  To understand Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics, it will help first to sketch his positive view of art’s true historical role. Heidegger’s own understanding of the work of art is resolutely populist but with revolutionary aspirations. He believes that, at its greatest, art “grounds history” by “allowing truth to spring forth” (PLT 77/GA5  65).[4] Building on Heraclitus’s view of the pervasive tension of normative conceptual oppositions (good/bad, worthy/worthless, noble/base, and the like) that undergird and implicitly structure our sense of ourselves and our worlds, Heidegger imagines the way  an ancient Greek temple at Paestum  once worked to help unify its historical world by tacitly  reinforcing a particular sense of what is and what matters: