Thing and world
There is no fourfold without the things that gather it into place. The elements of the fourfold each articulate a limit of the thing that opens it on to relations. The limits of the fourfold serve to weave the thing into place; they open the register of relations whereby the thing is contextualized within the world. If existence is ecstatic when outside itself, then things, too, exist ecstatically, as each member of the fourfold describes a way for the thing to be outside itself. In so doing, each one exposes the thing through an event of withdrawal that pours the thing out on to the space outside it. Each member forms a bridge by which the thing relates to the world.
This relational limit is what the fourfold share and what gathers them together. Heidegger refers to it as a “ mirror-play” (Spiegel-Spiel; PLT 178 = GA 79: 19), which is the essence of each of the four and also what allows them to come together as the fourfold: “The appropriative mirroring sets each of the four free into its own, but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another [Zueinander]” (PLT 177 = GA 79: 18). As mirroring, each of the four casts itself out to the others (Zueinander) and is likewise cast back from them: “Each of the four mirrors again in its own way the essence of the remaining others” (PLT 177 = GA 79: 18, trans. mod.). The mirror-play of the four names the way in which the finite always transpires with the beyond (just as an outside is required for mirroring and for the mirror to be what it is). Mirroring thinks the expropriation at the heart of appropriation and belonging (“within their mutual appropriation, each is expropriated into what is its own”; PLT 177 = GA 79: 18, trans. mod.). It articulates the gathering of the four in the thing and opens the spacing of the world.
This world is a world of things that, according to the lecture “Language”, are gestures of world: “The things gesture [gebärden] world. World grants [gönnt] the things” (PLT 199 = GA 12: 21, trans. mod.). We might understand gesture here in terms of what Heidegger says of it in the 1953–4 “A Dialogue on Language”, where a gesture is “borne along by an appeal from far away calling still farther out, because carried forth out of silence” (OWL 16 = GA 12: 99, trans. mod.). Things motion beyond themselves in an unfurling of world. But world grants things a reception of their excesses. All this is to say that there is no “world” in the abstract, but always only a populated and articulated one of particular situations at particular times, and likewise no encapsulated things, but always these outpouring gestures of relationality, so many bridges thrown between world and thing. In this thinking of thing and
215