Dasein - Monoskop

HEIDEGGER'S ONTOLOGY AND LANGUAGE AS THE UNIVERSAL MEDIUM 195 SI
almost inaccessible to systematic exposition. In order to overcome
this difficulty, I shall organize Heidegger's pronouncements around
seven theses that are formulated parallel to his central claims on art.
It is only after these somewhat laboursome preliminaries that I shall
turn to showing how important the belief in language as the universal
medium is for Heidegger. To postpone this task until this late
stage seems to me to be necessitated by the extreme difficulty of the
task and by the wealth of Heidegger's text. These difficulties make
it imperative to present first an account of what I take him to claim
and propose, independently of the objectives of my interpretation.
4.1. Art and poetry
The most important tenets of Heidegger's main work on art can be
summarized in seven theses. I shall present and explain them in
turn, and number them for subsequent reference:
(A-l) We cannot analyze the work of art starting from the categories
of "thing" or "equipment", since both of these categories
become accessible only in and through the work of art itself.
Heidegger arrives at this claim by criticizing traditional notions of
what a thing is, and by demonstrating how the essence of equipment
'must' be read from a work of art.
At first sight, the notion of thing seems like a natural starting
point for an investigation into the notion of an artwork. An artwork,
one might suggest, is but a thing with aesthetic value. But what
then is a thing? Heidegger gives a brief rundown of three traditional
answers, ar.d expresses his dissatisfaction with all three of them.
According to the first answer, the "thing" is the vir0KSifiEV0Vy it is
the carrier of attributes (ra OV^^E^KSIQ). Heidegger argues that
this notion makes the thing itself inaccessible: we can only reach
new and ever new attributes, but never the thing itself. What is
worse, this result—the inaccessibility of the thing—contradicts our
everyday experience: w f e believe that we have immediate contact
with things themselves, not only with their various attributes. 238
According to the second answer, a thing is but a bundle of sense
data: "The thing is the cnxrdrfcov, that which is perceptible by sensations
in the senses .. ." 239 This solution—the one proposed by Moore