OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
able to say whether or not an artwork is a thing — albeit a thing to which something else adheres. Only then will we be able to decide whether the work is something fundamentally different and not a thing at all.
THE THING AND THE WORK
What, in truth, is a thing insofar as it is a thing? When we ask this question we wish to know the thing-being (the thingliness) of the thing. The point is to learn the thingliness of the thing. To this end we must become acquainted with the sphere within which are to be found all those beings which we have long called things.
The stone on the path is a thing, as is the clod of earth in the field. The jug is a thing, and the well beside the path. But what should we say about the milk in the jug and the water in the well? These, too, are things, if the cloud in the sky and the thistle in the field, if the leaf on the autumn wind and the hawk over the wood are properly called things. All these must indeed be called things, even though we also apply the term to that which, unlike the above, fails to show itself, fails to appear. One such thing which does not, itself, appear — a "thing in itself" in other words — is, according to Kant, the world as a totality. Another such example is God himself. Things in themselves and things that appear, every being that in any way exists, count, in the language of philosophy, as "things."
These days, airplanes and radios belong among the things that are closest to us. When, however, we refer to "last things," we think of something quite different. Death and judgment, these are the last things. In general, "thing" applies to anything that is not simply nothing. In this signification, the artwork counts as a thing, assuming it to be some kind of a being. Yet this conception of the thing, in the first instance at least, docs not help us in our project of distinguishing between beings which have the being of things and beings which have the being of works. And besides, we hesitate to repeat the designation of God as a "thing." We are similarly reluctant to take the farmer in the field, the stoker before the boiler, the teacher in the school to be a "thing." A human being is not a thing. True, we say of a young girl who has a task to perform that is beyond her that she is "too young a thing." But this is only because, in a certain sense, we find human being to be missing here and think we have to do, rather, with what constitutes the thingliness of the thing. We are reluctant to call even the deer in the forest clearing, the beetle in the grass, or the blade of grass "things." Rather, the hammer, the shoe, the ax, and the clock are things. Even they, however, are not mere
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