## 1. Introduction to "Heidegger's Aesthetics": Beyond the Oxymoron




Perhaps the first thing to be said about "Heidegger's
aesthetics" is that Heidegger himself would consider the very
topic oxymoronic, a contradiction in terms like the idea of a
"square circle," "wooden iron," or a
"Christian philosopher" (Heidegger's own three
favorite examples of
 oxymorons).[1]
Treating Heidegger's
thinking about art as "aesthetics" would strike him as
incongruous and inappropriate because he consistently insisted that the
"aesthetic" approach has led Western humanity to understand
and experience the work of art in a way that occludes its true
historical significance. Nor can Heidegger's thinking be
sympathetically classified as "anti-aesthetic," because he
suggests that any such anti-aesthetics would remain blindly entangled
in aesthetics (in the same way that, for example, atheism remains
implicated in the logic of theism--both claiming to know the
unknowable); in his view, any merely oppositional movement remains
trapped in the logic of what it opposes (QCT 61/GA5 217). For
Heidegger, as we will see, the only way to get beyond aesthetics is
first to understand how it shapes us and then seek to pass through and
beyond that influence, thereby getting over it as one might
"recover" from a serious illness (ID 37/101). Because
the aesthetic approach continues to eclipse our access to the role
artworks can quietly play in forming and informing our historical
worlds, Heidegger thinks that only such a post-aesthetic thinking about
art can allow us to recognize and restore art's true
significance, helping us recognize the inconspicuous way in which art
works to shape our basic sense of what is and what
 matters.[2]




From a strictly Heideggerian perspective, then, any attempt to
explain "Heidegger's aesthetics" (or his
"anti-aesthetics") will look either malicious or
misconceived, like a deliberate flaunting or else an unwitting
display of ignorance about the basic tenets of Heidegger's views
on art. Fortunately, our starting point is not really so
misconceived. Once we understand why exactly Heidegger
criticizes (what we could call) the *aestheticization* of
art, we will thereby have put ourselves on the right track to
understanding his own post-aesthetic thinking about the work of
art. (We should not confuse the aestheticization Heidegger
critiques with "aestheticism," a term standardly taken to
refer to the "art for art's sake"
 movement.[3]
For
Heidegger, any such attempt to disconnect art from politics,
philosophy, and other history-shaping movements would not even be
thinkable without the prior reduction of art to aesthetics that he
criticizes.) So, what exactly is supposed to be wrong with the
aestheticization of art? What leads Heidegger to critique the
dominant modern tradition that understands art in an
"aesthetic" way, and why does he believe this aesthetic
approach eclipses the true significance of the work of art?


### 1.1 Heidegger's Understanding of the True Work of Art




To understand Heidegger's critique of aesthetics, it will help
first to sketch his positive view of art's true historical
role. Heidegger's own understanding of the work of art is
resolutely populist but with revolutionary aspirations. He
believes that, at its greatest, art "grounds history" by
"allowing truth to spring forth" (PLT 77/GA5
 65).[4]
Building on
Heraclitus's view of the pervasive tension of normative
conceptual oppositions (good/bad, worthy/worthless, noble/base, and the
like) that undergird and implicitly structure our sense of ourselves
and our worlds, Heidegger imagines the way
 an ancient Greek temple at Paestum
 once worked to help unify its historical world by tacitly
 reinforcing a particular sense of what is and what matters:



> 
> 
> It is the temple-work that first joins together and simultaneously
> gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which
> birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance
> and decline obtain the form of destiny for human being. ...The
> temple first gives to things their look and to humanity their outlook
> on themselves. (PLT 42-3/GA5 27-9)




Great art works *work* in the background of our historical
worlds, in other words, by partially embodying and so selectively
reinforcing an historical community's implicit sense of what is
and what matters. In this way, great artworks both (1)
"first give to things their look," that is, they help
establish an historical community's implicit sense of what things
*are*, and they give (2) "to humanity their outlook on
themselves," that is, they also help shape an historical
community's implicit sense of *what truly matters* in life
(and so also what does not), which kinds of lives are most worth living, which
actions are "noble" (or "base"), what in the
community's traditions most deserves to be preserved, and so
on.




As this suggests, Heidegger subscribes to a doctrine of
*ontological historicity* (refining a view first developed by
Hegel). Put simply, Heidegger thinks that humanity's
fundamental experience of reality changes over time (sometimes
dramatically), and he suggests that the *work* of art helps
explain the basic mechanism of this historical transformation
of
 intelligibility.[5]
Because great art *works*
inconspicuously to establish, maintain, and transform humanity's
historically-variable sense of what is and what matters, Heidegger
emphasizes that "*art is the becoming and happening of
truth*" (PLT 71/GA5 59). Put simply, great artworks
help establish the implicit ontology and ethics through which an
historical community understands itself and its
 world.[6]
In keeping with this
(initially strange) doctrine of ontological historicity, Heidegger
understands "truth" ontologically as the
historically-dynamic disclosure of intelligibility in time. As we
will see in section 3, this historical unfolding of truth takes
place--to use Heidegger's preferred philosophical terms of
art--as an "*a-letheiac*" struggle to
"dis-close" or "un-conceal"
(*a-letheia*) that which conceals (*lethe*)
itself, an "essential strife" between two interconnected
dimensions of intelligibility (revealing and concealing) which
Heidegger calls "world" and "earth" in his most
famous work on art.




In sum, great art *works* by selectively focusing an
historical community's tacit sense of what is and what matters
and reflecting it back to that community, which thereby comes
implicitly to understand itself in the light of this artwork.
Artworks thus function as ontological *paradigms*, serving their
communities both as "models of" and "models
for" reality, which means (as Dreyfus nicely puts it) that
artworks can variously "manifest,"
"articulate," or even "reconfigure" the
historical ontologies undergirding their cultural
 worlds.[7]
Heidegger
suggests, in other words, that art can accomplish its world-disclosing
work on at least three different orders of magnitude: (1)
micro-paradigms he will later calls "things thinging,"
which help us become aware of what matters most deeply to us; (2)
paradigmatic artworks like Van Gogh's painting and
Holderlin's poetry, which disclose how art itself works; and
(3) macro-paradigmatic "great" works of art like the Greek
temple and tragic drama (works Heidegger also sometimes calls
"gods"), which succeed in fundamentally transforming an
historical community's "understanding of being," its
most basic and ultimate understanding of what is and what
 matters.[8]




It is with this ontologically revolutionary potential of great art
in mind that Heidegger writes:



> 
> 
> Whenever [great] art happens--that is, when there is a
> beginning--a push enters history, and history either starts up or
> starts again. (PLT 77/GA5 65)




That is, great art is capable of overcoming the inertia of existing
traditions and moving the interconnected ontological and ethical wheels
of history, either giving us a new sense of what is and what matters or
else fundamentally transforming the established ontology and ethics
through which we make sense of the world and
 ourselves.[9]
Given Heidegger's
view of the literally revolutionary role art can thus play in
inconspicuously shaping and transforming our basic sense of what is and
what matters, his occasionally ill-tempered critiques of the reduction
of art to aesthetics become much easier to understand. For, in
his view, the stakes of our understanding of and approach to art could
not be higher.


## 2. Heidegger's Philosophical Critique of Aesthetics: Introduction




Heidegger believes that the aestheticization of art has gotten us
late moderns stuck in the rarefied and abstract view according to which
"the enjoyment of art serves [primarily] to satisfy the refined
taste of connoisseurs and aesthetes." Hence his amusing but
harsh judgment that: "For us today, ...art belongs in
the domain of the pastry chef" (IM 140/GA40 140). That our
culture blithely celebrates cafe baristas who compete over the
"art" of pouring foamed milk into our cappuccinos suggests
that we have lost sight of the role art can play in shaping history at
the deepest level, an ontologically revolutionary role compared to
which Heidegger finds the "artful" gestures of culinary
expertise rather empty.




For the same reason, Heidegger is no more impressed by Kant's highbrow
view that the disinterested contemplation of art should "serve
the moral elevation of the mind" (IM 140/GA40
 140).[10]
Instead, Heidegger is clearly sympathetic to the
"complaint" that, as he puts it:



> 
> 
> innumerable aesthetic considerations of and investigations into art
> and the beautiful have achieved nothing, they have not helped anyone
> gain access to art, and they have contributed virtually nothing to
> artistic creativity or to a sound appreciation of art. (N1
> 79/GA43 92)




Heidegger would thus agree with the sentiment behind Barnet
Newman's famous quip: "Aesthetics is for the artist
as ornithology is for the
 birds."[11]
Still, for Heidegger such complaints,
while "certainly right," are really only symptomatic of a
much deeper philosophical problem, a problem which stems from the way
modern aesthetics is rooted in the subject/object divide lying at the
very heart of the modern worldview. In order to get to the heart
of the problem, then, we need to take a step back and ask: How
 exactly does Heidegger understand
 *aesthetics*?[12]


### 2.1 How Heidegger Understands Aesthetics




As Heidegger points out, the term "aesthetics" is a
modern creation. It was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in the
1750s and then critically appropriated by Kant in his *Critique of
Judgment* (published in
 1790).[13]
Baumgarten formed the term
"aesthetics" from the Greek word for
"sensation" or "feeling,"
*aisthesis* (N1 83/GA43 98). As this indicates,
modern "aesthetics" was originally conceived as the science
of *aistheta*, matters perceptible by the senses, as
opposed to *noema*, matters accessible to thought alone,
like the truths dealt with in mathematical logic. In fact, modern
aesthetics is born of the aspiration to be "in the field of
sensuousness what logic is in the domain of thinking" (N1 83/GA43
98). That is, just as logic (conceived as the science of thought)
seeks to understand our relation to the true, so aesthetics (conceived
as the science of sensation or feeling) seeks to understand our
relation to the
 beautiful.[14]




To recognize that the central focus of modern aesthetics is beauty
is not to deny its traditional interest in the sublime or its
late-modern preoccupations with the abject, the obscene, kitsch, and so
on. Heidegger's point, rather, is that



> 
> 
> aesthetics is that kind of meditation on art in which
> humanity's state of feeling in relation to the beautiful
> represented in art is the point of departure and the goal that sets the
> standard for all its definitions and explanations. (N1 78/GA43
> 91)




In its paradigmatic form (the form "that sets the
standard" for all its other "definitions and
explanations"), modern "aesthetics is the consideration of
humanity's state of feeling in relation to the beautiful"
(N1 78/GA43 90).




Heidegger is not denying that there are numerous disagreements
within the modern aesthetic tradition (between Kant and Baumgarten,
just to begin with). Instead, his thesis is that even the
disagreements in the modern aesthetic tradition take place within the
framework of a common approach. It is this shared framework that
Heidegger designates when he refers to the "aesthetic"
approach to art. As we would expect, this basic framework
undergirds the paradigmatic inquiry of modern aesthetics, the study of
beauty through a "consideration of humanity's state of
feeling in relation to the beautiful." In all the aesthetic
investigations which take their cues from this one, Heidegger
observes:



> 
> 
> The artwork is posited as the "object" for a
> "subject," and this subject-object relation, specifically
> as a relation of feeling, is definitive for aesthetic
> consideration. (N1 78/GA43 91)




In other words, modern aesthetics frames its understanding of art by
presupposing the subject/object dichotomy: Aesthetics presupposes
a fundamental divide between the art "object" and the
experiencing "subject," a divide which is subsequently
crossed by the commerce of sensation or feeling. Of course, the
subject/object dichotomy forms the very basis of the modern worldview,
so we would be surprised if modern aesthetics did not presuppose
it. So, what specifically does Heidegger object to about the way
the aesthetic approach to art presupposes a viewing subject, standing
before some art object, enjoying (or not enjoying) his or her sensory
experience of this artwork? What is supposed to be the problem
with this aesthetic picture of art?


### 2.2 Heidegger's Critique of the Aesthetic Approach




In a provocatively-titled essay delivered in 1938, "The Age of
the World Picture," Heidegger provides a succinct formulation of
what it means to approach art aesthetically that helps us reach the
core of his objection to aesthetics. When "art gets pushed
into the horizon of aesthetics," he writes, this



> 
> 
> means [1] that the artwork becomes an object of lived experience
> [*Gegenstand des Erlebens*], and [2] in this way art comes to
> count as an expression of human life [*Lebens*]. (QCT
> 116/GA5 75)




Heidegger is making two connected points here (which are numbered
accordingly). The first is that when art is understood and
approached "aesthetically," artworks become
*objects* for human subjects to experience in an especially
intense, vital, or meaningful way. We can see this if we unpack
his typically dense language: As Heidegger frequently points out,
in the modern, post-Cartesian world, an "object,"
*Gegenstand*, is something that "stands opposite" a
human subject, something *external* to subjectivity. In
order to experience an object, the modern subject supposedly must first
get outside the immanent sphere of its own subjectivity so as to
encounter this "external" object, and then return back to
its subjective sphere bearing the fruits of this encounter. Given
the modern subject/object dichotomy, such an adventure beyond
subjectivity and back again is required for the experience of any
object. But in the case of the art object, Heidegger is pointing
out, the adventure beyond subjectivity and back again is a particularly
intense, meaningful, or enlivening one: A "lived
experience" is an experience that makes us feel "more
alive," as Heidegger suggests by emphasizing the etymological
connection between *Erleben* and *Lebens*, "lived
experience" and "life."




The second point Heidegger is trying to make is that when artworks
become objects for subjects to have particularly meaningful experiences
of, these artworks themselves also get understood thereby as meaningful
expressions of an artistic subject's own life experiences.
Heidegger does not ever develop any argument for this point; the
thought simply seems to be that once aesthetics understands artworks as
objects of which we can have meaningful experiences, it is only logical
to conceive of these art objects themselves in an isomorphic way, as
meaningful expressions of the lives of the artists who created
them. Still, this alleged isomorphism of aesthetic
"expression and impression" is not immediately
 obvious.[15]
Think,
for example, about the seriously playful "found art"
tradition in Surrealism, dada, Fluxus, and their heirs, a tradition in
which ordinary objects get seditiously appropriated as
"art." (The continuing influence of Marcel
Duchamp's "readymade" remains visible in everything
from Andy Warhol's meticulously reconstructed
 "Brillo Boxes"
(1964) to Ruben Ochoa's
large-scale installations of industrial detritus such as broken
concrete, rebar, and chain-link fencing, such as
 "Ideal Disjuncture"
(2008). Vattimo thus suggests that
Duchamp's "Fountain" illustrates the way an artwork
can disclose a new world, a world in which high art comes to celebrate
not only the trivial and ordinary but also the vulgar and even
the
 obscene.)[16]
This tradition initially seems like a
series of deliberate counter-examples to the aesthetic assumption that
artworks are meaningful expressions of an artist's own
subjectivity.




Even in this tradition, however, the artists' appropriations
are never truly random but invariably require some selection,
presentation, and the like, and thus inevitably reopen interpretive
questions about the significance these art objects have for the
artistic subject who chose them. (Why this particular object?
Why present it in just this way?) It is thus not surprising
that the founding work of found "anti-art,"
Duchamp's
 "Fountain"
(1917)--his deliciously seditious
installation of a deliberately inverted, humorously signed (by
"R. Mutt"), and brilliantly re-titled urinal in an art
gallery--is typically treated in contemporary aesthetics as an
extreme expression of Duchamp's own artistic subjectivity, not as
its
 absence.[17]
Here one could also point to the
failure of Robert Rauschenberg's attempt to deconstruct the found
art ideal of unique and spontaneous invention in his incredible
"combines,"
 "Factum I and Factum II,"
works which, despite
Rauschenberg's painstaking efforts to make them identical, instead
work to suggest the stubborn uniqueness of any given artwork. So, even
the found art tradition of the readymade and its heirs reinforces
Heidegger's point that, *in the basic aesthetic approach to art,
art objects are implicitly understood as meaningful expressions of
artists' lives that are capable of eliciting particularly intense or
meaningful experiences in viewing subjects*.




