Earth and world

In his essay on the “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger attacks the traditional metaphysics of form and matter. There is no formless matter, he insists, and human beings must take account of the particular forms in which matter comes to us in order to make use of it.

The essential distinction is instead between “earth” and “wworld,” the first referring to material reality with all its preexisting qualities and the latter to the humanly constructed. Between earth and world lies human labor, work, which brings earth into world – leather with its inherent qualities into shoes that are useful to human beings.

Work is strife, Heidegger says, but he says that this strife is not one that leads to disorder and destruction. Rather, through the strife of human work, world is shaped and even earth comes more and more to itself. He says, “In strife, each opponent carries the other beyond itself. Thus the strife becomes ever more intense as striving, and more properly what it is. The more strife, for its part, outdoes itself, the more inflexibly do the opponents let themselves go into the intimacy of simple belonging to one another. The earth cannot dispense with the open region of the world if it itself is to appear as earth in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion. The world in turn cannot soar out of the earth’s sight [can’t make shoes from soap bubbles] if, as the governing breadth and path of all essential destiny, it is to ground itself on something decisive.”