Art, paradox, and the sacred in Heidegger

Thesis

In this project I argue that that there exists paradox in Heidegger which illuminates the nexus between art, the sacred, and world-disclosure. Heidegger has worked out a reasonably good picture of these three domains individually and emphasized their essential connectedness in his writings after Being and Time, but provided frustratingly little to explain or motivate the nature of this connection. Perhaps consequently, this area has also been largely under-served in the existing secondary scholarly literature. I aim to contribute a novel and constructive reading to both, and one which makes explicit what I take to be another significant (and equally underdeveloped) implicit theme in Heidegger’s later work – paradox. I derive a starting definition of paradox independently from Heidegger’s account of the sacred, that is, his general engagement with religious phenomena, and then from his account of the work of art, yielding the following result: in both domains, there is a necessary paradoxical quality, an actionable contradiction in which the terms are co-instantiated and immediate. This analytic definition is expanded with reference to Kierkegaard to accommodate the ways we may relate to it as a horizon that requires personal risk, and then tested as an explanatory mechanism against points of intersection between art and the sacred. In the end, having derived a sense of paradox from the text and used it constructively back towards the text, a secondary theme gently emerges; one in which the world takes on a sacramental quality, and sacrifice appears as a means of responsiveness to Being.

Authors: Spahr, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ko09z26ao
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: phenomenology; Heidegger; Kierkegaard; Derrida; art; sacred; paradox
• Subjects: Philosophy; Phenomenology