The Sacred in Thinging: Heidegger’s “Design” in the Light of Kantian Aesthetics and the Telos of Nature

Abstract

This article offers a fresh exegesis of Heidegger’s philosophy of art, focusing on his conceptualization of artwork as the reproduction of the thing’s general essence. Grounding the analysis in Heidegger’s revisit of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, this study explores Heidegger’s interpretation of a thing as a “composed homogeneity” that reveals inherent determinations of temporality and spatiality in the self-presence of beings as a phenomenon grasped within finite human cognition. This is inextricably linked to the ecstatic temporality of Dasein, elucidating a cyclical human–thing dynamic integral to Heidegger’s ontology. Going deeper, I draw parallels between Kant’s “supersensible” realm and Heidegger’s “earth”, revealing a teleological (ethical) design manifested in art that captures the dual essence of Nature—using Kantian terminology, its purposiveness and contrapurposiveness—intersecting with Heidegger’s notion of the counter-essence of ἀλήθεια in relation to freedom. Finally, I show how the manifold aesthetic metamorphoses of this existential scheme within the existentiell ordinariness through nonradiant φαίνεσθαι, such as equipmentality, emerge as the everyday incarnation of this design.

1. Art, Thing, and Gestalt

“The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–1936), a seminal text by Martin Heidegger, delineates a philosophical transition from the concept of Dasein to a broader inquiry into being as such, although the interpretations of this transition remain contentious. William J. Richardson, at the close of his analysis, argues that “in analyzing a work of art, we find we are still inside the hermeneutic circle of which Being and Time spoke” (Richardson 2003, p. 417). For Richardson, in “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger persists in emphasizing resoluteness as a defining attribute of Dasein’s authenticity (Ibid.). He perceives a subtle inversion in which Being has “assumed primacy over”(Ibid., p. 417). Dasein—a contrast to the relationship found in Being and Time. For Hubert L. Dreyfus, this shift is more marked. He sees “The Origin of the Work of Art” as a departure from the “universal structures of Worldhood” (Dreyfus 2005, p. 407) depicted in Being and Time, infusing the world coming into presence through art with a heightened sense of pluralism. Dreyfus describes this process as revealing “the truth of being of a particular culture or a specific epoch in our culture the style of that world” (Ibid., p. 407). However, both scholars concur that when a work of art, rather than the humanlike Dasein, serves as the area where beings are unconcealed, the spatiotemporal dimension involved extends beyond the individual lifespan and defies full explanation through Being and Time’s framework of fundamental ontology.

This spatiotemporal dimension, expounded upon by Dreyfus, includes both the historical breadth of microscopic multiworldness and, as indicated by Richardson, an abstract engagement with the macroscopic essence of Being. This unique characteristic arises from the nature of art, a distinct type of thing that transcends generations, encapsulating innumerable human experiences within its “there-being”—essentially becoming a repository for repeated confrontations with the enigma of finiteness, linking the existentiell to the existential. To apprehend this complex phenomenon, a rigorous examination of Heidegger’s ontological characterization of thingness is required, considering Heidegger dedicates an entire section to discussing the “thingly character of the thing” and how it sustains the existence of the work. Unfortunately, both Richardson1 and Dreyfus overlook this aspect in their analyses, specifically, the mechanism by which die Gestalt, another crucial concept of this essay, understood as figure, is relevant in the formation of the work—typically an artificial state emerging from the natural state of thingness. The strife at the core of die Gestalt is even considered a flaw in “The Origin of the Work of Art” by Julian Young.2

Hence, the paramount questions this study seeks to address are: What is the relevance of die Gestalt—the rift-design structuring the artwork, which is viewed by Heidegger as “the reproduction of the thing’s general essence” (Heidegger 1971, p. 36)—to Heidegger’s overall ontology of Being and beings? Moreover, what is its aesthetic significance? I propose that this question must be illuminated by Heidegger’s reading of Kant, because, firstly, Heidegger’s discussion on the concept of the thing is extensively developed in his critical revisit of Kant during the 1935–1936 winter seminar at the University of Freiburg, The Question Concerning the Thing: On Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles. Secondly, fundamentally speaking, given that Heidegger views the occurrence of an artwork as the essential thingness being reproduced, the ultimate indicator of which is the emergence of an Openness of die Gestalt that can be justifiably interpreted as the ontological dynamic of Being’s inherent self-concealing/concealing being “cognized” and thus deliverable, Kant’s philosophy, which Heidegger appropriates to explore the conditions of cognition—or as Morganna Lambeth reads it, a “horizon” that acts as “a particular framework or perspective that guide how beings (i.e., particular, ‘factually existing entities’) show up for us” (Lambeth 2023, p. 79)—becomes crucial in our examination of Heidegger’s conception of art.

In the following parts: First, I read “The Origin of the Work of Art” with references to Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) and The Question Concerning the Thing: On Kant’s Doctrine of the Transcendental Principles (1935), illustrating how Heidegger configures his idea of die Gestalt as a repetition3 of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic to account for the ethical design of cosmos manifested in thinging. In this section, I elaborate on the essence of thingness in terms of the purposiveness/contrapurposiveness of Nature4 embodied in pregiven “composed homogeneity”, which realizes ethical design through the mediation of a thing’s spatiotemporal form in the aesthetic realm, with reference to both Kant and Heidegger.5 Then, I demonstrate that this design, according to Heidegger’s rendition of Kant, determines the manifold morphosis of phenomena by containing the transcendent, or in Kant’s terms, the “supersensible”6—where lies the end of freedom—within the senses; this allows a radiant schema of finiteness to be formalized aesthetically out of nonradiant φαίνεσθαι.

2. The Essence of a Thing as Composed Homogeneity: Heidegger’s Revisiting of Kant

In the past few decades, there have been several notable interpretations of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” However, as indicated by Matt Dill, most of them primarily describe the function of art in Heidegger’s conception, such as world disclosure and world reconfiguration. Indeed, the objective of Dill’s own article is also to decipher what “saving power” art is supposed to have, as Heidegger identifies it as a tool to rejuvenate the history of metaphysics (Dill 2017). While these scholarly contributions have significantly deepened our understanding of the essay and provided a postmodern, non-Cartesian, and reformative perspective on art, they tend to overlook a fundamental proposition articulated by Heidegger himself: A work of art is “the reproduction of the thing’s general essence” (Heidegger 1971, p. 36), and “the most immediate reality of the work” is its “thingly substructure” (Ibid., p. 37). By neglecting this crucial aspect, prior studies often lack the necessary ontological grounding to fully illuminate the depth and significance of Heidegger’s conceptualization of the work of art.

