Heidegger: The “Promise” of “Art” at the “Twilight” of Philosophy

The pertinence of Martin Heidegger’s decisive questioning of the “meaning of Being” to the manifold problems of our “dis-oriented ” world can be best elucidated in terms of its emphasis on the latter’s radical finitude. Indeed, Heidegger came to transcribe “Being” as “Being” in order to better highlight the ontological contingence of the said world. One whose ultimate ontological foundation, according to Heidegger, is “nothing” other than the “Ab-ground” of “Being” understood as its “abyssal groundlessness”. In the texts of the postwar period and, notably, in the controversial 1949 “Bremen Lecture” entitled “The Danger”, Heidegger explicitly identifies the “Abground” of “Being” with the notion of “Death” conceived as the “Hearth of Being” (“Das Gebirg des Seyns”). In order to think “Death” in such a manner, Heidegger modified the notion of “World ” which had played a key role in his influential lecture on “art” delivered in the mid 1930s. In the wake of Heidegger’s own insistence on the “identity” of the “Origin of the Work of Art ”and “Truth” as the “Ab-ground of Being” we shall further argue that only an “art” practiced as “Poetry” (“Dichtung”) could purport to break with “mimesis” and “be-speak Death” as the “Hearth of Being” as well as the “Open” of the dispensation of its “safeguarded essence”.