The Strife of Earth and World: An Explication of Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art

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2012
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Haverford College. Department of Philosophy
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Abstract
Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work” is self-presented as a discursive attempt to “see the riddle” that is art. Here I present this riddle as inhering primarily within Heidegger’s crucial ontological, phenomenological notion that art is the happening of truth understood as (un)concealment. This interdependent play of revealing and concealing inheres in the artwork’s work-being. I bring (un)concealment into view by primarily explicating how the work explicitly “sets up a world” and sets “forth the earth.” Within the unity of the work, the intimacy of these opponents instigates their strife. The world as the open realm of intelligibility, disclosedness, and the earth as self-concealing, that which only shows itself as refusing the disclosure of the world, are reciprocal. I argue that this circling reciprocity is what is most puzzling about the relationship between our being-in-the-world and the world as set up by the work itself. Here we find important clues to the mystery of creativity, which I find to be more a responsiveness to purposiveness in the process of creation than the having of a prior mental intention that is then adequately represented in the work, or not. All of this generates from a careful analysis of Heidegger’s understanding of human being as Dasein. Thus, I rely heavily, at first, on an exposition of his ontology in Being and Time. Finally, I attempt to make visible the significance of all this through an interpretation of Manet’s masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies- Bergère.
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