Laocoön and His Sons

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

The Laocoön Group, unearthed during the Renaissance, embodies not calm but existential rupture. For Heidegger, this is a sculpture where Being is pain, where truth appears in struggle against fate. The serpents are not simply punishers—they are earth’s resistance to human knowledge.

Laocoön’s twisted torso, the sons’ contorted limbs, the line of the serpents—all form a vortex of strife, not merely narrative, but ontological violence. The earth—the body under attack—refuses to conform to ideal beauty. The world—Greek rationality, divine justice, human wisdom—is breaking down.

Heidegger might interpret this as a presencing of the moment when the gods withdraw. This is Being under erasure—Laocoön sees, understands, and is nonetheless doomed. The sculpture is thus not dramatic illustration, but truth happening as irreversible pain. It tells us that world collapses when earth rises as serpent, and in that collapse, a deeper truth gleams.