| This project explains the role art plays in shaping our perception and understanding of the world by tracing the relation between factical life and art in Dilthey's and Heidegger's philosophical works. The facticity of life describes its givenness that is at once not immediately or wholly given, but always open to greater meanings. Life is what is closest to us, and yet most difficult to understand; we are entangled in that which we want to understand. For Dilthey and Heidegger, philosophy must be grounded in the "standpoint of life," i.e. the felt, living perspective of the self that is shaped by the plurality of contexts that form the world. In other words, philosophy must interpret life from life itself. I argue that interpreting life from life itself requires aesthetics because art preserves the complex relations that form the world and makes the significance of these relations more vivid. Rather than abstracting from the sensible and felt qualities of experience by privileging ideas, art delves into their depth. With art, the sensible is meaningful as such, not as a representation of an exterior meaning. Through art we become aware of ourselves as in a world, not simply detached spectators of things. By comparing Dilthey's and Heidegger's approaches to art through their shared concern with facticity, I will argue for the need to develop a factical aesthetics that maintains the irreducible significance of the sensible. |