What, then, constitutes the “general essence” of the thing? When Heidegger delves into the notion of thingness, he first grapples with distinguishing the ontological nature of beings from the entities themselves, a challenge underscored by the tension between semantic categorization and physical actuality. This endeavor raises a pivotal question about the underlying mechanism that allows human Dasein to access entities, a question that has lingered since his examination of Aristotle, where he contrasts “categories belong[ing] to λόγος” with “categories [that] are the beings themselves” (Heidegger 1995, p. 5). In his later years, Heidegger interprets the “thing” as gathering,7 echoing his prior interpretation of logos premised on the idea that all knowledge is channeled through saying.8 This premise lays the groundwork for his phenomenological hermeneutic exploration of the being of beings in Being and Time. Referring to this approach as “description”, Heidegger articulates: “The character of this description itself, the specific meaning of the λόγος, can be discerned first in terms of the ‘thinghood’ [‘Sachheit’] of what is to be ‘described’—that is, what is to be granted scientific clarity as we perceive it phenomenally” (Heidegger 1962a, p. 59). He suggests a methodology employing logos, or the verbal expressions of the thing, to fathom entities through a “scientific” delineation. Here, “scientific” does not denote conventional scientific methods like mathematical or biological analyses but rather a “science ‘of’ phenomena”, which Heidegger envisions as enabling oneself “to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly” (Ibid.).

Hence, through direct descriptions, Heidegger has explored the nature of thinghood—from his early theorization of Dasein to his later elaborations on the Fourfold—drawing on the expansive potential of language, particularly its nonthematic dimension. This approach is prominently employed in his investigation of ontic beings encountered in everyday contexts (such as hammers, pens, or stones), vividly illustrating how they constitute a totality of significance as readiness-to-hand. However, despite the meticulousness, precision, and comprehensibility with which he depicts the present, Heidegger’s ultimate ontological intention is to reveal the “abyss” of the nonpresent that delimits and negates beings. Upon scrutinizing his portrayals of these ontic cases, even with the most effective descriptions, our attempts to articulate thingness inevitably encountered temporal and spatial barriers, signifying the failure of logos.9 As a result, Heidegger’s inquiry into the essence of the thing becomes an exploration of the embodiment of its finiteness as a phenomenon, as evidenced by his discourse on the self-concealing nature of ἀλήθεια. The fundamental finiteness of the thing, when viewed metaphysically, arises from its confinement within the realm of sensibility, which is grounded in the possibility of appearing.

Heidegger emphasizes that “that which remains hidden in an egregious sense, or which relapses and gets covered up again, or which shows itself only in disguise, is not just this entity or that, but rather the Being of entities” (Ibid., p. 59). In this context, Being itself—or the logos of presencing—is perceived as an enigma closely intertwined with the boundless physical reality eluding the grasp of cognition, which is apart from the phenomenological reality characterized by its spatiotemporal finitude, namely, the boundary of the senses. This elucidates a classical epistemological standpoint where the domain of undisclosed entities, or the noumenal, while fundamentally granting the latter, does not constitute the thingness of things (which must be disclosed as ἀλήθεια, e.g., Heidegger’s definition of truth, in order to be grasped). In this vein, Heidegger expounds, “[b]efore Newton his laws were neither true nor false”, and further, “[t]hrough Newton the laws became true and with them, entities became accessible in themselves to Dasein” (Ibid., p. 269). Thus, the accessibility of entities emerges as a sine qua non regarding the constitution of Dasein, whereby a being must transform into a spatiotemporal field that enables the manifestation of other beings and provokes an inquiry into existence itself. This engenders the more primordial query: Why does Dasein possess the faculty to render other beings accessible? Going even deeper, we ask why we can presuppose the possibility of disclosure—truth as ἀλήθεια—thereby delving into the a priori foundation of transcendence inherent in truth.

Such a query, forming an integral part of the comprehensive project seeking to unravel the origins of knowledge, drove Heidegger’s systematic exploration of thingness through dialogue with Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic. The rationale underlying this path can be traced to a shared consensus between Kant and Heidegger concerning sensibility—the ultimate closed state of entities.10 As Kant puts it, “it is only by means of the form of sensory intuition that we can intuit things a priori, though by this means we can cognize objects only as they appear to us (to our sense), not as they may be in themselves”(Kant 2004, p. 79). Furthermore, Kant’s investigation of the a priori constitution of cognitive faculties (which are inherently suited for the acquisition of what appears) aligns with Heidegger’s assumption that truth itself (here referring to Being in its grandest sense, such as the inherent law of cosmology) confers upon human beings the capacity to presuppose the disclosure of entities as truth. Despite Heidegger’s departure from Kant’s subject-centered model of representation, both philosophers recognize the fundamental role of human perception in composing reality. For Kant, the causality of sense involves the interplay between the spontaneity of the understanding and the receptivity of sensibility, where the mind actively organizes sensory impressions according to the categories of the understanding to reveal truth in the form of phenomena. Heidegger, similarly, acknowledges that the study of being and beings involves an entanglement between the given and the inherent, namely, the existential structures of Dasein as care. Most importantly, both philosophers highlight the indispensable roles that time and space play in integrating and formulating these two aspects.

In The Question Concerning the Thing, Heidegger focuses his interpretation of Kant’s First Critique on a specific question: How can synthetic judgments, which are a posteriori, be a priori possible? As Heidegger sees it, this question requires us to “make out something binding and defining the object, but without going back to the object and entering into it” (Heidegger 2018, p. 117). In other words, Heidegger takes Kant’s theorization of the a priori condition of empirical knowledge as a method for comprehending the ontological constitution of sensibility, independently of the investigation of the ontic content it receives through intuited entities as objects—the knowing of which, according to Kant, is epistemically impossible as it transcends representation. Then, the study is directed toward the wonder of the conditions that enable the empirical grasping of objects, leading to an exploration of the cognitive agency that is transcendently embedded in the subject, which grants sensory intuition and further enables a synthesis alongside the faculty of understanding. In the First Critique, Kant calls this installation the “form” of intuition, or “pure intuition”, and defines it as space and time. As formulated by Kant, space is “the pure form of all outer intuitions”, while time, as “the immediate condition of the inner intuition”, is “an a priori condition of all appearance in general” since each determination of the mind originates from the inner realm without exception (Kant 1998, p. 163). This framework has inspired Heidegger in the respect that it clears a path for illuminating the givenness of things by outlining the spatiotemporal foundation of sensibility in virtue of (to use Heidegger’s terms) a fundamental ontology that presupposes Dasein’s transcendence. Later on in his own career, with the development of the notion of ecstatic temporality to study beings through Dasein in Being and Time (1927), Heidegger expanded his ontological departure from Kant into a “repetition”11 of a moment of ἀλήθεια historically handed down, which he calls “the disclosure of the primordial possibilities concealed” in a “fundamental problem” (Heidegger 1962b, p. 211).

