Equipment, Artwork and Truth (in Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art)

1. Introduction

Heidegger’s philosophy of art demands to be investigated and evaluated by putting it side by

side with his early philosophy of Being and Time, since it uses most of the essential themes of
the latter as stepping stones to present an almost conflicting perspective. I will investigate The
Origin of the Work of Art as a characteristic expression of Heidegger’s later philosophy, and
will try to provide an outlook of the change in his perspective by taking the two paradigmatic
entities of his early and late philosophy, the equipment and the artwork, as the threads to
weave my account. I will begin by explicating Heidegger’s conception of truth in Being and
Time, and continue with the topic of equipmentality through the explication of which I will try
to connect my investigation of his early philosophy and later philosophy. I will dedicate the
last part of my paper to a presentation of his account of the being of the artwork and complete
the cycle by returning to the topic of truth.

2. Truth

a. Three senses of truth

The general and rather consistent outlook of Heidegger’s approach to truth is to

replace the terminology and understanding of truth, and grounding it within, the notion of
unconcealment.1 The shift Heidegger proposes from truth to unconcealment has its basis in
his translation and interpretation of the Greek word alētheia, which generally is translated as
truth and employed as a property of statements but for Heidegger has a deeper origin in the
Greek context regarding its reference to the act of uncovering, or elimination of the state of
being hidden. His reconstruction of the notion of truth takes place through his distinction
between three senses in which truth can be understood, the first two of which being
traditionally acknowledged and employed ones while the third is, for Heidegger, the most
primordial sense widely ignored in philosophy but is the real ground and origin from which
the other senses derive.

1. Truth, in its ordinary and philosophically common sense, means correctness

(Richtigkeit) and is based on the idea of correspondence. The correspondence in question is

1
Expressed as disclosure, revealedness, uncoveredness or discoveredness as well, depending on the particular
context to meet the set of terms Heidegger uses such as Entdectheit, Unverborgenheit, or Erschlossenheit.
that of a statement or proposition with a state of affairs or fact. This first sense, truth number
one, is also called propositional truth.

Correspondence, for Heidegger, is based on the success of propositional attitudes

towards what they speak about. But this success cannot be accounted for if we take truth
solely as a property; neither can it be done while we operate on the deeper, more
ontollogically loaded traditional model of adaequatio intellectus ad rem, which is “merely a
starting point (Ansatz) and not at all that which is commonly taken to be, namely, an essential
determination of truth”.2 For this succeess is grounded in the act of rendering entities
uncovered: first, the entities themselves must be available; our orientation must be so that
entities show themselves in particular ways. Thus making utterances is always already an
attitude towards things, which is an attitude in the mode of discovering. Correctness of
utterances is possible “because Dasein is active in the world discovering things”.3

Propositional truth as correspondence emerges as a result of the theoretical mode of

relating to the world, which is a derivative one because we do not primarily attend to our
representations and compare them with the way things are. What we compare is different
ways in which things are given to us, and this operation already presupposes that things are
given to us. Abstract treatment of statements cannot reveal what they may mean, since every
statement is always already embedded in practices of using–in the most general sense–within
which our tools become transparent as they withdraw into usefulness. This is true for the tools
of sensibility and cognition as well; thus the representationalist model of language will reveal,
regarding propositional truth, only a derivative aspect of the issue–which is not the ground but
only the result.

2. In a more fundamental sense truth–truth number two–is the truth of entities, as their
being uncovered, discovered or disclosed (Entdecktheit). An entity becomes true when it is
made available for having an attitude, orientation or comportement towards it. This is ontic
truth, within which propositional truth is grounded. Truth of statements can be asserted or
denied only through bringing entities out of hiddenness, concealment, thus by discovering the
way things are and checking the correctness of statements against what is discovered.
Discoveredness of entities, though, is not primarily a theoretical issue. Entities must first be
given in practical ways of relating to the world; as something to sit on, as something heavy,

2
GA 29/30: 497, cited in M. A. Wrathall, “Unconcealment”, p. 343.
3
Guignon, p. 199.
as something warming, as something amusing... Only then we can abstract from the way
things are made available to us and treat them in isolation; as present-to-hand. This
uncoveredness of entities does not need to be in only one way: entities can be given to us, thus
uncovered in infinitely many ways, which are limited in practice by the way in which a
holistic disclosure occurs. We do not encounter entities in isolation in the practical mode of
dealing with them; they are embedded in a web of references to other entities and practices:
things manifest themselves to us always already in a pre-disclosed context. Thus even this
more fundamental sense of truth, disclosedness of entities, is still a derivative one. Disclosure
of entities is grounded in the disclosure of a context, which brings us to the most fundamental
sense of truth: the primordial truth.

3. The ground from which all other senses of truth derive is the disclosedness of the
world. Heidegger identifies this most fundamental sense of truth–truth number three–with
unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), which terminologically is reserved for this holistic
disclosure, and uses truth for the most part interchangibly with unconcealment.

Entities can be encountered only within a world, thus the disclosure of entities pre-
supposes that a world is already opened up. Ontic disclosure of entities happens in the mode
of signifying, and takes place within a totality of references, which he calls “significance”
(Bedeutsamkeit).4 Entities can “mean” anything only as part of the totality of references; yet
he assigns the term “meaning” a transcendental sense as well in connection with truth numer
three: “Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility of something maintains itself.”5 The world,
as the unified the totality of a referential web within which entities gain their referentiality is
the necessary ground for that entities can be what they are, and that our dealings, practices
and utterances make sense. Indeed, the world cannot be composed/constituted by weaving
individual meanings together: it is opened up in a simple, unitary way as the ground of all
meaning-making and the particular meanings become present only within this ground, rather
secondarily. This opening up of a world, unconcealment involves comportement, orientation,
understanding and acting, and pertains equally to the world and to Dasein.6 Dasein’s
understanding of the world and of himself goes inalienably together.Disclosedness of the
world is essentially tied with the transcendental horizon of Dasein’s possibilities. The horizon
unconceals a world of entities for Dasein’s comportment, while itself remaining invisible.

