The Problem of Art and the Experience of History
The critique of subjectivism in modern aesthetic theory is a well-known theme in contemporary hermeneutic philosophy, perhaps most famously represented by Hans-Georg Gadamer's opening arguments in Truth and Method.
In this context, the hermeneutic rehabilitation of the link between art and truth, and therefore of the experience of art as an experience of truth, aims not only to correct the modern approach to aesthetics as essentially based on the distinction between the "subjective" and the "objective," but is more fundamentally a way to radically rethink the very idea and history of the human spirit. In this paper I examine one of the principal sources for this development in the work of Martin Heidegger. In the first part of the paper, I show that the methodologically constructive and formal character of Heidegger's hermeneutics of facticity issues into the demand for a critique of the concept of "spirit" at the end of Being and Time. In the second part of the paper, I examine Heidegger's interpretation of art in The Origin of the Work of Art as remarkably coherent continuation of the critique of "spirit" as main task of his hermeneutics after Being and Time. My claim is that Heidegger's considerations about art as "event of truth" are therefore not limited to aesthetic theory but imply a theory of history and of the human spirit as essentially historical.
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