In 1936, the concept of art as a cultural founding force, which facilitates Dasein’s authentic communal relations in the form of a people’s (new) historical “beginning,” is considered by Heidegger in terms of the historical manifestation of Being, in the Ereignis, the "clearing and lighting" in the very midst of beings, "which grants and guarantees to us humans the passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves Being of all other entities as a whole, giving all things their look, delimitation, and meaning. Truth happens in the "work-Being" of the work of art, as the counter-striving forces of world and Earth clash, which is the site of aletheia, the vortex of the battle (polemos) for the unconcealement of beings. In Being and Time, "world" represents the overarching system of meaning(s) that organizes Dasein's activities and identity, the structure within which its life makes sense. However, in "The Origin of the Work of Art," the world does not simply represent the world as it is, because art does not simply reveal a world of which it is a part as just another thing; more importantly, art stands within the unique limits that it first establishes and sets forth. When "world worlds" in and through the work-being of the art work, a space is opened and the work erects a world, i.e., it establishes boundaries as it transfigures the world, casting the truth of an authentic historical existence toward the preservers, revealing the potential for the enactment of their destiny. This "worlding of world" occurs as an event, within the work-Being, within the Ereignis. McNeill expresses Heidegger's concept of the "world worlding," or world as an event, in the following terms: "World is not to be understood then, as an already existing openness within which the art work, as one particular being would then become accessible. World is rather an event, a happening, and occurrence, whose divine processes unfold in the work of art."

In addition to setting up a “world,” the art work also brings forth the Earth, and these counter-striving forces are the two essential features in the work-being of the work of art. Undoubtedly, the notion of Earth is of supreme importance in Heidegger's work during the turn, derived from, and equated with, Hölderlin's notion of divine "Nature" (Earth). Being and Time intimates the divine possibilities of Nature as the force that "assails us" and "stirs and strives," but in "The Origin of the Work of Art," Heidegger develops the concept of Nature more fully, and from his readings of Hölderlin, brings forth the Earth, arguing that "world" cannot be thought outside of its connection with Earth, world cannot exist or arise without it. Dasein cannot dwell authentically without acknowledging its debt to Earth, for Dasein's Being belongs to the Earth, which represents the divine-spiritual aspects of the holy, a force which Dasein must return to in order to transform its life. Earth is for Heidegger the radicalization of phusis as the coming-to-presence-of-beings in his thinking the Ereignis and the historical revelation and appropriation of Being. The Earth represents the primal ground upon which Dasein works to establish its dwelling, as the native soil upon which it builds its home. Earth is also the supreme spiritual presence, a sublime, inexplicable holy force that is beyond even the gods.

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