seen as an attempt to articulate, that is to “say,” the unitary place in which things come to presence and in which they come to be. The place at issue here (which appears in various guises as the “Da” of Dasein, as the clearing, die Lichtung, that is the happening of the truth of being, as the gathering of the fourfold in the Ereignis) is itself constituted only through the interrelations between the originary and mutually dependent (“equiprimordial”) elements that themselves appear within it. In Being and Time those elements are delineated through the analysis of being-in-the-world and unified in the structure of care and temporality; in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” they are seen in terms of the originary strife between earth and world; in late essays such as “The Thing,” they are articulated though the mirroring “dance” of earth and sky, gods and mortals that is the gathering of world.
Heidegger’s thinking thus begins with what is, in a certain sense, the simplest and most everyday of phenomena—the everyday fact of the constant and ongoing encounter that is the world, an encounter with which we are inextricably bound up, an encounter in which things, persons, and our own selves come to light. This encounter is not something that first occurs in some inner space within our skulls, nor in some purely mental realm apart from the world as such (as if we could make sense of the inner in separation from the outer, as if we already knew what the “mental” itself is); it is not something that occurs in a purely external realm of cause and materiality (as if we knew what the “external” and the “material” could mean here). The happening of world occurs first in the calling of language, in the gathering of the thing, in the opening up of the time-space that is also the “taking-place” of place. As it begins with something simple, so Heidegger’s thinking is an attempt to address the question, and the questioning, of being in a way that remains true to being as such, but which is also true to the belonging together of being and beings, of presence and what is present, of being and human being. All of Heidegger’s thought can be construed as an attempt to articulate this place of being. And in doing so, what Heidegger attempts is something that is difficult and even obscure largely because it is so fundamental, so simple, and so close: “The one thing thinking would like to attain and for the first time tries to articulate in Being and Time is something simple. As such, being remains mysterious, the simple nearness of an unobtrusive prevailing.”2 Elsewhere he writes:
To think Being does not require a solemn approach and the pretension of arcane erudition, nor the display of rare and exceptional states as in mystical raptures, reveries, and swoonings. All that is needed is simple wakefulness in the proximity of any