Andrew J. Mitchell
Heidegger Circle, May 2025
Heidegger’s Four Notebooks is intended to be his first postwar publication announcing a new direction in his thinking. Drafted between 1946 and 1950, the Four Notebooks effect the transition between Heidegger’s beyng-historical thinking of the 1930s and the thinking of the fourfold in his postwar writings. Emerging from out of both the Nietzsche lectures and their culmination in questions of nihilism, as well as the beyng-historical treatises of the 1940s, where Unterschied (differentiation) comes to be thematized, the project of the Four Notebooks is ultimately abandoned and its various insights distributed among Heidegger’s lectures and essays of the period (the lecture cycle Insight Into That Which Is and essays like “Building Dwelling Thinking,” among others). But these published offshoots of the work recontextualize their contents, departing from the constellation of concerns elaborated in the Four Notebooks. The materials relevant to the Four Notebooks project – its explicit drafts and sketches (GA 99, 104, 73.2), notes developing primary concepts (GA 73.2), and the Black Notebook entries from the time of composition, Remarks II–VIII, which frequently refer to the Four Notebooks and to which the Four Notebooks themselves frequently refer (portions of GA 97 and 98) – total some 1500 pages.
Today I will provisionally organize some of this material around what I take to be a few of the central issues motivating the Four Notebooks project. There are four such points: Differentiation (Unterschied) and its forgetting, language as conversation with stillness (Gespräch mit der Stille), the peculiar role of clue and need (Ratsal and Brauch), and lastly the world/thing relation, which inaugurates Heidegger’s thinking of the fourfold. I begin with some words on Heidegger’s writing of the Four Notebooks. My hope is to provide something of a footbridge to this mountain of material.
One of the unique things about the Four Notebooks materials is that it gives us access to Heidegger while composing what is to be a book. It is not far from the truth to say that Heidegger never wrote a “book” per se, that the bulk of his published work is lecture transcriptions. Being and Time was never finished, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics stems from a lecture course, other publications are essays and lectures, revisions to completed lecture courses, but nowhere a book. One might speak of a “minor literature” with regard to Heidegger, if by this one meant an avoidance of the “work” (Werk), i.e., first and foremost the book.1
And yet, here is Heidegger planning a book, and one he seems to deem important. He notes that he began working on the Four Notebooks as early as 1937, after completing the Contributions to Philosophy and at the time of the lecture course Basic Concepts of Philosophy: Selected “Problems” of “Logic” (1937–38), and records in the Remarks that the Four Notebooks could be taken as the “much demanded Second Part of Being and Time,” a comment that can only be taken sardonically (cited at GA 99: 185; GA 98: 61). The first two notebooks devoted to the Four Notebooks project, published as GA 99, offer numerous sketches of potential contents. Each of the four notebooks is designated by a Roman numeral and each has four sections designated by Arabic numerals. The first such sketch, crossed out in the text, divides the Notebooks so: “the unguarding (Verwahrlosung), the thing, the event, the primal announcement (Urkunde)” (see GA 99: 19). There are by my count nine of these content sketches found in the materials, most feature “event,” “world,” and “thing.” Others are organized as “event, thing, mildness, world” (GA 99: 133) or “thing, event, stillness, world” (GA 99: 143).
What is of added interest, and rather unique in Heidegger’s Nachlaß, are the presence of notes commenting on his writing process itself. As we shall see, language is a prime concern throughout this material and Heidegger is cognizant of the demands this places on his own writing of the Four Notebooks. Particularly in the set of notes entitled “I. 1–4” (published in GA 73.2), we find Heidegger deliberating how best to organize his materials: “What is decisive about the default of difference as refusal of differentiation only first in I 4 – do not just pack everything into I 1” (GA 73.2: 1111). Similar things are found in GA 99, where one reads “Let the words play; do not force” (GA 99: 28), or where one of the content lists is followed by the line “whether I first rather than III?” (GA 99: 19). But the notes in GA 73.2 seem to have the effect on the reader more in view. A note titled “the division in alteration” (Den Zwiespalt im Wechsel) says about this “leave [it] unspoken throughout I (indeed, on that, precisely an emphatic keeping silent, i.e., but then not spoken of as division and alteration – until I 4” (GA 73.2: 1118). In the meantime, differentiation is to be “only named in passing as the division in alteration” (GA 73.2: 1120). This kind of concern with effect, if I may call it that, is not found elsewhere in Heidegger’s compositional drafts, from what I have seen, and may indicate a concern of Heidegger’s that the Four Notebooks not simply report something, but that they effect, provoke, or perform something as well.2 Let us turn now to the four motives.