In this aesthetic approach, to put it simply, *art objects
express and intensify human subjects' experiences of
life*. What Heidegger thus characterizes as the aesthetic
approach to art will probably seem so obvious to most people that it
can be hard to see what he could possibly find objectionable about
it. Art objects express and intensify human subjects'
experiences of life; to many people, it might not even be clear what it
could mean to understand art in any other way. How should we
understand and approach art, if not in terms of the meaningful
experiences that a subject might have of some art object, an art object
which is itself a meaningful expression of the life of the artist (or
artists) who created it? What exactly does Heidegger think is
wrong with this "picture" of art?




Despite what one might expect from a phenomenologist like Heidegger,
his objection is not that the aesthetic view mischaracterizes the way
we late moderns ordinarily experience "art." On the
contrary, Heidegger clearly thinks that what he characterizes as
"the increasingly aesthetic fundamental position taken toward art
as a whole" (N1 88/GA43 103) does accurately describe the
experiences of art that take place--when they do take
place--in museums, art galleries, and installations; in
performance spaces, theaters, and movie houses; in cathedrals,
coliseums, and other ruins; in cityscapes as well as landscapes; in
concert halls, music clubs, and comic books; even when we listen to
our speakers, headphones, ear-buds; and, sometimes (who could credibly deny
it?), when we sit in front of our television screens, computer
monitors, iPhones, and so on. The experiences we have of what
rises to the level of "art" in all such settings are indeed
"aesthetic" experiences, that is, particularly intense or
meaningful experiences that make us feel more alive; and, if we think
about it, we do tend to approach these art objects as expressions of
the life of the artists who created them. The aesthetic view
correctly characterizes our typical experience of "art" in
the contemporary world--and for Heidegger that is part of
the
 problem.[18]


### 2.3 Symptoms of Subjectivism




This returns us to the bigger question we have been pursuing, and
which we are now prepared to answer: Why exactly does Heidegger
object to our contemporary tendency to understand and approach art in
this aesthetic way? In the revealingly titled essay we have been
drawing on, "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger
explains that "the process by which art gets pushed into the
horizon of aesthetics" is neither conceptually neutral nor
historically unimportant. On the contrary, the historical process
by which Western humanity came to understand art as
"aesthetics" is so freighted with significance that it
needs to be recognized as "one of the essential phenomena of the
contemporary age" (QCT 116/GA5 75). Strikingly, Heidegger
goes so far as to assert that our tendency to treat art as aesthetics
is just as significant for and revealing of our current historical
self-understanding as are the increasing dominance of science and
technology, the tendency to conceive of all meaningful human activity
in terms of culture, and the growing absence of any god or gods in our
Western world (QCT 116-7/GA5 75-6). This is a surprising and
deliberately provocative claim, one apparently meant to provoke us into
noticing and thinking through something we ordinarily overlook.
For, how can our understanding of art as aesthetics be just as
essential to our current historical self-understanding as are the
dominance of science, the growing influence of technology, the
ubiquitous discussions of "culture," and the withdrawal of
gods from our history--four seemingly much larger and more
momentous historical developments?




These five "essential phenomena"--the historical
ascendance of science, technology, aesthetics, and culture, on the one
hand, and, on the other, that historical decline of the divine which
Heidegger (echoing Schiller) calls the "ungodding" or
"degodification" (*Entgotterung*) of the
world--these all are "equally essential"
(*gleichwesentliche*), Heidegger explains, because these five
interlocking phenomena express and so reveal the underlying direction
in which the contemporary world is moving historically. Science,
technology, aesthetics, culture, and degodification are "equally
essential" as five major historical developments that feed into
and disclose (what we could think of
as) *the* *current*, that is, the underlying historical
direction or *Zeitgeist* of our contemporary
 world.[19] 
 In the late 1930s, Heidegger's name for the underlying direction in which
the age is moving is "subjectivism," a movement he defines
as humanity's ongoing attempt to establish "mastery over the
totality of what-is" (QCT 132/GA5 92). *Subjectivism*, in
other words, designates humanity's increasingly global quest to
achieve complete control over every aspect of our objective reality,
to establish ourselves as the being "who gives the measure and
provides the guidelines for everything that is" (QCT 134/GA5
94). Heidegger's fundamental objection to the aesthetic approach to
art, then, is that such an approach follows from and feeds back
into *subjectivism*, contemporary humanity's ongoing effort to
establish "our unlimited power for calculating, planning, and
molding [or 'breeding,' *Zuchtung*] all
things" (QCT 135/GA5 94).


### 2.4 How Aesthetics Reflects and Reinforces Subjectivism




In order to understand why Heidegger thinks the aesthetic approach
to art reflects and reinforces subjectivism, we need to know why
Heidegger characterizes humanity's ongoing attempt to master
every aspect of our objective reality as "subjectivism" in
the first
 place.[20]
We saw earlier that in the modern,
post-Cartesian world, an "object" (*Gegen-stand*),
is something that "stands opposite" a human
*subject*, something which is "external" to the
subjective sphere. This subject/object dichotomy seems obvious
when one is theorizing from within the modern tradition, in which it
has functioned as an axiom since Descartes famously argued that the
subject's access to its own thinking possesses an indubitable
immediacy not shared by our access to objects, which must thus be conceived of as
external to subjectivity.




Yet, as Heidegger argues in *Being and Time* (1927), taking
this modern subject/object dichotomy as our point of departure leads us
to fundamentally mischaracterize the way we experience the everyday
world in which we are usually unreflectively immersed, the world of our
practical engagements. By failing to recognize and do justice to
the integral entwinement of self and world that is basic to our
experiential navigation of our lived environments, modern philosophy
effectively splits the subject off from objects and from other
subjects. In this way, modern philosophy lays the conceptual
groundwork for *subjectivism*, the "worldview" in
which an intrinsically-meaningless objective realm
("nature") is separated epistemically from isolated,
value-bestowing, self-certain subjects, and so needs to be mastered
through the relentless epistemological, normative, and practical
activities of these subjects. Heidegger suggests that this
problem is not merely theoretical, because the subjectivism of the
modern worldview functions historically like a self-fulfilling
prophecy. Its progressive historical realization generates not
only the political freedoms and scientific advances we cherish, but
also unwanted downstream consequences such as our escalating
environmental crisis and less predictable side-effects like the
aestheticization of
 art.[21]


### 2.5 Undermining the Subject/Object Dichotomy Phenomenologically




So, how does the aestheticization of art follow from
subjectivism? (This is easier to see than Heidegger's
converse claim--that the aestheticization of art feeds back into
and reinforces subjectivism--so we will address it first.)
*Being and Time* does not undermine the subject/object dichotomy by
trying to advance the incredible thesis that the self really exists in
a continuous and unbroken unity with its world. Instead,
Heidegger seeks to account for the fact that our fundamental, practical
engagement with our worlds can easily break down in ways that generate
the perspective the subject/object dichotomy describes. Most of
the time, we encounter ourselves as immediately and unreflectively
immersed in the world of our concerns rather than as standing over
against an "external" world of objects. Just think,
for example, of the way you ordinarily encounter a hammer when you are
hammering with it, or a pen while you are writing with it, a bike while
riding it, a car while driving it, or even, say, a freeway interchange
as you drive over it for the umpteenth time. This all changes,
however, when our practical engagement with the world of our concerns
breaks down. When the head flies off the hammer and will not go
back on (and no other hammering implement is available to complete the
task at hand); when the pen we are writing with runs out of ink (and we
have no other); when our bike tire goes flat or our car breaks down in
the middle of a trip; when we find ourselves standing before an artwork
that we cannot make sense of; or, in general, when we are still
learning how to do something and encounter some unexpected difficulty
which stops us in our tracks--in all such cases what Heidegger
calls our ordinary, immediate "hands-on"
(*zuhanden*) way of coping with the world of our practical
concerns undergoes a "transformation" (*Umschlag*)
in which we come to experience ourselves as isolated subjects standing
reflectively before a world of external objects, which we thereby come
to experience as standing over against us in the mode of something
objectively "on hand" (*vorhanden*) (BT 408-9/SZ 357-8).




In other words, Heidegger does not deny the reality of the
subject/object relation but, rather, points out that our experience of
this subject/object relation *derives* *from* and so
*presupposes* a more fundamental level of experience, a
primordial modality of engaged existence in which self and world are
united rather than divided. Heidegger believes that modern
philosophy's failure to solve the problem of skepticism about the
external world shows that those who begin with the subject/object
divide will never be able to bridge it subsequently (BT 249-50/SZ
205-6). He thus insists that this more primordial level of
practically engaged, "hands-on" existence--in which
self and world are unified--must be the starting point of any
description of ordinary human experience that seeks to do justice to
what such experience is really like, a phenomenological dictum
Heidegger insists should also govern our attempts to describe our
meaningful encounters with works of art.


### 2.6 Phenomenology Against Aesthetic Subjectivism




Following the phenomenological dictum that we should describe our
experience of art in a way that is not distorted by the presuppositions
we have inherited from the metaphysical tradition is easier said than
done, however, for at least two reasons. First, the
subject/object dichotomy is so deeply entrenched in our
self-understanding that it has come to implicitly structure the
fundamental aesthetic approach (as we have seen). Second, it is
not immediately clear where (let alone how) we should look to discover
art in a non-aesthetic way. Indeed, it now seems natural for us
to think that what makes our experience of art objects significant is
that such experiences allow us human subjects temporarily to transcend
the sphere of our own subjectivity by getting in touch with art objects
outside ourselves, because these transcendent experiences can
profoundly enrich our subjective experience.




In Heidegger's view, however, this aesthetic perspective gets
the story backward. We do not begin confined to our subjective
spheres, temporarily leave those spheres behind in order to experience
art objects, only to return back to subjectivity once again, enriched
by the "booty" we have captured during our adventure in the
external world of art objects (BT 89/SZ 62). The reverse is
true: Human *existence* originally "stands
outside" (*ek-sistere*) itself, integrally involved with
the world in terms of which we ordinarily make sense of
 ourselves.[22]
We do
occasionally experience ourselves as subjects confronting objects (for
example, when we try to learn to draw or paint realistically, or when
we find ourselves standing befuddled before an art object), but the
experience of ourselves as subjects confronting objects is
comparatively infrequent and takes place on the background of a more
basic experience of ourselves as integrally involved with the world of
our practical concerns, an experience of fundamental self/world
intertwinement to which we always return.




"Proximally and for the most part [or 'initially and
usually,' *zunachst und zumeist*]," as Heidegger
likes to say, we do not stand apart from the entities that populate our
world, observing them dispassionately--or even passionately,
hoping to transcend an isolated subjective sphere which in fact we are
usually already beyond. Why, then, should we privilege the
detached, subject/object framework that results from the breakdown of
our engaged experience when we try to approach art
philosophically? We should not; trying to approach art while
staying within the aesthetic approach is like trying to learn what it
is like to ride a bike by staring at a broken bicycle: It is so
to privilege the detached perspective of the observer that the
participatory perspective gets eclipsed and forgotten. In
Heidegger's view, the phenomenologically faulty presuppositions
of modern philosophy have misled aesthetics into looking for the work
of art in the wrong place, at a derived rather than the basic level of
human interaction with the world, and thus into mistaking an intense
subjective experience of an external object for an encounter with the
true work of art.




Modern aesthetics presupposes the subject/object dichotomy and then
problematically tries to describe the subsequent interaction between
two allegedly heterogeneous domains, instead of recognizing and seeking
to describe the prior role works of art play in the background of our
everyday worldly engagement, in which no such dichotomy can yet be
found. Heidegger's post-aesthetic thinking about the work
of art will thus instead seek to describe the usually unnoticed way in
which artworks can form and inform our basic historical sense of what
is and what matters (as we saw in section 1.1). Heidegger's
thinking about the formative role art can play in the background of our
self-understanding is "post-aesthetic" in that it seeks to
get past the constitutive mistakes of aesthetics, but it might also be
characterized as "pre-aesthetic" insofar as the way he
tries to go beyond aesthetics is by getting back behind aesthetics in
order to do justice to that more primordial level of existence
aesthetics overlooks. Indeed, although this initially sounds
paradoxical, Heidegger suggests that *the best way to get beyond
aesthetic experience is to transcend it from within* (that is, to
experience the way a subject's experience of an aesthetic object
can lead beyond or beneath itself), as we will see when we turn to his
phenomenological analysis of Van Gogh's painting.




To sum up, then, because aesthetics tries to describe artworks from
the perspective of a subject confronting an external art object, the
aesthetic approach begins always-already "too late" (BT
249/SZ 207). Aesthetics looks for art in the wrong place (at a
derivative rather than primordial level of human interaction with the
world), and what it finds there is not the true work of art.
Misled by the presuppositions of modern philosophy, aesthetics
overlooks that more primordial level of human existence where,
Heidegger will argue, true art inconspicuously accomplishes its
ontologically-revolutionary work.


### 2.7 From Modern Subjectivism to Late-Modern Enframing in Aesthetics




Before turning our attention to Heidegger's post-aesthetic
thinking, the last thing we need to do is to clarify his more difficult
claim that aesthetics not only follows from but also *feeds back
into* subjectivism. What makes this claim difficult to grasp
is the specific twist Heidegger gives to it: Put simply,
aesthetics feeds back into subjectivism in a way that leads
subjectivism beyond itself--and into something even worse than
subjectivism. In aesthetics, Heidegger suggests, subjectivism
"somersaults beyond itself [*selbst
uberschlagt*]" into enframing (N1 77/GA43
90). We can see how subjectivism somersaults beyond itself into
enframing if we return to Heidegger's definition of subjectivism
in "The Age of the World Picture," according to which
modern *subjectivism* names our modern attempt to secure
"our unlimited power for calculating, planning, and molding [or
'breeding,' *Zuchtung*] all things" (QCT
135/GA5 94). It is not difficult to detect a subtle resistance to
the National Socialist worldview and (what Heidegger understood as) its
Nietzschean roots in Heidegger's 1938 critique of Western
humanity's drive toward the total mastery of the world through
"calculating, planning, and breeding." But more
importantly for our purposes, such descriptions of humanity's
drive to master the world completely through the coldly rational
application of *calculative* reasoning also show that what
Heidegger calls "subjectivism" is a conceptual and
historical precursor to what he will soon call "enframing"
(or *Gestell*).




"Enframing" is Heidegger's famous name for the
technological understanding of being that underlies and shapes our
contemporary age. Just as Descartes inaugurates modern
*subjectivism* (as we have seen), so Nietzsche inaugurates
late-modern *enframing* by understanding being--the
"totality of entities as such"--as "eternally
recurring will to power." Heidegger thinks that
Nietzsche's "ontotheology" (that means, to put it
briefly, Nietzsche's way of grasping the totality of what-is from
both the inside-out and the outside-in at the same time) worked to
inaugurate our own late-modern view that reality is nothing but forces
coming-together and breaking-apart with no end other than the
self-perpetuating growth of force itself. By tacitly approaching
reality through the lenses of this Nietzschean ontotheology, we
increasingly come to understand and so to treat all entities as
intrinsically-meaningless "resources" (*Bestand*)
standing by for efficient and flexible optimization. It is (to
cut a long story short) this nihilistic *technologization* of
reality that Heidegger's later thinking is dedicated to finding a
path
 beyond.[23]
For Heidegger, true art opens just such
a path, one that can guide us beyond enframing's ontological
"commandeering of everything into assured availability"
(PLT 84/GA5 72), as we will see in section 3.




