The Tyranny that Was the Greek Statue

The Greek statue was once an irresistible academic problem that drove some of our greatest minds literally crazy, while the scholarly attempts to understand it were spilling into society and fertilizing Western education. Our postmodernist, nonchalant attitude towards this strange object has it locked in the museums, where nowdays it is no more than a casual tourist attraction. This is not because the question that was the Greek statue was ever really answered; rather that we gave up on it, perhaps because we believed our own excuses not to deal with it. Heidegger’s questioning our relationship, as humans, with the Greek statue, allows a revisiting of the question of the ontological status of this hitherto unaccountable object, by shedding assumptions and introducing new evidence in the form of better-informed questions.