This “fundamental problem”, as Heidegger understands it throughout his philosophical career, is why Dasein can condition the happening of ἀλήθεια. Repeating Kant’s demonstration of the condition of synthetic judgments a priori, he finds a key to solving this problem: the concept of composed homogeneity. As interpreted by Heidegger, for a posteriori knowledge to be based on objects received empirically, objects must be given an intuitable unity that is appropriate to the spatiotemporal form of intuition: “What appears, according to its intuition and the form of its intuitedness […] is something determined in a certain way: a composed homogeneity” (Heidegger 2018, p. 139). Such a composed homogeneity, as the predestined spatiotemporal determination of thingness, would appear as a quantity, allowing the representation and understanding of all objects—that which “stand-over-against” us—to happen through experience. Based on Heidegger’s elaborations, this is how the gathering manifoldness, namely, his definition of Being as φύσις—the articulated Nature—comes to be:

The condition of experiencing appearances, here with regard to shape and magnitude (namely, the unity of the synthesis as quantity), is at the same time the condition of the possibility of the object of experience. In this unity, the encountering manifoldness of the “against” [Gegen] first comes to a stand [zum Stand]—and is an object [Gegenstand]. The specific quantities of spaces and times make possible the taking up of the encountering, its apprehension, the first letting-stand-against of the object [das erste Gegenstehenlassen des Gegenstandes]. The principle and its proof answer our question concerning the thingness of the thing, i.e., the objectivity of the object, in the following way: because objectivity in general is unity of the gathering of […] a manifold in a representation of unity and a preconception, while this manifold encounters [us] in space and time, what encounters must itself stand-over-against [us] in the unity of quantity as extensive magnitude.

(Ibid., p. 141)

Heidegger contends that when Being is conceptualized in such a manner, “something is attributed to the object synthetically but a priori, not on the basis of the perception of particular objects, but in advance, from the essence of experience in general” (Ibid.). This reiterates Kant’s view on synthetic judgments a priori, in which the core nature of a thing is framed as a representation. The objectivity of this representation is grounded in a formal unity anchored in pre-established spatiotemporal frameworks, effectively rendering it a vacuous figure devoid of substantial content. For Heidegger, however, this characterization is insufficient. He advocates for a dynamic and cyclical understanding of time and space, culminating in the concept of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality. This suggests that every phenomenological experience, even the most transient, is intrinsically linked to a referential totality—an aspect absent in Kant’s framework. Heidegger’s ontology, rooted in ecstatic temporality, expands the paradigm of composed homogeneity. In his view, time and space are not static dimensions but are imbued with actual content, such as equip mentality. This perspective allows for a more comprehensive understanding of thingness, surpassing the limitations of the traditional Kantian framework.

3. Heidegger’s Expansion of Kant’s Framework of the Purposiveness/Contra-Purposiveness of Nature and Its Significance for Questions of Aesthetics

Since Heidegger does not assume a subject/object categorization as Kant does, his repetition of Kant’s discovery goes beyond Kant to further account for a human–thing called In-between. Other than considering the spatiotemporal determination of thingness as purely subject to human intuition, Heidegger notices, inspired by Kant’s idea of Anticipations of Perception, a shared time-space of man and thing with the thing going ahead. He characterizes this In-between with a difference in timing to determine sensibility from the human’s side and the thing’s side: “this Between, as anticipation, reaches beyond the thing and likewise back behind us. Grasping-ahead [Vor-griff] is casting-back” (Ibid., p. 167). This statement is Heidegger’s conclusion of his whole interpretation of the First Critique (1781). With the discovery of In-between, he recognizes a reciprocal human–thing relation in terms of their common temporality in a single moment of unconcealment, which can be formulated in the following way: What I am supposed to receive from the external and grasp empirically is already determined by thingness in its givenness, so my futural comprehension of the thing is nothing but the actualization of a possibility set out from the past, and the present is my “being-already-in” my future. This idea of “ahead-of-itself-already-being-in” (Heidegger 1962a, p. 375), or “having been futurally” (Ibid., p. 378), is precisely how ecstatic temporality works as explained in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.

In this regard, having presupposed the thing’s predetermining role in Dasein’s ecstatic temporality, Heidegger affirms, even more strongly than Kant, the purposiveness of Nature. Purposiveness is a concept that Kant develops in the Third Critique (1790) to characterize the agreement of an item with an end, which in the case of Nature grounds reflective judgment by actualizing a natural being’s end in terms of intelligibility, namely, a priori suitability for cognitive agency to abstract a universal pattern from it, with “the unity of the manifold of its empirical laws” (Kant 2007, p. 16) (the synthesis of the a posteriori) possibly taken for granted. In Kant’s framework, such purposiveness transcendentally belongs to the faculty of intuition, which, though finite, is a permanent feature of the subject’s cognitive structure. For Heidegger, however, with the composed homogeneity seen as originally granted by thinghood and Dasein as a finite being defined by its openness to that which appears, the sequence between the thing and the human mind is reversed, with the thing authorizing a τέλος, anticipating cognitive activities. Hence, it is no coincidence that Heidegger uses the term die Gestalt—a figure, a shape, and essentially a design—to describe the simultaneous self-unconcealing and self-concealing essence of the thing, and to connect the self-concealing aspect with the impenetrable materiality. In this way, a thing is not merely the sum of its apprehensible objective “presentation” and its unapprehensible entities, but a cohesive whole of dynamic senses referring back to what is enclosed within it, enabling an ongoing interplay of revelation and oblivion. This interplay is irreducible to its purpose for cognition but exists for the purpose of being a thing as the original ground for Dasein’s “being-in-the-world”—its care and temporality—through daily interactions. Heidegger thereby establishes a thing-centered worldview that includes what was forgotten by Kant’s universe and cannot be processed by modern scientific positivism, requiring us instead to step into the thing’s openness, namely, comportment towards it.

