Taylor Carman

This book is probably the best comprehensive treatment of Heidegger’s philosophy of art currently available in English. A little over a third of the volume deals with the most widely read and discussed of Heidegger’s texts concerning art, the 1936 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The remaining hundred pages or so then go beyond that familiar territory into many other sources, including Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin and Nietzsche, his later essays on poetry and language, and his occasional remarks concerning actual paintings and musical and architectural works. Readers who don’t already know will be interested to learn that Heidegger’s comments on contemporary works of art frequently belie his own usual sweeping dismissal of modern art as so much smoothly manipulated technological product. Though he remained preoccupied with what Hölderlin called “the flight of the gods” in modernity and the spiritual “darkening of the world” in the age of technology, Heidegger also expressed admiration for the paintings of Van Gogh, Braque, Klee, and Cézanne, the music of Stravinsky and Carl Orff, the poetry of Rilke, Trakl, Paul Celan, René Char, and Stefan George, and the architecture of Le Corbusier.

Frederick Olafson criticizes Hubert Dreyfus’s interpretation of BEING AND TIME on a number of points, including the meaning of being, the nature of intentionality, and especially the role of das Man in Heidegger’s account of social existence. But on the whole Olafson’s critique is unconvincing because it rests on an implausible account of presence and perceptual intuition in Heidegger’s early philosophy, and because Olafson maintains an overly individuated notion of Dasein and consequently a one-sided conception of the role of das Man. Unfortunately, since Dreyfus confines his commentary exclusively to Division I, he in effect forgoes any attempt to explain how das Man might be understood as playing the simultaneously constitutive and destructive role Heidegger evidently envisioned for it. I conclude by arguing that the conformity and the conformism represented by das Man are bound together by Heidegger’s notion of standoffishness (Abständigkeit).