Karsten Harries’s commentary on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” opens with the interesting suggestion that the key to reading Heidegger’s influential essay is found in its epilogue. What makes the epilogue crucial for understanding the project’s underlying motivations is the manner in which Heidegger evokes Hegel’s famous pronouncement of the death of art. Harries encourages readers to understand “The Origin of the Work of Art” in view of Heidegger’s response to Hegel; in approaching the text this way, i.e., beginning from its end, an illuminating historical twist is given to Heidegger’s ontology.

As Harries shows, Heidegger is ambivalent toward the Hegelian position, recognizing “how difficult, but also how important it is to challenge Hegel’s proclamation” (5). For Heidegger, the death of art is symptomatic of the modern age, the “age of the world-picture,” in which the domination of a metaphysics that triumphs in technology also gives rise to an apparently opposed tradition of aesthetics. The aesthetic approach (from Baumgarten to Kant to Romanticism) stands in opposition to a predominant modern tendency to reduce reality to what can be measured and controlled by calculation. Despite its opposition to instrumental reason, this approach ultimately pushes art to an end because, in its own way, it too denies art an existence, a role, that matters in this modern age, or, as Harries puts it, “it denies art its essential ethical function” (3). One way of explaining this is by reference to the manner in which by internalizing the subject-object dichotomy the aesthetic approach ineluctably turns art into something whose meaningfulness belongs to the side of subjectivity, something that can only register (as meaningful) within the confines of a viewer’s “experience.” The aesthetic approach seeks to secure an autonomy for art in the face of a world that does violence to a sense of reality, but the only autonomy it can grant art is one in which art loses its hold in reality. Is this predicament final? Does art still matter today?

Following Heidegger, Harries invites readers not only to think the deficiency of art in the modern age but also to challenge Hegel by developing an alternative understanding of the original role art could have after its proclaimed death. What is at stake in such a project, however, is “not just or even primarily the future and more especially the significance of art, but our own humanity” (13). The turning from art to the question of humanity is central to Harries’s work (from The Meaning of Modern Art [Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1979], to the Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983], The Ethical Function of Architecture [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996], and Infinity and Perspective [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002]), and offers, in fact, a unique interpretation of the Heideggerian claim that what art calls for is a metaphysical rather than an aesthetic response. In a corollary manner, Harries’s reading of the “The Origin of the Work of Art” requires a metaphysical reorientation on the reader’s side. To put this in Heideggerian terms, “the metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner . . . is placed in question” (“What is Metaphysics?” Basic Writings, trans, D. F. Krell, Harper: San Francisco, 1977, 95). The question of art’s origin asks us to grapple with who we have become.

The first part of Harries’s commentary deals with “The Origin of the Work of Art” in the context of the time of its publication in 1936 and situates the essay in relation to three other important Heideggerian texts (Being and Time (1927), “The Rectorial Address” (1933), and “The Age of the World-Picture” (1938)) that, when considered together, allow Harries to reconstruct the development of Heidegger’s thinking on art as reflecting the dynamic intertwining of his metaphysics and political outlook. Harries shows that the essay on art should be read as a response to issues that had continued to preoccupy Heidegger since the publication of Being and Time, and that it specifically “addresses what may be considered an incompleteness in the understanding of authenticity” developed in that major, albeit unfinished, work. While the question of art does not, in itself, figure in Being and Time, Harries argues that Heidegger’s understanding of authentic existence ultimately “demands art” (31). This connection to art develops, however, only after the failure of a Heideggerian attempt to search for authenticity in the realm of the political.

“In Being and Time Heidegger links authentic existence to an affirmation of the history that has made us who we are. But that history speaks in many different voices. Which ones should we listen to?” (32) For Harries, the answer given in Being and Time leads to the theme of “choosing a hero” which he connects to Heidegger’s own choice of Hitler as his hero. Harries dwells on the intrinsic connections between Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism and his philosophical thinking, but also underscores the fact that this entanglement with Nazism was short-lived and that the German philosopher soon recognized “how disastrously he was mistaken.” In the essay on art, Harries finds a prism that reveals how Heidegger understood the nature of that error. Reading the essay against the background of the “Rectorial Address,” Harries thus shows how themes that will later become central to the work on art—such as the quest for origins, the dialectics of “earth” and “world,” and the important concept of “work”—are dependent on the transfiguration of a rhetoric that originally catered to a National Socialist audience.

The “Rectorial Address” pays homage to the Nazi Führerprinzip. Its call for a new commitment to the essence of science is inseparable from the call for an absolute commitment to the German fate. What anchors Heidegger’s dream of a spiritual renewal in the “Rectorial Address” is an understanding of the crisis of the age in terms of a world in which the death of God pronounced by Friedrich Nietzsche has become a reality. A godless world is a world in which the possibility of meaning has neither ground nor measure, and, as such, it is one that can only sustain forms of human existence that are essentially uprooted. Harries looks at the different ways in which Heidegger responds to the apparent consequences of the Nietzschean pronouncement, emphasizing how the kinds of solution given in the work on art differs from the “Rectorial Address” and from “The Age of the World Picture” in whose title is heard the worry about a world that can no longer be a home since it has taken the form of a picture.