The following question arises: what is more in being [Was ist seiender], that rough-hewn chair with the tobacco pipe that shows up in van Gogh’s painting, or the waves of light that correspond to the colors employed therein, or the states of sensation that we have “in us” in the contemplation of the image? Sensations play a role each time, but each time in a different sense. The color of the thing, for example, is something other than the stimulus given in the eye, which we never grasp immediately. The color of the thing belongs to the thing [itself]. Nor does it give itself as the cause of a state in us. The thing’s color itself, yellow, for example, is only this yellow as belonging to the cornfield. The color and its shining are determined each time by the original unity of the colored thing itself and by the kind of thing it is. This is not first composed out of sensations.

(Heidegger 2018, p. 144)

In “The Origin of the Work of Art”, we can see that in die Gestalt, the “earth” (perceived as an occult dimension of thingness) makes laws for sensibility and further for intelligibility, unceasingly letting the “world” appear and withdrawing it. In the example of the Greek temple, Heidegger says: “Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground. This resting […] draws up out of the rock the mystery of that rock’s clumsy yet spontaneous support” (Heidegger 1971, p. 141). The sentence equivocally describes how the unity of quantity providing “clumsy yet spontaneous support” for the disclosure of a thing is sensed as a mystery enclosed in impenetrable materiality. In Heidegger’s description, the material “earth”, enigmatically grounding the “emerging and rising in itself and in all things”, for the first time allows things to “enter into their distinctive shapes” and “come to appear as what they are.” With the ontological decision to be, it consequently sets up a “world” to shed light on “that on which and in which man bases his dwelling” (Ibid.). Thus, by identifying the foundation of being–human in the primordial design of thingness that comes directly out of impenetrable materiality, Heidegger extends Kant’s notion of Nature’s purposiveness to include not only the anticipating In-between of man and thing, but also a vague guess of what has ultimately enabled such anticipation. For this reason, composed homogeneity is no longer treated as a presumed cognitive factor but as an acknowledgment that any cognition should be attributed to a self-revealing end in the cosmos—an end that, unlike Kant’s God-like infinite knower12, remains transient and elusive. This end, as long as philosophy remains a deduction based on what can be known, can only be addressed as something contingent.

Subsequently, Heidegger further examines the origin of the intelligibility of things, looking into the undisclosed realm of entities. Through a poetic passage, he describes how the work—which he initially defines as the embodiment of “the thing’s general essence”—sheds light on the dynamic emergence of meanings as they ontologically anchor back into materiality. Here, the “earth” serves as “the sheltering agent” (Ibid.), while the “world” acts to clear “the paths of the essential guiding directions” (Ibid., p. 53), unceasingly emerging from and settling back into the former:

[…] the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the Open of the work’s world. The rock comes to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the lighting and darkening of color, into the clang of stone, and into the naming power of the word.

(Ibid., p. 45)

For Heidegger, in the Greek temple as a work of art, the qualities of shimmering, glowing, singing, and speaking find their τέλος in the massiveness, heaviness, firmness, and hardness of stuff and matter, just as light cannot achieve its radiance without being delimited by and compared to the dark realm of substances, including the particles and electromagnetic waves that fundamentally compose it but are not visually perceptible. Hence, inheriting Kant’s idea of the finiteness of phenomena, Heidegger embraces a sense of the noumenal within the phenomenal by taking the “earth”—a symbol of impenetrable materiality—as that which defines the cosmos’ blueprint for the spatiotemporal design of the sensible. This means that he has brought a materialist perspective into Kant’s idealistic constitution of the mechanism of knowing, which may be an Aristotelian legacy. (In Aristotle’s philosophy, as Heidegger interprets, “the basis of natural motion lies in the nature of the body itself” (Heidegger 2018, p. 58), and “[t]he earth is the center for every characterization and estimation of motion” (Ibid., p. 57), from which we can obviously see how it enlightened Heidegger’s thinking around the “earth” in his discussion of the noumenal basis of thingness.) With the emergence of composed homogeneity, imagined in terms of an “otherworldly” power of entities beyond sensibility, there appears to be a dynamic morphosis of phenomena driven by the prevalence of the unknown. That is to say, in Heidegger’s thing-centered perspective, to account for the condition of empirical recognition, the scope of appearance is broadened to contain a fluid, organic transfiguration of the “earth” directly arising from and dying into materials; this is perceived as the “supersensible” (again, per Kant’s reasoning) flowing together with the sensible. In light of this, he demonstrates the coexistence of the sensible and its negation in a spatiotemporally opened site of incomplete disclosure, or λήθη-affected ἀλήθεια, which he calls the work. In the work, while the “world” and “earth” are at war, the purpose and contrapurpose of Nature are compelled to face each other head-on, to obey, and to resist, respectively, the form of intuition.

Admittedly, given the inherent divergence in the theoretical structures of Heidegger and Kant, it is challenging to directly reconcile concepts between the two philosophers. Nevertheless, there is a discernible correspondence between Heidegger’s articulation of the earth’s holy attributes and the concept of the sublime as detailed in the Third Critique (which Julian Young also observed) (Young 2001, pp. 38–46), both of which point to transcendence in the hidden ground of the potentiality for sense (along with its negating power), thus legitimizing the incorporation of Kant’s aesthetics in the interpretation of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Pursuing this line of thought, an intriguing aspect reveals itself: Since, for Heidegger, any openness of being definitely involves a conflict with what is beyond sensibility, each instance of “unconcealment” regarding Nature’s purposiveness is inevitably shadowed by an enigmatic communication from its concealed basis. This is what the world/earth rift design means in the ontological sense, which further implies that according to Heidegger’s reasoning, what Kant characterizes as beauty and sublimity13 can and must coexist—a conclusion that goes beyond Kant’s original framework.