Heidegger distinguishes between the “difference of beings and being” and the
“differentiation into beings and being”
(Differenz von vs. Unterschied zu)
(GA 99: 73).
Schematically speaking, we could say that Differenz refers to ontological difference,
understood as the difference of being (Sein) from beings (the Seiende). Unterschied, on the
other hand, refers to an act of differentiation into being and beings. Differentiation thus
distinguishes between being and beings, on the one hand, and that which has been
differentiated from them: Seyn, now spelled with a y (I’ll reserve the German term for
Seyn when it is spelled with a y, otherwise I will say “being” for Sein without a y).
Seyn’s withdrawal serves to differentiate it from the being and beings left behind. Amid
those beings and beings, there is difference, ontological difference even, but such
difference is itself thereby differentiated from Seyn by means of Seyn’s withdrawal and
default. To be sure, Heidegger claims in the Four Notebooks that “the y in Seyn names
the fork of difference, Seyn neither as a being nor as being in terms of what is extant
(beinghood)”
(GA 99: 152).
If the Seyn that withdraws in the movement of
differentiation is written with a y, then the forgetting of that differentiation leads
Heidegger to write that same Seyn now as crossed out: Seyn. Differentiation gives
difference, we might say. Neither Seyn nor beings and being alone constitute the
Unterschied: “What essences of the two is the Unterschied itself; neither beings nor
being attains an experience of the Unterschied. The Unterschied is not a third to these
two, but also not what is first of both”
(GA 99: 142).
The differentiation is simultaneous
with the bestowing of difference, a bestowal that is inversely the withdrawal of Seyn.
If Heidegger started out as a thinker of being, he soon became a thinker of forgetting, with the two growing increasingly inseparable. Without pursuing the history of that development, the Four Notebooks represent the apotheosis of forgetting in Heidegger’s thinking, with Heidegger claiming nothing less than that everything comes from forgetting: “Everything comes from forgetting. — It itself did not arrive with this. It remains most forgotten. And therefore this too, that everything came from it” (GA 73.2: 1173).
That everything comes from, emerges from, arises out of forgetting, means
forgetting is not something simply negative, but plays a positive role: “Forgetting,
however, is no lack and no omission; but rather something lofty, because the first
dispensation of Seyn”
(GA 99: 69).
Forgetting is a dispensation, this brings it into the
purview of truth, which Heidegger famously thinks in terms of the Greek ALETHEIA,
or “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit), though here in the Four Notebooks, the emphasis
falls on the LETHE as a form of forgetting, which would thus render A-LETHEIA as the
“unforgotten” or even “unforgettable” (Unvergeßliche). But when what appears stands
unforgotten, the LETHE from which it arises must recede into the forgotten, and
extremely so, as Heidegger observes: “Forgetting (LETHE) – that this is so and what
forgetting is — remains most forgotten [das Vergessenste]”
(GA 73.2: 1114).
What appears in
truth would consequently be “unforgotten,” while what remains most forgotten would
be forgetting itself. “That” something appears, its “that” vs. its “what,” points to
givenness as the unforgettable aspect here, “The unforgettable [Unvergeßliche] […] is the
element of the ‘that’ [Daß]” (GA 73.2: 1170).
But givenness is nothing so straightforward. The notes collected in GA 73.2 dealing with book I of the Four Notebooks spend some time developing this notion of the unforgettable. Forgetting is not something that comes to befall an otherwise fully present moment of awareness, forgetting is operative from the outset, inherent to truth itself: “ALETHEIA is the beginning of the forgetting of the Unterschied” (GA 99: 164). But here we might think the forgetting in question is the forgetting of the givenness of an otherwise intact entity, but “forgetting leaves behind a trace in ALETHEIA” (GA 99: 13). There is a moment of forgetting, a trace of the forgotten, inhabiting what is unconcealed as unforgotten, corrupting its unforgottenness. Forgetting has already begun.
