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Earth, Bearing and Fructifying
Within the fourfold, the earth names what we might traditionally think of as the “material basis” of the thing. Such a claim can only be maintained if we understand “material” and “basis” in ways quite distinct from their traditional employ in the history of philosophy. That is to say, strictly speaking, the earth is neither “material” nor a “basis.” The role of the earth within the fourfold transforms all our usual expectations of what counts as earthen or even earthly, for the “matter” of the earth is nothing other than phenomenality as such. So “earth” does indeed name the constituency of things, but what constitutes the thing is sensuous appearance. The “matter” of experience is phenomenality. This sensuous phenomenality of things, their way of being in the world, is their shine, gleam, and radiance. The earth names nothing burdensome, unless it is the reluctance of this simple shining itself to appear as anything stable and fixed. If we say the earth is material, we must think that “material” as phenomenal radiance.
And similarly for any notion of a “basis” in the earth. Heidegger's sense of earth runs counter to the thought of a present basis, either for the life that would support itself upon it or the forms that would adopt it as their matter. This phenomenal character of the earth is not a basis because it does no work of grounding. The earth refuses this grounding role. If appearance is to shine and radiate through the world, then it cannot be tethered and chained to a ground. The earth as appearance must then be groundless, or, rather, neither grounding nor groundless, but something “between” these two and outside their oppositional polarity. For this reason Heidegger speaks of the earth as an “abyss” rather than a ground. All the earth bears is phenomenal and the phenomenal is all it can bear without becoming ground. The substantive requires grounds, the phenomenal does not. From this conception of earth as phenomenal appearing (no fundamentum inconcussum), Heidegger sketches a new vision of nature, encompassing rocks and waters, flora and fauna.
Heidegger famously first introduced a new conception of the earth in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” of 1936. (The first elaboration is dated as early as 1931.)1 This is not to say that the fourfold is already present in the artwork essay— it is not— but the role that the earth plays there prepares it for eventual inclusion in the fourfold in 1949. Before
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