4
Heidegger, Being and Time, gp. 87.
5
Ibid., gp. 151.
6
Ibid., gp. 221.
 What ultimately is opened up, in the most fundamental sense of unconcealment, is a
clearing (Lichtung). Truth number three, the primordial truth, is a clearing. Truth number
three, which has always been closely tied with the overall project of Heidegger both in his
early and late philosophy, undergoes changes throughout his career in a way that reflects the
changes in the overall philosophical outlook. He shifts gradually from understanding truth as
disclosedness of a world on the basis of some transcendental conditions (existentials) to, for
him, a more fundamental understanding of truth as the truth of beings and being. Truth of
beings in this sense would be unconcealment of their essences; of what they really are. Truth
as clearing is the truth of being, and is even more fundamental than the truth of beings. As
truth of beings is a revealing of their essences, truth of being as clearing can be seen as the
unconcealment of the essence of a world. In the context of Heidegger’s later philosophy, this
unconcealment is understood not in terms of existentials but historically; in terms of different
epochs within each of which a particular “meaning of being” is at work. From this perspective
“world” has to be considered in its historicality and locality; in the context of the plurality of
different epochs and different cultures, comportments and forms of life.

Truth of being, which is the ultimate precondition for the possibility of there being
truth of beings, is the hardest to get a grisp of due to its all-pervasive nature: its transparency
is the very condition of the revealedness of entities because it is the very mode of revealing
which withdraws to the background and lets entities be seen. We are capable of encountering
entities thanks to this covering up of the very mode in which and the conditions by which we
are capable of encountering them: “the concealment of beings as a whole...is older than every
manifestness of this or that entity.”7 On the other hand, truth of being–the clearing itself–is the
hardest to discern also due to the fact that it is the most global in the strictest sense: there is
nothing against which we can situate it; no other truths to compare and contrast since it is
manifest in every part and parcel of our experience.8 It has a transcendental status in that it
“grants first of all the possibility of the path to presence, and grants the possible presencing of
that presence itself”.9

7
Wrathall, p. 355.
8
Indeed Wrathall makes a distinction between the truth of being and clearing, asserting that clearing is more
fundamental than and grounds the truth of being. Since the distinction is not very crucial at this point for my
purposes, I treat them as having the same sense.
9
Heidegger 1993: 445, cited in M. A. Wrathal, “Unconcealment”, p. 356. It seems that the clearing itself is not
grounded in anything else; it is nowhere. But that would be in line with a perspective that takes the clearing to
be denoting something similar to a paradigm, conceptual framework or form of life. It can also be argued that
although this may conform comperatively easily with Heidegger’s perspective in Being and Time; it will not be
 Opening up of a world, a clearing, is always one among a manifold of possibilities for
the later Heidegger. A clearing is always a domain of some possibilities among others, and a
clearing itself is one among other possible clearings. Just as uncovering of some possibilities
for comportement covers up others, opening up a world closes other possible worlds: truth of
beings always covers up other truths, and unconcealment is always at the same time a
concealment.

b. Concealment and unconcealment

The pair of notions concealment and unconcealment occurs throughout the corpus of
Heidegger, but acquires its full terminological significance and specification in his later
works. This happens when he connects it with the notion of clearing and reserves it for being
in contradistinction to discoveredness of entities.10

Unconcealment, as clearing, makes sense only when taken together with concealment;
for a clearing takes place always among hiddenness and the very existence of a clearing points
to the concealment of any other possibilities for clearing. The event of unconcealing is by the
same token a concealing. Clearing is never the only clearing possible; but the possibility of
the very opening up of a single clearing depends on the simultaneous concealment of other
possible clearings. Expressed in terms of Guignon’s identification of reality with intelligibility
(in the most general sense): “what is primary is a...‘clearing’ or ‘opening’ which cannot be
coherently set over against a reality distinct from that clearing...there ‘is’ reality only within
the sphere of this disclosedness.”11

Opening up a world is always a play of concealment/unconcealment. Firstly, every

world is necessarily a finite world, thus it is both unconcealing and concealing at the same
time; moreover, its very unconcealing depends on that it is concealing. There can be no
unconcealment without concealment. For Heidegger this is the nature of unconcealment at
any level of reality. Entities themselves can be present, manifest themselves (alētheia) in
some way only by not being so in others (lēthē). Speaking of the notion of limit or boundary
(peras/πέρας) in Greek thinking he says: “[it] does not block off but, rather, as itself
something brought forth, first brings what is present to radiance. The boundary sets free into

that easily reconciled with his later, historical perspective that regards different clearings as the historical
unfoldings of Being, manifested in different epochs.
10
Wrathall, p. 341.
11
Guignon, p. 200.
unconcealment.”12 Thus there can never be an absolute unconcealment of entities. In the most
fundamental sense of unconcealment, the interplay of concealing and unconcealing takes the
form of the self-concealment of the world, or of being: a world is never only itself−the
unconcealed; but always more than that, since what makes possible that entities become
present never presents itself; it withdraws into concealment. Being, in the sense of later
Heidegger, is self-concealing by the same token that it is unfolding into clearings.

According to Harman13, the pair of unconcealment-concealment is a rather specific

manifestation of a duality omnipresent in Heidegger’s thought. The interplay of this pair,
which is the ground of truth in the ordinary sense, is not essentially different than other pairs
like light and shadow, earth and world, or tool and broken tool. He sees the last pair as the
paradigmatic one which is the origin of all others and is always instantiated in them. In order
to be able to assign such an ontological sense to the terms of tool and broken tool, Harman
abstracts from their literal connotations and extends their sense to such degree that there is no
part of Heidegger’s philosophy left which is not covered by them. For him this main axis of
Heidegger’s thinking reveals a fundamental interplay which is actually “one and the same for
all regions of reality” and Heidegger has no “genuine theories of ‘truth’, ‘time’, ‘tools’,
‘space’, ‘theory’” and so on.14 Tool-being, according to Harman, has nothing to do with
instrumentality in the specific sense−it is not confined to practical dealings with the world;
since even the essence of an ordinary tool is not what is accesible in it. On the contrary, tool-
being is always what is inaccessible: tool-being, as essence is the ever-elusive aspect of
reality, whose very nature consists in self-concealment.15

