Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Future of Art
The epilogue of Martin Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes quotes Hegel's famous judgment: “[A]rt is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past.” With this judgment, Hegel says that art has ceased to be the vehicle of self-knowledge for human beings; Hegel proclaims the pastness of art. But the future of art is thus put into question. This is how Heidegger transforms Hegel's verdict into a question: “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which […] truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?” Thus, the question of the pastness of art turns into the question regarding whether art is to be or not to be, into the question of the future of art. Hegel's judgment proclaims the pastness of art, because art is implicated with material contingency. That means that the question of the rehabilitation of art, of the future of art, is at the same time the question of the phenomenological rehabilitation of the material. What is central to this project of rehabilitation is the figure of the work of art with its own peculiar kind of materiality. Therefore, Heidegger reformulates the material of art as earth which is a source not just of contingency but also of potentiality. Yet, Heidegger does not understand art as the creation of aesthetic objects, rather, art is concerned with ποίησιϛ, with the bringing forth of beings out of the unconcealment. Such is the formulaic definition of art as τέχνη in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: “All art is concerned with the process of coming into being, and to practice art is also to consider how something capable of being or not being [τι τῶν ἐνδεχομένων καὶ εἶναι καὶ μὴ εἶναι] […] may come into being.” This formula, although it is nowhere present in the essay, is the hidden center of Heidegger's Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes – such is the claim of this essay. Heidegger returns to the ancient definition of τέχνη to place art within the parameters of history, i.e., starting history anew by introducing new beings. But every bringing forth of beings is a retrieval of the past, i.e., of the earth rich with potentiality from which alone the future can unfold. Thus, every decision concerning the future always takes up the past, i.e., the already-there of the earth.