Art as Truth

Art as Truth

Class Readings: Thomas Wartenberg/Nature of Art

November 22, 2015

Martin Heidegger said that “beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness.”(157) The truth is made present and manifest through that which is beautiful. A key theme in ancient thought was that the good, true, and beautiful all coalesced. The good, true, and beautiful were all essential Forms in Plato’s thought. The Danish Philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, recognized that is not enough for something to be true if it is cold and indifferent. For the existentialist gadfly, it was not enough to know the true way to live. An equally important question the philosophers struggle with is how to live beautifully. What good would it do to act in truth if it meant forsaking that which is beautiful. Heidegger held that the origin of art is not the artist nor the equipment but the art itself. The creation of art is different from the creation of other useful objects, of equipment, since art is created in and of itself, for itself. Equipment is made with a preconceived purpose in mind. For example, an ax is made to chop down a tree. In a work of art, createdness is exposed and experienced. The nature of art is the “setting-into-work of truth.”(159) In art, truth is in the process of becoming and happening. Art opens itself up to the world, showing us the Being of particular beings; the essence behind objects.