On 8 May 1996, robert scheetz wrote:
> Yes, but:
> "Aletheia" is a core notion with H ontologically. He here
> restricts its permissable meaning to the anthropologically primitive:
> unmediated, forcefull, concrete, sensual presence (physis)...says that
> the chronologically (is he denying time and history?) later concept of truth,
> abstract truth, is really antagonistic to truth...requires, here instancing
> the work of art (as it were intensified dasein), one suspend his critical
> faculty,
> and just let the "thing" be.
I don't see where Heidegger "restricts" the permissible meaning
of aletheia here. Please expand on this. As for the suspension of the
"critical faculty," I don't think Heidegger is out of line with the main
stream of aesthetic theory in thinking that critical judgment (as in the
sense of "This is good/bad/derivative/etc.") is at best subsequent to the
initial experience of art.
> Wagner lovers insist one banish any thought of
> matter and form and simply let the great waves of luscious sound
> wash over him. Metaphysics and subtleties aside, I ask you, is
> one experiencing the immediate unconcealed forceful presencing of being,
> or, cheap sex, an archetypal erotic pattern? which is the truth?
My impression of Heidegger's treatment of Wagner is that he was
very likely completely ignorant of his art, and simply adopted
Nietzsche's cheapest jibes. I'm afraid I don't understand your last
sentence. Are you equating the presencing of being and cheap sex, or
contrasting them?
> And what of his instancing the Gk Temple? i.e. art previous to its
> weaning from religion? Isn't this exemplum a disaster for
> his thesis? In origin it is supremely utilitarian (equipmental):
> a means of addressing/managing the cardinal practical problems
> of human life...its beauty, "art"-ness, purely adventitous.
> That is to say, its being qua work of art clearly originates
> in the most elemental factical matrix. Oughtn't Occkam's razor
> still be plied?
Surely Heidegger's point is at least partly that the beauty of the
temple is not at all "adventitious". The gods would not essence in any
old shack, but precisely where there is beauty, the gods essence most
forcefully.
However, your suggestion that the temple is "equipmental" is
interesting. Presumably you are saying that art is "authentic". Can we
work out a conception of art that is non-equipmental? Could we, for
instance, say that by immersing oneself so fully in equipment we in a
sense 'transcend' it? (I suspect this doesn't work.) I couldn't say
offhand whether we can understand Heidegger's treatment on art in this
context at all.
Martin Weatherston,
Philosophy & Religious Studies Dept.,
East Stroudsburg University,
East Stroudsburg, PA 18301.
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