The Origin of the Work of Art

Introduction

Heidegger first gave the lecture in Freiburg in November 1935, repeated it in Zurich and expanded it into three lectures in Frankfurt in late 1936; it was published only in 1950 in the collection Holzwege. Against an aesthetics that treats art as an object of enjoyment, Heidegger asks how truth happens in the work. His examples are a painting of shoes by Van Gogh, which he takes to be a peasant woman’s, and a Greek temple that sets up a world on the earth: the work lives from the strife between “world” and “earth”. In 1968 the art historian Meyer Schapiro objected that the shoes were Van Gogh’s own, a debate Derrida later took up.

More works by Martin Heidegger

• 1927Being and Time
• 1929What Is Metaphysics?
• 1946Letter on Humanism
• 1953The Question Concerning Technology