Furthermore...

Furthermore, when looking at his works, we are faced with a continuously pulsating feeling of anxiety, which, to use Heidegger’s terminology, brushes away the veil of Das Mann , forcing spectators to view themselves in their utter nakedness - in terms of an authentic self. Kant’s understanding of beauty would have been dominant in Munch’s Norway. His conciliatory view of the common world, or sensus communis , would have provided artists with public validation for their work.

During this period, however, painting needed Munch to break out of a representational approach to art and allow for more authentic human expression. According to Munch, “what one paints must be done with will and feeling,” just as he strived to “paint people who love and suffer” (Holland, 29; TIME, 1). In other words, Munch was needed to help art free itself from the bonds of realism and naturalism.

My thesis contains four major chapters that will follow through on the development of Munch’s expressionism and the philosophical implications of his new approach to painting. For Heidegger, anxiety, referred to as Angst , is associated with a feeling of ‘uncanniness’, or not-being-at-home. It is a state of mind that lies within Dasein , which is basically the philosopher’s term for human being. Anxiety is usually hidden or ‘asleep’ and in due time it awakens and shakes Dasein to the core.

Angst has two components: one is either anxious in the face of something or about something, and both refer to being-in-the-world. Dasein has anxiety about its involvements within the world and in the face of ‘thrownness’, or Geworfenheit : “The mood of Angst puts us in direct contact with nothingness, which goes hand in hand with being, for being is finite and only becomes accessible against the empty background of the ‘not’” (Harman, 70).

Death also plays a role with respect to Angst for the authentic Dasein . He or she understands that death is a possibility that at some point will be actualized and should thus be anticipated. But why is anxiety so troubling? According to Heidegger, Angst drives Dasein out of its immersion in the world of things and forces it to confront itself - and thus, the latter experience cannot be explained by ‘the they’, or Das Man , the anonymous ‘one’ who constitutes most of those surrounding Dasein .

Heidegger argues that Angst frees Dasein from the inauthenticity of Das Man .