First, however, we need to understand how subjectivism leads beyond
itself into enframing. Put simply, subjectivism becomes enframing
when the subject objectifies *itself*--that is, when the
human subject, seeking to master and control all aspects of its
objective reality, turns that impulse to control the world of objects
back onto itself. If we remember that modern
*subjectivism* designates the human subject's quest to
achieve total control over all objective aspects of reality, then we
can see that late-modern *enframing* emerges historically out of
subjectivism as subjectivism increasingly transforms the human subject
itself into just another object to be controlled.
*Enframing*, we could say, *is subjectivism squared* (or
subjectivism applied back to the subject). For, the subjectivist
impulse to master reality redoubles itself in enframing, even though
enframing's objectification of the subject dissolves the very
subject/object division that initially drove the subject's
relentless efforts to master the objective world standing over against
it (Thomson 2005). Subjectivism "somersaults beyond
itself" in our late-modern age of "enframing" because
the impulse to control everything intensifies and accelerates even as
it breaks free of its modern moorings and circles back on the subject
itself, turning the human subject into just one more object to be
mastered and controlled--until the modern subject becomes just
another late-modern entity to be efficiently optimized along with
everything else. We are thus moving from modern subjectivism to
the late-modern enframing of reality insofar as we understand and
relate to all things, *ourselves included*, as nothing but
intrinsically-meaningless "resources" standing by for
endless optimization. Interestingly, Heidegger saw this
technological understanding of being embodied in contemporary works of
art like the 
 modern butterfly interchange on a freeway,
which, like a
late-modern temple, quietly reinforces our technological understanding
of all reality as
 "a network of long-distance traffic, spaced in a way calculated for maximum speed"
(PLT 152/GA7 155), an optimizing function now
served even more efficiently and pervasively by the internet (to which
we are now connected by millions of little shrines, made ever faster,
more efficient and portable, and which we find ourselves increasingly
unable to live
 without).[24]




In the late 1930s, Heidegger understood such technological
optimization as an all-encompassing attempt to derive the maximal
output from the minimal input, a quantification of quality that
threatens to dissolve quality in the same way that the objectification
of the subject threatens to dissolve subjectivity. Heidegger
seems first to have recognized this objectification of the subject in
the Nazis' coldly calculating eugenics programs for
"breeding" a master race, but (as he predicted) that
underlying impulse to objectively master the human subject continues
unabated in more scientifically plausible and less overtly horrifying
forms of contemporary genetic
 engineering.[25]
Most importantly for us
here, Heidegger also recognized this ongoing objectification of the
subject in the seemingly innocuous way that aesthetics
"somersaults beyond itself" into neuroscientific attempts
to understand and control the material substrate of the mind.
For, once aesthetics reduces art to intense subjective experience, such
experiences can be studied objectively through the use of EEGs,
*f*MRIs, MEG and PET scans (and the like), and in fact aesthetic
experiences are increasingly being studied in this way. At the
University of New Mexico's MIND Institute, to mention just one
telling example, subjects were given "beautiful" images to
look at and the resulting neuronal activity in their brains was studied
empirically using one of the world's most powerful functional
Magnetic Resonance Imaging machines. In this way, as Heidegger
predicted in 1937:



> 
> 
> Aesthetics becomes a psychology that proceeds in the manner of the
> natural sciences; that is, states of feeling become self-evident facts
> to be subjected to experiments, observation, and measurement. (N1
> 89/GA43 106)




"Here," Heidegger writes, "the final consequences
of the aesthetic inquiry into art are thought through to the end"
(N1 91/GA43 108). Aesthetics reaches its logical
conclusion--the "fulfillment or consummation"
(*Vollendung*) which completes it and so brings it to its
end--when it thus "somersaults beyond itself" into
enframing.




Heidegger's objection to aesthetic enframing, then, is not just that
the work of art is increasingly falling under the influence of
enframing--that artworks too are becoming mere resources for the
art industry, standing reserves piled in storerooms "like
potatoes in a cellar" to be quickly and efficiently
"shipped like coal...or logs...from one exhibition to
another" (PLT 19/GA5 3). He is even more troubled by the way
art, reduced to aesthetics, does not just get enframed but
participates in the enframing--for example, when the feeling of
beauty is reduced to a purportedly objective brain state to be
precisely measured and controlled through cognitive
neuroscience.[26]




As the human subject turns its subjectivist impulse to control the
objective world back onto itself in such neuroscientific
experimentation, aesthetics increasingly becomes just one more
approach reinforcing the technological "enframing" of all
reality. Heidegger thus reaches a harsh verdict: Aesthetic
"experience is the element in which art dies. This dying goes on
for so long that it takes several centuries" (PLT 79/GA5
 67).[27]
Fortunately, Heidegger's prognosis is not as bleak as this
apparent death sentence suggests. That art is slowly dying as
aesthetics, he clarifies in a later addition,



> 
> 
> does not mean that art is utterly at an end. That will be the
> case only if [aesthetic] experience remains the sole element for
> art. Everything depends on getting out of [aesthetic] experience
> and into being-here [*Da-sein*], which means reaching an
> entirely different "element" for the "becoming"
> of art. (P 50 note b/GA5 67 note b)




In other words, art is dying only as aesthetics, and the death of art
as aesthetics makes possible the transformative rebirth of art as
something other than a subject's experience of an object. Indeed,
just as modern subjectivism led beyond itself historically into
late-modern enframing, so Heidegger believes enframing, in turn, can
lead beyond itself into a genuine post-modernity, an age that
transcends our late-modern age's ongoing technologization of reality
and its nihilistic erosion of all intrinsic meaning (the void which we
try to fill with all our superficial talk about "values")
(see Thomson 2011, 60-2). This hope for an historical turning
toward a genuinely meaningful post-modernity is what motivates
Heidegger's phenomenological attempt to describe and so convey a
post-aesthetic encounter with art, to which we now turn.


### 2.8 Conclusion and Transition: From Hegel's End of Art to Heidegger's Other Beginning




Because of the predicament in which modern aesthetics has left us,
Heidegger provisionally accepts the truth of Hegel's famous
judgment that:



> 
> 
> Art no longer counts for us as the highest manner in which truth
> obtains existence for itself. ...[I]n its highest
> determination, vocation, and purpose [*Bestimmung*], art is and
> remains for us...a thing of the past. (PLT 80/GA5
> 68)




Still, Heidegger nurtures the hope that (*pace* Hegel) the
distinctive truth manifest in art could once again attain the kind of
history-transforming importance that Hegel and Heidegger agree it had
for the ancient Greeks but has lost in the modern world.




This "highest" truth of art for which Heidegger still
hopes, however, is not Hegel's "certainty of the
absolute" (GA5 68 note a). That is, Heidegger does not hold
out hope for some perfect correspondence between (1) the
historically-unfolding "concept" Hegel believed was
implicit in the development of humanity's intersubjective
self-understanding and (2) an objective manifestation of that
intersubjective self-understanding in art. Thus, in Hegel's
most famous example, the tragic conflict between Antigone and Creon in
Sophocles' *Antigone* perfectly embodied the fundamental
but as of yet unresolved ethical conflicts--between conscience and
law, the family and the state, and so on--which had arisen
implicitly in the intersubjective self-understanding of fifth-century
Athens. Hegel thinks it is no longer possible for an artwork to
perfectly express the tensions implicit in the self-understanding of
the age and thereby call for an historical people to envision a future
age in which those tensions would be resolved (because this role was
taken over by religion and then by philosophy as our historical
self-understanding grew increasingly complex). Heidegger,
however, continues to hope for even more, namely, an artwork that
*already* embodies the transition between this age and the next
and which is thus capable of helping to inaugurate that future age,
here and now.




In tacit opposition to Hegel, Heidegger thus suggests that
art's highest "[t]ruth is [not 'the certainty of the
absolute' but] the unconcealedness of entities as entities.
Truth is the truth of being" (PLT 81/GA5 69).
Heidegger's defining hope for art, in other words, is that works
of art could manifest and thereby help usher in a new understanding of
the being of entities, a literally "post-modern"
understanding of what it means for an entity to be, a postmodern
ontology which would no longer understand entities either as modern
objects to be controlled or as late-modern resources to be
 optimized.[28]
Heidegger
expresses this hope that separates him from Hegel in the form of a
question: "The truth of Hegel's judgment has not yet
been decided," he writes, because



> 
> 
> the question remains: Is art still an essential and a
> necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our
> historical existence, or is art this no longer? (PLT 80/GA5
> 68)




Heidegger's point is that Hegel will no longer be
right--the time of great art will no longer be at an end--if
contemporary humanity still needs an encounter with art in order to learn how
to understand the being of entities in a genuinely post-modern
 way, and if we still remain capable of such an
 encounter.[29]




As this suggests, the ultimate goal of Heidegger's thinking
about art is to show what it would mean to move from a modern aesthetic
experience of an art object to a genuinely post-modern encounter with a
work of art, so that we can thereby learn from art how to transcend
modernity from within. As Heidegger will later claim, when we
encounter a true work of art,



> 
> 
> the presencing [*Anwesen*] of that which appears to our
> look...is different than the standing of what stands-opposite [us]
> in the sense of an object. (PLT 82/GA5 71)




But what exactly is the difference between an aesthetic experience
of an art object and an encounter with the true
"presencing" of a work of art? And how is the
traversing of that difference in our engagement with a particular work
of art supposed to teach us to understand being in a post-modern
way? Part III explains Heidegger's fairly complex answers to
these difficult but momentous questions.


## 3. Heidegger for Art, Introduction: The Three Pillars of Heidegger's Understanding of Art




"The Origin of the Work of Art"--an essay Heidegger
delivered repeatedly between 1935 and 1936, rewriting and expanding it
into three lectures (which became the three main sections of the
published essay, to which Heidegger then added a brief
"Afterword" near the end of the 1930s and a slightly longer
"Addendum" in 1957)--is far and away the most
important source for understanding his attempt to articulate an
alternative to the aesthetic understanding of art, although several
other works (contemporaneous as well as later) also provide important
clues to his
 view.[30]
In the final version of this famous
essay, Heidegger meditates on three different works of art in
succession: A painting of "A Pair of Shoes" by
Vincent van Gogh; a poem entitled "The Roman Fountain" by
C. F. Meyer, and an unspecified Greek temple at Paestum (most likely
the temple to Hera). Leading Heidegger scholars such as Hubert
Dreyfus and Julian Young rely almost entirely on Heidegger's
interpretation of the ancient Greek temple in order to explicate his
"promethean" view of art's historically revolutionary
potential, its ability to focus and transform our sense of what is and
what matters (as we saw in section 1.1). Young (2001, p. 22) and
Dreyfus (2005, p. 409) suggest that Heidegger's interpretation of
Van Gogh is "anomalous" and "largely
irrelevant" to this view, despite the fame generated by the
longstanding controversy surrounding it (a controversy to which we will
return at the
 end).[31]
Like almost all other scholars,
moreover, Dreyfus and Young simply overlook Heidegger's
introduction of Meyer's poem--even as they recognize that
for Heidegger, like Plato, "poetry" names the very essence
of art (namely, *poiesis* or "bringing into
being"), hence Heidegger's claim that: "*All
art* [that is, all bringing-into-being] ... *is essentially
poetry*" (PLT 73/GA5 59). We thus have to wonder:
Is the only complete poem Heidegger included in the essay that advances
this view of poetry as the essence of art really of no
 significance?[32]




In my view, Heidegger's analysis of each of these three works
contributes something important to his overarching attempt to guide
readers into a phenomenological encounter with art that is capable of
helping us transcend modern aesthetics from within. To put it
simply, the temple motivates and helps develop the details of
Heidegger's larger project; the poem implicitly contextualizes
and explains it; and the painting (and only the painting) directly
exemplifies it. In order to see how, let us take these points in
order. Heidegger's imaginative reconstruction of the lost
temple helps motivate his quest for a non-aesthetic encounter with art,
but not (as is often said) because he seeks some nostalgic return to
the Greek world. Heidegger dismisses such a revival as an
impossibility because the ancient temple--just like the medieval
cathedral--no longer gathers its historical world around it and
thus no longer works as great art, and such "world-withdrawal and
world-decay can never be reversed" (PLT 41/GA5 26).
Instead, the Greek temple shows that art was once encountered in a way
other than as a subject's intense aesthetic experience of an
object, and thus suggests that, while those ancient and medieval worlds
have been lost irretrievably, other works of art might yet be
encountered non-aesthetically in our late-modern world. Heidegger
thus elaborates his philosophical vision of how the temple worked for a
time to unify a coherent and meaningful historical world around itself
(by inconspicuously focusing and illuminating its people's sense
of what is and what matters) in order to suggest that a non-aesthetic
encounter with art might yet do the same thing once again: A work
of art might yet help to gather a new historical world around itself by
focusing and illuminating an understanding of being that does not
reduce entities either to modern objects to be controlled or to
late-modern resources to be optimized.




While Heidegger's project is thus undeniably inspired by the
past, this inspiration serves his goal of helping us move historically
into the future. His guiding hope, we have seen, is that a
non-aesthetic encounter with a contemporary artwork will help us learn
to understand the being of entities not as modern objects
("subjectivism") or as late-modern resources
("enframing") but in a genuinely post-modern way, thereby
making another historical beginning. So, which work of art does
Heidegger think can help us late moderns learn to transcend modern
aesthetics from within and thereby discover a path leading beyond
modernity? There are only two viable candidates to fill this
crucial role in "The Origin of the Work of Art":
Meyer's poem and Van Gogh's
 painting.[33]




So, why does Heidegger give such pride of place to Meyer's
poem? The answer to this puzzle (which too few readers even
notice) is that the poem introduces the broader philosophical context
of Heidegger's project by conveying his emerging understanding of
*historicity*, the doctrine according to which our fundamental
sense of reality changes over
 time.[34]
The ontological "truth"
that Meyer's poem embodies--and "sets to work,"
in Heidegger's creative appropriation of the poem--is that
truth itself is essentially historical and, moreover, that this
essential history of truth forms three successive "epochs,"
in the same way that the "jet" of water fills the three
consecutive "basins" in Meyer's eponymous
 fountain.[35]
For
Heidegger, to put it more precisely, the relations Meyer's poem
describes between the fountain's original "jet" and
its three successive water basins illuminate the relations between
"being" itself (that is, as we will see, the inexhaustible
ontological source of historical intelligibility) and the three main
historical "epochs" or ages in Western humanity's
understanding of being (as Heidegger conceived of this "history
of being" in 1936), namely, ancient "Greece,"
"the middle ages," and "the modern age" (PLT
76-7/GA5
 64-5).[36]