In Critique of Judgment, Kant defines beauty in terms of the pleasure generated from the formal purpose of Nature, and sublimity in terms of the pleasure derived from a practical purposiveness. He argues that practical purposiveness regards “the determination of a free will”, and since “the concept of freedom represents in its object […] a thing in itself” but “does not make it intuitable”, it is inherently against cognition (Kant 2007, p. 11). Thus, in the idea of sublimity, the pleasure acquired from the actualization of practical purposiveness is conditioned by the contrapurposiveness of Nature, which at the same time gives rise to displeasure accompanied by cognitive failures. Consequently, in a Heideggerian work of art, when the purpose and the contrapurpose of Nature are simultaneously embodied in one thing,14 and the latter, according to its practical purpose, evokes a feeling of spiritual exaltation into the “supersensible”, freedom is actualized, with affect serving as its agent in a twofold manner. On the one hand, beauty appears out of the impenetrable materiality as the constant presence of the intelligible in harmony with our sensory organs. This demonstrates the a priori subordination of cognition to things in themselves, and hence the sensible to the “supersensible”, this life to the holy. In contrast, sublimity prevails as the signal of the finiteness of every (“in each case this”) spatiotemporal unit that restricts intelligibility, which highlights the necessity of heading into the meta-φύσις realm of Being to grasp the fundamental mystery of existence—a manifestation of authentic resoluteness, in Heidegger’s terms. Then, if we accept the purposiveness–contrapurposiveness unity in a single design as phenomenologically inevitable (given that every sensible being is delimited by a boundary where cognitive failure begins), we will see in it our essential connection to the initial causality of the cosmos, governing the dual-structure of phenomena (as the embodiment of Being’s ἀλήθεια/λήθη interplay) and human responses to it. A story is told where “[t]hrough Being there passes a veiled destiny that is ordained between the godly and the counter-godly” (Heidegger 1971, p. 51), where the word “godly” presumably implies Being’s enigmatic letting-radiant of Nature that we call the beautiful, while the “counter-godly” refers to its negation. The unconcealment of such a design then illumines Dasein’s essential belonging to freedom, a theme of Being and Time. Going back to Kant’s theory, we can further elucidate its mechanism:

In the one case the reference is to grounds of sensibility, in so far as these are purposive on behalf of the contemplative understanding, in the other case, in so far as, in their opposition to sensibility, they are, on the contrary, purposive in reference to the ends of practical reason. Both, however, as united in the same subject, are purposive in reference to the moral feeling. The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, apart from any interest: the sublime to esteem something highly even in opposition to our (sensuous) interest.

(Kant 2007, p. 98)

Here, Kant clearly indicates the relationship between purposiveness (whether that of Nature or that of practical reason) and the “moral feeling.” Based on the above discussions, the “moral feeling” is inherently made possible by the subject’s connection to the “supersensible”, even though in the case of sensing the purposiveness of Nature, the sensible serves as the medium of such a connection. In Kant’s words, this can be thought of as the “ground of the unity of the supersensible […] lies at the basis of nature” (Ibid., p. 12). Then, we might ask: Could the moral implications of Kant’s aesthetics also be found in Heidegger’s philosophy of art, assuming that both see the essence of an aesthetic being on the basis of its sensibility, its purposiveness, and thus its compliance with a hidden “God-as-artist”? Or to put it more precisely, is the work of art ultimately ethical in Heidegger’s philosophy as well insofar as it seeks to actualize, through the revelation of a rift-design, the end (e.g., openness, clearing) authorized by the nonintelligible force of Being that underlies all beings?

To address this concern, I will succinctly explore how Heidegger interprets freedom. Notably, his exploration of freedom, akin to his study of “the thing”, begins with Kant. In Heidegger’s analysis, Kant’s freedom has two different categories: (1) transcendental freedom (absolute spontaneity), which is the “faculty of the self-origination of a state”, and (2) practical freedom (autonomy), which is the “self-legislation of a rational will” (Heidegger 2005, p. 18). For Kant, the latter incorporates the moral law. However, since autonomy is subject to absolute spontaneity,15 the moral underpinnings of practical reason necessitate examination in the context of their foundation in transcendental freedom. According to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, when such an investigation is driven by Dasein’s inherent capacity to question its own essence, it serves as the mechanism by which Dasein differentiates itself from categorial beings. Therefore, Heidegger sees the nature of freedom as the “fundamental problem of philosophy” that is guided by the question of Being (Heidegger 2005, p. 205), which for him determines the character of Dasein. This conceptual groundwork positions Dasein as the epicenter of freedom’s realization, intrinsically tied to morality.

Consequently, the concept of free will is shaped by, and emerges from, contemplation on the origin of absolute spontaneity, which must be examined in terms of the primitive state of thinging. For Heidegger, extending Kant’s initial argument, this introspection goes beyond mere causality, reaching an elemental motion that determines how beings affect their surroundings while manifesting themselves: “Causation means, among other things, letting follow on, origination. It belongs in the context of that which runs ahead, relating to processes, events, occurrences, i.e., to what we call movement in a broader sense” (Ibid. p. 22). Heidegger perceives an oversight in Kant’s theory of freedom due to its neglect of this elemental motion. That said, despite this critique, it is important to consider that Heidegger’s investigation into the self-legislation of Being, as he understands it, is fundamentally a retracing of what Kant calls practical reason. This connection suggests that Heidegger’s work carries an inherent ethical weight. He states in his concluding remarks:

This fundamental thesis and its proof are not the concern of a theoretical scientific discussion, but of grasping which always and necessarily includes the one who dies grasping, claiming him in the root of his existence, and so that he may become essential in the actual willing of his ownmost essence.

(Ibid., p. 205)

Moreover, Heidegger equates art with knowing, drawing from his interpretation of techne (Heidegger 1971, p. 57)—that is, the openness of the self-closing-disclosive essence of the thing—and with resoluteness,16 which he views as synonymous with freedom (Heidegger 1962a, p. 443) and, by extension, ethics. He substantiates this view in Being and Time: “the character of ‘goodness’ lies in making authentic existence possible” (Ibid., p. 435). Granted that authenticity in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology means Dasein’s resolute disclosure of its complete essence, and Dasein is a particular type of being through which beings are intelligible, we can infer that Dasein, being authentic, is destined to actualize the possibility of questioning ontologically why it a priori knows. This subsequently warrants the freedom of making all ontic choices as it “becomes clear about the chance elements in the situation disclosed” (Ibid., p. 74).

