I do think that Heidegger considers art to “work” on us in its own, unique way, and this effect differs from saying a similar thing in non-aesthetic language. To use your very appropriate example of the shoes in Van Gogh, to paint the shoes differs from saying “the farmer has experienced drudgery” as a reporter might speak of the farmer’s experience. The art work has something intrinsic to it that drives specifically aesthetic responses. However, at the same time as you well point out, those responses also are part of the “work of art”; that is, we also make it an art work with our engagement. So it is a function of both the art work and the work of art on us, what Thomas Wartenberg calls Heidegger’s “holistic account that treats every aspect of art — artist (or ‘creator’ in his terminology), work, and audience (‘preserver’) — as essential to it” (Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd Ed., p. 149). Yet your final point brings us back to one of the things that, I think, is most helpful in Heidegger. He is one of the few aestheticians who actually gives us a system of thought that works across different art forms (painting, poetry, architecture, etc.), where the writings of so many other thinkers work well perhaps in one area but not as well in another.

Many thanks for your thoughts.

–Andrew Swensen

But this is what I think he’s up to. For Heidegger any revealing of something, whether through language or some other medium, presupposes that something is concealed. Think of it this way: we cannot focus on something in the foreground of experience and at the same time fully grasp the background of experience. The very idea of a foreground presupposes an indeterminate background. With regard to ordinary objects, we are either fully immersed in our habitual activity with them so the contrast between foreground and background dissolves or we stand back and considered them objectively in which case the foreground becomes our focus and the background is inert. But in neither case do we get the whole in view.

Works of art on Heidegger’s view exist in the vortex of this interplay and reveal the tension between foreground and background. Van Gogh’s shoes reveal their Being as pieces of equipment, with their markings of wear, drudgery, the resistance of the world, but also of successful harvests, the historical path of the farmer. But there are intimations of something else in the painting that cannot be fully expressed as an element of the “world” of the farmer, brief glimpses of something not fully expressed that suggests a different destiny, a fundamental instability of the farmer’s world.

Thus, any account of the system of representation in the painting will be incomplete.

It is not at all clear to me that Heidegger thinks there is something distinctive about works of art. It seems to me its our mode of engagement with an object that makes it a work of art. After all, the three examples he uses–Van Gogh’s painting, a Greek temple, and a poem, are quite different kinds of objects.