In any case, one curious fact seems worth noting. The "sky" here suggests nothing supra-sensible but is conceived in what another language would call a purely "physical" way. Earth and sky, taken together, then, would suggest the entire "world" of "physical" nature. If we take them thus and think them together with "gods" (clearly designating the entire domain of the divine) and "mortals," we are reminded of the trilogy that characterized classical metaphysics: God, man, "world." This is a hierarchy of beings, of course, and we are dealing here clearly with Being. But is it possible that the sense of the Quadrate consists in suggesting that polyvalent plenitude of (the "simple") "Ἕν, by reason of which it can come-to-presence in Πάντα, sc. as God, as man and as "world"?
However this may be, Being as the polyvalent One is what Heidegger understands by the World. We see how fully the perspective of SZ, where There-being was the ultimate whereunto of the World, has shifted. In identifying now the World with the One, he insists once more on the fact that the World is not a being which, as far as he is concerned, has to be "grounded" in a cause, but simply comes-to-presence in the same way as Being itself. ". . . World comes-to-presence [simply] insofar as it worlds. . . ."15
2. The Negativity of Being
There is a significant passage where the negativity of Being is underlined, and this brings us to the relation of Being to its There. We are told again that Being is equivalent to Non-being, when considered from the viewpoint of beings. This is due to its "not"-character, by reason of which it recedes in the beings it reveals, as, for example, near-ness conceals itself in what is near.16 Another manner in which to express this same "not"-character (negativity) is to speak of the mystery of Being, a term that suggests not only the self-concealment of Being but the concealing of this concealment. Therefore Non-being, mystery (and, as we know from WW, errance) are all different formulae for the inherent negativity of Being.
15 ". . . Welt west indem sie weitet " (VA, p. 178).
16 VA, p. 176.