Thus, for example, just as the original "jet" of water
"falls" into the fountain's successive basins, so the
"overflowing" ontological riches concealed in the ancient
world were first diminished in the medieval world. "The
Origin of the Work of Art" make the contentious case that this
ontological diminution "begins" when concepts central to
the ancient Greek understanding of being get translated into Latin
without a full experience of what those concepts originally revealed
(PLT 23/GA5 8). Hence the obvious appeal for Heidegger of
Meyer's suggestive line: "Veiling itself, this [first
basin] overflows / Into a second basin's ground" (PLT
37/GA5 23). What remained of these ontological
"riches" in the medieval world was then transposed into and
reduced further in the modern epoch which, like the fountain's
third basin, stands at the furthest remove from its original source.
It thus seems clear that Heidegger included Meyer's poem
because he believed it suggestively illuminated the way the history of
being unfolds as an epochal history of decline, a "fall" which
results from this history's increasing forgetting of the source
from which it ultimately springs--the *Ur-sprung* or
"origin" of Heidegger's essay's title--in
a word: "Being" (*Sein*), Heidegger's
famous name for the source from which all historical intelligibility
originates (by way of the disclosive "naming-into-being" which
Heidegger understands as the "poetic" essence of art, as we
will see in the next section). In other words, Heidegger uses
Meyer's poem to allude to the broader philosophical context that
helps explain and motivate the new historical beginning he hopes art
will help us inaugurate. Heidegger's use of this particular
poem suggests, moreover, that in order to accomplish this "other
beginning," Western humanity needs to learn to tap back into that
original, ontological source (the overflowing "jet" of
being), and that such a reconnection with the source of historical
intelligibility is something art can still teach us. (Although
interpreters also overlook this, the quiet presence of a homophonous
"third reich" in Meyer's poem reminds us of the
deeply-troubling dimension of Heidegger's thinking in the
mid-1930s, the fact that his philosophical hopes for the future were
for a brief time deeply entwined with his idiosyncratic understanding
of the direction that the burgeoning National Socialist
"revolution" might yet
 take.)[37]




While both the temple and the poem thus remain quite important, only
Van Gogh's painting directly exemplifies what Heidegger thinks it
means to encounter art in a way that allows us to transcend modern
aesthetics from within. This means that Heidegger's
interpretation of Van Gogh's painting, far from being irrelevant,
is actually the most important part of his essay. For, it is only
from Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of Van
Gogh's artwork that we late moderns can learn how to transcend
modern aesthetics from within, and thereby learn from art what it means
to encounter being in a post-modern way. Since we have already
summarized Heidegger's "promethean" view of the
historically-revolutionary work accomplished by the ancient Greek
temple (in section 1.1), we will expand on the point of his return to
Greece only briefly (in section 3.1), saying more about how this return
to the past is supposed to help lead us into the future. The rest
of what follows will be dedicated primarily to explaining
Heidegger's pivotal understanding of Van Gogh's
 painting.[38]
Our
ultimate objective will be to show how Heidegger's interpretation
of Van Gogh allows him to move phenomenologically from the analysis of
a particular, individual ("ontic") work of art to the
ontological structure of artwork in general. Along the way, we will
present the main details of the postmodern understanding of being that
Heidegger thinks we can learn from a non-aesthetic encounter with the
work of art (section 3.7). Once we understand the ordered
sequence of steps in the phenomenological interpretation whereby
Heidegger thinks we can transcend modern aesthetics from within,
moreover, we will finally be able to resolve the long-standing
controversy surrounding Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh
(as we will see in section 4).


### 3.1 Back to the Future: Heidegger on the Essence of Art




Heidegger's introduction of "a well-known painting by
Van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times" (PLT 33/GA5 18),
is notoriously abrupt and puzzling to many readers. The path that
leads Heidegger to Van Gogh's painting should not be too
surprising, however, because it is the same path we have been following
here. Looking back at "The Origin of the Work of Art"
two years later (in 1938), Heidegger will write that:



> 
> 
> The question of the origin of the work of art does not aim to set
> out a timelessly valid determination of the essence of artwork which
> could also serve as the guiding thread for an historically
> retrospective clarification of the history of art. The question
> is most intimately connected with the task of overcoming aesthetics,
> which also means overcoming a certain conception of entities as what
> are objectively representable. (CP 354/GA65
>  503)[39]




We have seen that because aesthetics tries to describe artworks as
objects that express and intensify human subjects' experiences of
life, the aesthetic approach begins "always already" too
late. Modern aesthetics presupposes the perspective of a subject
confronting an external object and thereby misses the way art works
inconspicuously in the background of human existence to shape and
transform our sense of what is and what matters.




Heidegger expands this critique to include
"representation" here because representations are what
modern philosophy typically uses to try to bridge the divide Descartes
opened between subjects and objects. (The objective world
allegedly "external" to subjectivity gets duplicated in
miniature, as it were, and "re-presented" to the
mind--as in the famous Cartesian picture of consciousness as an
internal "theater of representations.") Of course,
Heidegger does not deny that representations sometimes mediate our
experience of the world. What he denies is that representations
go "all the way down," that they plumb the depths of
existence. Instead, representations presuppose a level of
existence they cannot explain. Heidegger's fundamental
phenomenological critique of the modern theoretical picture is that it
overlooks and then cannot recapture the more basic level of engaged
existence, a practical coping with equipment in which no subject/object
dichotomy has yet opened up because self and world remain integrally
entwined and mutually
 determining.[40]
This primordial level of engaged
existence, we will see, is what Heidegger thinks Van Gogh's
painting allows us to encounter and understand in a way that no mere
aesthetic representation ever could. In so doing, Heidegger
thinks, Van Gogh's painting allows us to encounter the very
essence of art.




On the basis of passages like the one above, however, some
interpreters claim that "The Origin of the Work of Art"
does not seek to "uncover the essence of art," but that
is
 misleading.[41]
As Heidegger says, his essay does not
seek to set out one "timelessly valid determination" of the
essence of art which would apply retrospectively to the entire history
of art, but that is only because he does not understand essences the
way they have been understood from Plato to Kripke, namely, as
"timelessly valid determinations" of what something
 is.[42]
In fact,
"The Origin of the Work of Art" does attempt to uncover and
communicate art's historical "essence," by which
Heidegger means that structure which allows art to reveal itself in
different ways as it unfolds in the human understanding across
time. What is confusing for many readers is that this historical
essence of art is not some substance underlying the different forms of
art or even a fixed property that would enable us to distinguish art
from non-art but, instead, an insubstantial and ever-changing
"essential strife" that is built into the structure of all
intelligibility (the structure whereby entities become intelligible as
entities), as we will
 see.[43]




Rather than forcing Heidegger to develop an entire art history, the
normative demands of his critical project only require him to focus on
two crucial historical moments in Western humanity's changing
historical understanding of art--a kind of before and after, as it
were, which contrasts the fullness of what has been possible with the
narrowness of what is currently actual. Heidegger is thus
primarily concerned to show, first, how the ancient Greeks encountered
art in a non-aesthetic way (and so enshrined it in their temples), and
second, how art is typically understood and experienced by us late
moderns, who remain caught in the grip of modern aesthetics and so
under the influence of "modern subjectivism" (PLT 76/GA5
63). As subjectivism's unlimited ambition to establish
"mastery over the totality of what-is" (QCT 132/GA5 92)
works to objectify even modernity's vaunted subject, moreover, it
increasingly transforms modern subjectivism into late-modern
"enframing" (as we saw in 2.7).




In "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger suggests
that modern subjectivism and late-modern enframing can be understood as
symptoms of Western humanity's continuing inability to accept our
defining existential finitude. The limitless ambition of our
subjectivist quest to master all reality conceptually results from our
refusal to own up to, make peace with, and find non-nihilistic ways to
affirm the tragic truth Heidegger gleans from the ancients:



> 
> 
> Much of what is cannot be brought under the rule of humanity.
> Only a little becomes known. What is known remains approximate;
> what is mastered remains unstable. What-is is never something
> [entirely] man-made or even only a representation, as it can all too
> easily appear. (PLT 53/GA5 39)




Heidegger takes off here from the second choral ode in Sophocles'
*Antigone* (which he discussed at length in 1935's
*Introduction to Metaphysics*). For Sophocles'
Theban elders, the one thing humanity cannot master is death. For
Heidegger, thinking about death opens us up to the terrifyingly
"awesome" insight that the known rests on the unknown, the
mastered on the unmastered, like a small ship floating on a deep and
stormy "sea" (IM 159, 164/GA40 159,
 162).[44]
We like to believe that
humanity is well on its way to mastering the universe, but art teaches
us that we are far from having exhausted the possibilities inherent in
intelligibility.




Yet, rather than leading us into despair over our essential human
finitude (the fact that we will never master the totality of what-is),
art helps us learn to embrace this finitude by reminding us of its
other side, namely, the fact that intelligibility will never exhaust
its source. For, it remains possible for being to continue to
become newly intelligible only if it cannot ever become fully
intelligible. Art thus teaches us to embrace the insight that
meanings will never be exhausted as precisely what makes it possible
for us to continue to discover new meanings, and in this way art helps
us see that human finitude is not something we should despair over or
seek to deny though compensatory subjectivistic fantasies (of complete control or finally complete systems). Of
course, the claim that we should give up thinking we could ever know
everything does not entail that we should give up trying to know new
things--quite the contrary. If the heroic is what helps us
affirm and thereby transform the tragic (as the famous speech by
Sarpedon in Homer's *Iliad* suggests), then
Heidegger's thinking about art is heroic: Art teaches us to
embrace the initially tragic insight that being will never be
completely revealed in time as the very thing that makes it possible
for human beings to continue to understand what-is in new and
potentially more meaningful ways.




In sum, the point of Heidegger's juxtaposition of modern
spleen and ancient ideal is not to call for the impossible revival of
the lost Greek past but, rather, to help motivate a new, post-aesthetic
understanding of what art could still mean for us, now and in the
future. If, instead of trying to obtain a kind of cognitive
mastery over art through aesthetics--or using aesthetics to extend
our late-modern understanding of all that is as
intrinsically-meaningless resources standing by to be
optimized--we simply allow ourselves to experience what is
happening within a great work of art, then Heidegger thinks we will be
able to encounter the "essential strife" in which the true
work of art paradoxically "rests" and finds its
"repose." When we encounter the
"movement" that paradoxically rests in the masterful
"composure" of a great artwork, moreover, what we discover
therein is an "instability" that underlies the entire
intelligible order, an ontological tension (between revealing and
concealing, emerging and withdrawing) which can never be permanently
stabilized and thus remains even in what is
 "mastered."[45]
Indeed,
what is truly mastered artistically, Heidegger suggests, is what
somehow captures, preserves, and communicates this tension in the
structure of intelligibility, allowing us to encounter and understand
this essential tension in a way that helps us learn to transcend the
limits of our modern and late-modern ways of understanding what beings
are.


### 3.2 The Phenomenological Approach to Art




To encounter the paradoxical movement at rest within a great artwork
(the mysterious movement that, Hammermeister nicely suggests, enables
art to move us in turn), Heidegger believes we need only follow the
phenomenological dictum that we should "simply describe"
our experience of the work of art "without any philosophical
theory" (PLT 32/GA5
 18).[46]
The phenomenological approach to art
obliges us to



> 
> 
> restrain from all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in
> order to linger within the truth that is happening in the work.
> Only the restraint of this lingering allows what is created to first be
> the work that it is. (PLT 66/GA5
>  54)[47]




Yet, simply "to let a being be the way it is [*wie es
ist*]" turns out to be "the most difficult of
tasks" (PLT 31/GA5 16). For, insofar as the concepts we use
to make sense of our experience remain uninterrogated as to their own
built-in interpretive biases, we tend not even to notice when
inappropriate conceptual categories lead us to a distorted or
inadequate apprehension of the phenomenon at issue.




Phenomenology's ideal of pure description thus requires us to
struggle vigilantly against our usual tendency to force the square peg
of recalcitrant experience into the round hole of ready-made conceptual
categories. (For example, since metaphysics tells us that things
at rest cannot move, we are inclined to dismiss any inkling of movement
in an artwork as some sort of idiosyncratic, subjective projection on
our parts.) In order truly to be open to the way things show
themselves to us, then, we have "to keep at a distance all
preconceptions and interfering misconceptions" [*Vor- und
Ubergriffe*] of what things *are*. Rather
than giving us license simply to do what comes "naturally,"
following Husserl's famed phenomenological
dictum--"Back to the things
themselves!"--requires us to struggle to discern and
neutralize the usually unnoticed metaphysical presuppositions (such as
the modern assumption of a fundamental subject/object dichotomy) which,
although they remain "derivative" of more basic experiences
that they cannot explain, nevertheless continue to pass themselves off
as "self-evident" and so lead modern aesthetics off track
(PLT 31/GA5 16).




It is not a coincidence that Van Gogh's painting is the first
example of an actual work of art that Heidegger mentions in "The
Origin of the Work of Art," and the context is revealing.
Heidegger is introducing the concept of a "thing," a
seemingly obvious idea the complex history of which he then goes on to
explicate and deconstruct in detail (PLT 20-30/GA5 5-16), thereby
undermining its initial appearance of
 obviousness.[48]
By showing that none of the three
standard metaphysical conceptions of a thing (which conceive of a thing
variously as "the bearer of traits, as the unity of a sensory
manifold, and as formed matter" [PLT 30/GA5 15]) manages to
capture fully our sense of what things are, Heidegger is able to make
the crucial suggestion that there is something about a thing which
eludes all our attempts to capture and express it conceptually:



> 
> 
> The inconspicuous thing withdraws itself from thought most
> stubbornly. Or can it be that this self-refusal of the mere
> thing, this self-contained refusal to be pushed around, belongs
> precisely to the essential nature of things? (PLT 31-2/GA5
> 17)




By suggesting that an ineliminable elusiveness--an independence
from human designs--is in fact essential to what things are,
Heidegger is motivating his own concept of the "earth" as
what both informs and resists conceptualization. (Indeed, this
crucial insight that there is something essential to things that
resists human control seems to be what motivates Heidegger to make the
transition from talking about the "nothing" to discussing
the "earth," as we will see.) At the same time,
Heidegger is also illustrating the phenomenological dictum that our
common-sense view of things--although it appears
"natural" and "self-evident"--is often
freighted with unnoticed metaphysical presuppositions that can eclipse
and so prevent a full encounter with the phenomena we face. By
revealing the limitations of Western philosophy's metaphysical
conceptions of what "things" are, Heidegger gives a
concrete demonstration of his critical-phenomenological (and obviously
Nietzsche-influenced) view that: "What seems natural to us
is presumably just the familiarity of a long-established custom which
has forgotten the unfamiliarity from which it arose" (PLT 24/GA5
9).




The fact that Heidegger's first mention of Van Gogh is framed
by these two ways of undermining our usual sense of the obviousness of
things should lead us to suspect that he is introducing an ordinary
idea that he will subsequently use phenomenology to try to excavate
beneath and so go beyond. Once we recognize the context, it is not difficult to detect
the irony in Heidegger's initial suggestion that "artworks
are familiar to everyone" already since they populate our world
just like all the other objects "on hand":



> 
> 
> One [*Man*] finds works of architecture and sculpture erected
> in public places, in churches, and in private dwellings.
> ...Works are of course on hand [*vorhanden*, i.e.,
> objectively present] like any other thing. The picture hangs on
> the wall like a rifle or a hat. A painting, for example the one
> by Van Gogh that represents a pair of farmer's shoes, travels
> from one exhibit to another. Works are shipped like coal from the
> Ruhr and logs from the Black Forest. (PLT 19/GA5 3)




In fact, it is clear that for Heidegger the very obviousness of the
public knowledge that artworks are *objects* and that they
*represent* things conceals the more "original"
truths about art which he seeks to uncover in "The Origin of the
Work of
 Art."[49]




That the initial familiarity of the anonymous "everyone"
(*jedermann*) with art objects and representational paintings
turns out to be a superficial acquaintance that covers over the true
depths of the matter at issue should not be surprising. Almost a
decade earlier, when *Being and Time* famously sought to
disclose the ubiquitous and thus usually unnoticed ways in which the
anonymous "one [*das Man*] unfolds its true
dictatorship," Heidegger had already observed that "we
read, see, and judge literature and art the way *one* sees and
judges." So, for example, "everyone knows" that Da
Vinci's
 "Mona Lisa"
is a great work of art; we think we
"know" this even if the painting has never spoken to us at
all, or if we have only heard that "they say" the enigmatic
hint of a smile on her face is supposed to suggest the numinous
presence of God, or the wry smirk of a secret lover, or, more recently,
that the sublime elusiveness of her smile finally can be
"explained" by neuroscientific findings about the way our
brains process different spatial
 frequencies.[50]
Through this kind of
"leveling down" to a publicly-accessible, take-home
message,



> 
> 
> everything primordial gets glossed over as something long
> familiar. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something
> to be manipulated. Every mystery loses its power. (BT
> 164-5/SZ 126-7)




"The Origin [*Ursprung*] of the Work of Art"
suggests, conversely, that by struggling personally with the mysteries
at work in Van Gogh's painting of a "A Pair of
Shoes," we can gain an insight into art's most
"primordial" (or "original,"
*Ursprungliche*) level of truth.




Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to present the deepest truths
that emerge from the kind of personal struggle that existential
phenomenology demands without thereby inadvertently supplying the
public with another leveled-down formula to bandy about, a familiar
catchphrase (like "language is the house of being") that
quickly becomes a superficial substitute for the insight it
bespeaks. The problem, expressed metaphorically, is that
receiving a souvenir from someone else's journey makes a poor
substitute for taking that voyage for oneself. Heidegger's
recognition of this difficulty helps explain why he seeks to
*show* at least as much as to *say* what he takes to be
art's deepest truths in "The Origin of the Work of
Art." Indeed, the distinguishing mark of the later
Heidegger's "poetic" style comes from the fact that,
after *Being and Time*, he is no longer content simply to
construct arguments in relatively straightforward philosophical prose,
but also begins to try to lead his audience performatively to see the
phenomenon ultimately at issue for themselves. This is a large
part of what makes Heidegger's later works even more elusive and
challenging for contemporary philosophical readers than *Being and
 Time*.[51]
Nonetheless, by drawing on
Heidegger's early as well as his later works, we can clearly
understand the enduring philosophical challenge that his
phenomenological approach to art seeks to surmount.


### 3.3 The Phenomenological Difficulty Heidegger Introduces Van Gogh to Address




The basic problem, we have seen, is that the way works of art
function in the background of our everyday experience cannot be
adequately described in aesthetic terms (as a subject's
experience of an art object) because: (1) aesthetics presupposes
the subject/object dichotomy; (2) this subject/object dichotomy emerges
only at a secondary level of experience, when our primary, integral
engagement with the world of practical equipment breaks down; and (3)
secondary structures of experience like the subject/object dichotomy
cannot recapture the primordial level of our engagement with the world
(the level from which it originally derives), because any such
description of an external object "on hand" for a subject misses
precisely *what it is like* to encounter "equipment"
in a hands-on way. Objective descriptions of equipment bypass the
very "equipmentality of equipment [*Zeughaften des
Zeuges*]" (PLT 32/GA5 17)--as Heidegger still phrases
the point in "The Origin of the Work of Art"--because
such descriptions fail to notice, let alone capture, what it is like to
be integrally involved with equipment in engaged use. The
fundamental problem, then, is: How can such engaged use ever be
adequately described and communicated?




It is this difficult attempt to describe phenomenologically
"what equipment in truth is" (PLT 32/GA5 17)--that is,
to convey the way we encounter something when we are not aware of it as
an object at all but, instead, are completely immersed in our practical
engagement with it--that motivates Heidegger not just to mention
but genuinely to introduce Van Gogh's painting, which Heidegger
thus presents simply "as an example of a common sort of
equipment--a pair of farmer's shoes" (PLT 32/GA5
18). In Van Gogh's most famous painting of
 "A Pair of Shoes"
(1886), Heidegger believes we can
"discover what the equipmental being of equipment is in
truth" (PLT 33/GA5 18). In other words, Heidegger thinks
Van Gogh's painting reveals what it is like genuinely to
encounter a shoe in its use as a shoe. As he puts it:



> 
> 
> The farming woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are
> they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less
> the farming woman at work thinks about the shoes, or senses them at
> all, or is even aware of them. (PLT 33/GA5 18)




Heidegger thus introduces Van Gogh's painting of (what he
takes to be) a farmer's shoes in order "to facilitate the
visual realization" of "equipmentality," that
primordial modality of existence in which we are integrally involved
with our world and so encountering equipment in a non-thematic,
hands-on
 way.[52]




Yet, this is a deeply paradoxical move, as Heidegger himself
realizes, because Van Gogh's painting does not picture shoes
being used as equipment; it pictures shoes merely standing there like
objects in a still-life painting! We will thus remain caught in
an aesthetic experience, Heidegger acknowledges, "as long as we
simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they stand there in the
picture" (PLT 33/GA5 19). The deep puzzle here, then,
is: How is Van Gogh's picture of "empty, unused
shoes" standing there like objects supposed to help us uproot and
transcend the subject/object dichotomy lying at the heart of modern
aesthetics? How, to put the puzzle in Heidegger's terms, is
a picture supposed to help us find a way out of the age of the world
picture? How is our experience of a painting of a pair of shoes
standing there like objects supposed to lead us back to a pre-objective
encounter with "equipmentality"? How, in other words,
can aesthetics transcend itself from within?




Here Heidegger has set up a genuine aporia--or better, an
*Holzweg*, a "forest path" or, more colloquially,
"a path to nowhere." It is not a coincidence that
*Holzwege* is the title Heidegger gave to the book of essays
that opens with "The Origin of the Work of Art." As
Heidegger hints (in the otherwise empty page he had inserted into the
book, before its first page), an *Holzweg* is a path through the
woods made by foresters (and known to backwoods hikers as well as
locals who follow these paths to gather their own firewood, as
Heidegger himself did). Such a path eventually comes to an
apparent dead-end, but this dead-end--seen differently--turns
out to be a "clearing" (or *Lichtung*), that is, a
place from which the trees have been removed which thus offers an
unexpected vista, an epiphany that, although it results only from
walking a particular path for oneself, nevertheless seems to come from
out of the middle of nowhere. For Heidegger, moreover, the
encounter with a "clearing" in a forest from which all the
trees have been removed--that is, an encounter with
*nothing*, initially--makes it possible for us to notice
the light through which we ordinarily see the forest. In his
terms, a clearing redirects our attention from entities to being, that
usually unnoticed ontological light through which things
ordinarily appear. Seeing differently, Heidegger thus suggests,
can turn an apparent dead-end into the occasion for an ontological
epiphany.


### 3.4 Seeing Differently: From the Noth-ing of the Nothing to the Essential Strife of Earth and World




With this crucial idea of seeing differently in mind, notice a
related aporia that appears a bit earlier in Heidegger's
text. While developing his phenomenological critique of the way
the modern conception of what "things" *are*
implicitly structures and so distorts the aesthetic understanding of
art, Heidegger observes that once this "subject-object relation
is coupled with the conceptual pair form-matter," and this
conceptual matrix is combined with the
"rational/irrational" and "logical/illogical"
dichotomies,



> 
> 
> then representation has at its command a conceptual machinery which
> nothing can stand against [*eine Begriffsmechanik, der nichts
> widerstehen kann*]. (PLT 27/GA5 12)




Heidegger seems to mean us to take his words seriously:
Aesthetic representation now possesses "a conceptual machinery
which nothing can stand against." Taken seriously, however,
these words leave no room for Heidegger's hope of transcending
aesthetics. We reach a dead-end, that is, until we hear these
words differently, as suggesting instead that (the) nothing can indeed
stand against the otherwise irresistible conceptual machinery of
aesthetics.




That might sound bizarre at first, but remember that, for Heidegger,
the nothing is not nothing at all but, rather, does something;
"the nothing itself noths or nihilates [*das Nichts selbst
nichtet*]" [P 90/GA9 114], as he notoriously put it
in
 1929.[53]
This active "noth-ing" of the nothing was the first name
Heidegger came up with to describe the phenomenological manifestation
of that which both elicits and eludes complete conceptualization, an
initially inchoate phenomenon we encounter when we go beyond our
guiding conception of what-is. To experience this
"noth-ing" is to become attuned to something which is not a
thing (hence "nothing") but which conditions all our
experiences of things, something which fundamentally informs our worlds
but which we experience primarily as what escapes and so defies our
"subjectivistic" impulse to extend our conceptual mastery
over everything. With the help of Heidegger's strange
thought that only this "nothing" can stand against the
conceptual machinery of aesthetics, we are now poised to understand his
phenomenological interpretation of Van Gogh's painting.




To turn a dead-end into a clearing one has to see it
differently. Notice how Heidegger looks at Van Gogh's
still-life painting of a seemingly ordinary pair of well-worn
shoes. The pivotal point in Heidegger's meditation takes
place when he attends to the fact that "[t]here is nothing
surrounding this pair of farmer's shoes" (PLT
33/GA5
 18-9).[54]
Although all the English translations obscure this (and no other
interpreters seem to notice it), it is clear that for Heidegger this
nothing is not nothing at all. Heidegger literally
says:



> 
> 
> Surrounding this pair of farmer's shoes there is nothing, in
> which and to which they can belong... [*Um dieses Paar
> Bauernschuhe herum ist nichts, wozu und wohin sie gehoren
> konnten...*] (PLT 33/GA5 18-9)




Heidegger thrice introduces Van Gogh's painting of "A
Pair of Shoes" by employing the word "nothing" in
precisely this ambiguous way; as we will see, this is how he begins
every extended discussion of Van Gogh's painting. The
crucial phenomenological question, then, is: What would it mean
to really see this "nothing," to encounter it not as
nothing at all but, quite differently, as that "in which and to
which" the shoes can indeed
 belong?[55]




If, following Heidegger, one attends long enough to the
"nothing surrounding this pair of farmer's shoes,"
meditating (with sufficient patience and
 care)[56]
on "the undefined
space" (PLT 33/GA5 19) in Van Gogh's
 painting--the strange space which surrounds these shoes like an underlying and yet also enveloping atmosphere--one
can notice that inchoate
forms begin to emerge from the background but never quite take a firm
shape; in fact, these shapes tend to disappear when one tries to pin
them
 down.[57]
The background of the painting not only
inconspicuously supports the foreground image of the shoes but, when we
turn our attention to this ordinarily inconspicuous background, we can
notice that it continues to offer up other inchoate shapes which resist
being firmly gestalted themselves. This intriguing phenomenon is
more obvious in some of Van Gogh's other paintings; that Van Gogh
seems to have embedded his own hat-wearing visage into the sole light
that illuminates his famous
 "Cafe Terrace at Night"
is perhaps easiest to see. It is clear that
"Vincent recognized that something important happened in the old
shoes painting, for he went on to experiment several times with the
theme" (Edwards 2004, p. 51), and if one studies another of Van
Gogh's paintings of
 "A Pair of Shoes"
(this one from the following year, 1887), it
seems hard to miss the faces half-emerging from the background in the
upper-right corner of the painting, or the Christ-like figure in the
upper-left.[58]





Heidegger later described this phenomenon as "the tension of
emerging and not emerging," and it is central to his remarks on
the painting of Cezanne and
 Klee.[59]
As Young nicely shows,
Heidegger especially admired Klee's later works, such as
"Saint from a Window" (1940), in which the eponymous image
in the foreground barely manages to emerge from the muted cacophony of
other images half-suggesting themselves from the
 background.[60]
Here the
tension between emerging and withdrawing is almost as palpable as the
central figure, which seems to be disappearing back into the subtly
dynamic background from which other figures continue to suggest
themselves. In a note he made beneath a sketch of Klee's
"Saint from a Window," Heidegger asks: "If one
erases the 'image'-character [from a picture], what [is
left] to 'see'?" He answers in another note by
quoting Klee himself: "The inner structure organizing the
picture itself thus begins to come to the fore--and come toward
truth, *coute que coute* [whatever
the
 cost]."[61]
For Heidegger, to put it simply,
Klee's late paintings preserve the phenomenological struggle of
emerging and withdrawing, and so bring the usually inconspicuous
tension between foreground and background itself to the fore, thereby
offering us a glimpse of the underlying structure hidden within all
art. This phenomenological "tension of emerging and not
emerging" that Heidegger finds in Klee and Cezanne,
however, he first discovered in Van Gogh's painting of "A
Pair of Shoes," specifically, in the way Van Gogh's
painting manifests what "The Origin of the Work of Art"
famously calls "the essential strife" between "earth
and world" (PLT 49/GA5 35).




We can encounter this phenomenological "strife" for
ourselves if we can recognize the way in which what initially seems
like "nothing" in the background of Van Gogh's
painting continues to tantalizingly offer itself to our understanding
while also receding from our attempts to order what it offers us into
any firm, settled meaning. Thus, when Heidegger defines the
phenomenon of "earth" as "the essentially
self-secluding" (PLT 47/GA5 33), he quickly qualifies this
definition by specifying that:



> 
> 
> The self-seclusion of earth is not a uniform, inflexible staying
> under cover; rather, it unfolds itself in an inexhaustible abundance of
> simple modes and shapes [*eine unerschopfliche*
> *Fulle einfacher Weisen und Gestalten*]. (PLT 47/GA5
> 34)




"Earth," in other words, is an inherently dynamic
dimension of intelligibility that simultaneously offers itself to and
resists being fully brought into the light of our "worlds"
of meaning and permanently stabilized therein, despite our best
efforts. These very efforts to bring the earth's
"inexhaustible abundance of simple modes and shapes"
completely into the light of our worlds generates what Heidegger calls
the "essential strife" between "earth" and
"world":



> 
> 
> The world grounds itself on the earth and the earth juts through the
> world. ...The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to
> raise the earth completely [into the light]. As self-opening, the
> world cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as
> sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself
> and keep it there. (PLT 49/GA5 35)




In Heidegger's view, then, for a great artwork to
*work*--that is, for it to help focus and preserve a
meaningful "world" for an
 audience[62]--this
artwork must
maintain an essential tension between the *world* of meanings it
pulls together and the more mysterious phenomenon of the
"earth." *Earth*, in his analysis, both
informs and sustains this meaningful world and also resists being
interpretively exhausted by it, thereby allowing a great artwork
quietly to maintain the sanctity of the inexhaustible within the very
world of meanings it conveys.




Like that notorious "nothing" which (Heidegger wrote in
1929) "makes possible the manifestation of entities as such for
human existence [or 'being-here,' *Dasein*]"
(P 91/GA9 115), the "earth" is thus Heidegger's name
in 1935-36 for what he most frequently calls "being as
such," a dynamic phenomenological "presencing"
(*Anwesen*) which gives rise to our worlds of meaning without
ever being exhausted by them, a dimension of intelligibility we
experience both as it informs and as it escapes our attempts to pin
it
 down.[63]
What this suggests, then, is that by 1935 Heidegger had become
dissatisfied with his broadly misunderstood "nothing noths"
terminology, and so seeks here to redescribe and more carefully elaborate
the mysterious phenomenon he had called the "noth-ing" six
years earlier as the "essentially self-secluding earth,"
the self-seclusion of which becomes palpable in its resistance to our
best efforts to bring the phenomenon fully into the light of our
worlds. We can even observe this refining redescription taking
place in Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh.


