sense bestowed upon entities in that world.

Thus, while in everyday practical circumspection we encounter entitieswithout being explicitly aware of them or the background practices that providethe source of their intelligibility, the work of art brings that world into focus byhighlighting central features of those practices and the 'look' things have in.virtueof them. But while the work of art brings forth the world in which we dwell, itjust as importantly sets forth the earth and 'lets the earth be the earth' (OWA 46).As we have mentioned, the earth refers to that which remains concealed in anygiven world, those aspects of things that every particular way of revealingconceals. How does the artwork allow the earth, that which resists every dis-closure, to be brought into the open? There are really two means that Heideggerdiscusses by which the work of art is able to show the earth as earth, and we willtouch upon them both.

The first way concerns the work of art's relation to its material. Heideggernotes that in our use of equipment:

the material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in theequipmental being of the equipment. By contrast the temple-work, in setting up aworld, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth forthe very first time and to come into the Open of the work's world. (OWA 46)

Now we should not take Heidegger to be reverting here to the conception ofmatter that he earlier rejected. The material aspect of the work that Heidegger isreferring to is not the independent matter that is the slate for our formativedesign, but rather that which resists every effort to master it, which escapes everyeffort to penetrate into it. Unlike scientific cognition that attempts to determinecompletely the object, great works of art do not try to master completely theirmaterial. Rather, they let the material shine forth in all of its mystery as thatwhich resists being subsumed under our rationalizations. Indeed, the reason that16 Hubert Dreyfus, 'Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Polities',

in Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993), p. 298.

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great works are open to endless interpretation is that they carry within them thisaspect; they refuse to yield fully to our intent. While equipment is better preciselyto the extent that it completely yields to the task, the work of art also displays theelements of impenetrability, the world disclosed does not fully master the earthfrom which it .springs forth.

If the work of art's relation to its material, to its source, is crucial for allowingus to see the earth as earth, so too is its status as a creation. Again, it is importantto avoid slipping back into our usual preconceptions concerning art when dealingwith Heidegger's discussion of this aspect of creation that belongs to the work.Heidegger is not interested in the work of art as the product of an isolated subjectwho attempts to convey his or her subjective experience to others. He does nottake creation 'as the self-sovereign subject's performance of genius' (OWA 76).Rather, what is important for Heidegger is that the artwork exhibits itself assomething that has been created. Thus, Heidegger thinks that creation consists in'causing something to emerge as a thing that has been brought forth' (OWA 69).In its serviceability, equipment vanishes into its use and the means to which it isput; it becomes inconspicuous. But the work of art shows itself, and shows itselfprecisely as something that has been created, as something that has come topresence historically. Thus, in calling attention to its produced nature, the workof art displays the world that emerges from it as also being historical andcontingent, and in a essential struggle with the earth that opposes any totalization.

Given the ability of the work to display the world and earth and their inter-dependence, Heidegger goes on to claim that 'what is at disclosure is at work inthe work: the disclosure of the particular being in its being, the happening oftruth . . . art is truth setting itself to work' (OWA 39-39). While ordinarily truthis conceived of in terms of a correspondence between knowledge and facts orpropositions and events, Heidegger calls such truth a derivative kind of truth. Forbefore we can ascertain the conformity between our knowledge and the facts, thepropositions and the events they refer to, the entities that they concern must firsthave been disclosed for our experience. It is only on the basis of ontological truth,the unconcealedness of beings in their mode of Being, that prepositional truthconcerning the correctness of our judgements is possible. Thus, for Heideggerprimal truth is 'aletheia, the unconcealedness of beings' (OWA 51). Which meansthat truth is also both historical and contains within itself an essential untruth.Historical, because every disclosure of beings takes place within a specific socialand temporal setting. Every happening of truth as aletheia carries with it anuntruth, because as we have seen, every disclosure of beings in one mannerentails a concealment of other possible ways in which they might be revealed:'this denial, in the form of a double concealment, belongs to the nature of truthas unconcealedness' (OWA 54). Thus, by setting forth the world in which entitiesare disclosed and the earth that resists such disclosure in an essential struggle, thework of art gives us access to the original nature of truth. Art is one of the ways

