Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

Abstract

Heidegger’s most important work, Sein und Zeit (1927), includes no reflection on art. But in the mid-1930s, he studied Hölderlin and began to see an important ontological phenomenon in art and poetry. His conception of art breaks radically with the aesthetics that understands art and beauty in a subjective manner and is part of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity. In his course on “Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst” (1936–1937), he undertakes the analysis of the essence of aesthetics, its role in Western thought, and its relation to art history. After having recalled that the word “aesthetics” as reflection on art and beauty dates only from the eighteenth century, he points out six basic facts in history.