### 3.5 From the Phenomenology of Van Gogh's Painting to the Ontology of Art




Heidegger's most famous presentation of Van Gogh's
painting pivots again on an ambiguous use of "nothing," to
which Heidegger now adds an elliptical, intimating locution ("And
yet...") in order to encourage his audience to hear a subtle
shift and so notice the meaning suggested by his otherwise superfluous
addition, "and nothing more." Heidegger's use
of this ambiguous locution ("and nothing more") was a
well-established rhetorical trope for him by 1935; it was his preferred
method for introducing the idea of that "nothing" we
encounter when we move beyond the totality of entities toward that
which makes it possible to encounter these entities the way we
do. Heidegger had established the pattern in 1929's
"What Is Metaphysics?" by deliberately employing just such
ambiguous locutions seven times in a row, referring to "the
entity itself--and nothing besides [*und sonst
nichts*]," "the entity itself--and nothing further
[*und weiter nichts*]," "the entity itself--and
beyond that, nothing," etc., and then driving the point home with
the rhetorical question: "Is this only a manner of
speaking--and nothing besides?" (P 84/GA9 105)




Seen in this light, the fact that Heidegger repeats the same
rhetorical strategy when he introduces Van Gogh's painting
becomes unmistakable:



> 
> 
>  A pair of farmer's shoes and nothing more. And yet.
> [*Ein Paar Bauernschuhe und nichts weiter. Und dennoch.*]
> 
> 
> 
> 
> From out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the
> toilsome tread of the worker stares forth... The shoes
> vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the
> ripening grain [i.e., "earth" makes "world"
> possible by inconspicuously *giving* itself to the world] and
> the earth's unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of
> the wintry field [i.e., it is also constitutive of earth that it
> *resists* this world by receding back into itself]. (PLT
> 33-4/GA5 19)
> 
> 
> 




As the editorial insertions suggest, the point of Heidegger's
phenomenological interpretation of Van Gogh's painting of the
shoes is not to engage in an armchair anthropology of farming but,
rather, to suggest that attending to the "nothing" in Van
Gogh's painting reveals the deepest level of "truth"
at work in art, namely, the essential tension in which the
phenomenologically abundant "earth" simultaneously makes
possible and also resists being finally mastered or fully expressed
within the "world."




When attending to the mysterious nothing allows us to recognize the
dynamic tension between "earth" and "world"
preserved in Van Gogh's painting, then we have thereby
encountered what is for Heidegger the inner tension at the heart of
art, a tension which not only drives art and keeps it alive but also
allows humanity's understanding of being to unfold
historically. "Art" in this essential
sense--which Heidegger also calls "poetry" or
*poiesis*, that is, *bringing into being*--can be
understood as an unending creative struggle to express that which
conditions and informs our worlds of meaning and yet resists being
exhaustively articulated in the terms of these
 worlds.[64]
The conflict preserved
in Van Gogh's painting--between emerging into the light and
receding into the darkness, revealing and withdrawing, "emerging
and not emerging"--is thus for Heidegger the basic structure
of intelligibility as it takes place in time.




Heidegger's description of this essential conflict between
earth and world should be understood as his attempt to elaborate
phenomenologically his enduring ontological understanding of truth as
the inherently agonistic manifestation of *a-letheia*,
that is, "truth" conceived ontologically as
historically-variable "un-concealment" or
"dis-closure." It is, we could say, the
*hyphen* in *a-letheia*--the joining together,
literally "under one" (*hypo* + *hen*), of
revealing and concealing--that Heidegger develops as the essential
strife between world and
 earth.[65]
With world and earth, in other words,
Heidegger seeks to name and so render visible the quietly conflictual
structure at the heart of intelligibility, the unified opposition that
allows "being" to be "dis-closed" in
time. Since *Being and Time* at least, Heidegger had
insisted on the "equiprimordiality" or
"co-originality" (*Gleichursprunglichkeit*) of
"truth" and "untruth" (BT 265/SZ 222), building
on Husserl's phenomenological axiom that the emergence of one
thing or aspect of a thing into intelligibility requires the concealing
of another. (Taken to its extreme, this axiom allows Heidegger to
suggest that the totality of what-is stands in the place of and so
conceals the "nothing" from which it
 emerges.)[66]
For
Heidegger, the fact that there can be no revealing without concealing
(and vice versa) is a necessary feature not just of perception or
cognition but of intelligibility in
 general.[67]





The truth disclosed by Van Gogh's particular
("ontic") work of art is thus *ontological*.
That is, the tension between emerging and withdrawing that is visible
in Van Gogh's painting implicitly conditions all artistic
creation, which (we have seen) means all bringing-into-being, that is,
all historical intelligibility. Heidegger thus goes so far as to
claim that:



> 
> 
> The world is the self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the
> simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical
> people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is
> continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and
> concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one
> another and yet are never separated... The work-being of the
> work consists in the fighting of the battle [*der Bestreitung des
> Streites*] between world and earth. (PLT 49/GA5 35-6)




As "earth," in other words, intelligibility
tantalizingly offers previously unglimpsed aspects of itself to our
understanding and yet also withdraws from our attempts to order those
aspects into a single fixed meaning. As "world," we
struggle nevertheless to force a stable ordering onto this
inexhaustible phenomenological abundance, however temporarily. In
this way, "earth" both supports and resists
"world," tantalizingly eliciting, always informing,
and yet also partly escaping all our attempts to finally stabilize our
intelligible worlds, to assign a firm shape to things once and for
all.




The "essential strife" of this *a-letheiac*
struggle between concealing and revealing, earth and world, is
precisely what Heidegger thinks Van Gogh renders visible in his
painting of "A Pair of
 Shoes."[68]
What we can thus learn
from a work of art like Van Gogh's painting--in which this
usually inconspicuous tension is masterfully preserved and
conveyed--is that our intelligible worlds are shaped by what we
take from and make of a dynamic phenomenological abundance that we can
never fully grasp or finally
 master.[69]
By partly informing and yet always also
partly eluding our attempts to order those aspects the earth offers to
our understanding into a single, final historical "world,"
the abundant earth preserves itself for future orderings, for worlds
still yet to be
 disclosed.[70]


### 3.6 Representing Nothing: Transcending Aesthetic Subjectivism from Within




For Heidegger, then, the essential tension between
"world" and "earth"--the dynamic
back-and-forth whereby some things (or aspects of things) cannot emerge
into the light of our intelligible worlds without others withdrawing
into the background (which means that it is impossible for everything to take place
in intelligibility all at once)--names the basic conflict in the
structure of intelligibility, a conflict which is ultimately
 responsible for the historical unfolding of what
 *is*.[71]
Once we
realize this, we can see that Heidegger's only other major
reference to Van Gogh's painting (in 1935's *The
Introduction to Metaphysics*) again follows the same basic sequence
of phenomenological steps. This important passage turns once more
on the double meaning of (the) "nothing" (which Heidegger
again seeks to suggest with the subtly ambiguous locution,
"nothing else"):



> 
> 
> A painting by Van Gogh: a pair of tough farmer's shoes,
> nothing else [*sonst nichts*]. The picture really
> represents nothing [*Das Bild stellt eigentlich nichts
> dar*]. Yet, what *is* there, with that you are
> immediately alone, as if on a late autumn evening, when the last potato
> fires have burned out, you yourself were heading wearily home from the
> field with your hoe. (IM 37-8/GA40 38)




Readers often take Heidegger's deliberately provocative claim
that "[t]he picture really represents nothing" as a
flat-footed assertion that Van Gogh's painting does not
represent
 shoes.[72]
But that obscures Heidegger's deeper point and, in fact, would
make no more sense than if, beneath
 "The Treason of Images"
(1929)--Magritte's realistic
representation of a pipe against a blank background-- Magritte had painted not the famous words, "This is not a pipe [*Ceci
n'est pas une pipe*]" but
instead: "This is not
a *representation* of a pipe." For, Magritte's
most obvious point is that a representation of a pipe (be it pictorial
or linguistic) is not itself a pipe. The surreal effect of
"The Treason of Images" comes from the way it encourages
viewers to confront the usually unnoticed distance between
representations and the things they represent. "This is not
a pipe" calls the very obviousness of representation into
question, and so points toward the mysteries concealed beneath the
system of representation we usually take for
 granted.[73]




The effect of Heidegger's provocative claim about Van
Gogh's painting of "A Pair of Shoes" is
similar. When Heidegger states that "[t]he picture really
represents nothing," he is not advancing the bizarre claim that
Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes does not represent
shoes. The fact that Van Gogh's painting represents shoes
is the first thing anyone notices about it and it is also (as we have
seen) the first thing Heidegger himself mentioned about it: Van
Gogh's picture "represents [*darstellt*] a pair of
farmer's shoes" (PLT 19/GA5 3). Heidegger is not
retracting that claim but, instead, building upon it, suggesting that
Van Gogh's painting does more than just represent a pair of
shoes: Van Gogh's painting "really, properly, or
authentically" (*eigentlich*) represents (the)
nothing. Indeed, it represents (the) nothing in a way that
ultimately allows us to transcend aesthetic representation from
within--by getting us back in touch with a more basic level of
human existence which the order of objective representations
presupposes but cannot fully
 recapture.[74]




The suggestively ambiguous phrase, "nothing out of the
ordinary," might make a good title for Heidegger's attempt
to show how the mysterious "nothing" emerges from Van
Gogh's painting of a seemingly ordinary pair of shoes. For
Heidegger, it is not that the person who broke in these empty shoes,
although absent from the painting, nevertheless remains present there
in his or her very absence. It is true, as Edwards (2004, p. 54)
suggests, that the palpable presence of the missing person whose feet
shaped the shoes that Van Gogh painted quite naturally leads those who
study the painting carefully to wonder, *Whose* *shoes*
were these originally? And that question, in turn, helps fuel the
controversy that still surrounds Heidegger's interpretation of
the painting (see section 4). For Heidegger, however, the
"nothing" that is visible in Van Gogh's painting is
not the haunting presence of these shoes' absent owner but,
instead, the equally paradoxical (and no less phenomenologically
discernible) appearance of that which is neither an entity nor merely
nothing at all and yet conditions our experience of all
entities. We can encounter this active nothing phenomenologically as we learn to be receptive to the textural hints of that which is not yet a thing and yet offers itself, in the suggestive hints of a "outline" or "rift-structure", beckoning to be gestated and so brought into being by our disclosive capacities.




What Heidegger finally wants to suggest, then, is not just that
the nothing emerges from the ordinary (that the nothing makes itself
visible in Van Gogh's painting of an ordinary pair of shoes) but
also the reverse, that what we now think of as "ordinary"
first originated out of the "nothing," through the
essential struggle between earth and world. For, in
Heidegger's view, initially extraordinary creations, once brought
into being, eventually become stabilized in intelligibility and so
perceived as merely "ordinary" (in much the same way that
what begins as a revealing poetic insight is eventually routinized into
a worn-out
 cliche).[75]
As he thus puts it:



> 
> 
> Does truth, then, originate out of nothing? In fact it does,
> if by "nothing" we mean no more than that which is not a
> being, and if "a being" represents that which is
> objectively on hand [*Vorhandene*] in the normal way--a
> [way of conceiving] "being," the merely putative truth of
> which comes to light and thereby becomes shattered by the
> standing-there of the work. (PLT 71/GA5 59)




In other words, the encounter with the nothing in the work of art
"shatters" the taken-for-granted obviousness of the modern
theoretical framework in which subjects seek to master external
objects, a framework implicit in the basic aesthetic view according to
which subjects undergo intensive experiences of art objects. The
phenomenological encounter with Van Gogh's painting undermines
the obviousness of the modern worldview by returning us directly to the
primordial level of engaged existence in which subject and object have
not yet been differentiated. Indeed, Heidegger thinks that
aesthetics transcends itself from within in the encounter with Van
Gogh's painting because this encounter with the work of art
brings us back to this engaged level of existence in a particularly
lucid and revealing way. This lucid encounter, moreover, is
supposed to help us transform our guiding sense of what beings are,
leading us beyond both the modern and late-modern understandings of
being as objects to be mastered and resources to be optimized.
But how exactly?




Heidegger thinks we can transcend modern aesthetics from within if,
in what begins as an ordinary aesthetic experience of an
object--Van Gogh's painting of a pair of shoes--that
stands opposite us (as if external to our own subjectivity), we notice
and carefully attend to the way these shoes take shape on and against
an inconspicuously dynamic background (the "noth-ing"
rethought as "earth"), a background which is not nothing at
all but, rather, both supports and exceeds the intelligible world that
emerges from
 it.[76]
Our experience of an aesthetic object
transcends itself here because, in order to encounter Van Gogh's
artwork in its full phenomenological richness (by recognizing the
struggle between "earth and world" that is preserved in the
painting), we can no longer approach the meaning of this work as if
this meaning were entirely contained within an external object standing
apart from us. Our phenomenological encounter with Van
Gogh's painting shows us that its meaning is neither located
entirely in the object standing over against us nor is it simply
projected by our subjectivity onto an inherently meaningless work; the
work's meaning must instead be inconspicuously accomplished in
our own engagement with the work. Through our engagement with Van
Gogh's painting, Heidegger suggests, we lucidly encounter the
negotiation by which we are always-already making sense of the
world.




It is crucial for Heidegger that we not reinterpret this encounter
as a subject's selective cognitive and perceptual uptake of an
objective world. What we encounter in art is something more
deeply rooted in existence which the modern subject/object dichotomy
skates right over. Our encounter with the work teaches us that
that meaning does not happen solely in the art object or the viewing
subject but instead takes place, we could say, *between* us and
the work. This, again, is an *ontological* truth; it holds
true of (human) existence in general. To be *Dasein* is to
be "the being of the '*between'*" (HCT
251/GA20 346-7), as Heidegger first put it in 1925.
This means that our encounter with Van Gogh's painting helps us
to realize and so *become what we are*. For, what we
lucidly encounter in art is our making-sense of the place in which we
find ourselves, a fundamental "world-disclosing" that is
always already at work in human "existence," our
standing-out into intelligibility. For Heidegger, Van
Gogh's painting allows us to lucidly encounter what we already
are, most fundamentally, but without realizing it--namely,
*Dasein*, "being-here," the active making
intelligible of the place in which we find ourselves. Art teaches
us to become what we already are by allowing us lucidly to undergo the
transition from understanding and experiencing ourselves as
meaning-bestowing subjects standing over against an objective world to
recognizing that, at a deeper level, we are always implicitly
participating in the making-intelligible of our
 worlds.[77]


### 3.7 Heidegger's Post-Modern Understanding of Art




This implicit struggle whereby being becomes intelligible in time,
we have seen, is the very essence of art, the "poetic"
heart of creation responsible for both providing and renewing our sense
of what-is. As Heidegger puts it:



> 
> 
> everything with which humanity is endowed must, in the [poetic]
> projection [that "brings-into-being" or makes things newly
> intelligible], be drawn up from out of the closed ground [i.e., from
> the "earth" understood as the untapped possibilities still
> concealed within the tradition] and set upon this ground.
> (PLT 75-6/GA5 63)




Humanity's ontological "endowment" (our sense of
what entities are) comes from the poetic
"naming-into-being" (or making intelligible) at the heart
of art. Moreover, Heidegger adds (showing that he was indeed a
conservative revolutionary, in 1936 at least), Western humanity's
sense of being can only be changed historically through the creative
discovery of possibilities hidden within the tradition that has come
down to us. Only by discovering the tradition's hidden
heritage can we hope to reshape our communal sense of what is and what
matters, thereby redrawing the basic contours of this tradition and so
creating new possibilities for human understanding and action. In
this way, for Heidegger, art remains capable of redrawing the lines
that establish our basic sense of what-is and what matters.




For art to accomplish this revolutionary task, however, the artist
must be able to see something beginning to take shape where others see
nothing at all. All great creators must be able to discern the
inchoate contours of something previously unseen and, as if thus
playing midwife to being, help draw it into the light of the
world.