Now, it could seem that the situation here is split between the ontic and the ontological, that various ontic moments are “forgotten,” but the ontological condition of their forgetting is nothing forgettable, a version of “the essence of technology is nothing technological.” The point would be similar to one made by Derrida in his “contamination” critique of Heidegger, that he seeks to quarantine being from any ontic contamination. But this would assume that ontological difference played a primary role here. Instead, and this is the point, forgetting is prior to difference (Differenz), it concerns the Unterschied itself.
When Heidegger writes, “The Unterschied is forgetting [die Vergessenheit]. It is the unforgettable [das Unvergeßliche]” (GA 73.2: 1179), claiming that the Unterschied is both forgetting and the unforgettable, this indicates to us the recoverability of the forgotten. We are oblivious to all that bears no relation to us. But forgetting is inherently relational, indeed, may well be inherent to relationality itself. Forgetting is a remarking of loss, is the trace of that loss. Without the incapacity to remember, we would never know we have forgotten. This would seem to mean nothing could ever be forgotten, because there is a trace of the unforgettable to it. But that grain of unforgettability is just the trace of the loss of what has been forgotten, it is the suffering of the loss without which it would go unremarked and remain obliviated, without which we will not have forgotten. Without this unforgettable, in other words, there would be no forgetting at all.
We can thus understand claims like “Forgetting is the unforgettable” (GA 73.2: 1171) as asserting that this unforgettable, which stands in the unconcealment of ALETHEIA, is itself forgetting, or rather is forgetting in so far as forgetting appears in unconcealment, or rather the unforgettable is the marker of a forgetting long past, a marker that itself has long been effaced.
If the unforgettable is the givenness of things, then the connection between forgetting, lethe, and the unforgotten, requires rethinking the privation of the privative alpha. It can no longer be thought as a simple negation. As such, Heidegger emphasizes its pivotal character: “In the ‘’A’ the turn out of the turn!” (GA 73.2: 1150). The A of Aletheia, its non-oppositional -un, revolves or alternates around forgetting, undoing itself only to turn again out of its turn in constituting itself.
Aletheia names the clearing wherein the difference between being and beings can be located. It is the site of the bestowal of the Unterschied, which Heidegger will soon think in terms of “world.” The Unterschied brings the ontological difference into the unconcealment of ALETHEIA. That giving comes from Seyn. The Unterschied is Seyn’s giving of itself into ontological difference. Seyn gives itself into a situation of its own forgetting and distortion (Verstelllung). Seyn separates from being and beings, that gap is Unterschied.
The forgetting of the Unterschied is thus the reification of ontological difference. But this is a peculiar forgetting: “Forgetting of the Unterschied is not nothing, but the most extreme fullness of refusal [Verweigerung]” (GA 99: 48). What Seyn thus gives, is its own refusal to give.3 And the trace of Seyn’s self-refusal is precisely ontological difference. From the realm of ontological difference, there can be no Seyn. Yet Seyn must be if only to be forgotten. Seyn cannot appear in these confines, or rather, can only appear as not-appearing, i.e. as crossed through. Ontological difference is the crossing through of Seyn.
The trace of the unforgettable within forgetting, the alpha’s privation, and the work of the un- more broadly, puts in place an inescapable alternation that defies opposition. Forgetting in this condition is “pivotal” (kehrig), subject to turns (Kehre). And there is one turn that needs to be effected in our relation to forgetting, one that might turn us out of this unworld of expropriation, a turn in forgetting itself whereby “The forgetting of the Unterschied turns itself into the Unterschied of forgetting. This turn is the entry [Einkehr] of world” (GA 99: 21). The turn is a move from forgetting differentiation to finding a differentiation within forgetting, which Heidegger will again distinguish by means of the un-, here eigentlich and uneigentlich, authentic and “unauthentic” forgetting.
