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Heidegger: Art as the Setting-into-Work of Truth

A. Core Idea: Art is not about the beautiful appearance, but about revealing truth.
Heidegger rejects traditional aesthetic approaches that treat art as an object of sensuous experience. He seeks to understand art through its “origin,” that which gives it its being.
The origin of art is not the artist, nor is it the work of art itself, but “art.”

B. The Thingly Character of the Thing:
Heidegger examines different concepts of "thing" to show their limitations and how they obscure the true nature of things. He describes three common interpretations: as a bearer of traits, as a unity of sensations, and as formed matter. He critiques how these interpretations ultimately fail to capture the essence of a thing. They are “assaults upon the thing”. He ultimately argues that “thing-being consists in what is left over” when things are stripped of utility; a self-contained aspect which still relates to earth.

C. Art and Equipment:
He contrasts the art work with a mere thing and a piece of equipment:
Equipment is made for usefulness, disappears within the act of using it, and exhibits a form created by use. The art work is self-contained and does not “disappear” in use. It is created in order to open up a clearing to truth. The equipmental character of equipment is best revealed, not through everyday use, but by the art work, which, by removing the object from its functional context, makes its essence manifest. “Rather, the equipmentality of equipment first genuinely arrives at its appearance through the work and only in the work.”

D. The Temple as Example:
The Greek temple serves as an example of how a work of art opens up a world and sets it back on earth. “The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.” It is not simply an object; it is a place where truth happens. The temple makes manifest both earth (the rock it rests on) and world (the space opened by the work).
"To be a work means to set up a world."

E. The Work as Strife Between World and Earth:
The work of art is not a resolution of conflict, but the setting-into-work of the strife between world (the Open, the realm of meaning) and earth (the self-secluding, the closed). “The opposition of world and earth is a striving…in essential striving…the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their natures.” This "strife" allows the true essence of things to become manifest; a clearing occurs in the opposition.

F. Truth and Unconcealment (aletheia):
Truth (aletheia) is not merely "correctness" but "unconcealedness" - a clearing in which beings can reveal themselves. Truth is not an ideal, but an event that happens in the work of art.
“Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting…in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes, that which is as a whole—world and earth in their counterplay—attains to unconcealedness.”
The nature of truth has inherent denial, a constant concealment, as “The nature of truth is untruth.”

G. The Poetic Nature of Art:
Art's essential nature is poetic, “All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such, essentially poetry.” "Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is."
Poetry brings forth the “unsayable” and forms a people’s understanding of their world.

H. The End of Art?
Heidegger questions whether art, as it has traditionally been understood, still has a role in the modern age; he ponders Hegel’s claim that art has become a thing of the past.
He argues that “experience” is an element in which art dies. He proposes that the judgement on the nature of art’s end depends on the historical understanding of Being, which has not yet been decided.

I. Key Quotes:
“The origin of something is the source of its nature.”
“The thing itself must be allowed to remain in its self-containment. It must be accepted in its own constancy.”
“To be a work means to set up a world.”
“Truth, as the clearing and concealing of what is, happens in being composed, as a poet composes a poem.”
“Reluctantly that which dwells near its origin departs.”

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"Dare to use your own reason" - Immanuel Kant