The setting that Harries constructs for reading “The Origin of the Work of Art” is particularly revealing in its ability to illuminate not only the significant change of Heidegger’s perspective beyond the political, but also the manner in which his conception of art remains rooted in the kind of language that had complied with the demands of a totalitarian regime. Hence, for example, while the essay on art seems to have abandoned the idea of recovering science’s origin(ality) within a new political order, the recovery of origins still remains the essay’s regulative ideal: not, this time, the return of science to its Greek origin, but the return of a community to the originality of art, to art’s origin. While the essay leaves behind the rhetoric of a transformation that is dependent on intellectual and political work, it nevertheless continues to search for the possibility of grounding a community’s meaningful life in a different kind of work: the work of art. Here, the double sense of the genitive preposition in “The Origin of the Work of Art” shows itself: “the origin of something, according to Heidegger, “is the source of its nature.” And, in this sense, the inquiry into art’s origin seeks to understand what constitutes the essence of art. Yet, the origin of art is also and perhaps primarily the manner in which art may present itself as origin, as a source of originality. “Is not art in its very essence origin?” (65)

In the second part of the commentary, Harries delves into the essay itself, its key concepts and propositions, guiding the reader through the developing stages of Heidegger’s complex line of argument from the question of “what is a thing?” to the “being of equipment;” from the meaning “world and earth”—with a beautiful reading of Heidegger’s example of the Greek temple—to Heidegger’s notion of truth and of the artwork as the event of truth. Art Matters has grown out of seminars on “The Origin of the Work of Art” that Harries has repeatedly taught at Yale during the last twenty years, and the commentary clearly retains some of the unique oral qualities of Harries’s teaching for which he is much admired. I was very fortunate to have had Harries as my teacher and advisor and to have been able to participate in his seminars in the earlier part of the nineties. These seminars remain, for me, exemplary in their weaving together of phenomenology with an erudite form of hermeneutics and in presenting a philosophy of art that combines highly abstract thinking with an insistence on the historically concrete, sometimes even technical, aspects of the artwork.

Art Matters concludes with the questions with which it began: “Does art still matter? Why does it matter?” For Heidegger, art clearly should matter, but his answer to these questions is ultimately uncertain. The future of art is the future of humanity, and while the philosopher’s work never contains the last word on the matter, it can be crucial in preparing for a certain kind of future. Heidegger thus regards his own essay as “the preliminary and therefore indispensable preparation for the becoming of art . . . [as what] prepares its space for art . . .”(“The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, 79). Yet does art really need philosophy to create for it the space from which it can emerge as origin?

This question echoes what, in my view, is one of the central tensions in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” a work of philosophy that all too often forgets to acknowledge the separateness (the specificity, the singularity or otherness) of the artwork it discusses. When philosophy undertakes the task of articulating for the artwork its original conditions of communicability there is always the danger of imposing on the artwork the confines of a philosophical event. Heidegger, as I read him, remains consistently indifferent to such a danger. This becomes clear, for example, in what for art historians is probably the most familiar “moment” in the essay: Heidegger’s treatment—or mistreatment—of Van Gogh’s painting of shoes to which Meyer Schapiro responded so aggressively in “The Still life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh” (Selected Papers, Vol. 4: Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society, New York: George Braziller, 1994, 135–42).

Since its publication in 1968, Schapiro’s attack on Heidegger has become a well-known “episode” and a common point of reference for theory. Yet, interestingly, and keeping with Jacques Derrida’s playful “Restitutions” (in The Truth in Painting, Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod, trans., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), the question of what shoes are actually depicted in the painting—peasant shoes or the artist’s own shoes—did not matter to theory. With only few exceptions, Schapiro’s criticism has had no real impact on our understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, on our understanding of the relationship between art history and philosophy, or on our ideas about the conditions—the possibilities, limits, the different ways—of writing about pictures. Moreover, Schapiro’s criticism is often taken as an example of the acute theoretical limitations of a certain paradigm of doing art history, limitations typically discussed in the context of a modernist/postmodern divide as, for example, in W. J. T. Mitchell’s evaluation of Schapiro’s “notorious Note” as “one of the most depressing episodes in art history’s continued failure to engage with theory and philosophy in the twentieth century” (“Schapiro’s Legacy,” Art in America 83, no. 4 [April 1995]: 29).

In discussing the Van Gogh example, Harries follows Schapiro in showing that Heidegger’s immediate association of the shoes with peasantry is indicative of—and in this sense, important for understanding—the imaginary space and the intellectual climate in which Heidegger’s thinking had taken shape. Yet, Harries does not regard Heidegger’s mistake as philosophically significant, because in his view Heidegger’s intent was not to describe the painting as much as to communicate a certain mood that is philosophically revealing. In this sense, “the whole controversy . . . seems only tangentially related to what matters in this essay“ (85). Indeed, Schapiro failed to understand or had no interest in understanding what mattered to Heidegger. But, we may also say that art mattered to Schapiro in a different way than it did to Heidegger, or that what mattered to Schapiro was that the specificity of the painting did not matter to Heidegger, that—in the Kantian sense of relating to something as an end in itself—Heidegger did not respect Van Gogh’s painting. Is Schapiro’s response, with its apparently positivistic insistence on the reference and identity of the painted shoes, simply a failure to engage theory, or can it also teach us something important about the (plurality of) ways in which art matters?