PHIL 570-02 Special Topics:Rhythmic Figures M 11-1:40 Dr. Fynsk

PHIL 570-02 Special Topics:Rhythmic Figures M 11-1:40 Dr. Fynsk

This seminar is devoted to Martin Heidegger’s turn to the question of art in the mid-1930’s and its meaning for the course of his thinking in the years immediately following his disastrous political engagement of 1933-34.

It will focus primarily on Heidegger’s lecture series of 1934-35 on Friedrich Hölderlin, and on Heidegger’s major essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935-36).

Both texts are extraordinarily rich documents. The lecture series, for example, offers a fascinating engagement with Hölderlin’s philosophy of tragedy (notably the Remarks on Oedipus and Antigone) and the thought of rhythm that informs Hölderlin’s account of tragic form. It also offers a quite stunning (though problematic) reading of Hölderlin’s river hymns. The artwork essay then develops numerous motifs from the lecture series in a remarkable account of the work’s formal composition. Both essays carry forward Heidegger’s thinking on language in important ways, and both touch upon an essential dimension of Heidegger’s later thinking, namely his notion of usage, der Brauch (which allows him to displace the modern notion of production).

Both also advance an understanding of art with profound ethico-political implications. Can this account of art be understood as a form of “national aesthetics” that relies on myth, as Lacoue-Labarthe charges? Or is there a more complex understanding of the artistic figure (Gestalt) at stake? The answer to this question helps define the considerable importance of this work for our contemporary context (with respect to topics such as art and ecology, or art and national identity).

The divergences between the two texts also open important avenues for questioning.Heidegger’s focus on the figure of the poet in his lecture series gives way to a virtual elision of the poet’s role in the artwork essay, to which Heidegger later appends a critical note observing that he has failed to come to grips with the question of the relation between Being and human being. A fundamental question opens here for Heidegger’s thought of the human essence.

The juxtaposition of the two primary texts for this course thus allows an introduction to core questions in Heidegger’s thinking in the period of the 1930’s, and essential questions about the nature of art itself. A careful textual analysis of the two primary texts, and consideration of other relevant works (Hölderlin’sRemarks, Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche’s understanding of art, and Heidegger’s lectures of 1942 on Hölderlin’s poem, “The Ister”) will afford a valuable perspective on this tumultuous period in Heidegger’s career.

Expertise with Heidegger’s thinking is not a prerequisite for this course. His writings on art offer an excellent pathway into his work.

Primary Readings:

Martin Heidegger: Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine”, trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).

Martin Heidegger: Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister”, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

Martin Heidegger: “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 139-212.

Martin Heidegger: Nietzsche, Vol. One: The Will to Power as Art, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).