Art or certainty

Brian Brock writes of Heidegger’s essay on “Nietzsche’s Word”: “The concept of ‘art’ as a replacement for Descartes’s ‘certainty’ attracts Heidegger not least because a public and social horizon is built into it: truth grows from an insight into being made public in a way that claims others.” That is, in contrast to Descartes, for whom truth arises from what is within, Heidegger employs a secular “Protestant” notion of a verbum ex auditu , the external claim that confronts the subject.

Brock continues: “Heidegger’s crucial move, in departure from Nietzsche, is to elucidate how, even if we say that language refers to reality, to real being, all knowledge nevertheless comes to us and is conveyed to us through representations. It is not apprehended ‘self-evidently’ as in the Cartesian/Kantian scheme. Representation always uses a communal or cultural form to show and so make real for others. This is the task of art, properly speaking.” Aesthetic knowledge thus becomes the model for all knowledge.