Temple and world

It’s obvious that, in Heidegger’s terms, human art remake earth -stone is remade into sculpture, the components of paint into a scene or a portrait. Heidegger also insists that art remakes world, reshapes the human environment by redrawing boundaries of earth and world.

Heidegger appeals to the example of a Greek temple: “A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley. The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. By means of the temple, the god is present in the temple. This presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. The temple and its precinct , however, do not fade away into the indefinite. It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does hte nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation.” Though its material is drawn from earth, it provides (in Brian Brock’s words) “a specific socialized interpretation” of human experience.

The temple displays its own relation to earth, and thus the relation of world to earth: “Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting of the work draws up out of the rock the obscurity of that rock’s bulky yet spontaneous support. Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence.”