LA REFORMA EDUCATIVA: 2013

As I have already said, Heidegger‟s The Origin initially took the form of a series of lectures given between 1935 and 1936. Subsequently, it underwent major revisions until it was published in its final form in 1960, Heidegger adding both an „Epilogue‟ and an

„Addendum‟ in that time.² The significance of this work for Heidegger can therefore be seen in the twenty-five years he spent re-working it, and so we can take it to be – if not definitive – certainly a substantial expression of Heidegger‟s thinking on art. However, if we approach the text seeking something conclusive in Heidegger‟s thinking on art, we are met with the following caveat: „The foregoing reflections are concerned with the riddle of art, the riddle that art itself is. They are far from claiming to solve the riddle. The task is to see the riddle‟

[BW 204].

Heidegger also hints at the illusive nature of art in his 1935 lecture course published as Introduction to Metaphysics, in which he says that „we must provide a new content for the word “art” and for what it intends to name‟ [IM 140]. Thus, in looking to art as possibly providing a way of escaping the grasp of metaphysics, Heidegger is here distancing himself from a traditional understanding of the essence of art as something thought aesthetically, that is, as something that is reduced to an experience of the artwork that in some sense stirs human emotions. In doing so, Heidegger will not seek to redefine the word so much as retrieve for art an understanding of its original essence – that is discloses truth. As Jonathan Dronsfield observes, this is significant insofar as Heidegger does not seek to tell us what art is in The

2 Indeed, as WS Allen notes, Heidegger continued to add notes to The Origin right up until his death, hinting at the importance, not only of art, but of the text itself for him. Cf. WS Allen, Ellipsis: Of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Blanchot (New York, State University of New York Press, 2007) p 62f.

119 Origin - rather, he seeks to reveal art as a way of opening up being to questioning.³ In clearing the path to the essence of art Heidegger intends, as a consequence, that art itself will be opened up to a decision about whether or not it is any longer to be viewed as providing a space for critical insight into the world, and thereby a site of resistance to technology.

It should be noted, at this point, that Heidegger is not the first philosopher to accord to art the status of disclosing truth. The German philosopher GWF Hegel, in his Aesthetics, does the same. For Hegel, art marks the incipient appearance of truth in the world, an appearance which grounds truth historically as spirit (Geist). Yet this first step is, for Hegel, only decisive insofar as it establishes truth as history. As part of a historical process, however, art is superseded in the movement of truth through history and is left behind as only „one sphere and stage of truth is capable of being represented in the element of art‟.⁴ The key word Hegel uses here is „represented‟. Art re-presents the absolute truth of spirit, it is the first move in the development of truth in a historical process that leads (firstly through art, then religious experience and finally philosophical thought) to the self-consciousness of spirit as the absolute truth of the world. At the end of this historical process, Heidegger tells us in his Hegel and the Greeks: „Truth, for Hegel, is the absolute certainty of the self-knowing absolute subject‟ [PM 332]. That is, Hegel‟s thought, for Heidegger, marks the beginning of the end of metaphysics as any counter-movement to metaphysics does not escape this essentially linear history.⁵ That is, for Hegel history culminates in the determination of beings in terms of the self-willing reason of human subjectivity, whereby anything lying outside this „actuality‟ (i.e., being) becomes nothing at all. Thus art, for Hegel, is no longer capable of revealing truth and as such is a thing of the past. However, Heidegger is able to challenge Hegel‟s assertion due to his own distinct interpretation of how history happens.

Michael Gillespie draws out this distinction effectively when, in using Heidegger‟s own terminology, he says that Hegel views history as a process of parousia, whereby truth unfolds increasingly and necessarily into full presence.⁶ This is significant in that history can only ever be singular for Hegel. It is a history that is decisively brought to presence through art,

3 Cf. Jonathon Dronsfield, „The Work of Art‟ in Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts, p 130. Dronsfield suggests that Heidegger, in refusing to give answers to what art is, reveals not only his conception of philosophy as a continuous questioning but also the importance that Heidegger attaches to art as a way of questioning into being.

4 GWF Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) p 9.

5 Heidegger says in his „Overcoming Metaphysics‟, first published in 1954 that „The completion of metaphysics begins with Hegel‟s metaphysics of absolute knowledge as the Spirit of will. [...] The counter movements to this metaphysics belong to it [EP 89].

6 Cf. Michael Gillespie, Hegel, Heidegger and the Ground of History (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984) p 153.

120 one that develops rationally, and so one that inevitably ends, from Heidegger‟s viewpoint, in the supersession of metaphysics as the ultimate reality of spirit. In relation to this Gillespie says that for Heidegger history is kairetic, that is, history entails a series of decisive moments, or epochs, that are unpredictable in themselves, incommensurate with the epochs that have gone before or come after, and retrospectively speaking, incomprehensible.⁷ Each epoch introduces an aporia in relation to being, a period of anxiety in which everything is open to question, and through which a historical people questioningly comes to determine its truth.

Thus there is nothing inevitable in the movement of history for Heidegger, as there is always the possibility of something decisive happening that opens up a new relation to being and so a new historical epoch.

Out of such distinctive views of history arise contrasting views on the essence of art. For both thinkers, art is able to ground truth historically. Yet whilst for Hegel art does this in such a way that it becomes absorbed into this history for Heidegger, as we shall see, art is able to ground truth historically in such a way that it opens up history anew. Hence, whilst Hegel sees art‟s highest vocation - the bestowal of truth – as something that lies in the past, for Heidegger, this judgement on art is limited to the history of metaphysical thought. This is because Hegel‟s pronouncement is made after the historical event of the disassociation of art and truth, whereby truth reaches its fullest realisation in the concept and art is thus reduced to its aesthetic determination (insofar as it affects the human subject). However, the point that Heidegger tries to make is not that Hegel goes wrong in what he says here, but that there is more to be said for art than is to be found in a purely aesthetic interpretation. Art also needs to be viewed in terms of what it can be, of the possibilities that belong to the essence of art insofar as it is able to ground truth historically. Hence, Heidegger says in The Origin:

We enquire into the essence of art. Why do we enquire in this way? We enquire in this way in order to be able to ask more properly whether art is or is not an origin in our historical existence, whether and under what conditions it can and must be an origin.

Such reflection cannot force art and its coming-to-be. But this reflective knowledge is the preliminary and therefore indispensible preparation for the becoming of art. Only such knowledge prepares its space for art, their way for the creators, their location for the preservers.

7 Cf. ibid.

121 In such knowledge, which can only grow slowly, the question is decided whether art can be an origin and then must be a forward spring, or whether it is to remain a mere appendix and then can only be carried along as a routine cultural phenomenon. [BW 202]

Thus it is to the possibilities that lie within the essence of art that we now turn, to see if art in its highest vocation is indeed, as Hegel says, a thing of the past, or whether it retains the capacity to open up truth historically and so point to a way beyond metaphysics.