> 
> 
> Because it is such a drawing, all creation is a drawing-up (like
> drawing water from a well). Modern subjectivism, of course,
> misinterprets creation as the product of the genius of the
> self-sovereign subject [and so imagines that a genius creates *ex
> nihilo*, by simply projecting his or her subjectivity onto an
> otherwise meaningless world]. ...The poeticizing projection comes
> out of nothing in the sense that it never derives its gift from what is
> familiar and already there. But in another sense it does not come
> out of nothing; for what it projects is only the withheld determination
> of historical existence [*Dasein*] itself. (PLT 76/GA5
> 63-4)




As this suggests, at the very core of Heidegger's
understanding of art is an encounter with a "nothing" that
is not simply nothing at all but, rather, designates possible meanings
still concealed within the tradition, which preserves historical
intelligibility as it has come down to us. The inchoate contours
of that which is not yet a thing need to be drawn out in an original
way in order to release the possibilities inherent in the tradition and
so create or renew humanity's ontological inheritance for the
future. In other words, artistic creation requires the exercise
of an active receptivity we might call *ontological*
*response-ability*, that is, an ability to respond to the
inchoate ways in which being offers itself to intelligibility.
For, only such an ability will prove capable (in Heidegger's
terms) of bringing that which was hidden in the "noth-ing"
(or still slumbering in the "earth") into the light of our
historical worlds.




To participate in such creation, the artist needs to be receptive to
what "The Origin of the Work of Art" calls the
"rift-design" or "fissure" (*Riss*)
that joins the world to the earth. By "creatively"
and selectively responding to the abundance of ways in which being
genuinely offers itself to us, the artist establishes one of these
possibilities, bringing it into the light of day for the first time,
just as Michelangelo legendarily spent weeks carefully studying the
subtle network of veins and fissures running through that famous piece
of marble before he could set his "David" free from the
stone. This is not to say that David was the only possible form
slumbering in that particular piece of marble; the rifts and fissures
running through it might have been taken up by the artist and
creatively gestalted in other ways, thereby giving birth to other, more
or less different
 sculptures.[78]
In any such case, however, "the
establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such
as never was before and will never come to be again" (PLT 62/GA5
50). In artistic creation, the artist responds to what offers itself,
creatively discerning and helping to realize the outlines of a new
world in the manifold possibilities offered up by the
 earth.[79]
 As Heidegger puts it:



> 
> 
> There certainly lies hidden in nature a rift-design, a measure and
> border, and, tied to it, a capacity for bringing-forth--that is,
> art. But it is equally certain that this art hidden in nature
> becomes manifest only through the work, because it is lodged
> originarily in the work. (PLT 70/GA5 58)




In Heidegger's view, then, all great artists learn to
recognize and respond to the complex texture of edges, lines, and
breaks which together constitute an open-ended "basic
design" or "outline sketch" (PLT 63/GA5 51), which
the artist then creatively gestalts in order to bring at least one of
the "inexhaustible" shapes still hidden in the earth into
the light of the world.




To gestalt the hints nature offers us in one way is necessarily not
to gestalt them in another, but Heidegger thinks that Van Gogh's
painting of the shoes preserves the hints of other possible gestalts in
its quietly dynamic tension between what clearly takes shape in the
foreground and what recedes into the background. For, in Van
Gogh's painting, what recedes into the phenomenological
background does so in such a way that, rather than completely
disappearing behind the foreground image, it continues to manifest a
complex texture of rifts and fissures that suggest the possibility of
other gestalts, new ways of drawing out what simultaneously offers
itself to and withdraws from our grasp, even ones that challenge the
habitual ways in which we have come to see things (as an ordinary pair
of shoes, for example). As Heidegger thus puts it, a truly great
artistic "beginning...always contains the undisclosed
abundance of the unfamiliar and extraordinary, which means that it
also contains the strife with the familiar and the ordinary" (PLT
76/GA5 64).




Heidegger's view that the hints intelligibility offers us can
be gestalted in more than one way makes him an *ontological*
*pluralist* (or *plural realist*), but he does not
believe that just anything goes. As his thoughts on the
"rift-structure" permeating intelligibility suggest,
Heidegger firmly believes that there is a coming into being in nature
itself which the bringing into being through art should serve.
This means that there must be limits on what the artist can creatively
impose that arise from the matter itself. The
"abundant" dimension of intelligibility Heidegger calls
"earth" has to genuinely resist the artist's creative
efforts to bring it into the light of the world at some point (or
points), or else art would just be a frictionless subjective projection
or hallucination (or even a deeper ontological destructiveness
masquerading as creativity), rather than an ontologically-maieutic
gestalting that finds a genuinely creative way to be grounded in and
truly responsive to the ways things show themselves. The
importance of acknowledging that there is always something in
intelligibility that resists our merely subjective designs (and not
Carnap's famous critique) seems to be the main reason Heidegger
stopped talking about the "nothing" and began referring to
the "earth." All genuine creativity, all
bringing-into-being, must learn to recognize and respect (what we could
think of as) the texture of the text with which it works. This
mean that all artists--indeed, all those who would
bring-into-being in a meaningful way, whatever media they work
with--must learn to draw creatively upon an elusive and excessive dimension of being
that cannot be entirely appropriated, finally mastered, or
definitively manipulated.[80]




Heidegger thus implicitly contrasts two drastically different ways
of comporting ourselves toward that which shows itself to
us--namely, the active receptivity of a genuinely
"post-modern" responsiveness to the phenomenological
"abundance" of being, on the one hand, and, on the other,
the endless domination of modern subjectivism (which treats everything
as an object to be mastered) or, even worse, the obtuse reductiveness
of late-modern enframing (which understands and so relates to
everything as an intrinsically-meaningless resource to be
optimized). Perhaps the easiest way to understand the difference
between the poetic and technological modes of revealing Heidegger
contrasts is to think in terms of the ancient Greek distinction between
*poiesis* and *techne*. Simply think, first,
of a poetic midwifery that respects and seeks to draw out the natural
potentialities of the matters with which it works, as Michelangelo
legendarily *freed* his "David" from the
marble or, less hyperbolically put, as a skillful woodworker notices
the inherent qualities of particular pieces of wood (attending to
subtleties of shape and grain, shades of color, weight, and hardness),
while deciding what (or even whether) to build from that wood. In
the same way, Heidegger contends, "[t]he authentic interpretation
must show what does not stand there in the words and yet is said
nevertheless" (IM 173/GA40 171). For Heidegger, as this
suggests, an "authentic" hermeneutics must work creatively
to bring forth the hidden riches of a text in the same way that a true
woodworker learns to "answer and respond above all to the
different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within
wood--to wood as it enters into human dwelling with all the hidden
riches of its nature" (WCT 14/GA8 17). Our creative yet responsive disclosure of such hermeneutic possibilities is what Heidegger calls "preservation," because it works to keep the world opened by the work alive historically as a way of seeing and understanding.




The distinctive character of this post-modern responsiveness to the
abundance of being stands out most clearly when we contrast it with our
defining late-modern tendency toward the kind of technological making
which imposes form on matter without paying any heed to its intrinsic
potentialities, in the way that, for example, an industrial factory
indiscriminately grinds wood into woodchips in order to paste them back
together into straight particle board which can then be used flexibly
to efficiently construct a maximal variety of useful
 objects.[81]
To
emphasize the difference, Heidegger pointedly asks: "But where in
the manipulations of the industrial worker is there any relatedness to
such things as the shapes slumbering within wood?" (WCT 23/GA8
26) Insofar as such a relatedness cannot be found, something
crucial has gone
 missing.[82]
For, without such an ontological
responsiveness, human beings lose touch with what Heidegger understands
as the source of meaning. Although our late-modern metaphysics
leads us to assume that all meaning comes from us, as the result of our
subjective "value positings," Heidegger is committed to the
less subjectivistic and more phenomenologically accurate view that, at
least with respect to that which most matters to us (the paradigm case
being love), what we care about most is not entirely up to us,
not simply within our power to control, and that this is a crucial part
of what makes it so
 important.[83]




To learn from art how to understand the being of entities in a
post-modern way means learning to cultivate and develop the ontological
responsiveness that allows us to understand and experience entities as
being richer in meaning than we are capable of doing justice to
conceptually, rather than taking them as intrinsically meaningless
resources awaiting optimization. In this way, we can learn to
approach the humble things that make up our worlds with care, humility,
patience, gratitude, even
 awe.[84]
This subjectivism-humbling lesson in
ontological responsiveness is precisely what Heidegger thinks great art
like Van Gogh's painting of "A Pair of Shoes" can
help teach
 us.[85]
In the contemporaneous "Holderlin and the
Essence of Poetry" (1936), Heidegger argues that the German
Romantic poet Friedrich Holderlin is the "poet of
poetry" because Holderlin's poetry expresses
poetically what poetry *is*: Holderlin's poetry
names-into-being the fact that poetry itself is essentially
a
 naming-into-being.[86]
In the same way, "The Origin of
the Work of Art" presents Van Gogh as the painter of
painting. For Heidegger, Van Gogh is the painter who paints what
painting really *is*, because his painting captures and
preserves that essential tension between revealing and concealing,
"earth" and "world," which is at work in all
*art*, indeed, in all creation, all bringing into and
maintaining in intelligibility.




What drew Heidegger to Van Gogh, then, was not just their mutual
affinity for rural life, their shared awareness of the way its pastoral
rhythms are rooted in nature's cycles and bespeak a fundamental
faith that hard work can bring forth the earth's hidden
bounty. Heidegger seems to have been deeply moved by the way
half-formed figures seem to struggle to take shape in the background of
Van Gogh's paintings, less in clear lines than in the thick
texture of the paint, brush strokes, and deep fields of color.
(This is something that, unfortunately, even the most realistic
representations of his paintings fail fully to convey, which is why
there is no substitute for encountering Van Gogh's paintings in
person.) For Heidegger, these two sources of attraction work
together; it is the mysterious bounty of the strife between world and
earth that comes through in the tension between what shows itself in
the foreground and what recedes into the background of Van Gogh's
paintings. In Heidegger's interpretation, Van Gogh's
painting preserves the essential strife whereby the "nothing
noths," both calling for and partly eluding conceptualization,
and his painting thereby allows us to encounter the way the earth both
yields to and resists our worlds and so, out "of the calm of
great riches, ripens and dispenses what is inexhaustible" (IM
164/GA40 118).


## 4. Conclusion: Resolving the Controversy Surrounding Heidegger's Interpretation of Van Gogh




Heidegger's subtle but ambitious effort to show phenomenologically how
aesthetics can transcend itself from within in an encounter with Van
Gogh's painting has not been well understood, and Heidegger's attempt,
as part of that effort, to link Van Gogh's painting with the deep
spiritual wisdom of rural life proved highly controversial (to say the
least). Unfortunately, this controversy has subsequently distracted
readers from understanding what Heidegger was really trying to do. By
working through this controversy here, however, we can finally resolve
it, draw its important lessons, and so put it behind us.




As we have seen, Heidegger assumes that the shoes Van Gogh painted
belong to a farming woman. The standard but unfortunate
translation of *die Bauerin*--literally "the
female farmer"--as "the peasant woman" is not
just classist but misleading. That the shoes disclose the world
of a *farmer* is important for Heidegger precisely because the
farmer's world is deeply attuned to the struggle with the earth;
the farming woman works the earth daily, caring for, struggling with,
and ultimately depending on the earth to nurture and bring forth
her
 harvest.[87]
Heidegger suggests that no one is more
immediately attuned to the struggle between earth and world than the
experienced farmer, long intimate with "the uncomplaining fear as
to the certainty of bread" as well as "the wordless joy of
having once more withstood want" (PLT 34/GA5 19). Of
course, farmers forced to abandon their farms in the dust bowl might
find Heidegger's vision of the earth as that which, from out
"of the calm of great riches, ripens and dispenses what is
inexhaustible" (IM 164/GA40 118) to be a romantic
exaggeration. Nevertheless, during the great depression era of
the 1930s, "the earth" really was Heidegger's chosen
name for that "inexhaustible" dimension of intelligibility
experienced not only by farmers while farming but also by poets while
poetizing, painters while painting, thinkers while thinking, and,
indeed, by all those who create by patiently and carefully seeking to
bring something long nurtured and concealed in a protective darkness
into the light of day. That such metaphors also suggest pregnancy
might help explain why Heidegger imagines the farmer as a woman,
despite the fact that the shoes in Van Gogh's painting appear
rather masculine to our contemporary aesthetic sensibilities. Or
Heidegger might simply have assumed that the shoes belonged to a female
farmer because the exhibition in which he originally saw
 Van Gogh's 1886 painting of "A pair of shoes"
was
probably populated with some of Van Gogh's many paintings from
1885 of women
 engaged in farm work
(women
 digging in the fields,
 planting,
 harvesting
and
 peeling potatoes,
and so on).




In fact, however, we have no way of knowing exactly which paintings
Heidegger saw at the 1930 exhibit of Van Gogh's works in
Amsterdam he later recalled having
 visited.[88]
The debate surrounding
Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh's painting can be
traced back to the fact that initially it is not even clear which
painting Heidegger is referring to when he invokes an allegedly
"well known painting by Van Gogh, who painted such shoes several
times." (Here are links to three of them, dated
 Spring 1887, 
 early 1887,
 and June 1886.)
 If Heidegger was aware that Van Gogh painted no fewer than five works 
titled "A Pair of Shoes" 
between 1886 and 1888, plus several other pairs of wooden farmer's
 clogs,
 leather clogs,
and paintings of
 more than one pair of shoes, 
 then he does not seem to have thought
this fact significant. The art historian who was closest to
Heidegger, Heinrich Petzet, proposes that the "various versions
[of Van Gogh's 'A Pair of Shoes'] each show the same
thing," and this might well be what Heidegger himself thought (if
he ever even thought about it): Each of these paintings manifests
the struggle between earth and
 world.[89]
Yet, there are lots of other
differences between these paintings; anyone who studies them will
quickly see that they are not even all paintings of the same pair of
shoes. Given the subsequent fame of Heidegger's essay, it
is quite understandable that both art historians and phenomenologists
would want to determine precisely which painting Heidegger was
referring to in "The Origin of the Work of Art" so as to be
able to evaluate his interpretation for ourselves. When the
eminent art historian Meyer Schapiro took up the task of identifying the
painting in the 1960s, however, the mystery over which shoes Heidegger
was actually referring to exploded into a whole new controversy.




Schapiro wrote to Heidegger to find out where and when he had
actually seen Van Gogh's painting; Heidegger, then nearing
eighty, recalled having seen an exhibition in Amsterdam in 1930, so
Schapiro cross-referenced all the works that could possibly have been
exhibited there with Heidegger's own descriptions of the painting
in his essay. In the end, Schapiro concluded not just that
Heidegger had melded several paintings together in his memory but that,
in so doing, Heidegger had mistaken as the shoes of a female farmer
shoes that in fact belonged to Van Gogh
 himself.[90]
The significance of
Schapiro's famous criticism has been hotly debated ever
since. Art historians have typically taken Schapiro's claim
that Heidegger mistakenly attributed Van Gogh's own shoes to a
farming woman as a devastating objection that pulls the rug right out
from under Heidegger's interpretation of the painting, whereas
philosophers sympathetic to Heidegger often conclude that
Schapiro's objection simply misses Heidegger's
 point.[91]
(These
philosophers thus treat Heidegger's apparent error of attribution
as if it were of no more philosophical importance than the remarkably
similar fact that the work Heidegger attributed to Don Scotus in his
Habilitation thesis was shown subsequently to have been written instead
by Thomas of
 Erfurt.)[92]




To wit, Dreyfus dismisses the question of who the shoes originally
belonged to as "irrelevant to how the picture works" (2005,
p. 409). Although Dreyfus is ultimately right, his dismissal is
much too quick to convince the many who disagree. For,
Schapiro's criticism does indeed constitute a devastating
objection to Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh, if that
interpretation is understood in the standard way. According to
what most readers take to be the sequence of phenomenological steps in
Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh, Heidegger begins (1) with
the assumption that the shoes belong to a farmer, an assumption which
then allows him (2) to invoke that struggle with the earth with which
the farmer's world is so closely attuned, so that he can finally
(3) postulate this earth/world tension as the ontological truth of
art. On this reconstruction of his argument, however, if
Heidegger is wrong that the shoes belonged to a farmer then the
phenomenological bridge he is trying to build between a particular
("ontic") work of art and the ontological truth of art in
general would collapse before it even gets off the ground, severed at
its very first step.




