lly this world and partially a world of truth hidden primarily because we do not see until someone points the way. Art is a human endeavor, for while plant and animal may be admitted to the Open, it is the human being who seeks entry:
Man, on the contrary, as the one who purposely asserts himself, is ventured into unshieldedness (Heidegger 133).
The man referred to is the self-willing man who can express and assert himself through creation. The work of art is by definition not merely created but creation itself:
The origin of the work of art--that is, the origin of both the creators and the preservers, which is to say of a people's historical existence, is art. This is so because art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical (Heidegger 78).
To state as Heidegger does that "Art is the setting-into-work of truth" (Heidegger 77) requires a definition of truth, and Heidegger provides such a definition. He notes first that truth as he means it is not that which we generally recognize under the heading of truth, noting that truth as he uses the term does not coincide with what is usually attached to cognition and science as a quality to be distinguished from the beautiful and the good, names for the values of nontheoretical activities:
Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is as something that is. Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance--as this being of truth in the work and as work--is beauty (Heidegger 81).
The way in which a society views the world involves what Heidegger calls "a particular confluence of beauty with truth" (Heidegger 81).
To state that the work of art takes us out of the ordinary does not mean that the subject of art cannot be what we would otherwise consider ordinary. Rather, it means that the work of art offers a...