ABSTRACT
A knowledge of the history of a painting is crucial for a full understanding of the meaning of that work, including an understanding of how a particular work can be a source of phenomenological insight. But in this chapter I will explore what a painting can tell us about history in a phenomenological understanding of being. For the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, history can tell us a great deal about the freedom of being, and so I wish to show here that a painting, too, especially a painting of an historical subject, can give us insight into the freedom of being. Two key, specific tasks that are central to history’s interest in freedom are at stake in my essay: helping us take responsibility for and a stand on history, and helping us understand freedom as the power to break with the world we find ourselves in. In fact, because a history painting can give us a special kind of experience with history in its decisive moments and, therefore, with a concretely configured moment of freedom, I wish to suggest here-and I only have space to suggest, rather than argue-that a work of painted history has a greater capacity than a work of written history does to demonstrate’s freedom’s power to perform a task that Heidegger thought was fundamental to philosophy: radicalize the question of being.
