Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" and the Question of Impersonal Great Art

Hi all –

Like a turtle scared of their own shadow, inching forward slowly and apprehensively, I'm reading Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art." I am struggling to make notes which I want to review and further develop. Making notes sounds simple and is anything but, in part because "The Origin of the Work of Art" sprawls. It does have organization; Heidegger certainly builds a critique of how we engage art. But each section threatens to go into entirely new territory, and a number of times you feel like a critical insight has been unlocked but the topic at hand has switched to something else. I would love to teach this text because it is a class unto itself on how to keep track of your own thoughts while communicating a description of a complicated object.

What caught my attention recently was a sentence in which Heidegger merely sets down a condition for his reflections. He's only stating where he is coming from for an illustration/argument which follows. I'll write it down and I think you'll immediately see that a lot is at stake:

It is precisely in great art – and only such art is under consideration here – that the artist remains inconsequential, as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creation process for the work to emerge. (1)

You might not think anything is at stake here. In that case, I urge you to think about those whose education primarily revolves around Great Books. I myself am a product of a graduate program centered on core texts (!), and many with significant political power in the United States want that sort of curriculum for all students. I am sympathetic to a nuanced and careful approach to establishing a core, but that isn't typically what we're dealing with. "Great art" isn't just about a nice painting hanging in the Louvre. It can underlie a logic which eventually results in forcing others to read certain religious texts in ways which are express violations of the First Amendment. "Great art" all too easily leads to phrases like "Western Civilization" and "the decline of the West" being used by Neo-Nazis. This is, unfortunately, a consequence to which Heidegger himself was extremely partial.

For our purposes, there are three notable moves made in this sentence:

1. Heidegger limits his consideration to "great art"
2. Heidegger strongly implies not-so-great art has too much of the artist about it
3. The artist disappears in order "for the work to emerge"

I realize we are going to want to argue with Heidegger right away. What of Rembrandt's self-portraits? They depend on the artist grappling with his own mortality at different stages of his life, no? It looks like a slam dunk against Heidegger: we have found great art where the artist themselves is of consequence to the art. Of course, someone can say that it is not Rembrandt in his full person in those paintings. Maybe we will find a letter by him saying "look at all these suckers! They think I'm grappling with my mortality, but what I really want is cash for tulip bulbs and wooden shoes." A whole school of criticism revolves around this skepticism. A work of art, in their view, depends on a dialogue internal to the work itself. The self-portrait of Rembrandt is at a distance from Rembrandt the person, as he captured himself in a moment he may not have been fully conscious of. With this notion in mind, the higher dialogue of art is preserved. No historical information need block the purity of experiencing and thinking about art.

This school of thought, known in literary studies as New Criticism, accompanies conservative approaches to education. It usually goes hand-in-hand with Great Books and core texts. Homer and the Bible are worlds unto themselves, artifacts where the speaker is an idealized being and we ourselves, reading the book, aren't exactly the audience. (2) There is an internal audience. This is most visible in poems clearly addressed to another figure, e.g. "To His Coy Mistress." We appreciate the work of art because we appreciate the world it creates. Those of you reading "The Origin of the Work of Art" will note that this sounds similar to some remarks of Heidegger later in the text–he talks about how "world worlds"–but I think something very different is going on there, something ultimately more about the themes of technology, the gods, nature, and how we conceive reality.

Where there is overlap is blind nationalism. You can see how ludicrous it is with something like the self-portraits of Rembrandt. You mean to tell me it is impossible to make a painting of yourself and mean something by it? It's impossible to write a poem about what you yourself are going through? Arguments that depend on the skepticism New Criticism advances do something totalitarian in nature. They delete our ability to talk directly about our own condition. This makes sense when it comes to New Criticism itself, as some invested in the school thought it a perfect vehicle for a Lost Cause vision of America, one which could defend Southern honor through a deluge of literary work. With every text being an imaginary world now rendered impervious to any number of facts, the fact that defending the pre-Civil War South is a cause for fucking losers never has to be confronted.