The discovery of Heidegger’s ethical considerations in his reading of Kant illuminates the significance of sensing the concealed dimension of thingness; this dimension envelops what Kant identifies as the “supersensible” in his idealistic philosophy, and its aesthetic affect is accentuated when phenomenologically observed through the prism of art. Furthermore, it reveals the cornerstone of Heidegger’s idea of “overcoming metaphysics […] represented in terms of metaphysics itself” (Heidegger 1973, p. 92): He is obviously moving from Kant to an existential terrain that resists logical deduction. For Kant, the practical purposiveness, which is about freedom, draws on a metaphysical principle as it involves an “external cause” that must be empirically given (Kant 2007, p. 71). Thought of in this way, the purpose of concealment embodied in thinging is deemed to be influenced by the noumenal realm or the “thing in itself”, and then we have presupposed a sub-conscious grasp of the meta-φύσις, discovering therein the potential to intuitively craft forms that align the transcendental cognitive schema with a concealed deity amidst entities. For this reason, metaphysics as a philosophy of freedom (the free motion of beings) is related to, as Heidegger puts it, “the question of the essence of the truth of ontological transcendence” (Heidegger 1962b, p. 22). However, in a metaphysical inquiry seeking the origin of ontological transcendence in terms of its ultimate ethical end, as long as it can only be conducted “supersensibly”, the traditional metaphysical approach based on theorization is no longer effective.17 As such, the existential terrain shaped by cosmological freedom demands a departure from strictly metaphysical methodologies to sidestep theoretical comprehension. Fortuitously, the intricate nature of thinging as part of ecstatic temporality—constituting the In-between—indicates that the τέλος operating within self-receding time-spaces in daily interactions brings about diverse phenomenological transformations. These transformations present a unique avenue to understand the transcendent based on its tangible effect on the perceptible. In the subsequent section, I will delve into how these metamorphoses manifest, giving rise to a distinct form of appearance where entities recede yet remain vaguely sensed—a phenomenon I term nonradiant φαίνεσθαι.

4. Metamorphoses of Nonradiant Φαίνεσθαι

As previously discussed, in exploring the realm of intelligibility, Heidegger extends beyond Kant by highlighting an intermediary relationship between humans and things. He emphasizes the thinging of things—the emergence of composed homogeneity—as preceding the cognitive operations of the “subject.” This stands in contrast to Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, which views phenomena as assembled representations within a structured framework of time and space, perceived by a rational, autonomous subject. Heidegger’s fundamental ontology challenges this view by rejecting the notion of such a self-sufficient subject. Instead, he sees the subject as a contingent “I”, integrated within Dasein in the mode of the present-at-hand. This integration satisfies Dasein’s existential need for a semblance of certainty, with Dasein’s very existence embodying multifaceted temporal experiences, both immersed in its “closest” world and engaged in distanced speculation through a scientific lens. Thus, in Heidegger’s framework, the subject is not foundational but relational.

As a result, the purposiveness of Nature is no longer an inherent attribute of transcendental apperception but becomes the destiny preordained by Being as physis, which unfolds itself and anticipates the givenness of all things in their various modes of existence. Consequently, the phenomenal realm, which Kant meticulously confines within the cognitive framework of the subject, becomes dispersed and flawed in Heidegger’s philosophy, as its boundaries are shaped not merely by cognitive faculties but by the ontological conditions of our historical existence.18 This historical existence, manifested in existentiell ways across various regions and epochs—what Dreyfus refers to in his interpretation of “The Origin” as the “style of that world” (Dreyfus 2005, p. 407)—also encompasses the esoteric arrival of divinities in the lives of mortals, as mediated through narratives handed down through religious perspectives. For instance, in Being and Time, Heidegger cites a fable from ancient Roman mythology, suggesting that human Dasein is composed of gifts from three gods: spirit from Jupiter (interpreted as time), body from Earth, and form from “Care” (Heidegger 1962a, p. 242). This fable, as Heidegger comments, can be seen as a “pre-ontological characterization of man’s essence” (Ibid., p. 243). More famously, in “The Thing”, as the divine realm constitutes a crucial dimension of the “fourfold” (the “gathering-appropriating staying” (Heidegger 1971, p. 172) of sky, earth, mortals, and divinities), a simple jug carries the topography of ancient sacrifice (Ibid., pp. 170–71). This causes the broad expanse of the sensible to be perpetually undermined by the “supersensible” (appearing as an anticipated failure to grasp “even a hole”19 at the end of meaning), although here the epistemic sense of “sensible”/”supersensible” becomes existential.20 Such is the overall landscape that Heidegger paints in “The Origin”, where the earth “juts through the world” (Ibid., p. 47).

The gathering of these chaotic and defective senses, constituting most of Dasein’s being in the world, is the nonradiant φαίνεσθαι that we usually take for granted. In contrast to what Heidegger calls radiance—namely Schein, understood as the self-showing unconcealment of truth—nonradiant φαίνεσθαι is truth’s deceptive self-concealment in its manifoldness. In “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Heidegger depicts its state of being as follows:

Concealment […] also occurs within what is lighted. One being places itself in front of another being, the one helps to hide the other, the former obscures the latter, a few obstruct many, one denies all. Here concealment is not simple refusal. Rather, a being appears, but it presents itself as other than it is.

(Ibid., p. 52)

Here, Heidegger has enumerated several situations in which what appears is not what is. Although all of them can be ontologically defined as dissembling, the different verbs Heidegger uses to describe how dissembling happens highlight the complex relationships between beings. Conceived as a design of the cosmos, categorial beings, as clearly indicated here, bear within them the motive to unconceal or conceal, even to support the concealment of others or to block the unconcealment of others.

This statement matches what we see in everyday life: the 3D cube’s appearance as a 2D surface, the transformation of solid silica into star-like ethereality, the temporary eclipses of celestial bodies, the biological mimicry of flowers, and the constant currency inflation and stock market volatility that cloud the real value of products. While these phenomena are explainable within the domains of physics, biology, or economics, the ultimate force governing these principles remains beyond empirical grasp, much less what determines each motive in each microspatiotemporal unit. Moreover, can the realities underpinning these perceptual phenomena—the cube, silica, sun, flower, gold, and silver—be considered ontologically “true”? Upon closer examination, they dissolve into ever more minuscule constituents (e.g., molecules, atoms, electrons, photons, quanta), reaching unknown realms that defy scientific categorization. In this regard, since all phenomena explainable by science are valid only within the context of a particular interpretation, they should be considered as dissembling. Thus, truth, in its most scrupulous sense, must reveal the metaphysical (i.e., how ἀλήθεια, as self-clearing, both unveils and hides itself) rather than the physical. Yet, with irony, as per the preceding analysis, the meta-φύσις basis of φύσις can never be intelligible. The origin of the phenomenon must reside outside of the phenomenon itself, lying in things in themselves. In Kant’s theory, the impossibility of theoretically understanding things in themselves signifies the “great gulf” between Nature and freedom (Kant 2007, p. 11). This unbridgeable chasm leads to the inference that metaphysical truth, as the freedom to design, remains absent unless it wills itself into existence. It might be likened to a radiance that spontaneously casts a mysterious harmony over the five senses that cannot be scientifically understood, but should only be reverently cherished as designed perfection on a teleological premise. Consequently, we are left to hypothesize a veiled designer behind the phenomenon of nonradiant φαίνεσθαι—a latent presence that sporadically incarnates and stands as the unconditioned catalyst for all conditioned realities. This underlying agency enables ontic knowledge by anchoring ontological transcendence, operating as a ceaseless dynamic that modulates the complex interplay of mundane life’s fragmentary, transient, interest-driven, and scientifically measured senses in their finiteness. Such an interaction with the “supersensible”, framed within a preontological perspective, is echoed by Heidegger when he states, “We believe we are at home in the immediate circle of beings. That which is, is familiar, reliable, ordinary. […] At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny” (Heidegger 1971, p. 53).