There is no part or aspect of reality untouched by the interplay of concealment and

unconcealment. Again, Harman says: “Wherever we go and whatever we do, we are always
surrounded by the unconcealed, claimed by it...but also [we] drift about in a permanent reign
of concealment”.16

12
Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, p.53. From now on “OoA”.
13
Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects.
14
Harman, p. 154.
15
It may be said that Harman’s interpretation of tool-being, which he takes to be something much more
fundamental then equipmentality, depends on his application of the line of thinking of later Heidegger to the
terminology and perspective of Being and Time. In his interpretation, talking of readiness-to-hand and present-
at-hand as exclusive modes becomes impossible: no tool can be broken to the extent that it loses tool-being
altogether; moreover, its very capacity to be broken depends on its tool-being.
16
Harman, p. 187.
 From this perspective, as we proceed towards more and more transcendental
structures, we are moving away from the unconcealed and approaching what is concealed.
This is true both for the existentials of Dasein and innermost depts of Being (containing
possible worlds, clearings, frameworks, essences as well as their origins), which are indeed
inseparable. Speaking of Dasein, this can be expressed in an unsophisticated metaphorical
way as that the condition of the visibility of objects is the invisibility of light itself, and in
another way−with a different terminology−as that the condition of the “immediate” character
of our experience in the most general sense is that it is mediated throughout: if this
mediatedness itself were somehow available to us in experience, neither the trancendental
conditions could be operative as they are, nor could our experience be in the way it is.
Speaking of Being, the interplay of unconcealment and concealment will acquire a further
twist in Heidegger’s philosophy of art in terms of his notions of strife and the pair of the
world and the earth, and the crucial question as to how can the essence of an epoch, a clearing
or a world can give way to another given that they are ever-concealed from us will find an
answer in terms of the world-founding power of art.

3. Equipment and equipmentality

a. As-structure

The equipmentality of an equipment for early Heidegger is realized only through

Dasein’s non-theoretical mode of relating to the world. This mode of relating is famously
expressed as handiness, and put forth, in the context of Being and Time, as an existential
structure of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. The notion of handiness, on the other hand, is not
formulated exclusively for treating our mode of relating to the entities we ordinarily call
equipments, or tools, whose distinctive feature is their being brought to existence by us
particularly in accordance with our needs and purposes, that is, to serve a function. Rather, the
existential of handiness covers a much wider scope of our experience as a transcendental
condition.

Dasein ontically, in the sense of our ordinary non-theoretical way of relating, lives in a
context opened up by handiness: every part and parcel of our experience is structured by it.
We encounter each and any entity as having a determinate place within our everyday dealings
with the world, our practices of using and producing. Every entity manifests itself to us as
something: a pen is something to write with, a house is something that provides shelter, walls
can be leaned on, sun warms up, fruits can be eaten and so on. There is nothing which is part
of our world yet is not something. Every entity we can encounter within our world is, thus,
relevant for us: every single entity within the world signifies something.

Another fundamental aspect of handiness is that it makes entities manifest in a web of

references. Every signification also is a reference to some other entities and practices: a pen
refers to writing, a paper and a desk; a desk with a paper and pen on it to a study; a study to a
house or a university. As such, entities belong to their proper contexts. An elephant does not
belong to a study or a pen to a wheat field. Reference, thus, is an inalienable part of
significance. The referential totality that makes up the world in which Dasein inhabits stands
or falls together.

Even the workshop of a handworker whose work is wholly unfamiliar to us is in no way

encountered chiefly as a mere conglomeration of things all thrown together, but instead in the
closest environmental orientation are shown handworking tools, materials, produced and ready
pieces, unready pieces, those found still in the works. Primarily, we experience the world in
which the man lives, however foreign, yet still as world, as the disclosed totality of references.17

An object in the traditional metaphysical sense is an entity we cannot encounter within

the world; it is not a part of it because it refers to nothing other than itself. An entity becomes
an object only if we rip it off from its context. An equipment is never an object as long as it is
an equipment; since, as we said in the beginning, the being of an equipment pertains to the
world opened up through handiness. The necessary connection between equipmentality and
handiness, and the nature of the difference between an equipment and an object have another,
more fundamental aspect which we will talk about next.

Theoretical mode of relating to entities renders them objects. In traditional

metaphysics entities are treated as independent, self-sufficient substances with properties.
They do not have essential relations with other substances, and their properties are added on
to them in an inessential way. There is no need to go into more detail regarding the notion of
subtance or property here since no further elaboration is required to make the basic point that
one performs any such analysis only if one relates to entities in a way that bereaves them from
any ontic significance and reference they might have, and investigates them by way of a
distanced “vision”, in line with the etymology of the term “theoretical”.

Entities can be manifestly “visible” only when we approach them theoretically. On the
other hand, equipmentality of the equipment, or, in another terminology, the tool-being of the

17
Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, p. 188.
tool is always invisible. The more the tool is invisible, the better it performs its function and
as long as it does so it remains invisible. As Heidegger famously depicts; one comes to see a
hammer as an independent entity with properties only when it is broken, thus when its
equipmentality is lost. Moreover, one does not even pay attention to the very equipmentality
of the equipment; one does not even consider an hammer as an equipment or even a tool as
long as one is “lost” in one’s work, using a smootly functioning hammer. Equipmentality lies
in the very invisibility of the equipment; its withdrawal and vanishing. In this sense,
referentiality of entities is not present. Harman writes:

The tool is referential, in a twofold sense...By disappearing from view...it allows the ultimate
reference to swallow all of its component forces into an invisible system or network lying silently
beneath it. In this first sense, the “reference” of the tool is the encountered finality or terminus to
which it anonymously contributes...But in each case, a lost race of tool-beings is smothered
beneath these end-points, vanishing into the machinery whose dominance finally halts in some
impenetrable surface. In a second sense, then, reference is the act of an entity’s withdrawal into
its unseen efficacy, hidden away in its function or execution or performance.18

b. Usefulness and reliability

What we have said so far applies the equipment and its equipmentality non-
exclusively: all entities within the world to which we relate non-theoretically manifest
themselves to us as ready-to-hand and so, they themselves as entities and even their readiness-
to-hand withdraw to the background and become invisible. Every entity, a tool or not in the
ordinary sense, means something: the as-structure, with respect to its scale of application,
cannot discern between Dasein’s various comportements towards entities; be it production of
chairs, composing of musical pieces, or sitting on a rock.19 Thus, what properly pertains to the
being of the equipment remains to be indicated. But this, for later Heidegger, cannot be
achieved within the framework of Being and Time. Now let us briefly look at why this is so,
and how is the question as to the equipmentality of equipment is asked and answered by him
in his later philosophy.