Heidegger's nationalism, compared to that, is in a specific way less pronounced. At least in these passages, he does not argue for how we must read all texts. He wants to know how great art, for example a Greek temple, works. As a temple is a place meant for the "god himself [to] be present... [it] is the god himself." That's a radical conclusion but certainly not beyond the ideas we bring to the spaces we hold sacred. He goes further:

The same holds for the linguistic work. In the tragedy nothing is staged or displayed theatrically, but the battle of the new gods against the old is being fought. The linguistic work, originating in the speech of the people, does not refer to this battle; it transforms the people's saying so that now every living word fights the battle and puts up for decision what is holy and what unholy, what great and what small, what brave and what cowardly, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave (see Heraclitus, Fragment 53). (3)

Before, Heidegger held that a "nation" emerged from the work of a temple. The temple establishes the "unity" of various "paths and relations," creating an "open relational context" for a "historical people" (4). What holds for the temple holds for the "linguistic work." It seems straightforwardly nationalistic and illiberal at first glance, as he depicts a battle between new gods and old gods waged in a text weaved from our speech. That battle rages over what we consider holy and unholy, what we believe great, who we think brave, what we believe beyond us, who we believe should rule. It looks like a romanticizing of tradition, a backdoor way of saying it holds all the wisdom we ever need. I don't think we have to accept that interpretation, though. You can hold, based on this passage, that what matters is the debate about what is sacred within what is sacred. And that debate does not have to result in the vindication of tradition as it has previously been understood. It can be overthrown: "new gods" isn't particularly subtle. It doesn't have to conform to greatness in a way which extols people like Caesar or Napoleon. Why can't greatness be about equal rights? We can readily identify those as petty who don't see anything worth fighting for besides themselves.

I am not saying Heidegger is not a nationalist. He is a nationalist with murderous intent! I am saying something more interesting is happening here than a simple advocacy of how traditions and texts bind us. In part, I think this is because Heidegger takes Being far more seriously than many other conservatives and reactionaries do. He is one of them, but Being in his work engages becoming, the theme of change, and the question of meaningfulness throughout history. Whereas for most conservatives and reactionaries, the question of being is used to advance an obvious answer. There's God, who only truly is, and He has given laws. Or there's this country and its traditions, the only things worth knowing, and they have laws which allow us to live. If you don't obey those laws, in some sense you are not. You are sinful or traitorous and have distanced yourself from what truly is. Being is moral truth, being is your dignity, being is static, being wants to deny the fact of change.

I think, in this discussion, we have talked plenty about why great art shouldn't be divorced from the person of the artist. I certainly think Heidegger is wrong in holding that 1) not-so-great art has too much of the artist about it 2) great art depends on an artist disappearing completely. But even though I do hold his thinking on these lines is interesting, I want to conclude by rejecting the need for "great art." I'm going to do this, of course, with an eye to another set of stakes.

So I really don't think we need "great art" as a concept. I do think having a few touchstones in common is very good, as it helps to talk about the things that matter to us through a common reference point. And I do think we should have standards. But this doesn't lend itself to believing there are works which are so magical they have eclipsed their creators entirely. If a work is magic, it is because it lets us see more of humanity and how humanity can be extended. Greatness expands sensitivity instead of erecting tacky statues of Dear Leader.

You'll note, though, I'm not throwing out the concept of greatness entirely. This much I think Heidegger gets right, even if he misses the mark other ways. Whatever authenticity is, it can hit us at a primal level at times. We can recognize someone who has done something brave against the views we hold against them. We can eventually recognize justice against our own self-interest because we are made to see people for who they truly are. I don't think there's any way to decouple authenticity from some notion of greatness. Does this mean we have to accept hierarchies which dehumanize others? Of course not. But it does mean we have a fundamental tension to grapple with–the justice we seek means we have to make judgments and deliberate imperfectly–and it is a tension which should lead us to think about what virtues we specifically need for a democratic polity. I assure you achieving those virtues is not a simple task. Look at those doing the work and how complicated it gets for them, even as they find ways of doing it effectively and getting others started through some basic advice. Almost like a negotiation, you could say, over what we value in a "linguistic work."

Notes and References

1. Heidegger, Martin, "The Origin of the Work of Art" in Basic Writings (ed. Krell). New York: HarperCollins, 1993. 166.
2. An "idealized being," an internal speaker, is not free from error relative to the narrative they tell. You can have unreliable narrators in literature. An author placing themselves in the position of internal speaker is adopting a persona so as to advance a theme. This is certainly a reasonable way of reading, but it can be used to say that the way things were is never questionable. It can be used to immerse readers in antiquarianism and any manner of crank ideas before letting them ask the most obvious questions.
3. ibid., 169.
4. ibid., 167.