ONLINE FIRST
published on January 23, 2018
Karen Robertson
Heidegger and the Ambivalent Status of Human Interpretation
Art, History, Modernity
Drawing on Heidegger’s essay “The Origin on the Work of Art,” I argue that works of art reveal human experience to be simultaneously finite and ecstatic and that art is part of the way our experience unfolds. Secondly, I argue that the dynamic of experience that art enables and in which it is implicated is precisely what historical experience is; this historical character of our experience is also always intersubjective and relational. Next, I turn to “Why Poets?” to analyse Heidegger’s critique of Rilke’s work in terms of the idea that works of art are involved in our self-constitution as historical and relational beings. Reading these two essays together, finally, allows me to conclude by characterising the demands of a distinctly modern experience of interpretation and by identifying the need to question what it means to be a “we” as the defining question of modernity.