The work of art and its fate in Heidegger’s history of being

Thesis

This thesis provides an original and comprehensive interpretive account of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of art at the stage of development it had reached by the time of composition of his seminal essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (OWA). The central exegetical claim advanced is that artworks are construed by Heidegger as entities that creatively articulate the affective dimension of human experience. This reading is set against the background of a reconstruction of Heidegger’s underappreciated substantial reworking of his existential understanding of human affectivity, first introduced in Being and Time, into a historically inflected conception of the way human beings are fundamentally exposed to intelligibility as such. After outlining the key features of such reworking, it is argued that OWA, by its own internal logic, requires supplementation from the theoretical context thus established. This is achieved by showing that and how artworks function as distinctively suitable vehicles for the projection of affective grounds of intelligibility. In the process, several long-standing puzzles in the OWA scholarship are addressed, including Heidegger’s conception of a ‘strife between world and earth’ as central to the functioning of artworks, artworks’ distinctive ontological import, the significance of Greek architecture as Heidegger’s primary illustrative example, and Heidegger’s renewed ontology of equipment as a foil to that of artworks. An account of artistic experience is then developed as a corollary to the proposed picture of art. On this account, artistic experience involves a transformative reshaping, itself ultimately affective in nature, of the experiencer’s frame of reference. Artistic experience, so construed, is then argued to provide the resources for a novel and compelling interpretation of OWA’s exegetically contested Van Gogh episode. The thesis concludes by situating the proposed account of art within Heidegger’s broader mid-1930s being-historical project, with particular attention to the different roles he envisages for artworks within it.

Authors: Vitangeli, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-kz7b86zwj
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English