ABSTRACT
One of Heidegger's chief concerns was the key role played by art in mankind's relation to Being. In his analysis of the subject, he is not interested in examining it in the narrow sense, as part of aesthetics, since, like metaphysics, he regards aesthetics as defined and constrained by the spirit of 'enframing'. His longest discussion of art, The Origin of the Work of Art, published in 1950 in the collection Holzwege, was derived from material initially delivered in a public lecture to the Art-Historical Society of Freiburg-im-Breisgau on 1935. In Being and Time, Heidegger treats nature merely as something available for practical human purposes or as a present-at-hand object that can be studied by natural science. In 1930 in Amsterdam Heidegger saw one of Van Gogh's eight paintings of shoes. In his description of the Greek temple as a work of art, Heidegger rejects what is often seen as Plato's view that art is merely an imitation of reality.
