Glimpses of Truth in a Sea of Nescience: Reflections on Ereignis in Art in Wölfli, Heidegger and Advaita Vedānta

Martin Heidegger's deconstruction of Western Metaphysics was a project designed to retrieve an appreciation of the question of Being through a distancing from the distortions created by the history metaphysics itself. This project takes several forms, but a particularly radical form can be seen by interpreting Heidegger's work Contributions to Philosophy in the light of the Indian philosophical tradition, Advaita Vedānta. We find in this juxtaposition an accentuation of three concepts: Self, concealment and Being. The relation of these three elements can be seen within the movement of the work of art, and can be seen especially vividly in outsider art. It is in outsider art that we see the movement towards a disruption which breaks us free from metaphysical thought, throwing us into a pre-metaphysical realm, while still under influence of what Advaita philosophy would call nescience [māyā, avidyā]. We intent to show in this article that the works of Adolf Wölfli can be seen as a manifestation of the rupture of 'pre-metaphysical occurrence' disrupting our normal discourse; an occurrence that ultimately can be verified only by its own example, as a unique appearance.