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THE FOURFOLD
Andrew J. Mitchell
Heidegger’s thinking of the fourfold (das Geviert) is a thinking of the relationality of things. It names the “gathering” of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals that Heidegger views as constitutive of the thing. The thing so constituted, however, is one that is resolutely finite and opened to the world beyond it. As such, the thing can no longer be considered an “object” in the sense of a self-contained, encapsulated, discrete entity that would stand ever only over and against a subject. Instead, the thing exists relationally, in engagement with the world, and the fourfold is what makes this relational existence possible.
The term “fourfold” first emerges in the 1949 lecture cycle Insight into That Which Is held at the private Club zu Bremen while Heidegger was under a teaching ban from the French authorities in the wake of the Second World War. This lecture cycle—comprised of the lectures “The Thing,” “Positionality,” “The Danger,” and “The Turn”—is Heidegger’s first lecture appearance after the war and it marks the debut of a new configuration of his thinking, one centered on “things.” It is thus a major step along his path of thought. Indeed, in a 1964 letter, Heidegger states in no uncertain terms that, “Apart from the thing lecture, I have never once presented my own thinking purely on its own terms in publications, however far it has come in the meantime, but rather have presented it always only in such a manner whereby, as a first attempt, I have sought to make my thinking understandable in terms of the tradition.”1 The fourfold is Heidegger’s thinking “on its own terms.”
Given this remark of Heidegger’s, it should come as no surprise that the presentation of the fourfold found in “The Thing” is not stated in the staid language of traditional philosophy, but veers toward the poetic (the same holds for the subsequent presentation of the fourfold in the 1951 lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking”). We read:
The earth is the building bearer, what nourishingly fructifies, tending waters and stones, plants and animals. [. . .]
The sky is the path of the sun, the course of the moon, the gleam of the stars, the seasons of the year, the light and twilight of day, the dark and bright of the night, the favor and inclemency of the weather, drifting clouds, and blue depths of the ether. [. . .]
The divinities are the hinting messengers of godhood. From the concealed reign of
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