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in which beings are unconcealed in their Being. Therefore, the work of theartwork cannot, as the tradition would have it, be thought apart from thehappening of truth, for as Heidegger concludes, 'beauty is one way in which truthoccurs as unconcealedness' (OWA 56).17

Having developed the ontological significance of the work of art in Heidegger'sphilosophy, as one of the 'essential ways . . . in which truth happens' (OWA 55),we must now turn to a second feature of Heidegger's treatment of the work ofart. This concerns what Heidegger refers to as the 'saving power' of art in the ageof technology. While Heidegger, as we have said, argued that our understandingof Being was embodied in a set of cultural and historical practices that grantsentities their intelligibility in our everyday involvement, he also came to assertthat each era of Western history could be characterized by a particular, over-arching characterization of entities that imbues all of the specific practices thatare publicly available. Thus for Heidegger the Greeks marvelled at things asobjects of beauty that came to presence in their own fruition; people inthe medieval era understood all beings fundamentally as creations of God's willand as marked indelibly with his presence; and, most importantly, the persuasivemodern understanding of Being takes entities as resources for our manipulationand control.18

In 'The Question Concerning Technology' Heidegger argues that we shouldnot, as so many do, conceive of the era of technology and its dangers in terms ofthe greater mechanization of our world and the instrumental application oftechnology to all sectors of human affairs. Indeed, somewhat cryptically,Heidegger asserts that 'the essence of technology is by no means anythingtechnological' (QCT 4). Technology is for Heidegger above all 'a way ofrevealing' (QCT 12). What is truly decisive for the technological age is themanner in which things are revealed to us within it, the understanding of Beingthat it bestows upon us. For in the technological world all entities are revealed asBestand, a standing-reserve, 'everything is ordered to stand by . . . so that it may beon call for a further ordering' (QCT 17). In 'The Age of the World Picture'Heidegger had spoken of this understanding of Being in terms of a Ge-stall, anenframing, of all entities standing over and against us as a reservoir for our ever

17 Therefore, Heidegger does not merely reverse the ancient opposition between truth and art, asNietzsche did, but he shows how art is essentially within the domain of truth. Indeed, forHeidegger the kind of truth that art participates in is more fundamental than truth as ordinarilyconceived.

" Certainly there is present in Heidegger's reading of the history of Being what John Caputo termsa 'dangerous mythologizing' tendency, in which Heidegger privileged an original Greek grantingof Being and then read all subsequent history in terms of a progressive degeneration. However,one need not buy into the mythologizing elements of Heidegger's thought in order to accepthis much more plausible claim that certain cultures and ages do embody specific interpretationsof beings in their paradigmatic practices that can be diagnosed and contrasted with our modes ofunderstanding.

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greater mobilization. In this technological age everything is seen as 'resources' atour disposal, to be efficiently utilized.

The danger of the technological age is not, as we might first suspect, thatthe understanding of Being that it embodies is simply inaccurate. Nor can thesolution, for Heidegger, consist in a simple rejection of this all-persuasiveexperience of beings that governs our thoughts and actions. First, as the tech-nological understanding of Being is a manner of revealing beings it happens in thedomain of truth: 'technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing andunconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens' (QCT 13). As withevery revealing, the technological one contains both its truth and its untruth, andwe cannot simply dismiss it as a faulty picture of reality. Nor can we, forHeidegger, simply do away with it, for it belongs to our Geshick, our destiny.For Heidegger an understanding of Being is not something within our control, itis something bestowed upon us, something which we are socialized into in virtueof belonging to a particular cultural and historical world.19

The danger, then, is not the technological understanding of being itself but thepossibility that this understanding will come to have such a grip upon us thatevery other possibility will be blocked off forever. Heidegger writes in 'TheQuestion Concerning Technology':

Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus underway, is continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursuing and pushingforward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all of his standardson that basis. . . . Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibilityof revealing. . . . Where Enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of thestanding-reserve mark all revealing. They no longer even let their own fundamentalcharacteristic appear, namely, this revealing as such. (QCT 26, 27)

The danger really then consists in two elements. The first is that because thetechnological understanding of Being has gained such an all-persuasive hold,across cultures and sectors of human affairs, there is the possibility that we will beso swept away in this single manner of revealing as to cut off for good thepossibility of future ways of revealing. Second, there is the danger that in ourabsorption in the practices that embody this mode of concealing we willcompletely cover over its character as a revealing. That is, just as he was in Beingand Time, Heidegger is concerned that in our everyday dealings with entities wewill become so focused on the beings revealed as to forget the question of themeaning of Being.

