Pure Abstraction, Colour as Substance
In his Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Romantic poet John Keats famously writes that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. In The Origin of the Work of Art, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes the nature of the relationship between Truth and Beauty. Heidegger says that “Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is” and that Beauty is the appearance of Truth in the work of art. Since Truth is the revealing of itself, the arising of Truth and Beauty is not a fixed matter of fact, but rather a process or an opening. I relate this opening to the way in which Heidegger defines the word phenomenon in his central text Being and Time: