THINGS
It brings near: “The thing things. By thinging, it lets the earth and sky, divinities and mortals abide. By letting abide, the thing brings the four in their remoteness near to each other” (GA 79: 17/16). Such a relating qua gathering is at the essence of the thing, of a jug, for example: “this manifold and simplistic gathering is the essencing of the jug” (GA 79: 13/12). Essencing is appropriating as a gathering into relation. But this can only take place where the thing is understood as exposed (abiding) and since this exposure will ineluctably and essentially tie the thing to its surroundings, essencing can only take place where there is the medium for such abiding, where there is a while. “The essence of the jug,” Heidegger writes, “is in a while [Weile]” and we should understand this at its fullest sweep to mean that there is no jug, there are no things, without this while (GA 79: 13/12).
The thing needs its while, but the while just as much needs its thing: “Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold’s while [dessen Weile] each time into something that abides: into this or that thing” (GA 79: 13/12, em). There could be no while without each time something abiding (a Je-Weiliges). There is no abiding in the abstract. It always is conditioned and be-thinged (bedingt).22 The while is the medium of what abides and insofar as there is likewise no medium without something mediated (the thing brings its medium with it), there is no while without something whiling, abiding, lingering, without things.
And things there are. The lecture “The Thing” concludes with a sudden blossoming of things. It demonstrates the richness and diversity of abiding:
The thing is nimble [ring]: jug and bench, footbridge and plow. But a thing is also, after its manner, tree and pond, stream and mountain. Things are, each abiding [je weilig] thing-like in its way, heron and deer, horse and bull. Things are, each abiding thing-like after their manner, mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown and cross. (GA 79: 21/20)23
Abiding has another name: thing. Abiding implicates a beyond by instantiating itself liminally in a medium, through a material exposure, we might say. And mortals, too, are similarly thinglike, though the passage does not say it. (Earlier in the lecture, Heidegger had cited Meister Eckhart referring to God as a thing or dinc; see GA 79: 15/14.) What is thinglike of mortals is their residing (aufhalten). Mortals abide in residing, in dwelling. In more than one sense, then, all these things abide for a while.
The temporality of abiding as a relation to the while offers a time that would not simply contain the abiding thing, but would be influenced by it, fitted to it. Such a time would not be an empty form, as Fink
22 “The things condition [be-dingen] the mortals. This now says: The things visit each time [jeweils] the mortals especially [eigens] with world” (GA 12: 20/PLT 197–98, tm).
23 Mortals (and plants) are explicitly mentioned in the talk of abiding found in the Anaximander essay. There the eonta are named “all that presences, that essences in the manner of what each time abides [des Je-weiligen]: Gods and humans, temples and cities, sea and land, eagle and snake, tree and bush, wind and light, stone and sand, day and night” (GA 5: 353/266, tm).