email to an art exhibit reviewer:
I’m thrilled to see Heidegger remembered as inquirer into art, especially as entrance into your review [of an exhibit of ancient and contemporary ceramics in Malta]….
Heidegger implicitly distinguishes between the Work which eventually results in an artwork and the artwork itself. So, “the work of art” has the artist-at-work (the Work) in mind (“setting forth" toward the artwork). Indeed, the artwork doesn’t “set itself to work” [quoting reviewer] “The truth of an entity” [ibid.] is intentional, which only living “entities” show. (What may be the “truth” of a gloriously-colored bird showing, unwittingly, its evolved excellence?).
"The truth has set itself to work.” Setting forth will be “set up” [Heid.] as the artwork. He makes that distinction (setting forth—> setting up) in his 1931 lecture “The Essence of Truth.” The Work (including what resulted in his lecture, “Origin of the Work of Art” [1936])—“the nature of art” [reviewer]—exemplifies “the truth of being” [Heid.], which belongs only to being, i.e., a life “setting itself to work”[reviewer]. “Origin of the Work of Art” is an artwork (developed as several versions of the lecture before publication.)
We die, leaving at best our marks on Earth. The “works” deep inside caves of southwest Spain “say” “We lived memorably.”
All that remains to prove they lived is their re-marks on what lasts best: the stone.
From that, we moderns make up our histories. But their near-term heirs, also “Of ” the caves, must have seen a legacy of their ancestors. So, there was history. There being a basis for remem-
brance and advancing even further, came to light through found examples, “lived” again in living remembrance.
So, the “meet” of neolithic and contemporary dramatizes some-
thing profound about the singularity of our humanity across generations, across millennia.
Heidegger ends “Origin” by saying: “Art is history, in the essential sense that it is the ground of history.”
I love that.
