Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art

This book, the first comprehensive study in English of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, starts in the mid-1930s with Heidegger’s discussion of the Greek temple and his Hegelian declaration that a great artwork gathers together an entire culture in affirmative celebration of its foundational ‘truth’, and that, by this criterion, art in modernity is ‘dead’. His subsequent work on Hölderlin, whom he later identified as the decisive influence on his mature philosophy, led him into a passionate engagement with the art of Rilke, Cézanne, Klee and Zen Buddhism, liberating him not only from the overly restrictive conception of art of the mid-1930s but also from the disastrous politics of the period. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the anglophone world, Young establishes a new account of Heidegger’s philosophy of art and shows that his famous essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ is its beginning, not its end.

• Young is a distinguished commentator on Heidegger and author of a very successful book on Nietzsche’s philosophy of art • This is the first book-length treatment of the topic in English and draws on material hitherto unavailable in the anglophone world • Proposes a new account of the development of Heidegger’s thinking about art

1. ‘The origin of the work of art’; 2. Hölderlin: the early texts; 3. Hölderlin: the later texts; 4. Modern art.