It should be apparent by now why Heidegger thus attributes a saving power to

19 Thus, despite Heidegger's own valorization of the Greeks, he was well aware that we could notrecoup their understanding of beings. Even in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' he writes that wecannot retrieve the world of the Greek temple or the medieval cathedral, 'the world of the workthat stands there has perished' (41).

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the work of art in the era of technology. The artwork allows us to discern theunderstanding of Being given in the world and to see it as a manner of revealing,a contingent one in constant struggle with the earth from which it springs. In theartwork the world is revealed as world, and thus the mode of revealing that swaysin the technological age is seen as a manner of revealing, and not simply taken asthe nature of reality. The work of art can as such open a new stand within us,giving rise to a fuller awareness of the understanding of Being in which we dwell.Indeed, art functions for Heidegger as one of the few, fundamental ways in whichwe can become cognizant of the way beings are revealed, of the very meaning ofBeing. Which is why Heidegger wondered if just perhaps, 'could it be thatrevealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part mayexpressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew ourlook into that which grants and our trust in it' (QCT 35)?

IV. CONCLUSION

Having delimited the nature of Heidegger's meditations upon the work of art wehave found that art occupies a prominent place in his thought both because of itsontological significance and due to its saving role in the technological age. As afundamental way in which beings are revealed, and indeed in which the structureof revealing as such is disclosed, the work of art has an ontological status thatcannot be grasped with the usual categories given in substance ontologies.Heidegger insists that we must examine the work of art on its own terms if we areto discern its paradigmatic function for our cultural practices. The work of art canalso open a new stance within us by revealing the essence of the understanding ofBeing that underlies the technological era. This allows us to engage in theeveryday practices that embody this understanding while remaining aware oftheir contingency. More importantly, by encountering the work of art as a workwe remain receptive to future bestowals of Being that would allow us tounderstand the beings we encounter in new ways.

Certainly, Heidegger's exploration of art is not free from difficulty. Nor have Iattempted to investigate every aspect of Heidegger's view of the work of art. Ihave merely tried to delineate some of its central features, and, in particular, totrace out the nature of the relationship between Heidegger's view of art and someof the other major themes of this thought. By deliberately limiting the scope ofthis work I have thus left open a number of questions that might be raisedconcerning Heidegger's treatment of art. For instance, the view that the work ofart discloses the world of a historical people and its relationship to the earth seemsto apply at best to a very limited range of what are normally considered artworks.While it is true that Heidegger remarks in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' that heis only dealing with 'great art' (OWA 40), it is still by no means easy to see whatstatus lesser works of art could have for Heidegger, or how we are to distinguishbetween great and ordinary art. Heidegger's sketchy remarks on the production

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and reception of the artwork d o not seem wholly satisfactory to me either. While I agree with Heidegger's critique of the subjectivist treatment of art that attempts to grasp the work completely in terms of the artist's intentions and experiences, I nonetheless think more needs to be said concerning the function of producing art within a cultural context. Likewise, at times Heidegger's view of the artwork seems to treat the recipient as wholly passive, an approach that masks what I would claim is a more reciprocal relationship between the viewer and the work. However, I will leave such queries open for further consideration to be made on the basis established here. For whatever dificulties there might be with Heidegger's treatment of art, it is, I hope to have shown, undeniable that Heidegger poses a number of important questions concerning our habitual philosophical conceptualizations of art, and presents a unique framework in which to ask anew the question of art.m

Daniel E. Palmer, Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 47970, USA. Email: dpalmer@expert.cc.purdue.edu.

. m I would apccially hkr to thank Dr. Jacqueline Marih who provided numerous helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper.

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