OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
Earth rises up through world and world grounds itself on the earth only insofar as truth happens as the ur-strife between clearing and concealment. But how does truth happen? We answer: it happens in a few essential ways.a One of these ways in which truth happens is the work-being of the work. Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is the fighting of that fight in which the disclosure of beings as a whole — truth — is won.
Truth happens in the temple's standing there. This does not mean that something is correctly portrayed and reproduced here but rather that that which is as a whole is brought into unconcealment and held there. "lo hold" originally means "to watch over [hüten]." Truth happens in van Gogh's painting. That does not mean that something present is correctly portrayed; it means, rather, that in the manifestation of the equipmental being of the shoe-equipment, that which is as a whole — world and earth in their counterplay — achieves unconcealment.
In the work truth is at work — not, that is to say, merely something that is true. The picture which shows the peasant shoes, the poem that says the Roman fountain, does not merely show what these isolated beings as such are — if, indeed, they show anything at all. Rather, they allow unconcealment with regard to beings as a whole to happen.b The more simply and essentially the shoe-equipment is absorbed in its essence, the more plainly and purely the fountain is absorbed in essence, the more immediately and engagingly do all beings become, along with them, more in being. In this way self-concealing being becomes illuminated. Light of this kind sets its shining into the work. The shining that is set into the work is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth as unconcealment comes to presence.
In certain respects, we have, now, certainly grasped the essence of truth more clearly. What is at work in the work may, therefore, have become clearer. Yet the work-being of the work that has now become visible still tells us nothing at all about the most immediate and salient reality of the work, its thingliness. It even seems as if, in pursuing the all-consuming aim of comprehending the self-subsistence of the work itself as purely as possible, we have completely overlooked one crucial point: a work is always a work, which is to say, something worked or produced [em Gewirktes]. If anything distinguishes the work as a work it is the fact that it has been created. Since the work is created, and since creation requires a medium
a Reclam edition, 1960. Not an answer since the question remains: what is it which happens in these ways?
b Reclam edition, 1960. The Event.
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