I was hoping we would discuss Heidegger in this class; I had studied him some last semester and it made me actually want to take this class. While Heidegger can sometimes be challenging to understand, and as Kip noted not an author to imitate, he does present some intriguing ideas about human beings and particularly art.
One thing that was touched upon in this class on Hiedegger, which I found to be an important aspect in my other class, was the idea of thankfulness. In my previous class we had promoted Heideggers idea that we as human beings should receive the world, not take the world. When one receives the world, they take in the world as it is. On the other hand when one takes from the world, they take it in a way that they see fit. So, in our technologically driven societies, we take lumber. The trees are not longer trees in and for themselves but a means to our human end. In class what made me think about this idea of thankfulness was the quote, “we are here to care for these things.”
What art does then is lets us receive the world. In changes our perceptions of the world. In Heideggarian terms, we constantly live in social gestalts, or paradigms which rule and guide our understanding of the world. Art unconceales aspects of the world which are not readily recognized in ones current paradigm. This is why people come to see art as seeing something normal in a different light.
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