Abstract
In his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger discusses three examples of artworks: a painting by Van Gogh of peasant shoes, a poem about a Roman fountain, and a Greek temple. The new entry on Heidegger’s aesthetics in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, written by Iain Thomson, focuses on this essay, and Van Gogh’s painting in particular. It argues that Heidegger uses Van Gogh’s painting to set art, as the happening of truth, in relation to ‘nothing’, which is a key term in Heidegger’s essays leading up to The Origin of the Work of Art. This paper extends a similar analysis to the Greek temple as a way of offering an exposition of Heidegger’s concerns in the essay. It begins by briefly outlining Thomson’s argument that Heidegger relates Van Gogh’s painting to ‘nothing’, and indicating the way this argument can be extended to the Greek temple. It then discusses three ways in which ‘nothing’ can open up the significance of the temple as a work of art in which truth happens: (1) it is not concerned with objective representation; (2) it depicts the primal strife of earth and world, concealing and unconcealing; (3) it is fundamentally historical.
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Notes
An asterisk following a page reference indicates that I have modified the translation, generally for the sake of accuracy or consistency.
References
Heidegger, M. (1971). The origin of the work of art. In A. Hofstadter (Ed.), Poetry, language, thought (pp. 17–87). New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1998). What is metaphysics? In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Pathmarks (pp. 82–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2000). Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Malpas, J. (2006). Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge: Massachusetts Intsitute of Technology Press.
Thomson, I. (2010). Heidegger’s aesthetics. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2010 edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2010/entries/Heidegger-aesthetics.
Acknowledgements
This paper was prepared with assistance from the Melbourne College of Divinity.
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Mackinlay, S. Heidegger’s Temple: How Truth Happens When Nothing is Portrayed. SOPHIA 49, 499–507 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0217-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-010-0217-1