Abstract
Heidegger exposed the limitations of the concept of being as self-consciousness. He developed a different framework to understand a human being as an entity whose essence is defined by its existence. Being as existence safeguards its own potentiality and prevents it from getting conceptually and explicitly exhausted. Heidegger describes this strange, dynamic and tense unity of counteracting trends in a human being using opposition of “earth” and “world”. Earth is the source of potentiality from which human beings draw-up meaning to start their historic existence. In art, this meaning is preserved in the works of art. In art, truth becomes an event that constitutes being as existence and enables it to make a leap and advance into the future.
When thought’s courage stems from
the bidding of Being, then
destiny’s language thrives.
(Martin Heidegger, The Thinker as Poet,)
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When I presented this paper at the conference in Istanbul in June 2011, in a discussion a question came up about how Rorty discussed this problem. At that time I was not ready to give a detailed answer. After reading Rorty’s “Essays on Heidegger and others” I have to admit that Rorty acknowledged that Heidegger turned from science to art and poetry looking for a different foundation for truth. However, Rorty interpreted Heidegger’s ideas in the light of pragmatism. Rorty called Heidegger’s answers poetic appropriations of pseudo-problems we have inherited from our historic tradition. Rorty stated that Heidegger treats philosophy as a “banal poetry”, more like an “unconscious self-parody”. In spite of Rorty’s sometimes seemingly sympathetic analysis of Heidegger’s point of view about where and how to answer the question about truth and who can we entrust to do it, the difference between Heidegger and him gets very vivid when Rorty talks about the language and its role in the process of cognition. Rorty looked at Heidegger from Dewey’s pragmatist platform, which prohibited him from seeing Heidegger’s implicit intensions when Rorty turned to art for help to illuminate the problem of truth and its historic grounding. /Rorty R., Esssays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, Vol.2, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991/
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Stafecka, M. (2012). The Truth of the Work of Art: Heidegger and Gadamer. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Phenomenology and the Human Positioning in the Cosmos. Analecta Husserliana. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4795-1_17
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