The Unterschied of forgetting into authentic and inauthentic now presents us with a forgetting that can be recalled and remembered (standard forgetting), i.e., inauthentic forgetting, and a forgetting that refuses such recall, authentic forgetting (which is aligned with the default of Seyn and thus gives us nothing ontically particular to remember). And yet the two belong together in a relation of guarding: “The turn guards what is the same [Selbe] of inauthentic and authentic forgetting; guards the event of conversion [Verwindung] of the unguarding; worlds what is inauthentic of the authentic” (GA 99: 30).
As we shall see, the task of the Four Notebooks is to think and say what is here distinguished as the same amid forgettings. For “Thinking is the saying [Sage] of the Unterschied of forgetting and thus the saying of the turn in this” (GA 99: 25). And this means for Heidegger that “an entirely different prospect for thinking opens here, that essentially it must enter forgetting” (GA 99: 26). But the saying of such forgetting is complicated, for how does one name what is authentically forgotten?
Heidegger’s pursuit of the conversational form, as in the Country Path Conversations of the 1940s, receives now a new contextualization and even justification in the Four Notebooks. Heidegger writes regarding these prior conversations that
Conversation in the sense of the country path is not a form of speaking. It is the event of the worldly essence of language. The dispensation of the event speaks. Everything historical has fallen away.
In the conversation the issue [die Sache] speaks. It is the conflict of the Unterschied.
The thinkers of the conversation bring what comes: the arrival of expropriation […].
GA 99: 8
Country path conversations are recast as revolving around the Unterschied and as a bringing of expropriation (a thought to which we shall return).
But Heidegger is uncomfortable with the form of the Country Path Conversations, writing: “The conversation of language, however, precisely does not let itself be said in the form of ‘conversations’” (GA 99: 9). As such, Heidegger adds, “The formal conversations (country path) are only preliminary exercises for the authentic conversation, whose saying remains in the inapparent of the Four Notebooks” (GA 99: 18). Indeed, “The Four Notebooks are an inscription of the conversation of language” (GA 99: 18).4
Within the Four Notebooks, conversation, Gespräch, is understood as a gathering of language, as indicated by the Ge- prefix. What is gathered into language, however, is not just what is spoken of it, but also, and more importantly, the unspoken: “Conversation is the needing gathering of language, to which the unspoken comes, in order to remain unspoken in it” (GA 99: 7). Our conversation is something of a vehicle for the unspoken, given that for Heidegger, “the essence of conversation is the stillness of the world [Stille der Welt]” (GA 99: 8). The unspoken of the said and the stillness of the world engender conversation.
The conversation is not with a second partner. It is not a “dialogue” in this sense, which is part of Heidegger’s discomfort with the form of conversation. Instead, even when another is present, all saying is a conversation with stillness. So Heidegger can claim that “Conversation is the between within which thinkers, speaking to one another, complete the saying [die Sage vollbringen]” (GA 99: 7), while simultaneously holding that “Saying is only the illuminating [Lichtung] of the stillness of the location of the Unterschied of forgetting: the saying of the world” (GA 99: 23). Simply put, saying serves stillness.
More precisely, saying is a conversation with stillness. One might understand this such that what is said therein, what is voiced, may remain a matter of ontic beings, but nothing could be said were it not for the silence against which the words define their contour and clang. But this role of silence as the “negative space” of words, if you will, is not what Heidegger has in mind for stillness. Stillness is not a silent backdrop against which language is voiced. The relation is more complex.
