Abstract

This thesis attempts to apply the concept of authenticity worked out by Heidegger and Sartre to the field of aesthetics. Specifically, it seeks to determine whether and in what ways works of art could be authentic in the way in which Heidegger's Dasein or Sartre's pour-soi can be authentic. In the Introduction, I put forward the basic thesis that a work of art is authentic insofar as it makes its "world" its own. Taking world in its Heideggerian sense, the world of the work of art is that of the perceiving subject as reorganized on the basis of the work's organizational principle, or form. Because of the originality of its form, the work is the necessary basis of its world. ;Part One provides a phenomenology of the work of art that seeks to determine whether a work of art is the kind of being that could have a world and make its world its own. After arguing for a definition of the work of art based on the experience of the spectator, I take the Kantian notion of "subjective finality" as definitive of the work of art. The subjectively final object is then compared to others, those without finality, and those with it . The result of this comparative ontology is a definition of the work of art as a for-itself-for-us. The work is dependent for its being on the recognition of other subjects. The last chapter of Part One considers what constitutes the historicity and "life" of a work of art. ;In Part Two, the work of art is considered in relation to our understanding it as the embodiment of a creative act. Here, the concepts of form, style and expression are analyzed. Using Heidegger's analyses of Befindlichkeit, anxiety and resoluteness, I argue that an authentic understanding of what the work of art expresses is arrived at through anxious feeling in response to an interpretation of the work's form. ;Part Three begins by expanding the notion of authenticity beyond that of resoluteness, by taking into account Sartre's theory of authenticity, and the history of human existence on which Sartre bases his notion. It concludes with an application of this expanded notion of authenticity to the work of art. The work of art is analysed in terms of its social, historical, environmental and ethical possibilities for authenticity