Indeed, Heidegger's entire interpretation of Van Gogh as the
painter of the ontological truth of painting implodes if its first step
is merely an idiosyncratic and arbitrary projection on
Heidegger's part--or something worse. And this is
precisely what Schapiro alleges. As Schapiro delivers his
verdict:



> 
> 
> Alas for him, the philosopher has deceived himself. He has
> retained from his encounter with Van Gogh's canvas a moving set
> of associations with peasants and the soil, which are not sustained by
> the picture itself. They are grounded rather in his own social
> outlook with its heavy pathos of the primordial and earthy. He
> has indeed "imagined everything and projected it into the
> painting." (Schapiro 1968, p. 138)




As this attempt to link Heidegger's thinking of earth with
"the soil" and his "social outlook" suggests,
Schapiro's famous criticism has an obvious political
subtext. To put it bluntly, Schapiro is insinuating that Heidegger
projected his own National Socialist-tainted associations onto Van
Gogh's work, then mistook these "blood and soil"
projections for the truth of the
 painting.[93]
Even stripped of the
political subtext that motivates it, this allegation that
Heidegger's interpretation of Van Gogh's painting is really
nothing more than a projection of Heidegger's own subjective
biases represents a potentially formidable objection to
Heidegger's attempt to move beyond the subject/object dichotomy
at the heart of aesthetics. For, if Heidegger's
interpretation really just covertly reinstalls his own subjective
perspective, then this attempt to transcend aesthetic subjectivism from
within looks dubious at best.




Heidegger's response to this particular objection (which he
anticipates in "The Origin of the Work of Art") is simply
to turn it around. Heidegger maintains, in effect, that any
objection that he is merely projecting is merely a projection on the
part of the objector. As he puts it (in the line Schapiro throws
back at him in the quotation above):



> 
> 
> It would be the worst self-deception to believe that our description
> had first pictured [or imagined, *ausgemalt*] everything thus as
> a subjective act and then projected it onto the painting. (PLT
> 35-6/GA5 21)




Here, however, we seem to reach a deadlock. To Schapiro,
Heidegger's anticipatory denial of projection looks like an
unconscious confession, what Freud called a *denegation*, that
is, a disavowal that really confirms the truth of what it denies (the
classic example of which is: "I have no idea what my dream
meant, Dr. Freud, I only know it was *not* about
my
 mother!").[94]
To Heidegger, Schapiro would seem to
have deceived himself in the "worst" way; by projecting
projection onto Heidegger's essay, Schapiro's interpretation
will have been led astray by its own maliciousness. Is there no
way to avoid leaving the debate in such an unfriendly state, where the
explicit avowal of "not A" is taken as an unconscious
confession of "A," no one's motives remain above the
hermeneutics of suspicion, and art interpretation threatens to collapse
into the relativism of competing subjective
 projections?[95]




The way out of this impasse is to take Heidegger's
phenomenology much more seriously, as we have done here. What we
have seen is that, rather than just asserting his interpretation of Van
Gogh, Heidegger provides *a phenomenological argument* for it,
that is, a series of steps meant to take his audience from an
experience of an "ontic" work of art to an encounter with
the ontological truth of art in general. Insofar as we can personally
experience the phenomenological sequence of steps to which Heidegger
refers, we ourselves can attest to the truth of his
interpretation. (And if we cannot experience that sequence, or we
experience something else instead, then we can seek to redescribe,
refine, or contest his interpretation for ourselves). Let us thus
seek to finally resolve this longstanding controversy by summarizing
and then clarifying the basic sequence of steps in Heidegger's
phenomenological interpretation of
 Van Gogh's 1886 painting
 of "A pair of shoes."




When Heidegger discusses Van Gogh's painting of "A Pair
of Shoes," we have seen, his analysis takes us from: (1)
experiencing Van Gogh's painting as an aesthetic object (a
painting of a pair of shoes apparently on hand for our viewing); to (2)
attending to the nothing (that is, the way the painting's
background continues to suggest other possibilities which nevertheless
resist being fully gestalted and so brought into the foreground); to
thereby (3) encountering the essential tension between earth and world
(the inconspicuous struggle between revealing and concealing implicit
in "what *is* there"), and so finally (4) coming to
see for oneself what it is like to walk in a farmer's shoes (by
encountering for oneself, in the artwork, the struggle to bring the
bounty of the earth forth into the light of the world). We can
see this quite clearly by looking at one of the crucial passages again,
this time with the four steps in Heidegger's phenomenological
transition explicitly labeled:



> 
> 
> [1] A painting by Van Gogh: a pair of tough farmer's
> shoes, [2] nothing else. The picture really represents
> nothing. [3] Yet, what *is* there, with that you are
> immediately alone, [4] as if on a late autumn evening, when the last
> potato fires have burned out, you yourself were heading wearily home
> from the field with your hoe. (IM 37-8/GA40 38)




These four steps, taken together, form the phenomenological bridge
that allows us to move from an interpretation of a particular work of
art to the ontological truth inherent in all art (indeed, in all
coming-into-being). In other words, these are the four steps in
the phenomenological argument whereby Heidegger discovers what he calls
the *a-letheiac* "essential strife" between
"earth" and "world"--that is, the tension
of emerging and withdrawing implicit in all intelligibility--in
 Van Gogh's 1886 painting
 of "A pair of shoes".




We can unpack that third step--and better understand its
connection to the fourth--by further examining Heidegger's
curiously specific assertion:



> 
> 
> Yet, what *is* there, with that you are immediately alone, as
> if on a late autumn evening, when the last potato fires have burned
> out, you yourself were heading wearily home from the field with your
> hoe. (IM 37-8/GA40 38)




Initially this certainly sounds, as Schapiro alleges, like a highly
idiosyncratic projection of Heidegger's own subjective prejudices
onto Van Gogh's work. Of course, art historians like
Schapiro commonly observe that in late works like "A Pair of
Shoes," Van Gogh seems to devote as much care and attention to
his use of color and brush strokes as he does to representing the
fairly simple subject at the center of the
 painting.[96]
What is so interesting
for us about this, however, is that if one attends carefully to what
emerges from "[o]ut of the dark opening of the well-worn insides
of shoes" (PLT 33/GA5 19)--attending specifically to the
lighter patches of color that emerge from the dark opening of the shoe
on the right--one can in fact discern the head (hair bonnet and
face in profile), torso, and arms of what could easily be a woman,
carrying a hoe (a small shovel), with what could even be a small
orange-brown "fire" smoldering behind her. 




Insofar as we too can discern this "little old woman who lived
in the shoe" (as we could call this figure Heidegger seems to
have seen), then we can be certain (*pace*
Derrida) that Schapiro did in fact correctly identify the precise
painting Heidegger was discussing: "A Pair of Shoes"
(1886). But this also means that Heidegger is not using Van
Gogh's painting as a jumping off point for his own
free-associations (as Schapiro assumes); instead, Heidegger is drawing
directly on his own phenomenological encounter with the painting when
he describes "what *is* there" (IM 37-8/GA40 38) in
the work's inconspicuous earth/world
 struggle.[97]
This would also explain
what Heidegger means when he says (immediately following the quotation
Schapiro throws back at him):



> 
> 
> If anything is questionable here, it is rather that we experienced
> too little in the vicinity of the work and that we expressed the
> experience too crudely and *too literally*. (PLT 36,
> emphasis added/GA5 21)




If Heidegger was *literally* describing the figure he saw
emerging from "[o]ut of the dark opening of the well-worn
insides of shoes" (PLT 33/GA5 19) in Van Gogh's painting of
"A Pair of Shoes" (1886), however, then what Heidegger
offers us is not merely the projection of his own subjective
associations onto a blank canvas but, instead, a meaningful gestalting
of something from what is really there, something we too can
phenomenologically confirm for ourselves. (It may help to examine this
detail from the shoe on the right-hand side of Van Gogh's "A
Pair of Shoes" (1886); here the figure of the farming woman
that, I argue, Heidegger creatively disclosed "[s]taring forth
from out of the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes"
(PLT 33/GA5 19) has been outlined by Mark Wrathall in order to make it
easier for others to see.)



![Detail from the shoe on the right side of Van Gogh's painting entitled A Pair of Shoes](VanGoghShoeDetail.jpg)
Detail from the shoe on the right side of Van Gogh's "A Pair of Shoes"




This is important, because to make something from what is really
there--something which is neither obviously determined by what
offers itself to us nor simply ignores what offers itself to us in
order to impose its own subjective idea--this is what all true
artistic creation does, according to Heidegger's view (presented
in section
 3.7).[98]
As we saw, every
"authentic" hermeneutics must do this; to interpret any
great work of art, "you yourself" have to struggle to bring
forth its hidden riches, just as the farmer must struggle with the
earth to bring forth the bounty nurtured within it. To engage in
such phenomenological hermeneutics, we might thus say, is to encounter
oneself as *a farmer of meaning*. For, such an encounter
allows us to understand for ourselves what it is like when the earth
comes to inform our worlds with a genuine, partly independent meaning
which we ourselves brought forth creatively and yet did not simply
make-up or project onto the work. When we catch ourselves in the
act of making-sense of an artwork in this way, then we experience for
ourselves that fundamental making-sense from which, for Heidegger, all
genuine meaning ultimately derives.




Here, then, we reach the important fourth and final step in
Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation, which still needs to
be explicitly unpacked and explained. As we saw in sections
3.5-6, Heidegger claims that by experiencing the implicitly dynamic
tension between earth and world in Van Gogh's painting, we can
thereby come to encounter the same primordial level of practical
meaning that is unknowingly known by the farmer who uses her shoes
"without noticing or reflecting" on them (PLT 34/GA5
19). From what has been said, we should now be able to understand
just how that is supposed to be possible. In our phenomenological
encounter with Van Gogh's painting, we catch ourselves in the act
of struggling to impose a stable world of meanings upon an inherently
dynamic intelligible domain that both informs and resists this
world. To thus find ourselves "worlding the earth" in
our encounter with art, we have just seen, is to experience for
ourselves essentially the same struggle as the farmer who must struggle
with the earth in order to bring forth and maintain her world. In
our encounter with Van Gogh's painting, we thus learn for
ourselves what it is like to walk in a farmer's shoes (where
earth and world meet, both literally and figuratively), because we too
have experienced the way the earth both informs and exceeds the world
of meanings we take from it, enduring the same struggle to world the
earth (albeit on a smaller scale) in our own hermeneutic and
phenomenological engagement with Van Gogh's painting (and
Heidegger's
 texts, which seek to "preserve," that is, creatively disclose, the inexhaustible world of meanings at work in the work, thereby helping to hold open this ontologically-pluralistic and so nascently postmodern world).[99]




The most important point to grasp here, then, is that Heidegger does
not maintain (as it is easy but nonetheless a mistake to assume) that
Van Gogh's painting allows us somehow first to directly intuit
the world of a farmer as she might experience it so that, by getting in
touch with her farming world, we can thereby come to experience the
"essential tension" between earth and world with which a
farmer is intimately familiar. That cannot be right because it
begs the question, assuming the aporetic step that Heidegger realizes
needs to be explained (as we saw in 3.3), namely, how can we move from
an aesthetic experience of a painting on hand like an object to an
encounter with the "equipmentality" of equipment? It
is crucial to see that Heidegger does not first assume that the shoes
in the painting belong to a farmer, and then, by alluding to the
farmer's world, introduce the essential struggle between earth
and world as the truth of the painting. If that were the sequence of
steps in Heidegger's argument, then not only would he be
knowingly begging his own question but, worse, Schapiro's telling
criticism that the shoes in Van Gogh's painting could not in fact
have been used by a farmer would constitute a completely devastating
objection to Heidegger's interpretation. For, *Schapiro
is certainly right that the shoes in the painting could not have been
used by a woman while farming*, for the simple reason that the
Dutch farmers Van Gogh painted wore wooden clogs in the damp potato
fields, not leather shoes like those worn by farmers in Southern
Germany, which would have quickly rotted from the damp soil in
the
 Netherlands.[100]
Thus, if Heidegger had sought simply
to move from what he assumed were a pair of *farmer's*
shoes to an intimation of the earth/world struggle familiar to farmers,
and then from there to the essence of art, Schapiro's objection
would destroy the bridge Heidegger was seeking to build from an ontic
work of art to the ontological truth of art in general.




This longstanding controversy can finally be resolved, however, once
we realize that Heidegger's phenomenological interpretation of
Van Gogh actually follows a different sequence of steps. As we
have seen, Heidegger moves from: (1) experiencing an objective
painting of unused shoes (in the standard aesthetic way); to (2)
noticing and attending to the dynamic "nothing" in the
background of the painting and thereby (3) encountering the earth/world
struggle implicit in the work; to finally (4) intimating, from this
earth/world struggle, what a farmer's inconspicuous use of shoes
as equipment is like. The trick Schapiro misses (along with most
other readers of Heidegger's famous essay) is that attending to
the "nothing" that makes itself visible in the background
of Van Gogh's painting allows us to encounter the essential
tension between world and earth for ourselves, and it is this
encounter--with the tension between that which comes forth into
the light ("world") and that which nurtures this coming
forth and yet also shelters itself in the darkness
("earth")--that allows us to understand, as though
from the inside, *what it is like* to walk in the shoes of a
farmer.




In the end, then, Schapiro's objection that the shoes belonged not to
a farmer but to Van Gogh himself does indeed miss Heidegger's
philosophical point. Once we understand the actual sequence of steps
in Heidegger's phenomenological argument, we can see that Schapiro's
criticism really only temporarily complicates the inference from step
3 to step 4 (that is, the move from encountering the conflict between
earth and world to understanding what it is like to walk in a farmer's
shoes). This is an inference, however, that Heidegger could have
reached just as easily by discussing the world of Van Gogh himself
(whom Schapiro takes to be rightful owner of the shoes in the
painting). In Heidegger's view of him, Van Gogh clearly understood the
earth/world struggle at least as lucidly as the farmers he painted (so
Heidegger could just as easily have moved from encountering the
earth/world struggle to understanding what it is like to walk in the
shoes of a painter like Van Gogh). Indeed, Heidegger's final point
(the point conveyed by his references to "you" and
"you yourself") is that Van Gogh and these farmers lived
the same struggle in different ways, and so do all of us meaning
farmers, that is, all of us who genuinely create by discerning
inchoate contours and struggling to give shape to something that
previously was only partly glimpsed at best and so remained hidden
in darkness. Art thus teaches us not to try to banish the darkness
that surrounds the light of intelligibility, but to learn to see into
that ubiquitous "noth-ing" so as to discern therein the
enigmatic "earth" which nurtures all the genuine meanings
that have yet to see the light of day. Insofar as we can learn from
Van Gogh (or other similarly great artists) to see in this poetic way
ourselves, Heidegger suggests, we will find ourselves dwelling in a
postmodern world permeated by genuinely meaningful possibilities.