Let us return to the idea of the unspoken. This is not simply something I chose not to say, it is not a matter of content in this sense. It is also not necessarily the “unsaid” as Heidegger will subsequently think it in relation to his postwar poetics, where the poet’s words “say” the unsaid, or allow us to extrapolate it from the said. Instead, the unspoken is what goes unsaid whenever there is speaking. Speech conceals the unspoken. There is an antagonism in communication between sound and silence, we might say. But we do not get at the unspoken by simply remaining silent, there must be speech, and not so that the unspoken would show itself in contrast to speech, but so that it not show itself and, indeed, remain unspoken through the various vocalizations of speech. In this way, speaking preserves the unspoken. There is thus a coincidence and simultaneity (Zusammenfall) between the unspoken and what is said in speech: “The unspoken coincidence in the saying of the Unterschied speaks clearer and truer than any definition, which necessarily surrenders everything to representation” (GA 99: 29). Representational thought cannot think the unspoken without antagonizing it into opposition with the spoken.5
Language in the Four Notebooks, then, forgoes a direct naming of the forgetting of the Unterschied (as this only ever falls back into the mire of representation). Instead, the forgetting remains unspoken.6 For Heidegger, the simultaneity of the unspoken with the spoken allows the spoken to shield the unspoken and offer it a kind of guardianship. It is not what we say that forms the conversation Heidegger is interested in, it is what is unspoken that as such resonates and accords with stillness. The unspoken speaks to stillness and accords with it. For this to happen, a certain renunciation must occur. The subject must renounce any attempt to name, conceive, or possess that stillness. The accordance (ent-sprechen) must be a disavowal (ent-sagen), as Heidegger emphasizes in the Remarks at this time: “The required saying corresponds [entspricht] to Seyn. What remains for saying other than a disavowal [Ent-sagen], which takes from (removes from) [ent-nimmt (ent-fängt)] its said its assertive quality, and thus, remaining in a counter-hearing [Ent-hören], relinquishes every utterance about the being of beings” (GA 97: 228). The accordance in question is between the unspoken and the prevailing stillness. But it is precisely this renunciation that allows for the possibility of a turn in forgetting.
Language guards the unspoken in our speaking. Otherwise we would confront mere silence. Here instead, what is spoken guards the unspoken, granting it its communion with the stillness that surrounds.
Amid the materials for the Four Notebooks, there are numerous terms that defy easy explanation and have to be teased out from the context Heidegger provides for them (Weltspindel, Letze, Vorlaß, etc.), the epitome of this is the term Ratsal. The word is found in Grimm’s dictionary, where it bears two meanings, the first, beratung, means something like advice or counsel. The illustrative quotation is to the effect of subjects seeking counsel against their lords. The second meaning given is anschlag, in the sense of a placard or something giving notice. It is also listed as an 11th–13th century Old Middle and Low German form of the word Rätsel or riddle, enigma.7 Forthcoming translations include “clew” with medieval spelling (Campbell, GA 100) or “omen” (Knowles, GA 97). In what follows I will opt for “clue” in standard spelling. Clue has the benefit of connecting the primary meanings as something that offers a kind of advice toward the solving of a puzzle or a riddle. What then is this clue?
One of the more forthcoming presentations of the clue occurs early on in Four Notebooks I–II, across a series of statements starting with the unspoken. The unspoken remains despite what is said, indeed is guarded by that. Heidegger writes, “The unspoken […] remains and in such remaining becomes the unbidden [das Unbefohlene]” (GA 99: 8). The unbidden is what arrives to us without our asking or soliciting. It cannot be commanded or accessed by the command of a superior. Heidegger immediately adds about this unbidden: “The saying of need is obedience to the unbidden” and “In the unbidden the essence of will is converted [verwunden]” (GA 99: 8–9). We will return to the role of need momentarily, for now we see the unbidden as effecting a conversion within willing (and thus a conversion of machination and the predominance of will to power more broadly). This now forms the clue: “The unbidden is the clue [Ratsal] of the forgetting of the Unterschied” (GA 99: 9).8
The unbidden, which is the unspoken, remains guarded by what is said, is overlooked by means of what is said, does not even seem to appear in light of what is said. But this is precisely, and paradoxically, why it is a clue. The clue of non-appearing is a clue of forgetting. The clue is that there is no clue and that this is the clue to a forgetting.
The forgetting of the Unterschied is again the belief that ontological difference is sufficient. From within this metaphysical realm, there can be no Seyn. Seyn is crossed through, has been erased. What crosses through and covers over Seyn is ontological difference itself. Ontological difference is itself the crossing through of Seyn. From within the metaphysics of ontological difference, Seyn does not appear. I am not sure if we can say that it appears in not appearing. Were it to do so, it would function more like a hint (Wink), as Heidegger had proposed in the Contributions and throughout the period of beyng-historical thinking. In that account, a trace of the withdrawn positively appears qua trace to be discerned by poets; such is the hint. The clue, for its part, does not appear, gives no indication that it is, in fact, a clue; an absence clues us to a forgetting.9
This follows what I call “Bigfoot hunter” logic, whereby it is understood that Bigfoot are expert at covering their tracks, so much so that the absence of any tracks at all is a good indication that Bigfoot are in the vicinity. Obviously, Heidegger is pushing his thinking of accordance and correspondence, his thinking of relation and non-relation, to its very limits.
