3
With the sky, Heidegger comes to think the wide expanse of appearance. Whereas the earth names an ungrounded bearing that suspends the thing in “mid air,” we might say, the sky serves to name this space of suspension. What the earth bears is borne aloft into the sky. The sky thus enables the earth’s ungrounded and superficial irruption into the realm of radiant appearance (of shining). The sky is the space (even the “spacing”) of the earth’s irruption. The earth could not be the earth without such a sky, there would be nowhere for it to appear much less conceal itself, nowhere for it to come to fruition. By making the sky a participant in the fourfold, Heidegger ascribes this expansive, mediated existence to every thing that is. The fourfold announces that earth and sky are inherent to things. If earthly existence is always a shining, radiant one, then earthly existence always takes place under the sky, for only the sky can distribute the peculiar radiance of the earth. To be ungrounded is to be distributed beyond oneself and the sky is what makes such distribution possible. But here, with this formulation, it sounds as though the sky would precede the earth and await its emergence. Such is not the case. The sky is opened along with that which emerges; what emerges traverses the sky in so doing. Which is to say there could be no sky without the earth, either.
Perhaps then, as the sky does not simply name a presence isolatable and locatable above us, we should hear a new sense to Heidegger’s recurrent phrase “unter dem Himmel” (“under the sky”), that of being “amidst (unter) the sky.” The earth does not name a solid ground beneath us and the sky does not name an empty space above us. The two would have to be thought together more intimately. Heidegger accomplishes this in considering what he terms the “dimension,” the spacing between earth and sky (see GA 7: 198/PLT 218). Our first concern, then, will be with the nature of this dimension.
For its part, the sky is no empty space, but a field of alteration and transition, of shifting densities and depths. At its first formulation in “The Thing” we read:
116