The cosmophany of geographical realities
“The dispute” (Streit) which Heidegger sees between Earth and World in The Origin of the work of art is here interpreted as the “as” (als) which makes earthly substance come out of its identity as that-which-lies-beneath (hupokeimenon, subjectum) by deploying its Being toward an unsubstantial predicate, which is a certain world – the World, for us whose world it is. This assumption of the subject (the Earth) as a certain predicate – a world, which by the same token is opened up – produces geographical realities. The work of art plays here the role of a scout. Science, on the other hand, will have no rest until it grasps the identity of the subject (that of the logician, which is none other than the physicist’s object). We can thus find a triple homology in the Streit: it is at the same time a dispute between Earth and World, between science and art, and between subject and predicate, a dispute which indefinitely begets the moving reality of a certain milieu (Umwelt).