Heidegger links the clue to a turn out of the forgetting of the Unterschied. That turn (Kehre) is understood as a turn “in” (Einkehr), an entrance, and it is one to which we are clued. Heidegger writes simply: “Entrance from catching sight of the clue” and what is understood is that the clue brings about the entrance of the world, thus allowing him to remark: “World differentiates itself [unter-scheidet sich] in the clue –“ or to define Ereignis as “Event: world-entrance in the clue” (GA 99: 29, 46, 82). Heidegger thus attaches “world” importance to the clue, at one point defining what it means “to world” as follows: “Worlding: that the event as event of the Unter-schied expropriates itself into the stillness of the clue” (GA 99: 112).
With all this emphasis upon the clue, one would think that we are seeking something distant or exotic, something far from our usual abode. Nothing could be further from the truth, as a note in the Remarks of the time makes clear: “Questioning is not always easier than answering. Indeed, what is most difficult for us, beyond all the play of question and answer, is to hear the advice [Rat], which has already advised our essence, although we do not guess it [nicht erraten]. This is the advice of the clue [Rat des Ratsals]” (GA 97: 266). The clue is to lead us back to where we have already been advised, it leads us back to our essence. And that essence is to be a relation to Seyn.
If the clue clues us into our relation to being, then it clues us into the fact that Seyn needs us (braucht uns). Seyn needs mortal guardianship for its self-disclosure and if not in the Da or “there” of Dasein then in the world of the fourfold wherein the mortal is a needed participant.10 The role of “need” (Brauch) is emphasized in the Four Notebooks from the very beginning, indeed the opening lines of Four Notebooks I–II begins: “The saying of need [Brauch] is thinking in the other style. ‘Need’ is a preliminary name for Unter-Schied. The saying brings about [ereignet] the conversation of the Unter-Schied” (GA 99: 7).11
What is uttered in need is no lack, but a belonging together of the mortal and Seyn. Seyn needs the mortal to platform ontological difference, which is to say the forgetting of Seyn, its crossing through. To need the mortal is to be in relation with the mortal, a spaced relating, it requires differentiation between the mortal and Seyn. The signal of that relation, the testament of that prime relation, is the clue. Seyn is not absent it is only in abeyance, its non-appearing is no absence, its non-appearing provides the clue. To think need is thus to think a relation persisting through non-relation, that the most expropriated would nevertheless harbor appropriation, and vice-versa: “The name ‘need’ preserves for thinking that within the event of appropriation [Ereignis] it thinks expropriation [Enteignis]” (GA 99: 9). Expropriation, which we tend to associate with the unguarding of being and its deliverance into machination and technology, is likewise a mode of appropriation, a form of givenness. The clue gives us to think them as the “same” (Selbe), appropriation and expropriation.
Seyn needs the mortal, not to usher beyng into presence, but to let Seyn withdraw, more: to let Seyn go forgotten. Seyn needs mortal forgetting.
The early sketches for the contents of the Four Notebooks begin with the first notebook devoted to what Heidegger calls “unguarding,” Verwahrlosung. Unguarding names the delivery of beings into a situation where they are left unguarded, where they are presumed to be all that is and fully present, this is the situation of metaphysics or of the ontological difference, as we have previously discussed. The particular being is an unguarded entity. In these early sketches, the unguarded being is contrasted with what Heidegger calls “the thing,” which he thinks in relation to world. The cover of Notebook II is representative here:
(From unguarding) [as refusal]
through event of appropriation
to thing
in world
– world/thing –
The juxtaposition of unguarded and guarded beings, the latter understood as “things,” runs throughout the Four Notebooks, instancing the fundamental relation of its construction.
