Does art tell the truth?
On the axis: Place of science · the work of art
Do tragedy, the novel, the poem disclose truths about the human condition that no scientific statement could formulate, or do they offer only an enjoyment with no knowledge-value?
Justification
In , modern science becomes "research": it marks out its domain by constituting phenomena as objects according to a prior projection, nature as a calculable ensemble of motions. notes that it wants to know nothing of the nothing, and that it does not think, in the sense he gives the word: not as a failing, but because it does not determine, by its own procedures alone, the ontological presuppositions that constitute its domain. Against this monopoly, and the commentaries on Hölderlin make the work and poetic speech ways of access to being. This widening does not hold for every method or every kind of knowledge: it favours thinking and poetry.
Science does not think.What Is Called Thinking?, lectures 1951-1952
The Age of the World Picture (lecture 1938, publ. 1950) · What Is Metaphysics? (1929) · What Is Called Thinking? (lectures 1951-1952, publ. 1954)
Justification
Science has no monopoly on the true: by reducing everything to measure and calculation, it misses the living, the singular and the meaningful, which poetry, myth and intuition grasp better than it does. Romanticism contests the 's claim to set scientific knowledge as the model of all knowing, and rehabilitates ways of reaching the real that calculating reason had disqualified.
Novalis, The Novices of Sais · Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature
Anchors: Nietzsche · Heidegger · Romanticism