ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger is generally regarded as the most significant continental philosopher of the twentieth century and, along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the two greatest philosophers of that century. Deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological school of philosophy, Heidegger instituted a radical rethinking of the most basic concepts by means of which Western philosophers had attempted to cognize the structure of all that exists. Despite the difficulty of his writing and the obscurity of some of his claims, Heidegger’s philosophy marks an important turning point in Western thought. Heidegger came to believe that art was one of the distinctive ways in which truths
about reality could be apprehended by human beings. In this respect, he allies himself with his great German predecessors, G. W. F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom held that art had significant cognitive import. Also like his forebears, Heidegger thought that art was fundamentally historical, that the art of an era was marked by that era’s most basic assumptions about human existence. Indeed, his innovation was to develop an account of art that explains its deep metaphysical import. Anyone trying to understand Heidegger’s claims about art will be struck by the
density of his prose. The difficulty of Heidegger’s writing on art stems from at least two sources. First, Heidegger was a systematic philosopher of the first rank, so that his views on art depend on his understanding of general issues in metaphysics. In addition, since he believed that our ordinary language unconsciously incorporates misleading philosophic models, he believed it was necessary to develop a terminology that would forestall suchmisconceptions. Still, it is possible to framemost of Heidegger’s basic claims accessibly while still demonstrating their insightfulness and significance for understanding of the nature of art.
