THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART
this indication is confined to warding off that which might initially distort our view into the essence of things.
World is not a mere collection of the things — countable and uncountable, known and unknown — that are present at hand. Neither is world a merely imaginary framework added by our representation to the sum of things that are present. World worlds, and is more fully in being than all those tangible and perceptible things in the midst of which we take ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be looked at. World is that always-nonobjectual to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse, keep us transported into being." Wherever the essential decisions of our history are made, wherever we take them over or abandon them, wherever they go unrecognized or are brought once more into question, there the world worlds. The stone is world-less. Similarly, plants and animals have no world; they belong, rather, to the hidden throng of an environment into which they have been put. The peasant woman, by contrast, possesses a world, since she stays in the openness of beings. In its reliability, equipment imparts to this world a necessity and proximity of its own. By the opening of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their distance and proximity, their breadth and their limits. In worlding there gathers that spaciousness from out of which the protective grace of the gods is gifted or is refused. Even the doom of the absence of the god is a way in which world worlds.
A work, by being a work, allows a space for that spaciousness. "To allow a space" here means, in particular: to make free the free of the open and to install this free place in its structure. This in-stalling [Ein-richten] presences as the erection [Er-richten] mentioned earlier. As a work, the work holds open the open of a world. Yet the setting up of a world is only the first of the essential traits of the work-being of the work that we need to discuss here. The second essential trait which belongs to it we shall attempt to make visible by starting, in the same manner as before, from the foreground of the work.
When a work is brought forth out of this or that work-material — stone, wood, metal, color, language, tone — we say that it is made, set forth [hergestellt] out of it. But just as the work required a setting up, in the sense of consecrating-praising erection (since the work-being of the work consisted in a setting up of world), so a setting forth [Herstellung] is also necessary, since the work-being of the work has itself the character of a
a Reclam edition, 1960. Being-there [Da-sein]. Third impression 1957: the Event.
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