Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin

Thinking Through Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”

Rodin’s Gates of Hell are not an illustration of Dante—they are a cosmic threshold, a terrifying portal where Being falls into the abyss of its own weight. For Heidegger, this would not be a decorative frame, but a metaphysical rift, a standing-into-truth of Being as agony.

Figures crawl, writhe, reach, fall. The Thinker sits above—not as philosopher, but as witness to the world’s undoing. The gates do not open—they implode. The earth is bronze: rough, melted, volcanic in texture. It resists polish, it resists form. The world that appears is not moral—it is existential pain, a condition of being forsaken, without center.

Heidegger would not read this as despair. Rather, it is truth in eruption. The Gates show Being in disarray, where form no longer clarifies, but collapses. In this gate, truth is what we fall into, not what uplifts us. It is world lost to the abyss—and earth rising as unformed mass, claiming back its beings.