Author Description

The remarks on "art" and "aesthetics" at the center of the volume provide the connecting link to the great "Holzwege" treatise "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes," the first elaboration of which goes back to 1935. The volume begins with the exhaustive and unique interpretation of Kant's "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment" in summer semester of 1936. As Heidegger writes to Elisabeth Blochmann on June 27, 1936, he conceived of this interpretation as an alternative draft to the "empty slogans" of contemporary (National Socialist) art doctrine. The question of "art" is further elaborated during the following winter semester by Heidegger's only seminar on Schiller, which deals with the famous "Briefe zur asthetischen Erziehung des Menschen". The two concluding seminars on Kant's "Prolegomena" and on the "Progress" of metaphysics (of summer semesters 1941 and 1942, respectively) are closely related to each other and are devoted to Kant's later expositions and retrospective self-interpretations of his main work "Critique of Pure Reason".