Influential interpretations of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art focus on the view that great art is massive and communal—typically structures like temples and cathedrals. This approach, however, faces two interpretive problems. First, what are we to do with artworks in the essay that clearly are not monumental or communal, such as van Gogh’s Shoes? Second, how should we understand our experience of works such as the Greek temple, which once were but are no longer central in this way? (...) Heidegger himself says that great art of the past becomes either a relic of the past or a mere object of aesthetic experience, but his description of his own experience with a Greek temple seems to contradict this. To understand Heidegger’s views on art—including his explicit claims about the limited vitality of great art of the past and his unintentional case for the continued power of great art of the past—it is crucial to distinguish, first, between Heidegger’s notions of world and worldhood, and, second, between two senses of what makes art great—world disclosure and world gathering. Doing so allows us to make better sense both of the essay as a whole and the potential continued vitality of great art of the past. (shrink)

This thesis examines Moby-Dick through the lens of existential phenomenology, with a focus on explicating Ishmael’s character in relation to the philosophical concept of the understanding of being. Establishing Hubert Dreyfus' interpretation of how works of art disclose understandings of being as a critical philosophical framework, this thesis prioritizes literary analysis of Melville's Moby-Dick and Homer's The Odyssey over philosophical exposition. This literary analysis, based in the critical perspective of phenomenological ontology, investigates and compares phenomenological accounts of mood and polytheism (...) in Melville and Homer. Brief analyses are also made of Dante, as a representative of a monotheistic understanding of being, and the contemporary existential context of Moby-Dick's ontological framework, as related to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This approach analyzes the experiential phenomenology of Ishmael’s attunement to mood, his relationship with Queequeg, and his interpretations of the sperm whale, culminating in an analytic of his accounts of worldhood, sacredness, and polytheism. (shrink)