Philosophical Aesthetics and Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ Babette Babich In memoriam: Jacques Taminiaux (1928-2019) Tracy Burr Strong (1943-2022) My concern over many years has been Heidegger and Hölderlin and when I undertook to write this essay at the invitation of Prof. Dr. Harald Seubert for presentation in Messkirch I could not present in person. But the locus and the other invited speakers were influential for my thinking: as Heidegger once wrote on the occasion of a conference on his thinking, the purpose of learned conferences is to exchange questions. In this spirit, I begin by noting Karsten Harries’ complex and nuanced Infinity and Perspective. 1 For Harries, this includes reference to Cusanus. And on the other side of infinity, Patrick Aidan Heelan (1926-2015) reflects on Van Gogh’s Bedroom at Arles in his Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science. 2 And in what follows, I shall also draw on Jacques Taminiaux (1928-2019) especially his reading of Hölderlin [I bracket Hegel and Schiller]. 3 Overall, I read Heidegger. 4 What is at issue is phenomenology and art as Harries and Heelan read issues of perspective differently, in Harries via Erwin Panofsky and Descartes and Mersenne along with Meister Eckhart and, heretically as Harries reminds us, the bracketing that is gold. In another context I believe I would wish to argue that one can read from Augustine through to Reiner Schürmann but I cannot write about this here. Thus and instead of the better paper I would have written had I written it in exchange with colleagues in Messkirch (this is the stock counterfactual of philosophical life, familiar to most scholars), I reflect concerning Heidegger in the context of art as it works on us as Heidegger is a 1 Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). 2 Patrick Aidan Heelan, Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 3 Jacques Taminiaux, La Nostalgie de la Grece à l’aube de l’idealisme Allemand (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967). See for another reading that the one I will obliquely touch on here, Françoise Dastur, “Hölderlin and the Orientalisation of Greece,” Pli Vol. 10 (2000): 156-173. 4 Taminiaux, Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).