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.

Calvin Schrag’s Self after Postmodernity is a trim but ambitious book. In it Schrag sets out to correct, or at least to temper—sometimes seemingly to appease—what he regards as the excesses and distortions arising from contemporary assaults on the concepts of selfhood and subjectivity, arising particularly from recent French philosophy. In so doing, he tries to articulate a response to the problem of modernity as framed by Weber and Habermas, that is, in terms of the increasing mutual alienation of the cultural spheres of science, morality, and art. To these three Schrag adds a fourth, religion, and doing so affords him repeated—though not always fruitful—digressions into Kierkegaard’s account of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of existence.