It can be said that equipment and its equipmentality has a paradigmatic status in
Heidegger’s early philosophy. The most central and characteristic terminology of Being and
Time (“Referentiality”, “significance”, “handiness”, “as-structure” and so on) fit the best to
our relations to entities which are produced by humans in order to realize human ends, and are

18
Harman, p. 25.
19
For a statement of a similar point through a different perspective, see Harman, p. 68-80.
extended to other entities, actions and comportements in virtue of their direct or indirect
relation to the activities of using and producing. He says of our relation to nature:

Accordingly, in the environment [an] entity becomes accessible which is not in need of
producing, but is always already ready-to-hand. Hammer, tongs, and needle in themselves refer
to they consist of steel, iron, metal, mineral, wood. In equipment that is used, “nature” is
discovered along with it by that use, “nature” in the light of products of nature.20

Equipments most clearly manifest being “in order to” (Um-zu) realize particular and distinct
ends. Their being lies in their usefulness, instrumentality, thus performance (Vollzug): the
more they are useful, thus “good” equipments, the more they “refer” away from themselves
and towards the end they help accomplish. While their being lies in their invisible
performance, the end itself is visible. According to Harman, this ambiguity reflects an
ambivalence in the being of the equipment itself: “Equipment is “meaning” or “reference” in
two distinct senses. It is the performance of a withering subterrenian force, but a force that
also acts to summon up some explicitly encountered reality...[it is] a reality [in the former
sense] that is also somehow an appearance, or a verb that is also a noun.”21

Equipmentality of the equipment has a further and more fundamental dimension than
usefulness, which is not recognized and addressed by early Heidegger but is crucial for the
perspective he tries to put forward within the context of art and artwork. This dimension is
“reliability”, and actually it shifts the focus from the omnipresent instrumentalism of everyday
life, which acquires an ontological status in the context of Being and Time, to its non-
instrumentalistic source. This instrumentalism, reflected in the over-whelmingly productionist
tone of “as-structure”, is regarded by the later Heidegger as having a dimension of historicity;
as a manifestation of what he later called the long-lived epoch of metaphysics, which was a
clearing opened up by a productionist comportement towards being. Instrumentality, for later
Heidegger, does not seem to point to a structure so primordial that it non-historically
conditions our relation to any entity, whether it is a god or a shoelace: handiness should not be
understood as an existential in the sense of a a-historical, universal, transcendental condition
of Dasein’s comportment towards the world; but as pertaining to the truth of the epoch of
metaphysics, thus to a historical clearing among others. The existential of handiness in his
later philosophy gives way to underlying forces or realities which neither reflect an
underlying instrumentalism, nor put Dasein at the theoretical focus. But it can be asserted that,
and I will do so following Harman’s interpretation, the set of notions like as-structure,
20
Heidegger, Being and Time, gp. 70.
21
Harman, p. 26.
referentiality and handiness which pertain to the vocabulary of Being and Time, cannot be
reduced to their instrumentalistic connotations: they have a deeper ontological dimension
which surpasses their employment in an instrumentalistic framework and in virtue of this
dimension they are operative in, and indeed exteremely fundamental for his later philosophy
as well. Harman calls this dimension “tool-being”, by which he denotes the “subterranean
reality which never comes openly to view.”22 From this perspective, the instrumentalist
understanding of “equipment”, “equipmentality” and “handiness” becomes not the whole of,
but only the more superficial and contingent side of a double reality. Even if we do not
subscribe to such an interpretation of Heidegger, we can still observe that the interplay of
unconcealment and concealment is a persistent theme of Heidegger’s corpus, regardless of the
particular terminology in which they are expressed. Thus even though we may label the
terminology and perspective of Being and Time instrumentalist, as he himself also does to a
significant extent in his self-critique of his early philosophy, we have to recognize that the
theme of a fundamental structure, force, or reality unconcealing a world of entities and
comportments while itself remaining always concealed is a consistent one for Heidegger. The
notions of “earth” and “world”, “the strife”, “the fourfold” and especially truth, being and
essence operative in his later philosophy, which we will deal with subsequently, cannot be
conceived without this theme, and it is meaningless to assert that they are original inventions
of later Heidegger independent of Being and Time. It can moreover be said that his change of
perspective with respect to the mutual exclusiveness of readiness-to-hand and being present-
at-hand does not undermine the claim of a persistent theme of interplay, since we can see the
same interplay quite easily within the context of the ambivalent character of handiness and
equipmentality that was mentioned above as well.

Returning to the analysis of equipmentality, it can be said that the incapacity of the
conceptual palette and the perspective of the Being and Time at differentiating (or its
intentional effort to blur the distinction) between entities which we ordinarily call equipments
and those we do not, is seemingly overcome in Heidegger’s later philosophy. He now can say
that usefulness “is the basic trait from which this entity [equipment] regards us, that is, flashes
at us and thereby is present and thus is this entity”23 and thus open a space for being able talk
of “useless” entities. Moreover, he will tell that even the being of the equipment cannot be
confined and reduced to mere utility.

