no answers are given in the essay. Whatever gives the impression of such an answer are directives for questioning. (See the first sentences of the Epilogue.)
Among these directives there are two important hints, on pages 196 and 202. In both places mention is made of an "ambiguity." On page 202 an "essential ambiguity" is noted in regard to the definition of art as "the setting-into-work of truth." In this ambiguity, truth is "subject" on the one hand and "object" on the other. Both descriptions remain "unsuitable." If truth is the "subject," then {GA 5: 74} the definition "the setting-into-work of truth" means: "truth's setting itself into work" (compare pages 196 and 162). Art is then conceived in terms of the propriative event. Being, however, is a call to man and is not without man. Accordingly, art is at the same time defined as the setting-into-work of truth, where truth now is "object" and art is human creating and preserving.
Within the human relation to art there results the second ambiguity of the setting-into-work of truth, which on page 191 was called creation and preservation. According to pages 196 and 182 the artwork and the artist rest "simultaneously" in what goes on in art. In the rubric "the setting-into-work of truth," in which it remains undecided but decidable who does the setting or in what way it occurs, there is concealed the relation of Being and human being, a relation that is unsuitably conceived even in this version—a distressing difficulty, which has been clear to me since Being and Time and has since been expressed in a variety of versions (See, most recently, "Zur Seinsfrage" and the present essay, p. 186, "Only this much should be noted, that. . . .").
The problematic context that prevails here then comes together at the proper place in the discussion, where the essence of language and of poetry is touched on, all this again only in regard to the belonging together of Being and saying.
There remains the unavoidable quandary that the reader, who naturally comes to the essay from without, will refrain at first and for a long time from perceiving and interpreting the matters at issue