The latter accounts for the purpose of the thing: the house is constructed to provide shelter.

The former involves the agent bringing about a change: so the builder causes the house to be built. Here Kant distinguishes two forms of causality: the causa efficiens and the causa finalis. That is to say, aesthetic engagement resides in the fact that we recognize that the object was purposefully constructed (it’s not random) but it serves no direct purpose or function. Perhaps this involves a fairly ingrained Kantian notion of art as “purposive without purpose” or in a more humorous if slightly misguided reading “pointedly pointless”. Even if one were to define the function of the artwork, one would be even more hard-pressed to find general agreement. We might indeed be hard-pressed to determine what the function of the artwork is in the first place. When we look at an ancient fragment - let’s take one of the most famous examples, the Venus de Milo with its celebrated missing arms (more on that celebration below) - we don’t claim that it ceases to function as an artwork, that it somehow becomes merely “present-at-hand” and thus obstructs our projects. As Heidegger himself points out in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”, the artwork is not exactly equipment but neither is it a mere object. Now at first glance, applying this to considerations involving ancient fragments of artworks seems blithely wrongheaded. I then confront the object as, in German, the Gegenstand - that which stands against me or that which is in my way. When I encounter the “present-at-hand”, there’s a momentary disruption of that immersion. When I deal with things that are “ready-to-hand”, I am immersed in my world I am involved. When my cat breaks my favorite mug, its objecthood intrudes upon my routine and momentarily hinders my project of getting ready for work. But Heidegger insists we live in a richly textured world where some things show up to us as being more important (and thus conceptually “closer” to us) than others because of our involvement with them.Ī mug from which I drink my morning tea is equipment. It flattens out experience by making all things equal in that they are merely present. Rather, while it’s not without its uses, this way of viewing the world is actually a second-order, deficient mode of understanding. Heidegger’s project in his famous treatise (unfinished and thus itself something of a fragment) Being and Time is to demonstrate that the seemingly objective, scientific way of looking at the world as a collection of present objects is not the way in which we actually interact with the world at all. The broken mug is “present-at-hand” its presence obtrudes upon us as an obstacle of sorts: we can’t get a drink with it and it must be disposed of and cleaned up. So a mug is “ready to hand” insofar as we use it (or can use it) as a vessel to hold liquid that will quench our thirst when we drink from the mug. For Martin Heidegger, things are “ready-to-hand” when we they are available for us to be involved with them in pursuit of a project. If we are to put this in Heideggerian terms, it is no longer “equipment” and thus no longer “ready-to-hand”. Strictly speaking, it’s no longer a mug as such at all. Its brokenness prohibits it from any longer doing what it was supposed to do in my life and thus, in an important sense, it no longer is what it was back when it was a functional mug. It’s no longer serviceable as the thing it was. If it’s not reparable (or if I am too lazy to bother with the repair), I throw the mug away. When I wake in the morning to find my cat has knocked over a ceramic mug and it has broken upon the floor, I don’t attempt to use the mug again, nor do I place the mug on a shelf for others to admire.

Fragments draw us on, they ask us to approach but the more we approach, the farther they seem to recede.

Fragment definition art