Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is notoriously dense and difficult. In part this is because it appears to come almost from nowhere, given that Heidegger has relatively little to say about art in his earlier work. Yet the essay can only be adequately understood, I would argue, in concert with Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin from the same year, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing.” Without the Hölderlin essay, for instance, the central claim of “The Origin of the Work of Art” to the effect that all art is in essence poetizing, Dichtung, can hardly be appreciated in its philosophical significance without the discussions of both essence and poetizing that appear in the Hölderlin essay. This is true of other concepts also. The central concept of the rift (Riß)—the fissure or tear—that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” might readily be assumed to be adopted from Albrecht Dürer, whose use of the term Heidegger cites at a key point in the 1936 essay. Here, however, I argue that the real source of the concept for Heidegger is Hölderlin, and that the Riß is, moreover—quite literally—an inscription of originary, ekstatic temporality; that is, of temporality as the “origin” of Being and as the poetic or poetizing essence of art. I do so, first, by briefly considering Heidegger’s references to Dürer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and other texts from the period, as well as his understanding of the Riß and of the tearing of the Riß in that essay and in its two earlier versions. I then turn to Heidegger’s 1936 Rome lecture “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing,” in order to show the Hölderlinian origins of this concept for Heidegger.
The Literary Philosophical Significance of the Belles Letters in the Late Yi Dynasty