Beings—that which is—are only an aspect and effect of the event. The sense in which this is so brings us once again to the figure of the fourfold. In the complete schema sketched by Heidegger in Contributions (GA 65, 310/CPFE, 218/CPOE, 246),28 the event (E) is simply the point of intersection between two axes of tensional and oppositional interaction, namely,
Figure 4.1. Proto-Fourfold in Contributions to Philosophy (GA 65, 310)
In this diagram, the parenthesized word Da on the right suggests that the larger parentheses mark the limits of the finite and situated site or place of the event, of the “there.” Human being and divinity are depicted as dimensions of the “there” that as such are external to it. Temporal presence is the tensional “between” of gods and humans, which are now even more clearly assimilated to the dimensions of future and history, forthcoming and already-having-been. In addition to this, temporal presence has two “internal” dimensions: earth and world, i.e., material incorporation and referential articulation. As Jeff Malpas has suggested, these dimensions could also be regarded as the spatial background vectors of presence.29 We will see in Chapter 5 that their spatial character becomes all the more evident in the 1949 Bremen lecture “The Thing,” in which “world” is replaced by “sky”: sky and earth, visibility and materiality, are the constant “above” and “beneath” of all things, that beneath which and upon which things are present. Spatial dimensionality is no longer subordinate to temporal dimensionality or derived from it; rather, spatiality and temporality are equiprimordial.
The event of being3 is the unifying/differentiating interaction of these four background dimensions of meaningfulness, which are not in themselves something that subsists and precedes the event, but rather—like the ecstases of timeliness (cf. Chapter 2)—names for the different “vectors” of a unitary movement of meaning-generation. Beings are the foreground, the “outcome” of the intersecting interplay of these dimensions; a “thing” is an aspect of the event itself, considered without the background dimensions (being2) and with an exclusive regard for the foreground of meaningful presence