Introduction
The Fourfold: On the
Relationality of Things
The fourfold (das Geviert) is a thinking of things. The fourfold names the “gathering” of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities that comes to constitute the thing for Heidegger. In the late 1940s, operating under a teaching ban imposed by the French authorities in the wake of World War II, Heidegger ventures “the boldest statement of his thinking” in announcing the fourfold.1 First named in the 1949 lecture cycle Insight Into That Which Is, held at the private Club zu Bremen, developed and refined over the next decade, and remaining with Heidegger until the end of his life, the fourfold is nothing less than the inauguration of Heidegger’s later thinking. The fourfold brings together the poetic sensibility of Heidegger’s Hölderlin interpretations of the 1940s with the esoteric rigor of his notebooks from the 1930s, into a new figure of thought: the thing. The simple things around us—indeed, the things themselves—become the focus of his attention, lending to his work of the period a unique phenomenological density disencumbered of all formal transcendentalism. The fourfold provides an account of the thing as inherently relational. Thanks to the fourfold, these things unfold themselves ecstatically, opening relations with the world beyond them. Unlike the self-enclosed object of modern metaphysics, the thing is utterly worldly, its essence lying in the relations it maintains throughout the world around it, the world to which it is inextricably bound. The world becomes the medium of the thing’s relations. The fourfold is the key to understanding this streaming, mediated, relationality of finite, worldly existence.
The importance of this new thinking of the thing should not be underestimated. The 1949 Bremen lecture cycle, Insight Into That Which Is, where the conception of the fourfold is first forged in its opening lecture “The Thing,” stands alongside Being and Time (1927), Heidegger’s landmark early work, and the Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38), the gravitational center of his middle period, as a third, decisive milestone along his path of thought. While such a claim might first appear hyperbolic, Heidegger himself puts great stock in this orientation to the thing. In a 1964 letter reflecting on his path of thought hitherto, he confesses: “Apart from the thing lecture, I have never once presented my own thinking purely
1 Egon Vietta, author of Die Seinsfrage bei Martin Heidegger, as cited in Petzet, Stern zugehen, 62/Encounters, 56. For more on Vietta, see Petzet, Stern zugehen, 107–10/Encounters, 100–2.
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