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Consideration of Nomoi as Technological Essence

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Every work has its thingly character. What would they be without it? But perhaps we find this very 
crude and external approach to the work offensive. It may be the conception of the artwork with 
which the freight handler or the museum charlady operates, but we are required to take the works 
as they are encountered by those who experience and enjoy them. Yet even this much-vaunted 
"aesthetic experience" cannot evade the thingliness of the artwork. The stony is in the work of 
architecture, the wooden in the woodcarving, the colored in the painting, the vocal in the linguistic 
work, the sounding in the work of music. The thingly is so salient in the artwork that we ought 
rather to say the opposite: the architectural work is in the stone, the woodcarving in the wood, 
the painting in the color, the linguistic work in the sound, the work of music in the note. "Obviously," 
it will be replied. What, however, is this obvious thingliness in the artwork?

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Here, the British sense “fine art”, which passed on to China, where the compound notion of art 
was unknown, is not in play. The world of fine art that passed on to become the political art world 
as “art world”, as money market. Rather art is what is set alongside nature in order that nature can 
first be thought as other than art. Ergo, the Western world as such is in play. Western nature. But 
Western has long since lost its definiteness, since “the sea lanes” extend everywhere, the 
commercial system is as much in the “periphery” as at the “core”, and the military oversight is limitless. 
This means most of all the technologizing of all movement on the earth, since most of all money, 
as art, is the technological invention, the universal flattening and objectivistion of transactional 
being. Technology is not money, but money most freely lets its essence come into sight as 
cybernetic leveling of being. Its needs and wants are guarded by technology in the form 
of military orientation by works of military art that are technological, i.e., cybernetic and guiding. 
As cosmopolitanism. This means: art as “art world” is excluded from the basic sense art as 
what is Western in what is the globalized west as what is art as all Western making, rather 
than blind coming forth of nature or phusis. Nomoi, money and law, cease to hold their own 
over and against art as making, for making is a path flowing forth that is learned, just as 
nature is what comes forth of its own without learning, and the nomoi is neither learned nor
not learned. In this swimming in patternless currents, we don’t yet, everything depends on it, come to 
conflate all things in a universal impossibility such as Schmitt's conception of the political 
which leaves no hoop from which to look out and to take bearing. 

The flowing forth calls us to the question of the object of the action of the “thingly”. The 
“artwork” now names an attempt to think without phusis. Phusis is primordial for the face of 
the earth, which then gives the idea. Phusis already yields, when seen form Aristotle, looking 
back into the archaic world, the look and the energia as its ground. “Artwork” here then is no 
longer ground of a coming forth, but it attempts thinking as genuine future. “What, however, 
is this obvious thingliness in the artwork?” 

Art here: The Question: Why are we not yet thinking? These are the same. What obstructs 
genuine future is attempted in the thinking, as the possibility of sensing the obstruction. How 
so far does the region of Questiong come to be sensed here? Already, in approaching this 
question we realize that Aristotle is set aside. Aristotle says: there is quality, and there is substance. 
Not so here. Color is no mere quality, The red tomato, something as something, the red is a tomato. 
Something as something. The tomato is red. The red is crushed, it is juice. The red is juice. 
The something as something is as much the thingness as it is the work as the dynamism of 
the ergon. Aristotle is both set aside and not set aside, for the metaphysical core can not 
yet be overcome. The End of Metaphysics, that that gives nothing to imagination and nothing 
to intellect, metaphysics proper, ousia, the true and the false, being and not being, 
appearance and truth, quality and substance as confusion (this list is not exhaustive, 
but exemplary of what has been, without determination according to the current text). 
Metaphysics, what can not set out but must be sensed in the “artwork” as the coming 
forth of the History of Being.