Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel

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

Heidegger’s notion of the origin of the work of art—what brings it forth as being, as a site of unconcealment—finds primal expression in the Lion-Man figurine. Here, we encounter not merely a representation but a being that stands within its own truth. The Lion-Man, carved from mammoth ivory, is not an illustration of myth but a clearing (Lichtung) in which the early human world begins to be. It is not an "object," nor even simply a symbol—it is the site in which early human Dasein projects meaning into the world.

The fusion of animal and human traits does not merely illustrate imaginative thinking; it initiates a strife (Streit) between earth—the raw, unknowable, self-secluding materiality of ivory—and world—the meaningful order in which the lion-man stands forth as divine, powerful, or totemic. This sculpture reveals how Paleolithic humans experienced being—not as subject-object dichotomy but as embedded in a cosmopoetic disclosure. The figurine is thus not a tool to worship or use, but an ontological event: it is the happening of truth, where truth is not correspondence but the dynamic unconcealment of being.

In its opacity, the Lion-Man both reveals and withholds. It allows us to see that even the most ancient works of art are not naïve representations but ontological sites where truth becomes present. Heidegger says that art is not simply made—it happens. And here, the Lion-Man happens as a mythic-becoming, the rupture of the ordinary through the extraordinary. The earth resists full disclosure—the ivory’s veining, the incompleteness of knowledge—while the world insists upon projecting a divine-human hybrid. Their conflict allows aletheia, truth, to emerge.