THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART
When, here and elsewhere, we conceive of truth as unconcealment, we are not merely taking refuge in a more literal formulation of the Greek word. We are reflecting upon that which, unexperienced and unthought, underlies our familiar and therefore worn out essence of truth in the sense of correctness. From time to time we bring ourselves to concede that, of course, in order to verify and grasp the correctness (truth) of an assertion we must return to something that is already manifest. This presupposition, we concede, is unavoidable. But as long as we talk and think in this way, we understand truth merely as correctness. This requires, of course, a still further presupposition, one that we just make, heaven knows how or why.
{GA 5: 39} But it is not we who presuppose the unconcealment of beings. Rather, the unconcealment of beings (being) puts us into such an essence that all our representing remains set into, and in accordance with, unconcealment. It is not only the case that that in conformity with which a cognition orders itself must already be somehow unconcealed. Rather, the whole region in which this "conformity with something" occurs must already have happened as a whole within the undisclosed; and this holds equally of that for which a particular correspondence of a statement to the facts becomes manifest. With all our correct representations we would be nothing – we could never make the presupposition of there being something manifest to which we conform ourselves – if the unconcealment of beings had not already set us forth into that illuminated realmb in which every being stands for us and from which it withdraws.
But how does this happen? How does truth happen as this unconcealment? First, however, we must make it clearer what this unconcealment itself is.
Things are, and human beings, gifts, and sacrifices are, animals and plants are, equipment and work are. The being stands in being. Through being passes a coven fate ordained between the godly and what goes against the godly. There is much in beings man cannot master. But little comes to be known. The known remains an approximation, what is mastered insecure. Never is a being – as it might, all too easily, appear – something of our making or merely our representation. When we contemplate this whole in its unity we grasp, it seems, all that is – though we grasp it crudely enough.
a Reclam edition, 1960: i.e., the Event.
b Reclam edition, 1960. If the clearing were not to happen, i.e., the appropriating [Er-eignen].
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