In this way, the sense of the “supersensible”—which sustains sublimity in an idealistic context where reason affirms its superiority over nature as a faculty of the human mind—claims infinity beyond sensory perception and becomes uncanny in the postdisenchanted discourse of everydayness, devoid of a stable “I.” As defined by Heidegger, the uncanny is a state of being revealed in Dasein’s anxiety, aroused by the disclosure of its thrownness, which “puts Dasein’s Being-in-the-world face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the world” (Heidegger 1962a, p. 321), and is further related to the “call of conscience” to “understand this thrownness as the null basis which it has to take up into existence” that will bring about “its becoming free for the call” (Ibid., pp. 333–34). The commonly inferred notion of freedom—understood as an elemental motion of being that enables all causality, grounding the phenomenal realm—suggests that in Heidegger’s uncanniness, the Kantian concept of practical purposiveness is actualized in the way that Kant thinks it is in sublimity. Notwithstanding, Heidegger’s uncanniness is more nuanced and inescapable than Kant’s sublimity, for with the clarification of a spatiotemporal “Da” that abolishes the idea/material distinction, the boundary between phenomena and the region of entities does not appear as a “great gulf” in the infinite subject’s supersensible confrontation with overwhelming representations. As such, it cannot be processed with the faculty of judgment, but rather functions as a fluid abyss in the finite ecstatic temporality’s confrontation with the never-ending voidness, which envelops and swallows it as the destiny of every “openness.” This is the thing confronting de-thinging, life confronting death, while immersed in mundanity and changing restlessly. Merleau-Ponty’s idea of le creux can help to elucidate the subtleties in the transfigurations of the sensible caused by the pervasiveness of what lies beyond and, simultaneously, what flows below: “the created hallow […] from which results the descensus, the unrest/troubling of the given” (Morris 2018, p. 198).

Referring to the theory of purposiveness, we can discover something through further phenomenological examination: The human’s encounter with the uncanny within nonradiant φαίνεσθαι essentially results from an intuition of disharmony that implies an absent agent. Given that things designed to be sensible should be radiant in their entirety, the mere existence of nonradiant φαίνεσθαι signifies the contrapurposiveness of Nature, highlighting the presence of an absence. Consequently, our intuition that a priori requires formally adaptable time-spaces will lead us to instinctively search for something that is not here. At the same time, it necessarily causes the perceiver to see something here with unreasonable grotesqueness, to question it, to be frightened by it, and to poetize it in the light of its occult bearing. This is how the state of “not-at-home” composes a dimension of “poetic dwelling”: With the openness of the abyss, Dasein recognizes that it is not living in a self-contained, established world—which it should be, according to the presumed design—but in a worlding world forever lacking, where closed time-spaces are hidden everywhere, where perhaps something is missing parts of itself, where something is simply a disguise for something invisible, where the whereabouts of all things are suspended in voidness. Thus, the seemingly familiar life becomes a possibility that can either actualize into a design or just close into λήθη; that is, being in the world as a mystery.

It is worth noting, nonradiant φαίνεσθαι engaged in this way is completely different from nonradiant φαίνεσθαι that is simply accepted without the involvement of cognitive transcendence and meta-φύσις consciousness, as in the latter there is no attempt to confront the abyss a priori. For example, lying in bed at night, when a car passes by the window, one will hear the sound of wheels grinding on the ground gradually diminishing. In this case, a person contemplating “who is inside it”, “where are they from/going to” and feeling afflicted by the sound—a ghostly embodiment of providential time and hence of the finiteness of Dasein’s own openness with regard to a particular totality of significances—will experience a poetically uncanny moment. Either the person will recount the sound itself as it vanishes into thin air or make up a story based on conjecture since there is an implicit confrontation with that which is transcendentally transfiguring phenomena and magically disturbing familiarity, as opposed to treating the sound as a mere passing noise.

Thus, in Heidegger’s philosophy of art, when the nonradiant φαίνεσθαι is opened together with thinging, it will be aesthetically engrossed with the emergence of the uncanny. Precisely because of the self-denying nature of ordinary phenomena, manifested as finiteness, indeterminacy, and incomprehensibility, the transcendent will be perceived as that which is absent and limits sensibility. While the entire human–thing In-between is existentially illuminated with the grasp of such an inconstantly present being, ecstatic temporality is known with its missing parts imagined, and the entanglement of Nature’s purposiveness and contrapurposiveness comes into view. Only on this condition can the esteem of freedom and the love of the radiant (i.e., the harmonious form given by the thing in itself as a miracle) be simultaneously possible. This is also why, unlike most traditional aesthetic theorists who deny that beauty has any constituent relationship with content, Heidegger sees true artistic meaning (even form itself) in a work’s disclosure of the content (more precisely, content composed of its condition of being utilized and subjected to wear and tear) of a thing.

To illustrate this point, let us revisit his interpretation of Van Gogh’s shoes. In his view, Van Gogh’s depiction of the equipmentality of the shoes sheds light on “the dark opening of the worn insides” (Heidegger 1971, p. 33), thus making the retreating quality of the earth palpable:

In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.

(Ibid.)

Dogmatically considered, equipmentality, being defined as that which has the purpose “to be used”, signifies the content of a thing rather than its form. This leads to the implication that it may not typically be involved in a radiant moment, conditioned as it is by the emergence of a form—an empty figure heralding the mere purposiveness of Nature. However, in Van Gogh’s work, the “consumed” appearance of the peasant shoes undergoes a transfiguration by the void beyond the limitations of time and space, converting it into a form. This begins with the perceiver’s encounter with the uncanny—those self-closing possibilities disclosed as what are becoming nonpresent—driving the perceiver to abstract a patternized expression, such as “tools wear.” Then, the earth (from and towards which the equipmentality arises and vanishes) becomes visible as a symbol of the region of entities, the approaching ineffable, and the great unknown that is both the source and destination of the tools’ existence and function.