22
Harman, p. 24.
23
Heidegger, OoA, p. 10.
 In the most ordinary way, an equipment is something manufactured in order to be
useful. Equipment is distinct from things of nature in virtue of its being manufactured by
human beings. From the perspective of the productionist metaphysics, started by Plato and
Aristotle, manufacture consists in the realization of a pre-conceived form in matter. But it is
not only manufacture that is analyzed in this manner: all coming to be is conceived on the
basis of the coming together of a form and matter; manufacture is the paradigm according to
which all entities and their geneses are modeled. He says: “matter and form are
determinations of beings which find their true home in the essential nature of the equipment.
This name designates what is manufactured expressly for use and usage...the intermingling of
of form and matter is controlled beforehand by the purposes [of equipments].”24 Since
usefulness is taken to be the essential being of the equipment, and responsible in the first
place for its existence, and whole being is modeled on the being of equipment;
instrumentalism is how being is conceived within the whole epoch of metaphysics, including
to some extent even the philosophy of Being and Time itself.

All actual, wordly things, “thingly” entities, are understood as the composite of form
and matter, thus on the model of equipment: “matter and form are in no way original
determinations belonging to the thingness of the mere thing.”25 But, further, even the being of
equipment, its equipmentality, has a more distant source than enformation of matter; one
which cannot be understood on the basis of these pair of notions since the being of the
equipment cannot be reduced to the event of manufacture by which it appeared. Moreover, the
pair of form and matter and the difference between them have a deeper origin.26 In order to be
free of the baggage this tradition imposes on any analysis of equipmentality, or to provide a
glimps of another plain of thought untainted by productionist metaphysics, Heidegger resorts
to a different, non-philosophical, approach: understanding the equipmentality of the
equipment through art.

The Origin of the Work of Art divides the investigation of the being of the artwork into
three phases, beginning with the investigation of the being of the thing and of the being of the
equipment. The equipment is a peculiar kind of entity which is the midway between the thing
and the artwork. An equipment “rests in itself” like a thing, but unlike it, it is not self-
sufficient; like the artwork it is something created, but lacks the “self-sufficient presence”

24
OoA, p. 10.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid., p. 15. Zimmerman puts this “deeper origin” as “the event which made philosophical reflection possible
in the first place: the primal Greek encounter with being, in Zimmerman, p. 161.
common to the artwork and the thing, since it is “forced into being”: it is half-thing and half-
artwork but lacks the character of self-sufficiency common to both.27 Thus its investigation
would shed light on the being of the thing and of the artwork.

On a superficial level the only difference between the thing and the equipment would
seem to be having or not having utility. The underlying productionistic comportement of the
metaphysical approach towards being can comprehend the thing only as a sort of equipment
which is not fabricated and bereaved of usefulness, thus not comprehend at all; for nothing
else can be said of what remains. The artwork, on the other hand, is comprehended as a sort of
equipment as well: something fabricated by human beings, not for the satisfaction of a
particular purpose but with an extra element of artistic worth.28 Heidegger sees this approach
as an assault29 on the thingness of the thing, thus on the work-being of the artwork and even
on the equipmentality of the equipment. The thing, the equipment and the artwork have
common grounds which are far deeper than these.

As has been said, he addresses the need for a more fundamental understanding of the
being of the equipment then conceiving it as consisting in mere instrumental function. Unlike
the early Heidegger, he now claims that usefulness of the equipment itself must be grounded,
and done so in a way which accounts for its instrumental function but is much more
fundamental than it. This deeper dimension of usefulness is reliability (Verlasslichkeit).

His investigation of the equipmentality of the equipment has as its paradigm the
famous peasant shoes depicted in Van Gogh’s painting. Usefulness of these pair of shoes can
only be understood through their use, since only in use an equipment manifests its
equipmentality. How the equipmentality of the shoes becomes manifest in use? They become
equipmental to the extent they become invisible: the peasant woman must be never aware of
her shoes in the field for the shoes to be really what they are. We cannot get a glimpse of this
equipmentality by imagining, looking at, or investigating the shoes. Not even clues which can
point to its use, such as a piece of dirt, cannot reveal the being of these shoes.

We would expect the early Heidegger to indicate that what is missing for us to be able
to learn the being of the peasant shoes is the context within which they are used, which would
enable the shoes to manifest themselves in their referentiality, and not as mere objects thrown

27
OoA, p. 10.
28
OoA, p. 18.
29
OoA, p. 11.
against a subject. The experience of the peasant woman with her shoes can then be explicated
on the basis of their being ready-to-hand. But here two questions would arise for the later
Heidegger: first, whether the utility of the shoes is all that is to their equipmentality, and
second, whether the knowledge of this context would be confined to the participants of the
world of the peasant woman. If so, one can only know this context by being already in it. But
one already knows, when looking at Van Gogh’s painting, about the context−the referential
totality of which peasant shoes are a part, since one is familiar the world of a farmer. Yet this
is not on its own enough, for the later Heidegger, for one to learn what in truth the being of
these shoes are.

Indeed in the painting, the shoes are presented not amidst other entities like a scythe or
a sickle, or against a pastoral background; rather they float in “an undefined space.”30 Yet
what this painting conveys the very being of these shoes. Heidegger depicts what is being
conveyed in a non-philosophical jargon as such:

From out of the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the shoes the toil of the worker’s tread
stares forth. In the crudely solid heaviness of the shoes accumulates the tenacity of the slow
trudge through the far-streching and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On
the leather lies the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the
field-path as evening falls. The shoes vibrate with the silent call of the earth, its silent gift of the
ripening grain, its unexplained self-refusal in the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by
uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, wordless joy at having once more withstood
want, trembling before the impending worth, and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.31

Heidegger argues that all these are conveyed only through the painting; for the peasant
woman these are not made manifest by the shoes: she simply wears them. But, in contary to
what an instrumentalistic interpretation of the equipment and usage can account for, this mere
usage has a more fundamental dimension which is bound to remain ever-concealed. The
usefulness of the equipment is grounded in its reliability, which is the essential being of the
equipment32: thus using is never a mere utilization.

