Aesthetics

Poetry, Language, Thought

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Martin Heidegger

1971

This collection of essays gathers some of Heidegger's most celebrated and accessible writing on art, language, and human dwelling. The centrepiece is "The Origin of the Work of Art", where Heidegger argues that great art does not represent reality but discloses a world — opening a clearing in which a people understands what is and what matters. "Building Dwelling Thinking" explores what it means to truly inhabit the earth rather than merely occupy it. "Language" and "...Poetically Man Dwells..." develop the claim that language is not a human tool but the house of Being, and that it is in poetry — above all Hölderlin's — that language speaks most originally.