With the prethematic interaction with the transcendent, Dasein unconsciously grasps and combines a series of existentiell images based on a predetermined existential scheme: the furrows of the field, the raw wind, the leather, the soil, the ripening grain, the winter tundra, the trembling crib, the silent grave, all of which flow in their destined, finite, and obscure within timeness.21 This within timeness is essentially a form as seen through equipmentality’s “resting-within-itself” in its capacity to deteriorate—an ontological rather than ontic structure whose content is replaceable. This replacement creates an endless cycle of life and death in a mundane world, originally revealed by the shoes but now capable of extracting new images from the earth. It builds upon the old, growing as an organic development of the “free play” of imagination and understanding, to use Kant’s terminology. In this context, the scene becomes radiant—a self-emerging composed homogeneity is forged from impenetrable materiality, serving as a messenger of things in themselves, proclaiming the purposiveness of Nature, which is to redeem the uncannily sensed contrapurposiveness, authorized by freedom. Moreover, because this composed homogeneity is never fixed or finalized, existing instead as Being as Becoming that defines the In-between, it discloses the full-time horizon of the dynamic evolution of the design. To Heidegger, this is the beautiful:

The more simply and authentically the shoes are engrossed in their nature […] the more directly and engagingly do all beings attain to a greater degree of being along with them. That is how self-concealing being is illuminated. Light of this kind joins its shining to and into the work. This shining, joined in the work, is the beautiful.

(Heidegger 1971, p. 54)

A complex point to unravel is the paradoxical nature of nonradiant φαίνεσθαι, such as equipmentality, as Heidegger understands it. On the one hand, because of its “self-concealing being”, it lacks structural wholeness when revealed in each ontic spatiotemporal unit. On the other, it is formally complete as an ontological manifestation of the concept of deficiency. Being’s withdrawing oblivion, which causes the conditionality of appearance, is thus taken as an unconditionally true axiom with the quality of evanescence, thought to be eternally defining worldhood. To put it more simply, mortals die, but Hades is immortal. Standing for the ultimate and inescapable closure of all possibilities, Death not only restricts Dasein, but also continually uses categorial beings as its vessel, via which the existential pattern is always disclosed: Tools decay—Being un-be. According to Taylor Carman’s analysis of Heidegger’s idea of Death, this pattern, when expressed as words, is linguistically called a generic. A generic is a self-evident truth without the need for a qualification check. For instance, in the sentence “Birds fly”, what is referred to is neither the action of some birds nor all birds, but a fact that is obvious to a three-year-old child. Likewise, when we say, “Mortals die”, we are talking about “the bare actuality […] of that terminal closure” (Carman 2015, p. 143), as he explains:

Heidegger’s assertion that Dasein projects into death its own most possibility, as the utter impossibility of existence, the impossibility of existing at all, is unarticulated with respect to quantification: The claim is neither merely that some possibilities die off (and some don’t) nor that all do, but rather that possibilities just do die off. Not that they might or must, or that some or all do—but simply that they do. In the words of William Butler Yeats (and, following him, Chinua Achebe), things fall apart. They just do.

(Ibid.)

Carman’s conceptualization of the generic facilitates a deeper comprehension of finitude as an existential form. When revealed in categorial occasions, it is normally articulated in ordinary language: leaves fall; flowers wither; snow melts; wood cracks; land sinks; people change; generations pass. Epistemically, this form turns the things appearing ontically against our cognitive faculty22 into a structure adaptable to it by adding a sense of order, which is derived from the meta-φύσις, into the disordered φύσις. In this way, the nonradiant φαίνεσθαι, as the uncanny incarnation of the transcendent, proclaims the legislative power of things in themselves by making being-toward-death known as a design.

We can justifiably conclude, in Heidegger’s view, that the unconcealment of this design allows the residue of everydayness to shine as the beautiful. In addition, since a form does not rely on a particular piece of content, and things in themselves freely inspire imagination and understanding, aesthetic morphosis of the initial image definitely emerges. Ironically, a “formless” art beginning from ordinary content is thus transfigured into the art of a contentless form. This is, I think, what Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s shoes has accomplished. With the discovery of other things upon the land of the peasant woman’s dwelling, all of which are finite, we see in a work of art the materializing transcendence that illuminates the vast tapestry of the mundane while also revealing its veiled alignment with the sacred. This also echoes Heidegger’s persistent engagement with the “gods” throughout his writings, which continue to provoke unresolved debates among commentators: the notion of “earth” as the “highest of gods” (Heidegger 2014b, p. 164); the earth as the “Mother of all”, harboring an “abyss” (cited in Heidegger’s reflections on Hölderlin’s “Germania”, line 76) (Heidegger 2014a, p. 96) that defines the “uniqueness” of Dasein (Heidegger 2012, p. 259); the abyss as “the originary essential sway of ground”, which, in its “withdrawal” (Ibid., p. 256), signifies freedom (Heidegger 1998, p. 134); “philosophy” as a measured draught from the River Ameles in the region of lethe (where mortals begin their next cycle of reincarnation in Greek mythology) (Heidegger 1992, p. 118); Dike, the goddess of moral order and judgment in ancient Greece, standing for the overwhelming “enjoining structure” of Being that confronts techne, a synonym for art, both of which hint at human beings’ inherent uncanniness (Heidegger 2014b, pp. 178–80); Lethe, not merely an underworld domain but also the goddess of oblivion according to Hesiod, being the daughter of Eris (strife), herself the offspring of Night, an inhabitant of Tartarus (the great gulf), who previously gave birth to Aether and Hemera (Hesiod 2006); and the ultimate aesthetic experience for Dasein, distilled into a singular moment through its encounter with ἀλήθεια and the holy:

World and earth in their strife will raise love and death to their utmost and will bring love and death together into fidelity to god and will withstand the maze—in the manifold mastering of the truth of beings.

(Heidegger 2012, p. 280)

Thus, the entire worldliness, including the verdicts of heaven and the underworld, as well as nirvana, preserved in the storytelling of our ancestors, cycles once again as thinghood intersects with Dasein and enters the Open through the latter’s decision to make art; the cosmos is condensed into the arising and perishing of this life—this very moment—to produce poesis, which Stanley Cavell might call ordinary language (Cavell 2002), yet surpasses mere language as it penetrates the impenetrable fabric of materiality. A strand of metaontic awareness, born out of awe at this impenetrability, signals Nature’s ontogenesis conforming to a preordained form. The numinous significance of nonradiant φαίνεσθαι then becomes clear: it is precisely because we recognize our mortal fate and the destined vanishing of things that we can perceive—as Hubert L. Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly famously state in their book title—“all things shining” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011).