Heideggers holy and quiet joy: body hermeneutics of two paintings by Lawren S. Harris

How would our lived human body experience Heidegger's holy? This dissertation uses a phenomenological method of body hermeneutics to develop a lived experience of the notion of the holy from Heidegger's later thought with the help of two paintings by Lawren S. Harris.

Body hermeneutics, developed by Samuel Mallin, is a method of systematically feeling out and describing the experience of phenomena through the four regions of the lived body: the perceptual, the motor-practical, the affective, and the cognitive/linguistic. The artworks hold the phenomena and create situations through which the viewer can repeatedly access and explore the phenomena. The artworks also speak to the whole body, not just to the cognitive aspect of our being, and thus make it much easier for us to recognize and overcome our cognitive preconceptions and to develop a fuller bodily experience of the phenomena.

The first part of the dissertation, working with the painting Beaver Swamp, Algoma, explores how one can phenomenologically experience and describe that which is not an entity, since both being and the holy in Heidegger's understanding are not entities. By describing the contrasts between the experience of figures and lines in the painting on one hand and colour and light fields on the other, a new bodily attitude can be felt and developed that is quite different from our everyday attitudes towards phenomenology and perceiving things in general. This new bodily attitude is helpful for describing phenomena like being and the holy as understood by Heidegger.

The second part of the dissertation, with the help of the painting Northern Lake, further develops the understanding of the new bodily attitude. It explores a particular kind of darkness to better understand the phenomena of depth and abyss, and a particular kind of light to describe the haleness as the experience of the holy.