Title

Complicating Heidegger and the Truth of Architecture

Keywords

Concept of being, Art objects, Buildings, Basic writing, Beauty, Dasein, Philosophical object, Ontological essence

Abstract

According to Martin Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time (hereafter, BT ), the everyday world at its most fundamental level is a domain of praxis , a realm of predominantly practical truths shaped by and disclosed to practical tasks and relations. As we will see, in BT , Heidegger identified two main categories of objects belonging to the everyday world: use-objects that are "ready to hand" (cloth- ing, shelter, tools, and materials) and "thingly" (dinglich) objects that are "present to hand" (ob- jects of science, mere things, and natural entities- which I call "elemental objects"). In this article, I argue that as early as 1935-36 in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (hereafter, OWA), this ontological distinction was implicitly complicated in ways that Heidegger did not explicitly acknowledge when he supplemented the ontological schema of BT with a new and definitively different category of beings: works, the creative products of art and architecture.

Original Publication Citation

Travis T. Anderson. “Complicating Heidegger and the Truth of Architecture,” in The Aesthetics of Architecture: Philosophical Investigations into the Art of Building, ed. David Goldblatt and Roger Paden. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 69-79.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2011-12

Publisher

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Language

English

College

Humanities

Department

Philosophy

University Standing at Time of Publication

Associate Professor

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