THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART
in the right direction. This is no mean achievement, when we recollect that those modes of thinking familiar from ancient times arc an attack upon the thingliness of the thing, and all the more when we recollect that they submit beings as a whole to an interpretation which is incapable of grasping the essence of equipment and of work, and makes us blind to the primordial essence of truth.
To determine the thingliness of the thing, neither reference to the hearer of properties nor to the unity of the manifold of the sensorily given is adequate. Least adequate of all is the matter-form structure, taken by itself, which is taken from the realm of equipment. To provide an authoritative and deep interpretation of the thingliness of the thing we must tum to the belonging of the thing to earth. The essential nature of earth, of the unmasterable and self-closing bearer, reveals itself, however, only in its rising up into a world, in the opposition between world and earth. This strife is fixed in place within the work's figure and becomes manifest through this figure. What is true of equipment, that we experience its equipmentality proper only through the work is true, also, of the thingliness of the thing. That we never know of the thingliness of the thing directly, and if we know it at all do so only in an indefinite kind of way — in other words, that we need the work - this fact shows indirectly that in the work-being of the work the happening of truth, the disclosure of beings, is at work.
But, we might finally object, if the work is indeed to bring thingliness into the open in a striking way, must not the work, for its part — before, and for the sake of its createdness — have been brought into relation to the things of the earth, to nature? Someone who must have known about it, Albrecht Dürer, made, after all, the well-known remark: "For in truth, art is found in nature; whoever can wrest it from her has it." "Wrest [reißen]" means here, to bring forth the rift [Riss] and to seize [reißen] it with drawing pen and drawing board. Immediately, however, we raise the counter-question: how can the rift be wrested forth except as the rift, and that means if it has not first been brought into the open, through the creative sketch, as the strife between measure and unmeasure? Certainly, there is found in nature a rift, measure, and limit, and bound to them the potentiality for a bringing forth, art. But it is just as certain that this art which is in nature is made manifest only by the work, made manifest because it is found in the work in a primordial way.
Our efforts concerning the reality of ·the work should have prepared the ground for discovering, in the reality of the work, art and its essential nature. The question of the nature of art, and of the path to knowing it,
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