Heidegger's Earth and World: Concepts of a fascist philosophy?

After reading The Origin of the Work of Art for the first time, the philosophy proposed by Heidegger can remind us of his involvement with Nazism. The concept of a World as a plexus of significative relations that provide the entities that surround men with meaning, from an enlightened cosmopolitan perspective such as that of liberal democracies and socialism, seems out of place in our times. A moment in history where western culture erases the localisms of historical peoples. From this perspective and next to the artistic vanguards that were in vogue in the period, the idea of the work of art as founding a World appears as a bizarre device at the service of fascism, in a time when the hope of a humanist and cosmopolitan state seemed to lose its utopic character. Despite this, a more attentive reading of the text reveals a more profound complexity. The objective of this essay is to overcome the interpretation that sees Heidegger’s philosophy as imbued with the ideology of Nazism and as an obsolete theory in what regards modern art. On the contrary, it reveals itself as a philosophy that has a twofold relationship to Kant’s enlightened critiques. On the one hand, it deals with the limits of human reason to confront the illegitimate pretensions of its time’s science and, on the other, overcomes Kant’s aestheticism to achieve a more correct and comprehensive grasp of the artistic phenomenon.

Heidegger seems to include two different meanings in the formula “art is the becoming and happening of truth”. The example of the Greek temple fits more easily in an interpretation that relates his philosophy to Nazism. This work of art founds a historical culture by providing its members with a plexus of meaning where their lives and decisions take place. This statement may remind us of Hegel’s idea of the death of art when religion and philosophy overcome it in its function of an objective manifestation of the spirit. In this way, the idea of the work of art founding a world appears as a primitivism, a theory that seems more adequate to tribal arts than to the 20^th century. Despite Heidegger’s attempts to present art as establishing the truth on which the other elements of culture are supported, he subordinates art to politics: the latter being nothing more than the tangible symbol of the order under which the population of a certain culture are organized. But Heidegger provides us with other examples that are hard to put in consonance with the first. Van Gogh’s painting and Meyer’s poem are claimed to reveal philosophical concepts. The first introducing us to the essence of the “equipment” (defined as that which is manufactured expressly for use and usage) and the second by illustrating the concepts of World and Earth trough the history of thought. How are we to put in consonance these two functions that are assigned to art? One that makes the work of art the origin of all particularities and another that makes it a meta-discourse with universal characteristics on the nature of being.

The key is in the concept of Earth and its essential struggle with World. Again, a reading that only touches the surface of Heidegger’s circles can see in the concept of Earth notes of Hitler’s regime and its romanticized German country life, specially after the interpretation that is provided on Van Gogh’s painting. Heidegger defines Earth as that which “always closes itself and therefore welcomes and receives in its inside”, as that on top of which the world is founded and as that which is raised by the world. The essential struggle between the World and the Earth is instigated by the work of art whose very essence is this struggle. The Earth is therefore what is but is not World. Given the World is by definition all that we know, we can say Earth is nothingness. Like Heidegger said in his infamous phrase, nothingness itself nothings, which is to say that nothingness does things, it’s active. Then, this Earth is the inexhaustible source of being from which the being that reflects on its being (dasein) rises a world. Earth escapes the human attempts to achieve a stable knowledge about it. What the Greek temple and Van Gogh’s painting have in common is their power to “bring here the earth”, that is to say, extract something from the darkness of that which escapes the limits of what humans can know within their plexus of meaning (World) and bring it to the light of what can be known by us. The temple is limited to founding the historical people of the Greeks while the painting, with its technique that favors the expressiveness of the broad brushstrokes to the definition of realist lines, expresses the constant essential struggle between Earth and World. The shoes of the painting enable us to know the world of the countrywoman but if we focus on the background we start receiving gestalt images that disappear as soon as we try to retain them, just as the earth escapes the human attempts of conceptual stabilization. The “rising of a world by the temple” doesn’t lack this essential struggle which is the essence of the work of art. The difference resides in that the great art of our times enables us to know this structure of being.

In this way, Heidegger’s conceptual framework faces the “objective” attitude of its time’s thought together with its technolatric tendencies and overcomes the subjectivism of Kant’s aesthetics. It doesn’t achieve it with a weak propagandistic discourse: it reveals an ontological complexity that escapes modern thought. Revealing the complexity of Truth, which can never fully capture Earth, the objective perspective becomes powerless in what regards questions that ask for something more than causal chaining of physical phenomena and its possible utility when applied to technology. The artistic phenomenon and its essential struggle reveals itself as a medullar part of all human societies: the constant change in humanity’s way of thinking both itself and the entities that surrounds it has an origin in the always partial character of all possible knowledge. From this perspective Heidegger’s philosophy can be considered as a further refinement of the theorization on the limits discovered by Kant in times when the universal and necessary character of the categories becomes unacceptable, accepting the historical character of truth.

It is a significative fact that, as Meyer Schapiro discovered, Van Gogh’s shoes were not the countrywoman’s but the artist’s. The art of the vanguards turns towards itself. The concept of the World of a historical people becomes problematic in times where the west’s globalization fully covers the planet. In this context, some questions deserve further development: Is a world possible in our post-modernity? Is the work that reveals the ontological structure of itself just another chapter in the history of art? Or, on the contrary, is it the dawn of a transcendental art that, as all works, also founds a transcendental World?