Art and Responsibility A Phenomenology of the Diverging Paths of Rosenzweig and Heidegger

by Simon, Jules

• ISBN13: 9781441109521
• ISBN10: 1441109528
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-03-24
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Two German philosophers working during the Weimar Republic in Germany, between the two World Wars, produced seminal texts that continue to resonate almost 100 years later. Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger, a Jewish thinker and a philosopher who at one time was studying to become a Roman Catholic Priest, each in their own, particular way include in their writings powerful philosophies of art that, if approached phenomenologically and ethically, provide keys to understanding their radically divergent trajectories, both biographically and for their philosophical heritage. Simon provides a close reading of some of their essential texts-The Star of Redemption for Rosenzweig and Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art for Heidegger-in order to draw attention to how their philosophies of art can be understood to provide significant ethical directives.

Author Biography

Jules Simon is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Science. Technology, Ethics, and Policy at the University of Texas at El Paso, USA. He is the co-editor of The Double Binds of Ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the Fragments (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009). Professor Simon is on the editorial board and works as book editor for the Rosenzweig

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Introdution	p. 1
A phenomenology of Diverging paths	p. 1
Philosophies of history	p. 5
Outline of this text	p. 8
Rosenzweig's "turn" to philosophy, art, and the ethical	p. 8
Heidegger's "turn" from politics	p. 11
To art and language	p. 13
Messianism and politics	p. 14
The Mask of Mephistopheles	p. 19
A mathematic-based symbolic logic Theology	p. 23
The god: metaphysics as negation of negative Theology	p. 25
The irrational, empirical starting point	p. 26
Formulating metaphysics	p. 27
Where are the mythical gods of Olympia?	p. 30
The world: metalogic as negation of negative cosmology	p. 32
Doubting Descartes	p. 32
Formulating the metalogic	p. 34
The sleeping, plastic world	p. 36
The human self: meta-ethics as the modern method	p. 38
Kant's soul-less negative psychology	p. 38
Formulating meta-ethics	p. 40
Defiantly tragic heroes	p. 44
Art and the new philosophy	p. 49
Renewing Narrations or Chaos in Creation	p. 57
Rosenzweig's creation story as: "chaos in creation"	p. 58
Theory of art	p. 65
Critique of generation in Idealist aesthetics	p. 65
Ascending from underground to the Garden of Life	p. 69
Trust, the holistic author, and art as language	p. 71
Genius	p. 74
Renewing the story of creation	p. 78
Rosenzweig's midrash as Philosophy of Language	p. 85
Knowledge, interpretation, and ethics	p. 85
The analogy of love as ethical dialogue	p. 90
The grammar of particularity	p. 96
The purpose of art: the holistic human	p. 99
Accomplishing the aesthetics of ensouling	p. 101
Applying the midrash: from art to the ethical	p. 104
The Messianic Aesthetic	p. 111
Partners in immanence	p. 111
Growing the world - one dialogue at a time	p. 120
From redemptive art to a "messianic aesthetics" as performance art: the poetics of responsibility	p. 128
The word of god	p. 132
Configuring a messianic aesthetic in the socio-historical realm	p. 135
Heidegger's Hammer: From the Workshop of Being and Time to the Work of Art	p. 153
Out of the "things themselves" sighting The historical horizons of da-sein	p. 153
The function of logos as relational speech and truth as aesthetics	p. 165
The hammer as tool and work as a function of Totality	p. 171
Constituting the transcendent world and deciding freely for oneself	p. 178
Deciding freely for oneself? An enduring problem	p. 180
Turning Through Phenomenology to Art and Ethos: an analysis of the Origin of the Work of Art	p. 187
Establishing the connections	p. 188
The thing and the work	p. 189
The thing as the bearer of attributes	p. 190
The thing as the unity of the manifold perceptions	p. 192
The thing as form-stuff	p. 192
Standing on the ground of decision	p. 197
The work of art as the place of conflict	p. 202
Truth and art	p. 207
Founding art as poetry	p. 214
Philosophy, Poetry, and the Absent God: Interlocutions on Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Political	p. 225
Interlocutions and the Heidegger controversy	p. 225
Jean-Marie Schaeffer on Heidegger's role as a traditionalist	p. 226
Julian Young: rehabilitating the fallen master	p. 231
Veronique Fóti: on dissembling, violence, and feminism	p. 238
My turn	p. 245
Hölderlin's hymn "The Ister"	p. 246
Final Words	p. 257
Bibliography	p. 273
Index	p. 285
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