Reliability of the equipment is a ground which unconceals a world of entities and

practices while itself remaining concealed. We remember this ambivalence in the very being
of the equipment from the dual nature of the as-structure. Indeed, this aspect of ambivalence,
or duality in being, is what is inherited from the early thought of Heidegger into his later
philosophy. Yet, this ambiguity is not explained, at this stage, in terms of the transparent

30
OoA, p. 14.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
nature of transcendal structures and operations, thus in a way centered around the experience
of Dasein. Instead, we will see that this ambiguity is explained in terms of the gathering
together of different forces, elements, dimensions, or aspects pertaining to the way in which
being unfolds itself. By gathering what is meant is not the bringing together of two factors or
entities whose natures are alien to one another; as it is roughly the case with the picture
traditional hylemorphism draws. Rather, it may be said that what in being belong together
come to occur together in a polarized and tense unity which cannot be torn apart yet cannot be
reduced to a simplicity either.

Heidegger’s formula for the ambivalence in the being of the equipment, which is a
case of the omnipresent theme of the interplay of unconcealment and concealment just
mentioned, is expressed as such: “This equipment [shoes] belongs to the earth and finds
protection in the world of the peasant woman.”33 To simply put what he basically means by
the “earth” and the “world” before going into more detail in what follows; while the latter
expresses more or less what is being unconcealed historically and locally within a clearing,
the former expresses what is the self-concealing ground which sustains every world and
which can never be unconcealed in any of them. The earth refers to the refusal of being to be
completely uncovered, once and for all. The world becomes manifest in its unconcealedness
and the earth as self-concealing in the equipment: they are gathered together in their
opposition and complementarity for the peasant woman in virtue of its reliability, which
enables her to be “admitted to the silent call of the earth...[and to be] certain of her world.”34

The equipmentality of the equipment lies in this gathering the world and the earth,
thus everyting in their unity and difference, within itself. Usefulness in the sense of mere
utility is only a consequence of the reliability of the equipment,35 which is the necessary
ground and origin of the former. Equipment is resting-in-itself in virtue of its reliability, and
more specifically, in virtue of the earth to which it belongs: thanks to being something of the
earth, the equipment refuses to be completely unconcealed and be done for, and this self-
contained repose is what is also thingly in the equipment. On the other hand, its utility and
referentiality belongs to the world, in virtue of which the equipment is something familiar that
partakes in the flow of life, helping fulfill its demands.

33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
35
Ibid., p. 15.
 The being of the equipment, its equipmentality, is revealed to us only when we enter
the world of the peasant woman. This can not be achieved by abstract theorizing about or
distanced observation of the shoes; not even by an explication of their use and illumination of
their referentiality. For Heidegger, the being of an entity, in this case of an equipment, is
revealed by getting out of our world, through art, to have a glimpse of another world, the
world where the entity belongs, in its self-concealing unconcealedness. Through this glimpse,
our world becomes refurbished. This revelation and refurbishment corresponds to what
Heidegger calls “the happening of truth” in the sense of a breach to another world−this is how
truth number three, a clearing, is founded or transformed. One of the few ways in which truth
happens is through art.

4. Artwork

The artwork has a thingly character and also it has in common with the equipment that
it is a created entity, as we have indicated before. We have so far talked about the being of the
equipment, which we hoped that would shed light on the createdness of the artwork as well.
Heidegger begins The Origin of the Work of Art with raising a question as to the being of the
thing, its thingliness, and stating in which accustomed ways this question cannot be
approached. But he comes to the conclusion that the being of the thing cannot be discovered
without first discovering the being of the equipment; which was the paradigm upon which the
metaphysical tradition treated the thing. What the being of the equipment consists in turned up
to be revealed in the artwork. What remains is to discover the work-being of the artwork, and
in what its thingliness and createdness consists in; then we may hope to arrive at the
thingliness of the thing in the most roundabout way, ultimately through art.But it is already
made clear by Heidegger that the traditional metaphysical approaches will not work for this
purpose, since they model everything on the basis of the equipment, which is in turn reduced
to the event of its manufacture. Rather, the artwork should be understood in its own being;
then its thingliness and createdness can be discovered.

Heidegger’s view of art and his reconstruction of the notion of truth are essentially
connected, as has been briefly stated above. The work of art has essentially to do with truth:
for a work of art to maintain the power of being artistic means to be that through which truth
of being or beings is disclosed; truth sets itself to work in the sense that being of the being
comes forth and rises up in its constancy.
 When, and on what conditions, is an artwork what it is in its essence? This question is
closely connected with the answer to the question of the work-being of the artwork. Works
displayed in museums or art galleries are for the most part relics of their previous being; they
are no longer what they were. The reason for this is not solely that they no longer are situated
in places where they once belonged. Their dislocation is a severence of them from their
worlds; but the “world” they truly belonged is already lost. An artwork cannot be one without
a world, since it does not keep its essence in itself independently as a substance in the
traditional sense does. But this does not mean necessarily that the self-sufficiency of the
artwork depends on its standing in relations within an extant world; a world which is already
enveloping and keeping the artwork in itself. Rather, claims Heidegger, the self-sufficiency of
the artwork consists in that it belongs within the world it itself opens up; “for the work-being
of the work presences in and only in such opening up.”36

In order to reveal the work-being of the artwork, he now takes an example of non-
representationalist art: a Greek temple. We will see through this example truth number
three−truth of being, in the sense endowed by later Heidegger, properly at work.

A Greek temple, seems to owe its appearance to techne, yet its being cannot be
discovered in terms of the form-matter couple of productionist metaphysics. Prior to the
epoch Heidegger calls metaphysics, the Greeks were aware that through techne they occasion
the presence of powers much bigger than themselves; powers which far surpass their efficacy
in building the temple, and which become present in their self-concealment and refusal to be
unconcealed. Since their recognition of that what renders a building a temple, and its precinct
holy is this presence of gods; they were aware that their act of giving the shape of a temple to
pieces of stone is not the real cause of the being of the temple, but only a means through
which real powers show their efficacy.

