Hermeneutics and aesthetics: Heidegger and art

Heidegger's radical questioning of art seeks to achieve the overcoming of aesthetics. In this essay I examine the interrelation of Heidegger's meditation upon art and his confrontation with the tradition of western philosophical reflection on art. In particular I treat three principal topics: (Part One) Heidegger and Hegel on the nature of great art; (Part Two) The history of aesthetics and the decline of great art; (Part Three) The overcoming of aesthetics in relation to art, technology and the holy.;The crux of Heidegger's confrontation with the tradition concerns his relation to Hegel. In fact, "The Origin of the Work of Art" can be read as Heidegger's "repetition" of Hegel's aesthetics. By profiling Heidegger's understanding of great art against Hegel's one appreciates the full scope of Heidegger's encounter with the tradition which culminates in Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics.;Heidegger makes explicit his encounter with the tradition in his history of aesthetics. Heidegger reinterprets the basic developments in the history of aesthetics as essential stages in the history of Being. These also mark stages in the decline of great art. In Heidegger's view, aesthetics is one of the ways in which the oblivion of Being occurs. The more aesthetics comes to dominate the more art is conceived in relation to human feeling rather than as an event of truth.;I probe the overcoming of aesthetics by examining the essential relation that Heidegger discerns between art and technology. I do so first by elaborating Heidegger's critique of the reigning "technical" concept of art which liberates the meaning of art/techne from a technological interpretation. This enables art to be rethought as a counter-movement to technology. Nevertheless, I maintain that the depth of Heidegger's questioning of art must consider the holy as the name which (following Holderlin) he gives to the opening up of the open place that occurs in the work of art.;I conclude with some critical reflections that focus on the problems that confront Heidegger's radical attempt to rethink art in relation to the leading concepts of his later thought: das Ereignis, das Gestell and das Geschick.