The unguarded beings are ultimately regarded as pieces of “standing reserve” (Bestand), though at this time, Heidegger has not fully disambiguated Gestell from Machenschaft, positionality from machination.12 The choice of Gestell as name for the essence of technology is made here. Noteworthy, too, is that Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same is drawn into connection with the standing reserve (Bestand), is viewed as constitutive of its very constancy (Beständigung). This was not the case in the 1937 lecture course devoted to eternal recurrence and the connection appeared to be first made in the appendix to “Who Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” from 1954. We now find that connection operative much earlier:
“Not the eternal recurrence of the same [ewige Wiederkehr des Gleichen] (most extreme constancy [Beständigung] of presence), but rather the sudden entrance into the selfsame [in das Selbe]” (GA 99: 12)
“Produced constancy [hergestellte Beständigung]: the steady self-production of constancy (eternal recurrence of the same)” (GA 99: 41)
The unguarding of beings leads to a new determination of presence: “presence is defined from out of positionality as the steady constancy, suited for positionality, of the securing of inventory for the steadily uniform standing reserve” (GA 99: 126). Positionality is itself understood as “the establishment of dominance over the earth [Erdherrschaft]. Earth as arsenal of usable standing reserves” (GA 99: 117).
Against this recurrently constant standing reserve, Heidegger presents the thing in its relation to world. “The thing: is the expropriating gathering of the world into what abides [das Weilige]” (GA 99: 13). We will turn to this notion of expropriation momentarily, for now the thing is an abiding gathering of world. But world is here understood by Heidegger in terms of a “fouring” (Vierung).
With this fouring, we see the genesis of the fourfold that will appear in Heidegger’s publications in the months and years ahead.13 At the center of the four is world, world is constituted by the presiding of the four (see GA 99: 31). Two of the four that surround the term “world” are familiar, from top to bottom, sky and earth. The other two, from left to right, are the Freye (the freely open) and Sparnis (the saving). Additional notes make clear that saving is associated with the divine (see GA 99: 116) and that the Freye is to be inhabited by those who dwell. And insofar as the human “has become unthinkable” (GA 99: 61) in terms of a starting point for thinking relation, Heidegger introduces the term “mortal” in these pages,14 identifying the mortal as a figure of relation thought from out of expropriation: “The mortals: the name names the human, insofar as his essence is experienced in terms of the essence of death and, i.e., in terms of the expropriation in the event of appropriation. The mortals are thought in terms of the relation within their appropriative essence” (GA 99: 62). Eventually, the fourfold is revised to read: earth, sky, gods, mortals (GA 99: 132).
Fouring is thus the worlding of world, the “worldly incursion of the fouring in the sphere of the Unter-Schied” (GA 99: 29). The two axes of the four make up the stretching or splitting or tearing of the spacing of world. For its part, “The thing is the guardian [Wahrnis] of what is proper to the world [des Eigentums der Welt]” (GA 99: 13). The thing is a kind of ontic tether for the world in its worlding.15 But the world does not world without the mortal’s involvement: “The human inhabits the world-fourfold when he has properly been appropriated into the mortal” (GA 99: 116). What this means is that, if Seyn “needs” the mortal, then it would equally need the sky, the divinities, the earth; what Seyn would need is a world wherein to expend itself, the mortal would be needed qua participant in that world building, not as its sole builder.
The world of the thing exhibits the relation that is the leading concern of the Four Notebooks, indeed, something of its namesake: relation (Ver-Hältnis), the two sharing the abbreviation VH, as Heidegger observes:
V.H.: Four Notebooks [Vier Hefte]; but V.H. is the sigil for the relation [Ver-Hältnis]. The path to the relation is difficult, so long as world, so long as thing, so long as world-thing, must remain unthought. Thus let the relation remain at first unnamed. GA 99: 20.
Here at the end we can name it. The relation is iterated across everything we have discussed, between thing and world, between the withdrawal of Seyn in the Unterschied, between being and beings in ontological difference, and likewise between Ereignis and Enteignis, appropriation and expropriation themselves.
A note towards the end of the second Notebook provides a relatively clear account:
World worlds thing –
Thing things world.
That is the relation [Ver-Hältnis].
The relation is the essence of the Unterschied.
The relation takes place in the appropriation of expropriation
[ereignet sich im Ereignis der Enteignis].
The relation is the carrying out of difference.
