OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
of equipment - indicated the need to pose the question of equipmentality anew while avoiding the familiar interpretations.
We allow a work to tell us what equipment is. By this means, it came to light what is at work in the work: the opening up of beings in their being, the happening of truth. If, however, the reality of the work is determined by nothing other than what is at work in the work, how do things stand with regard to our project of searching out the real artwork in its reality? As long as we supposed the reality of the work to lie primarily in its thingly substructure, we went astray. We now confront a remarkable result of our considerations – if "result" is what it can be called. Two points become clear.
First, the prevailing concepts of the thing represent an inadequate means of grasping the thingly clement in the work.
Second, the thingly substructure, which we wanted to treat as the most evident reality of the work does not, in that way, belong to the work at all.
As soon as we become fixated on finding such an element in the work we have unwittingly taken the work as equipment to which we then ascribe a superstructure supposed to contain what is artistic about it. But the work is not a piece of equipment that is fitted out in addition with aesthetic worth adhering to it. The work is no more that than the mere thing is a piece of equipment minus the marks of authentic equipmentality – usefulness and being made.
Our posing the question of the work has been disturbed by the fact that we asked, not about the work but, rather, half about a thing and half about equipment. That, however, was not a way of raising the question first developed by us. This way of raising the question belongs, rather, to aesthetics. The way in which aesthetics is disposed, in advance, to view the artwork stands within the dominion of the traditional interpretation of beings in general. But to disturb this familiar mode of questioning is not what is essential. What really matters is that we open our eyes to the fact that the workliness of the work, the equipmentality of equipment, and the thingliness of the thing come nearer to us only when we think the being of beings. A condition of this is that the limits imposed by self-evidence first fall away and that current pseudo-concepts be set aside. This is why we had to take a roundabout route. But it brings us directly onto the path that may lead to a determination of the thingly aspect of the work. The thingly in the work should not be denied out of existence; rather, given that it belongs already to the work-being of the work, it must be thought out of that work-being. If this is so, then the path to the determination of the thingly reality of the work runs not from thing to work but from work to thing.
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