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The Arts

Dasein And The Arts

So how do you apply philosophical principles to think about art? An example can be derived from an unlikely source. Reneh Karamians uses Heidegger’s philosophy as an illustration of how to understand aesthetic experience.

Martin Heidegger gave philosophy a new description of humanity. No longer was mankind defined in terms of mind distinct from the physical world, as in Cartesian thought for example, but rather as being-in-the-world. Heidegger described ‘being’ as the essence of humanity, and employed the term ‘Dasein’ (German for ‘being-there’) to describe our existence.

This idea of being as the essence of humanity is not difficult to understand. It’s the realization that the essence of human existence is not to be found in our corporeality, as it would be for a physical object existing in space and time, but rather, in a certain type of experience of existing.

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