GA 99: 171–72
Relation is operative even in the metaphysics of ontological difference, no difference without relation, we might say. And that is because relation works through the persistence of appropriation within expropriation, or the always expropriated character of the proper.
Ereignis and Enteignis are the push and pull of each other. They are to be thought in terms of the withdrawal of Enteignis in the bestowal of Ereignis, a withholding in all giving. But in the giving of Ereignis, a mark of that giving persists, a mark of that constitutive withdrawal persists. What has withdrawn in Enteignis could be said to be guarded now. If there is a mark of this Enteignis left upon its withdrawal, then we can easily reverse the perspective and see this Enteignis, this withdrawing, now as a giving and donating, a giving precisely of the mark of its withdrawal. In this sense, Enteignis is a bestowal (it could also be called a promise). Enteignis gives the mark of its withdrawal, releases the trace of Ereignis.
This is why Heidegger cautions, “Entrance of things does not mean that everything which is now standing reserve in the inventory of positionality, is to become a thing” (GA 99: 140). The switch is not something that happens across two worlds, from the unworld of unguarded standing reserve to the world of world and thing. Instead, it requires rethinking this relation of expropriation in appropriation. It means seeing that even in the most unguarded standing reserve, that it gives no sign of world, this may be the sign of world qua forgotten. The loss of forgetting is the highest protection. The same item of standing reserve may nonetheless harbor, shelter, and protect the relational thing. Standing reserve is the crossed through thing, their continuity is the clue.
In all the instances I have examined here, a figure of indiscernability has emerged: forgetting, stillness, cluelessness, and even standing reserve. In each case, a kind of sighting was required which was able to see what did not appear. Heidegger first thematizes the “inapparent” (das Unscheinbare) in these pages as well. To see the forgotten is to see the non-present in the present, to find the clue, to stretch toward the faith that the silence is a stillness communing with the unspoken enjoyment of the world of things, persisting even amid the surrounding carnage, nay, even thanks to it.
To overcome the forgetting of the Unterschied is to realize the sheltering role of forgetting. The forgotten is what is most guarded. This goes to the point where even the guard would have to no longer know what it is that they guard, or even that they were a guard. It might go so far that these guards of forgetting might even think themselves prisoners of an unworld of machination and will to power.
The Four Notebooks seek to stage the simultaneity of this awakening to and forgetting of relation.
1 Writing and publication is itself a recurrent theme throughout the Black Notebooks of this period.
2 Another aspect of the language is worth noting: 1) heavy use of abbreviations, 2) turn to agrarian vocabulary, simple saying. Also: graphic elements; • use of genitive in constructions.
3 think with Hölderlin “Bread and Wine” where gods withhold themselves to spare us their overwhelming presence that would otherwise consume us.
4 Shane on Inschrift
5 another instance of the Un-
6 “the conversation of language says the unspoken and this is the Unter-Schied of forgeKing” (GA 99: 26).
7 see also GA 67: 235, “Being itself is the riddle.” GA 98: 118 (Rätsel ist Ratsal)
8 And “The unspoken remains the clue of the Unterschied” (GA 99: 161).
9 see remarks on “shadows” in GA 73.2: 1130–32.
10 On the role of need in Heidegger’s thinking of the 1950s, see the recent dossier in Gatherings 13 (2023), “Special Section on a Recent Text from Heidegger’s Nachlaß ‘The Argument Against Need.’”
11 See also the opening page of Remarks III (1946–47): “In view of need… The name ‘need,’ however, names only a trait in the event of the Unter-Schied. ‘Need’ is a preliminary name for Unter-Schied” (GA 97: 217).
12 On this, see The Fourfold, ch. 1
13 It is central to the thought of the project: “The Four Notebooks say the fourfold of the Unterschied” (GA 99: 140).
14 “The human – taken on its own, in whatever way – has become unthinkable; even as the finite, even as the correlative subject position [Subjektwesen]; thus every question concerning the relation ‘of the human’ ‘to’ … becomes groundless and errant. […] The human as the mortal” (GA 99: 61).
15 Though Heidegger takes effort to distinguish the thing from the traditional beings of ontology: “The thing does not enter the place of the being (ONTA); for this, along with being, is forgoKen in the carrying out of the Unterschied” (GA 99: 14).