This happening or gathering is, moreover, not something that occurs in some general and anonymous fashion. What is gathered is always gathered in its concreteness and particularity—it is “I” who is gathered, together with this thing and that—and so is itself constituted as a gathering that has its own particularity, its own character, its own unity and bounds. It seems natural, and inevitable, to describe such a gathering as a gathering that occurs in and through place since place names just such gathering in particularity. The idea and image of place, particularly as understood through the idea of topology, is indeed just the idea and image of a concrete gathering of otherwise multiple elements in a single unity— as places are themselves gathered into a single locality (and in Heidegger’s later thinking, notably, as we shall see in chapter 5 below, in the late essay “Art and Space,” this idea of the gathering of place in place, the happening of the “settled locality” or “Ortschaft” becomes an important theme). As it functions to embody and articulate the idea and image of such a gathered unity, so place embodies and articulates an idea that Heidegger takes to be central to the thinking of being as such—the idea of unity. It is this idea, understood in one way in terms of the Aristotelian claim concerning the equivocity of being (“being is said in many ways”), to which Heidegger famously refers as providing the initial inspiration for his thinking, but the emphasis on unity, its necessary relation to difference, and the way this is intimately connected with the question of being occurs throughout his thinking, often specifically in connection with Greek thought but in a way that also makes clear its wider relevance. Thus, in 1969, he says that “To be able to see the parts (as such) there must be a relation to the unity . . . since Heraclitus, this unity is called ἕν, and . . . since this inception, the One is the other name of being,”38 and before this, in the 1940s, he comments that:
Greek thinking equates beings, τὸ ὄν, early on with τὸ ἕν, the one, and, indeed already in pre-Platonic thinking being is distinguished by “unity.” Until today, “philosophy” has neglected to reflect at all upon what the ancient thinkers mean with this ἕν. Above all, it does not ask why, at the inception of Western thinking, “unity” is so decisively attributed to beings as their essential feature.39
One way of understanding Heidegger’s thinking in its entirety—a way of understanding that also picks up on the supposed importance of the Aristotelian equivocity of being—is in terms of the attempt to articulate the nature of the unity that is at issue here, since that task is at one with the question of being. The claim I would make, however, is that this attempt is one that is already determined, in Heidegger’s thinking (and I would
38, “Seminar in Le Thor 1968,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 19 (GA 15:302).
39. Basic Concepts, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, p. 60 (GA 51:71–72).