In Origin of the Work of Art, in the course of an analysis of art otherwise remarkable for its reticence in addressing the question of beauty, Heidegger writes in the Afterword of a relationship between truth and beauty that is at once Hegelian and a declaration of divergence from Hegel:The truth of which we have spoken does not coincide with what is generally recognized under this name-that which is assigned to knowledge and science as a quality to be distinguished from the beautiful and the good, terms which function as the values of non-theoretical activities. is the unconcealment of beings as beings [die Unverborgenheit des Seienden als des Seienden]. .Truth is the truth of Being [die Wahrheit des Seins]. .Beauty does not occur alongside this truth. It appears when truth sets itself into the work. This appearing (as this being of truth in the work and as the work) is beauty. Thus beauty belongs to the advent of truth. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure, and purely as its object. Beauty does, however, consist in form, but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the beingness of beings [als der Seiendheit des Seienden] .At that time, Being made its advent as etSoc;. The idea fits itself to the piopc[>r). The cruvoXov, the unitary whole of popc[>f] and uXr|, in other words, the epyov, is in the manner evepyeia. This mode of presence became the actualitas of the ens actu. This actualitas became actuality, reality. Reality becomes objectivity. Objectivity becomes experience. In the manner in which, for the world determined in the Western way, beings exist as the real, there lies concealed a particular convergence of beauty and truth. To the transformation of the essence of truth there corresponds the essential history of Western art. This can no more be grasped by taking beauty by itself than it can in terms of experience-supposing that the metaphysical concept of art is adequate to the essence of art.1It is at this point that Heidegger breaks off his Afterword. A fuller account of what is meant here by truth, Being, unconcealment and the deficiencies of metaphysics can, needless to say, be drawn from a multitude of essays, lectures and notes that Heidegger composed from the 1930s onwards. With respect to beauty, on the other hand, exegesis has far less textual evidence on which to rely.That the invocation of beauty's link to truth is dictated solely by the task of expounding Hegel, with whose aesthetics Heidegger explicitly engages in the Afterword, is inconsistent with the remark that Heidegger, in his previous discussion of van Gogh and C. F. Meyer, makes in his own voice: shining that is set into the work is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth as unconcealment comes to presence [west].2 The link that Hegel-and German Idealism, more broadly-perceives between truth and beauty undergoes a transformation with Heidegger's rethinking of truth as unconcealment. (Even though the earlier essay On the Essence of Truth is dedicated to this renewal of the question of truth from within ontology, it omits any mention of beauty.) Through his appropriation of the link between truth and beauty, Heidegger renders it a bone of contention with Hegel. For both Hegel and Heidegger, it is the philosophical understanding of truth that illuminates the meaning of the beautiful rather than the immediate pleasure of beauty that illuminates the meaning of truth. For both thinkers, the definition of beauty is in the service of a larger philosophical project: they decline to take their bearings from the everyday experience of beauty.The point of departure for the ostensibly counterintuitive definition of beauty at which Hegel arrives, and from which Heidegger sets out in turn, is arguably Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. Even as he sets up the terms and positions that will facilitate the subsequent dissatisfaction with the everyday experience of beauty, Kant is himself concerned less with excluding certain objects from the class of the beautiful than with determining the subjective conditions of pure aesthetic judgement. …