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ABSTRACT
In a passage from the addendum to “The Origin of the Work of Art” often ignored in the secondary literature, Heidegger expands on how art institutes the unconcealment of the truth of Being with reference to the ontological difference—the difference between Being and beings which cannot rely on the comparison of predicates for clarification. The relationship between art and the ontological difference is not immediately obvious and lacks further explication in Heidegger’s other texts. This paper argues that there are two fundamental elements to the ontological difference that Heidegger focuses on that can be used to elucidate art as a strife of world and earth: “the Nothing” [das Nichts] outlined in “What is Metaphysics?” (1929) and world-projection described in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929–30). Understanding these two elements of the ontological difference (world-projection and the Nothing) as present together in the event of unconcealment (aletheia) thereby clarifies for the notorious concepts of earth, world, strife, and rift (Riß) that characterize the work of art. Recourse to the ontological difference as an explanatory mechanism for conceptualising Heidegger’s philosophy of art is a useful way of avoiding common issues in the prevailing literature that will be laid out below.
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Notes
1 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (hereafter OWA) in Off the Beaten Track, 55.
2 Ibid., 52.
3 Polt, “Meaning, Excess, and Event”, 32.
4 Ibid.
5 Withy, Heidegger On Being Self-Concealing, 41.
6 Ibid.
7 Heidegger, Basic Problems, 78. Emphasis added. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 157, Heidegger asks: “To every being, then, ‘there is’ what-Being and that-Being, essentia and existentia, possibility and actuality. Does ‘Being’ mean the same thing here [in both expressions]? If not, how is it that the Being in what-Being and that-Being has been split?”
8 Withy’s own understanding of the ontological difference is, at times, problematic. She writes on 43 that “the ontological difference does not claim that the being of an entity is distinct from that entity.” However, this is exactly what Heidegger wishes to draw attention to: an entity and its way of Being are not discrete, they depend upon one another, but they cannot be said to be commensurable. “On the Essence of Ground” (1929) suggests that “beings in their Being, and Being of beings…belong essentially together on the grounds of their relation to the distinction between Being and beings (ontological difference).”
9 Ibid., 38.
10 Ibid., 27.
11 See Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity, 142; de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis, 152.
12 Backman, Complicated Presence, 151. Similarly, Nowell Smith in Sounding/Silence, 42, asserts that it is crucial to emphasise the unity here: “the entry into the phenomenal world requires not only this differential traction, but also the opening up of a space of mutual belonging through which beings are ‘joined’ together within the open.”
13 Radloff, Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism, 327.
14 See Withy (Citation2022) and Cassati (Citation2021) for a discussion of different interpretations of the ontological difference.
15 Heidegger, Basic Problems, 17.
16 Ibid., 78.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 70.
20 Ibid.
21 Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts, 362.
22 Ibid., 364.
23 Ibid., 363.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 364.
26 Ibid.
27 Heidegger, OWA, 23.
28 Ibid., 16.
29 Ibid., 14.
30 Ibid., 26.
31 Ibid., 27.
32 Ibid.
33 Allen, Ellipsis, 88.
34 Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, 95.
35 Ibid., 102.
36 Heidegger, “On The Essence of Ground” in Pathmarks, 97.
37 Heidegger, “On The Essence of Truth” in Pathmarks, 151.
38 Ibid., 153.
39 Heidegger, OWA, 30.
40 Ibid., 26.
41 Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, 103.
42 Thomson, Heidegger, Art, Postmodernity, 98. This position has also been adopted in Cooper (Citation2020), 195: “For Heidegger this is possible because of the dynamic darkness of the picture’s background, out of which shapes seem to be emerging and which he associates with the term ‘nothing’”.
43 Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 210. Heidegger also describes the coherence between the appearance of world in anxiety as an appearance of the Nothing in Being and Time, 232: “So if the ‘nothing’–that is, the world as such–exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious.”
44 Heidegger, OWA, 20.
45 Ibid., 20–21.
46 Ibid., 24.
47 Ibid., 25.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 29.
51 Heidegger, OWA, 31.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 31.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 32.
57 Ibid., 44.
58 Ibid., 40.
59 Ibid., 36.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michael Thatcher
Michael Thatcher is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the School of Humanities & Languages, The University of New South Wales, Sydney. His primary interests are in phenomenology and aesthetics. He is writing his dissertation on the place of difference in the thought of Martin Heidegger and particularly its bearing on his philosophy of art and critique of aesthetics.