Ḥaqīqat va nisbat-i ān bā hunar: Persiska (Farsi) 1388

The Origin of the Work of Art. This essay is packed full of insights, so, for the sake of brevity, I will only be focusing on its main ideas. What probably stands out the most about this essay is the originality of Heidegger’s thinking concerning the origin of the work of art, i.e., the Being of the work of art. Heidegger doesn’t conceive of the work of art, or, I should say, a great work of art, in terms of representation or form and content. While aesthetics has long used these categories in order to analyze and explain artworks, Heidegger believes that they are unsuitable for investigating the Being of works of art. This, of course, is not to say that these categories are totally useless in relation to the study of works of art. Heidegger will lay out his own categories through which the Being of artworks is revealed. Surprisingly, Heidegger only sparsely mentions beauty in the course of his inquiry. Another surprise in this essay is that Heidegger, unlike many philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche, argues that truth and art are deeply interconnected not mutually exclusive. Heidegger flat out rejects the belief that art is subjective, a belief that is very much in style to this day.