The Origin of the Work of Art

One of Heidegger's chief concerns in the mid-1930s was the key role played by art in mankind's relation to Being. In his analysis of the subject, he is not interested in examining it in the narrow sense, as part of aesthetics, since, like metaphysics, he regards aesthetics as defined and constrained by the spirit of “enframing”, which has resulted in our destructive modern-day technological approach. Instead, his insights into art are an integral part of his fundamental philosophical exploration of the nature of Being.

His longest discussion of art, The Origin of the Work of Art, first published in 1950 in the collection Holzwege, was derived from material initially delivered in a public lecture to the Art-Historical Society of Freiburg-im-Breisgau on 13 November 1935. He repeated the lecture in Zurich in January 1936, and during the same year revised and expanded the content, presenting it as a three-part lecture in Frankfurt on 7 and 24 November and 4 December. Until then, Heidegger had paid little attention to art, which had hardly been mentioned in Being and Time(and, perhaps strangely for a German, Heidegger also showed relatively little interest in music, a field in which Germans had for long excelled).

Although the focus in both of these works is on “Dasein and its world”, the emphasis in each is different. Being and Time examines Dasein's nature, or Being, in an already-established world, whereas The Origin of the Work of Art enquires as to how the world was first established.