NPSA Presentation: Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" and Authenticity

Generally I find two things interesting: (1) what we get out of art and (2) whether we are always able to respond to art. These interest me because of the rarefied air they provide. If we have the conversation about how Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight engages the Global War on Terror, or whether Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit tells a story about social class and loneliness, we're opening up questions about how we see life and want to live. I think all of us see that aesthetic questions are not incidental to politics. More than one of us at this conference has commented on the quality of a campaign ad as causing us to retch in revulsion or inspiring us to believe the right candidate will win.

Still, making the formal connection between aesthetics and politics isn't always obvious in the scholarly literature. And when we're talking about Martin Heidegger, a Nazi with quite a lot to say about art, our first instinct is to hit "skip." Why should we bother with someone whose politics and ethics are completely repellent?

I'll get to answering that question in a little bit. First I should note that Heidegger in general is treated a curious way in political philosophy. Usually, one starts with his diagnosis of nihilism as an affliction inherent to our grappling (or not grappling) with Being. Long story short: we do not grapple with the primal, fundamental questions. According to him, those questions and their spirit were lost a long time ago. The choices which brought us to depending on technology to think for us start, for Heidegger, with Plato.

So while this is absolutely the terrain of political philosophy, it is also too broad. What if Heidegger has something to say, perhaps about art, that we might be able to use? Or must incorporate into our thinking? When I was reading Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," I realized quite a bit of it is in dialogue with more traditional themes–e.g. how we are shaped by history and culture, how we understand "use" itself, how we designate what is meaningful–and I want to bring the essay to the consideration of those doing political theory and philosophy.

Scholars looking at "The Origin of the Work of Art" debate aspects of it which do not fail to touch on the larger themes. In the paper, I put a pair of scholars, Ryannen and Kummala, into dialogue with Iain Thomson. Ryannen and Kummala think Heidegger makes too strong a distinction between "art" and "equipment." They hold he wants art to be horribly impractical at the cost of failing to realize how art actually works. In our everyday lives, we find things that are serviceable, like situation comedies, and they can move from being useful–letting us blow off steam after work–to something more profound. They would like to loosen Heidegger's distinction and have us talk more about how art works for us daily. I'm sympathetic to this project but I put them in dialogue with Thomson because Thomson strongly hints you can't dismiss Heidegger's dismissiveness. Heidegger wants to talk about "great art" for very specific reasons. He dwells at length on a Greek temple and how it is not merely an object external to us to behold, or one we label as sacred. What it does is define the Earth around it, making it sacred, changing the landscape and those of us in it in a fundamental way:

By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct, however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation. (Basic Writings, 167)

I picked that passage to read because it is not subtle: "By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple." Heidegger offers a philosophy by means of which a people's faith is fully real to them. The mistake everyone makes is in believing that the divine mysteries go so far beyond us they cannot be comprehended. No: they are all around us. The "temple-work... gathers" all the paths people take. "Birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace" – the temple as art, as great art, sets the stage for "the shape of destiny for human being." And you can see Heidegger's not-so-subtle nationalism here, too. Individuals have destinies, but added together there is a "historical people" with a "vocation" to fulfill.

On the one hand I am sympathetic to loosening the distinction between "art" and "equipment," but it is only possible if I can be more precise about what is at stake in "great art." What is most important in the temple example? I actually don't think it is about the collective consciousness of a "historical people." It is something closer to being aware of the importance of a historical and cultural heritage. So aware you could reject it and be considered a serious judge of what is at stake. This, you'll note, is no less than authenticity with its full moral weight. We recognize not our situation, or mere circumstances, but a place in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be.

To illustrate this further, I turn to Gregory Schufrieder, who describes at length how art in "The Origin of the Work of Art" depends on a rift between world and Earth. The Earth is a “primal and abysmal ground,” mysterious and irreducible, and the world is roughly a “historical dimension of phenomena.” The point of the distinction is that our usual experiences do not entail splitting world and Earth: we just see their continuity. But art requires we see the fissure; you can even say art is the imprint of that fissure between them.

It's a beautiful and rich image, and it speaks to how Heidegger himself is in dialogue with a distinction from Hegel about symbolic art. Hegel holds that art as symbolic is primitive and has been eclipsed by religion and philosophy. You could say aesthetic thought, in this respect, has been enhanced and evolved via technology. Heidegger refuses this: his turn to the primal, his claiming "the work is a symbol," seems to me to be exactly the right move. Why did people make art in concentration camps? How did they see that as essential to survival? The symbolism of art points to how art does not use up or waste the material involved in its creation. Things are not resources, they are treasures, and we learn to treasure through the sort of existential dialectic Heidegger initiates in "The Origin of the Work of Art."

In a world where we are relentlessly beset by con-men, authenticity in this text seems to me to be absolutely crucial. It is not merely media literacy, civics education, or even piety or deeply held virtues. It is an argument with the logic underlying the modern world. We didn't fully realize property won't bring you freedom or that technology cannot supplant the arts. We need to attend not just to a measurable result, but to how we think. It's not necessarily a radical call to changing our education–many of us already teach in this vein–but it will change our priorities.