Techne and artistic creation, in this early Greek sense, do not exclude each other:
techne has an artistic aspect to it, and art involves a dimension of techne in a crucial way.
Then the nature of their relation has to be illuminated. Authentic techne, in the non-
metaphysical sense, is an “art of ontological disclosure” as Zimmerman expresses, and in that,
is “a dimension of truth”.37 Heidegger puts essence of techne as such: “what is decisive about

36
Ibid., p. 20.
37
Zimmerman, p. 222-232. He summarizes the authentic sense of producing as such: “Authentic producing,
then, understood in terms of the Greek insight, involves disclosing something appropriately, letting it come
forth into its own, bringing it into the arena of accessibility, letting it lie forth as something established stably
techne does not lie at all in making and manipulating or in the using of means, but rather in
the aforementioned revealing [Entbergen]. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing
[Verfertigen], that techne is a bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen].”38

Notwithstanding, that the essence of art consists in truth is not in virtue of the aspect
of techne involved in it; on the contrary, what enables authentic techne to be a dimension of
truth is that it is a restricted, confined mode of artistic creation. In this sense, techne owes its
possibility to a previous unconcealment: it can disclose entities only within a world opened up
by art.

Then, what makes a Greek temple what it is, is not in the first place that is a product of
techne; for in that case it would be of the same sort with an equipment, not an artwork. We
have to discover, thus, the essence of artistic creation, which is primary, and the being of the
artwork; then what art has essentially in common with techne, and artwork with equipment,
will follow.

What a Greek temple realizes is gathering around itself “the unity of those paths and
relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and
decline acquire for the human being the shape of its destiny.”39 It opens up a world, which is
“the all-governing expanse of these open relations”, for the people to inhabit and find
themselves and their vocation in it.40 The temple is not added on to an already existing
environment with familiar entities, events and practices: the enviroment itself, with all the
people, animals, plants, rocks, the air, the night and the day for the first time come to appear
as they are through the temple’s becoming present, which “gives to things their look, and to
men their outlook on themselves.”41 The temple remains a temple, thus the artwork an
artwork, as log as this world, this “look” and “outlook”, is present.

In commonplace terminology, what the temple does can be described as enabling the
Greek people to acquire an identity through its symbolic presence; one can then say that the
appearance of entities for the first time through the presence of the temple indicates that an

for itself. To ‘pro-duce’ something means to lead it forth (pro-ducere), to release it so that it can manifest itself
and linger in presence in its own way... Authentic producing, techne, then, is not a matter of an ‘agent’ using
‘force’ to push material together into a specific form. Rather, it is a disclosure of entities for their own sakes.”,
p. 230.
38
VA I: 13/13, cited in Zimmerman, p. 232.
39
OoA, p. 21.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
identity operates holistically, that it establishes simultaneously a new self-represenation, a
bond between people by creating the sense of belonging together to something bigger than
themselves, and a connection to their common world through shared practices, references and
symbolisms. Yet Heidegger has something more essential, primordial and totalizing in mind.
He presents the opening up of a world through the appearance of the Greek temple as
something akin to the operation of phúsis, which Heidegger describes as “coming forth and
rising up in itself and in all things...[which at the same time] lights up that on which man
bases his dwelling.”42 This reference to phúsis is in place to make it explicitly clear that when
we are talking about truth, unconcealment and clearing we are no longer referring to Dasein’s
horizon of possibilities but to the unfolding of being into historical realities to which Dasein
participates like other entities, though of course not in the same manner; since he also
indicates that Dasein possesses a world while stones or plants do not: to be in a world is to
dwell in the “openness of beings,” within which “all things gain their lingering and hastening,
their distance and proximity, their breadth and their limits.”43

The opening up of the world of the Greek people through the appearance of the
temple, and the operation of phúsis in bringing things to being are both grounded in the earth,
which presences (is “lighted up”) by the same event of unconcealment as the ever self-
concealing origin and to which everything which comes forth returns back. The earth
presences as the all-giving source and ground of the eternal self-regenerating power of nature,
and the protecting and sheltering ground of the world.

For they are grounded in the earth, which is ever self-concealing even when it is
presencing, entities can never be completely uncovered in their being: they resist disclosure.
Notwithstanding that the being of entities is their self-manifesting, since “being presences as
appearing”44, they are still autonomous: they never belong to Dasein in the fullness of their
being. As Zimmerman puts it; “entities cannot be reduced to the event of their appearing
within a historical [thus, finite] ‘world,’ for entities belong to the ‘earth’ which can never be
made fully present in any world...If we try to penetrate into the innerness of an entity...we
destroy the entity in question.”45

42
Ibid., p. 21.
43
Ibid., p. 23.
44
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 86.
45
Zimmerman, p. 226.
 The world itself is also always concealed as a world: what is unconcealed is the
totality of entities and open-relations that are in the world. The conditions of the very
appearance of entities is cannot be experienced as entities are. And there is always more than
one way of disclosing being and beings: every disclosure closes up, obstructs other possible
ways of disclosure. Yet the concealedness of the world and the self-concealment of the earth
are different. As Zimmerman argues, Heidegger for some time treated concealedness of the
world and that of the earth to be the same; but later he came to the conclusion that the earth
remains forever beyond the level of the interplay of unconcealment and concealment involved
in the case of the world.46 This self-concealment, or refusal, seem to exceed the scope of the
invisibility of tools, including the cognitive ones, and the transparency of underlying
transcendental structures: with the self-concealment of the earth, we seem to go out of the
precinct of Dasein altogether and enter into a realm akin to Kant’s thing-in-itself, with the
crucial difference that this is not a noumenal realm which arises from a cognitive necessity;
but from a real and manifest resistance on the part of being. But from a different perspective,
the focus may be shifted from signification, experience and intelligibility towards practices
and it can be asserted, as Dreyfus does, that the world is the “style” of a people’s practices,
values, characteristics which can only be displayed but not rationalized, in a way similar to
Kuhnian “paradigm”, and the earth is the resistence of all those to a totalizing explication.47 It
may be said that both would be covered by Heidegger’s pair of world and earth, because their
content, scope and level of generality allows them to be applied from the most ordinary shoe
to the biggest historical decisions.

