The “Side” of Technique and the “Side” of Art in Martin Heidegger’s Late Thought

Paweł Dybel

Abstract

The author refers to the manner in which Heidegger undertook in his late publications the question of technique and art. In doing so author indicates the key role played in Heidegger’s reflections by the distinction, introduced by ancient Greeks, between two ways of extracting/discovering the transparency of the actual with the aid of techne based on artisanal skills. The first way, involving the production of everyday objects, is embedded in the foundation of the later concept of technique, while the second, known as poiesis, became the basis of the comprehension of art. In the first case, key significance belonged to the interpretation of real life, emerging in the seventeenth century in natural sciences as an easily calculated “standing reserve” (der Bestand) of energy to be applied. Such energy made possible the exploitation (knowing no bounds) of the world of Nature whose non-secretiveness matters only insofar as man is capable of suitably focusing it on himself. Today we painfully confront the disastrous outcomes of this approach.

A totally different approach towards the non-secretiveness of the real is that of a presentations of artworks, which, as the outcome of poiesis, offer and reserve art due to the latter as such. Consequently, they produce the effect of beauty. This is why today art, exhibiting in its presentations the experience of the non-secretiveness of the real as focused on itself, makes contemporary observers aware of the limitations and threats of an adjustable approach to that non-secretiveness.