Przejrzeć Heideggera

Martin Heidegger’s lecture The Origin of the Work of Art, presented on November 13th, 1935 in Freiburg, marked a significant turn in its author’s philosophical thought. Earlier Heidegger had immersed himself in politics, yet when it proved to be a blind alley or simply a mistake, he turned to aesthetics. And although he never endeavoured to form a systematic theory of art or aesthetics, art does hold a solid position within his philosophical output. When certain researchers tackle the issue of Heidegger’s specific, metaphorical language, they point out that the philosopher addressed well known issues that, in fact, had already been widely discussed beforehand. While analyzing art, he asked a basic question about its substance. The provided answer would also remain on the traditional side: only art, as opposed to thinking with the use of certain terms, saliently relates to being – here Heidegger’s thought finds its common ground with those of philosophers as different as Schelling, Nietzsche or Adorno. Heidegger himself found his idea of art very much opposed to traditional aesthetics - to what focused on artistic experience and on experiencing art. In his opinion, all attempts to interpret a work of art that were based on the term “experience”, using it then to construct a whole concept of modern aesthetics, were deleterious effects of the old philosophy focused on subjectivity, where aesthetics is inevitably degenerated – not only by promoting the wrong idea of the spheres belonging to the artist and the viewer, but also by losing sight of the work of art being the highest, essential instance. Thus, solely a work of art remains the object of his specific metaphysics, since it embodies the substance of art. And so, the desire to “see through Heidegger,” focusing on his key opus - The Origin of the Work of Art - follows the perspective drawn by Hermann Mörchen who aimed at breaking the philosophical refusal to make connections between Heidegger and Adorno, as well as confronting the output that each of them had left after their deaths. Within that perspective, a significant role is played, next to Adorno, by Walter Benjamin – as there are certain remarkable aesthetic problems that at times set the two adversaries closer to each other, and at times further apart. Benjamin’s letters involve a critique of Heidegger’s work. According to Adorno, every attempt to justify aesthetics by invoking the origin of art as its core, must lead to a disappointment. Whereas Benjamin, in an essay that was supposed to earn him a degree, mused about the “origin of German Trauerspiel;” and like Heidegger, he also wrote about van Gogh. Thus, the presented conclusions may not only imply differences, but also correspondence and compliance of certain philosophical assumptions made by the philosophers.