Returning to the artwork; to be an artwork means to “set up a world”48, and in setting

up, the artwork also “sets forth the earth.”49 What this “setting up” and “setting forth” consists
in is explained by Heidegger as, from the side of the world, opening up a world and “keeping
in abidingly in force,”50 thus in its free openness; and, from the side of the earth, as moving
the earth in to the open of a world and holding it there, thus letting “the earth be an earth.”51
To let the earth be an earth means to bring it into the open as essentially self-concealing: “The
earth is openly illuminated as itself only where it is apprehended and preserved as the

46
Zimmerman, p. 228.
47
Dreyfus, p. 411.
48
OoA, p. 22.
49
Ibid., p. 24.
50
Ibid., p. 22.
51
Ibid., p. 24.
essentially undisclosable, as that which withdraws from every disclosure.”52 In this the being
of the artwork with its connection and difference with the equipment becomes explicit: in the
equipment the work material disappears into usefulness; since it is present in ordinary
production only as undesired resistance preventing the bringing about the intended shape and
utility. Thus, it is not used in the authentic sense but used up.53 In the creation of the artwork,
on the other hand, the material “comes forth for the very first time...into the open of the world
of the work”54: the artwork in setting up a world sets itself back to into the earth, by setting it
forth as which cannot be reduced to matter and be put into the service of a form.

Then, what is the relationship between what is traditionally and ordinarily regarded as
form and matter, thus that between their origin; the world and the earth, in the artwork? The
world and the earth belong together in their essential difference. They are in opposition in
their unity, yet their unity is not that of opposites indifferent to each other. Heidegger calls
this opposition of unseparable but different factors which belong together in a tense unity
strife, borrowing a term from pre-Socratic philosophy and developing it in a way quite
reminiscent of Hegel’s notions of contadiction and its solution. For Heidegger essential strife,
as opposed to conflict or incompatability, is an opposition which perpetuates itself; which is at
rest in its inner movement so that “the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of
their essences...[and carry] the other beyond itself”55 In this way, the more fierce is their
opposition, the more they belong to one another: “The earth cannot do without the openness
of the world if it is to appear in the liberating surge of its self-closedness. World, on the other
hand, cannot float away from the earth if, as the prevailing breadth and path of all essential
destiny, it is to ground itself on something decisive.”56 The work-being of the artwork consists
in this strife between the world and the earth, which finds its most manifest, simple and thus
powerful expression in the artwork. This expression is achieved in what Heidegger calls “the
figure” (Gestalt).

Playing on a family of German words Riss, Grundriss, Auf-riss, Umriss (translated

respectively as ‘rift’, ‘fundamental design’, ‘outline sketch’ and ‘shared outline’) he arrives at
the formulation of figure as the “strife which is brought into the rift-design, and so set back
into the earth and fixed in place” and indicates that his usage of the term figure (Gestalt) is to

52
OoA, p. 25.
53
Ibid., p. 24.
54
Ibid., p. 24.
55
Ibid., p. 26-7.
56
Ibid., p. 27.
be thought in connection to “that particular placing [stellen] and placement [Ge-stell]
[through which] the work comes to presence when it sets itself up and sets itself forth.”57 Thus
in the creation of the artwork the material is not used up, but is freed and let be what it
essentially is; as the ever self-concealing, unconquerable earth. The figure is not, for this
reason, at rest without any movement like the form of the equipment: it manifests an inner
tension. Thus the figure of the artwork is never a form imposed on a matter but contains both
and their original tense unity: it manifests the inseparability of the world and the earth by
bringing the strife into the rift-design. The artwork is different from the equipment in that the
latter, in its using up the earth as mere material and having a form which is indifferent to this
matter and thus bereaved of its inner movement, is released beyond itself to disappear into
usefulness: the transperancy involved in the handiness of the equipment is in virtue of this
doing away with the strife. Thus, the thingliness of the equipment, as its equipmentality, is
also covered up in its disapperanace into usefulness, while in the earthy character of the
artwork its thingliness, the being of the thing, is set forth.

In the artwork its createdness is “expressly created into what is created”, as opposed to
the equipment, since createdness essentially refers to the happening of truth: creation of the
artwork is the “fixing in place of truth in the figure” thus “effecting the happening of truth.”58
An equipment belongs to the openness of the world; at best it can make manifest this
openness of beings instead of covering up. But the createdness of the artwork refers to the
power of bringing about an openness of beings, thus “founding” a world: the equipment has
nothing to do with this most fundamental sense of truth.

In what consists the happening of truth through the artwork, then, to conclude in
simply and explicitly all that has been said? Truth happens as unconcealment: as the opening
up of a new openness of beings; a new “world”. Within this openness, beings are no longer
usual and ordinary, but unusual and extraordinary: they acquire a new “look” so for the first
time begin to be by being freed up from their concealment which is the reign of familiarity,
ordinariness. Art does not cover up, which is the feature of equipmentality and usefulness; in
some sense it dispels the fog of handiness, familiarity and ordinariness that has set over
beings and carries us away from the realm of the usual to the openness of beings. Truth

57
Ibid., p. 38.
58
Ibid., p. 39.
happens as transformation of “all familiar relations to world and to earth, and henceforth to
restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking.”59

Bibliography

1. Heidegger, M. Off the Beaten Track. Edited and translated by J. Young and K. Haynes.
Cambridge University Press.

2. Heidegger, M. (2010) Being and Time. Translated by J. Stambaugh. Albany: State

University of New York Press.

3. Dreyfus, H. L. (2005) “Heidegger’s Ontology of Art” in A Companion to Heidegger.

Edited by H. L. Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall. Blackwell Publishing.

4. Harman, G. (2002) Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago and La
Salle, Illinois: Open Court.

5. Wrathall, M. A. (2005) “Unconcealment” in A Companion to Heidegger. Edited by H. L.

Dreyfus and M. A. Wrathall. Blackwell Publishing.

6. Guignon, C. B. (1983) Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis, Indiana:

Hackett Publishing Company.

7. Zimmerman, M. E. (1990) Heidegger's Confrontation With Modernity : Technology,

Politics, and Art. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

8. Heidegger, M. (1992) History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by T.

Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

9. Heidegger, M. (2000) Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by G. Fried and R. Polt.

New Haven: Yale University Press.

59
Ibid., p. 40.