Extract trom the book: The Manmade Object
To deal with art is like trying to find an element - a substance that can say something about anything but itself. The ancient Greek basic idea was that God and man were separated respectively in the world of ideas and the external phenomena - and that's just through art that these two opposites are reconciled. Ever since, philosophers and thinkers have tried to refine, modify or reject this idea, simply because there is a connection between art, striving for truth and being human. The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling repealed two thousand years later the ancient Greek contrast between spirit and nature or external existence and proclamed art life's highest explanation. Art was now something that was an answer or understanding model of existence rather than a question. A familiar definition of art from the twentieth century, another German philosopher Martin Heidegger's definition, which says that art is truth put-into-existens. This simple description is enough to understand that there is something fundamentally at stake as soon as the concept must be considered, because you can not talk about art without simultaneously consider the greatest concept known to man: the truth. In the past the concept of God was a way to understand this truth put-into-existens, but in a seemingly godless phase in human history, we must approach truth in a different way, namely by recognizing the truth through the false - or said in a more mundane way; we must learn the unknown through the known.