Conclusion
Heidegger’s thinking of the fourfold is a thinking of things. It names the dehiscence of the thing as it unfurls itself through world. In the foregoing analyses we have traced the components of the fourfold in order to show how they converge in the thinging of the thing. The thinging thing is resolutely finite, that is, relational (in-finite). Each component contributes to the constitution of just such a relational, finite existence.
The earth grounds the thing, but this ground is ultimately an abyss, nothing solid beneath one’s feet. This abyss, however, is by no means an absence, but instead is what comes to appearance in the very radiant phenomenality and sense of the world itself. The ground of the thing is consequently nothing other than this “bearing” of sense, this appearing. The earth is stretched between a withholding (an abyss, Ab-grund, remaining away of ground) and a radiance (the shining forth of the sensible). This earth as stretched, or spaced, requires a medium through which to extend itself.
The sky provides this, receiving the earthly thing and distributing it across its variegated field. The sky opens the heavens around the thing, granting to such things the reverberation of their relations. The sky is thus nothing inert or stable, but constantly aflutter with the streaming of these relations. This thickened sky, replete now with the relations of all that appears, has its own texture and density that shifts from place to place. The reciprocal relations of things give the sky the tensile strength to buoy and support what appears in it. The mediation of the sky, however, can only last a little while. The shifting of the sky, its light and its dark, brings a measured time to things, a time that they themselves help bring about by receiving what is apportioned to them.
The situation of the earth and sky alone does not yet arrive at the full fledged thinking of mediation determinative of Heidegger’s later thinking. One could still misconstrue this situation as one of containment. With the divinities, Heidegger provides the measure of the relation, the “logic” of mediation whereby all that appears, the arriving and the withdrawing, is marked by its exposure to this medium. The divinities name the fact that appearance is remarked, however destitute the times, and that even things bear witness. The divinities allow the unattainable to
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