I went to the market today. At the news kiosk I picked up the Feb. 26 Times Literary Supplement. The TLS has a commentary by Lesley Chamberlain on "Heidegger through post-Darwinian eyes". She argues that Darwin's influence on Heidegger is under appreciated because when we read translations of Heidegger's German the similarities are unapparent to us, but in German Heidegger is using the same vocabulary as the German translation of The Origin of the Species. Half of the essay is on the German art world's reaction to Darwinism, and The Origin of the Work of Art.

[T]here were two driving ideas behind that lecture. One suggested that works of art, defined as the truth-at-work-in-the-work, cast a special light on Being. It followed from this that art, and beauty, and the truth of the work, should be considered in a sphere other than traditional aesthetics. After Darwin, who showed that the mind and the moral sense had also evolved and did not come divinely equipped with a sense of beauty, truth and goodness, both the moral worth of high art and the category of category of beauty were radically disrupted. Darwin showed that "every form and color that man chose to find beautiful, from the spirals of a shell to the blooms of an insect-pollinated flower, were the effects of 'secondary laws'. . . related to the dire struggle for existence". And so Heidegger could say aesthetics was another set of beliefs left with no ground to stand on. Beauty did not relate to an impulse of delight the Creator wished to share with mankind. Nor did it have, for Darwin at least, a "higher" meaning. Heidegger gave art a meaning, to allow a glimpse of Being, but he showed a wilful lack of interest in art's human creators. Look again at what Darwin was accused of from the side of the humanities: we can see how closely it matches the negative view of Heidegger that prevailed in many circles to the end of he twentieth century. "The subversive tendency. . . challenged the whole basis of traditional thinking about the beauty of the creation". Evolutionary theory, which gave beauty a subordinate use in the struggle to sustain emergence, removed the moral privilege of the work of art, and the moral and the social status of those who claimed it as the vehicle for universal truths. The impact of Darwin's undoing of classical aesthetics was democratic and particuliarizing and localizing, and he was rightly accused of undoing high culture; as Heidegger seems to do.

  ¶ 4:42 PM