THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART
Whenever art happens, whenever, that is, there is a beginning, a thrust enters history and history either begins or resumes. History, here, does not mean a sequence of event.'> in time, no matter how important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task [Aufgegebenes] as the entry into its endowment [Mitgegebenes].
Art is the setting-itself-to-work of truth. An essential ambiguity is concealed in this sentence, present because "truth" functions as both subject and object. Yet "subject" and "object" are inappropriate terms, here. They prevent our thinking this ambiguous essence — a task that no longer belongs to our reflections. Art is historical and, as historical, is the creative preservation of truth in the work. Art happens as poetry. This is founding in the threefold sense of bestowing, grounding, and beginning. As founding, art is essentially historical. This does not just mean that art has a history, a history in the external sense that, in the passage of time, art appears together with many other things, and in the process changes and passes away, and offers changing aspects to the study of history. Art is history in the essential sense: it is the ground of history.
Art allows truth to arise [entspringen]. Art arises as the founding preservation of the truth of beings in the work. To allow something to arise, to bring something into being from out of the essential source in the founding leap [Sprung] is what is meant by the word "origin [Ursprung]."
The origin of the artwork — of, that is, creators and preservers, which is to say, the historical existence of a people — is art. This is so because, in its essence, art is an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, becomes, that is, historical.
We are inquiring into the essential nature of art. Why do we thus inquire? We do so in order to be able to ask properly whether or not, in our historical existence, art is an origin, whether, and under what conditions, it can and must become one.
Such reflections cannot compel art and its coming-to-be. But this reflective knowledge is the preliminary and therefore indispensable preparation for the coming-to-be of art. Only such knowledge prepares, for art, the space," for creators, the path, and for preservers the location.
In such knowledge, which can only grow slowly, it is decided whether art can be an origin — and therefore must be a leap ahead — or whether it should remain a mere postscript, in which case it can only be carried along as a cultural phenomenon that has become routine.
a Reclam edition, 1960. The place of its staying.
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