THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART
out of and in which the work is created, thingliness, too, must be part of the work. So much is indisputable. The question remains, however: how does being created belong to the work? This issue can only be elucidated when two points have been clarified:
(1) What is meant, here, by being-created and by creation as distinct from making and being-made?
(2) What is the innermost essence of the work itself, from which it can he gauged to what extent being created belongs to it, and to what degree being-created determines the work-being of the work?
Creation, here, is always thought with reference to the work. To the essence of the work there belongs the happening of truth. The nature of creation we define in advance in terms of its relation to the essence of truth as the unconcealment of beings. The belonging of being-created to the work can only come to light through a still more primordial clarification of the essence of truth. The question of truth and its essence returns.
If the statement that truth is at work in the work is to be something more than a mere assertion, we must raise this question once again.
First of all, we must now ask, in a more essential way: to what extent is an impulse to something like a work contained in the essence of truth? What is the essence of truth, that it can be set into the work — even, under certain conditions, must be set into the work — in order to have its being as truth? The setting-of-truth-into-the-work is, however, how we defined the essence of art. Hence, the question just posed becomes:
What is truth, that it can happen as art, or even must so happen? To what extent is there [gibt es] such a thing as art?
TRUTH AND ART
Art is the origin of both the artwork and the artist. An origin is the source of the essence in which the being of a being presences. What is art? We seek to discover its essential nature in the actual work. The reality of the work was defined in terms of what is at work in the work, in terms, that is, of the happening of truth. This happening we think of as the contesting of the strife between world and earth. In the intense agitation of this conflict presences repose [Ruhe]. It is here that the self-subsistence, the resting-in-itself [insichruhen] of the work finds its ground.
In the work, the happening of truth is at work. But what is thus at work is at work in the work. This means that the actual work is already presupposed,
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