Andrew J. Mitchell
The fourfold (das Geviert) is a thinking of things. The fourfold names the “gathering” of earth, sky, mortals and divinities that comes to constitute the thing for Heidegger. In the late 1940s, operating under a teaching ban imposed by the French authorities in the wake of the Second World War, Heidegger ventures “the boldest statement of his thinking” in announcing the fourfold.1 First named in the 1949 lecture cycle “Insight Into That Which Is”, held at the private Club zu Bremen, the fourfold brings together the poetic sensibility of Heidegger’s Hölderlin interpretations with the esoteric quasi-structural concerns of his notebooks from the 1930s, into a new figure of thought: the thing.2 The simple things around us – indeed, the things themselves – become the focus of his attention and lead him to a phenomenologically more robust sense of world than heretofore found in his work. This world is a world of things, each a cluster of streaming relations reciprocally determinative of world. The fourfold is the key to understanding the utter relationality of worldly existence, for things are now understood to be the gathering points of the fourfold. Only with the fourfold does Heidegger attain the simplicity of vision adequate to a thinking of thing and world.3
Things appeared in Heidegger’s thinking before the fourfold. Indeed, it would be shocking if they did not. But the notion of the thing that one finds in Being and Time is rather slim.4 We know that there is a scientific approach to the thing that presents itself as objective and regards the thing as something present-at-hand (vorhanden). One of the important moments of Being and Time is the realization that this presumed objectivity of beings is itself founded on a more primordial lived relationship with these things (see Chapter 3). They are said to be “ready-to-hand” (zuhanden). The hammer disappears in use (where it is ready-to-hand), but on the interruption of the work is regarded from a detached perspective (as present-at-hand). Things appear in Being and Time in terms of either presence or utility. But by the time of the fourfold, Heidegger sees no real distinction between these alternatives, in so far as the assignment of a use value (of any value) requires a wholly present object available for the assessment.5 In short, there are no things in Being and Time, and this is a problem. For all its transformation of our conceptions of subjectivity, Being and Time remains wedded to an inadequate conception of “objectivity” or thinghood. To change our understanding of the subject, it is not enough to rethink human existence as Dasein. Humans do not exist alone, as no one knew better than Heidegger, but exist in a world. To transform the human, to think being-in-the-world, is to transform the world and so long as that additional work of transforming the conception of the thing remains outstanding, the project of Being and Time must remain incomplete. To change the subject while retaining the object is to change nothing. The project of Being and Time demands more. The thinking of the fourfold provides this rethinking of thing and world and in this regard arguably could be read as the consummation of Being and Time’s effort to think the world.
The fourfold is not a passing phase in Heidegger’s thinking: references to it are found in the lectures and essays of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.6 While the fourfold is often dismissed as an obscure, mystic or overly poetic exuberance of Heidegger’s thinking, along its paths Heidegger achieves his most phenomenological thought. Commentators go astray when they try to understand the fourfold as a symbol for something else or a metaphor for a hidden ontological structure or as a reinscription of earlier views: those of Heidegger himself or those of the ancient Greeks, the Taoists, Native Americans, or even Hölderlin.7 We do best when we take Heidegger at his word and, listening to his thought, let it be as strange, unconventional and thought-provoking as it can be in its evocation of thing and world.
The fourfold is said to be “gathered” (versammelt) into things and Heidegger’s use of the term warrants comment.8 As a gathering, the thing is desubstantialized; it is no longer construed as a present and self-enclosed entity, but instead as the intersection of earth, sky, mortals and divinities. Considering the thing a gathering thus precludes any conception of the thing as a steady presence. The fourfold gathers around the thing in a tenuous convergence. There is nothing everlasting or monumental about such things; they tarry ephemerally (Heidegger’s term is weilen). The thing abides. The same gathering that unites the four in the thing is equally a disaggregation of that thing. What is gathered is not a homogeneity, but a spaced parting of assembled members. The fourfold disaggregates the thing by releasing it from the bounds of an encapsulated self-identity. Heidegger’s name for this, not surprisingly, is “thinging” (“The thing things”; PLT 176 = GA 79: 17). The thing in its thinging is telescoped out beyond itself. The thing is not only gathered but disassembled at once, and through this disassembly it enters the world. The fourfold delimits and thereby situates the thing in a context of the world. Each element of the fourfold names a limit or interface of the thing whereby it passes into world.
The extrapolated thing extends beyond itself along the avenues of relation presented by the four members of the fourfold. Each of these grants the thing a place within a particular cluster of relations. The particular thing is a node for such relations. The four avenues of relation taken together contextualize the thing. The thing as limited and finite is inherently tied to a world beyond it, “The limit is not where something ceases, but rather, as the Greeks recognized, the limit is that from where something begins its essencing” (PLT 152 = GA 7: 156, trans. mod.). It begins out beyond itself as led along the pathways of the fourfold. The nature of finitude is to be related to a world extending beyond oneself; it is to be “infinite”, properly understood:
In-finite means that the ends and the sides, the regions of the relation, do not stand by themselves cut-off and one-sidedly; rather, relieved of one-sidedness and finitude, they belong in-finitely to one another in the relation which “thoroughly” hold them together from its middle [Mitte]… The in-finity that is to be thought here is abysmally different from that which is merely without end.
(EHP 188 = GA 4: 163, trans. mod.)
The fourfold names the reverberating extent and radiant fringe of the thing, the way it issues out beyond itself in an infinite belonging to world.
The mortals are the humans. They are named the mortals, because they are able to die.
(PLT 176 = GA 79: 17, trans. mod.)
Death is constitutive for the mortals. The analysis of death in Being and Time showed that while death is each time what is most our own, death is nonetheless nothing that any of us might possess (see Chapter 4). What is most our own is no possession and we are no longer its possessors. Mortals are defined by this dispossession, which is only to say that the mortal is defined by something outside it (by what is not its property, by an “improper”). But in so far as I die my death in being-toward-death – and this is as much of my death that I can ever die – then this “outside” is nothing beyond me that I would lack, nothing that eventually could be added to me in order to complete me, but instead a way of naming the inclination of my being into the world. Consequently, “mortals” names those beings defined by exposure and openness to world. But to be open is not to bear a portal within an otherwise closed-off field (existence has no need for such “windows” of openness); it is to be exposed through and through. There is nothing of the mortal that is not opened in this way, for there is no way to construe mortality while retaining a steady conception of pure presence. The “absence” of death that nevertheless determines mortal existence undermines any strict opposition between presences and absence. This death is not an absence at all, but a name for what existence can never possess, which thereby holds existence open, and, in so doing, defines mortal existence as an essential relationship with a world beyond it.
Mortality is nothing other than the ineluctable sharing of such relations, a being-in-community, something made explicit in “Building Dwelling Thinking”: “Mortals dwell in so far as, by their own essence, namely, that they are capable of death as death, they accompany [others] in the use of this capability so that there may be a good death” (PLT 148 = GA 7: 152, trans. mod.). In so far as death demonstrates the role of withdrawal (or dispossession) as constitutive of finite relationality, Heidegger can identify death with a way of being that eludes the oppositional contrariety of presence/absence endemic to metaphysical thinking. Heidegger’s term for this way of relationally existing via withdrawal and non-appearance is “essencing”: “Death as the shrine of nothingness harbours in itself the essencing of being” (PLT 176 = GA 79: 18, trans. mod.). Essencing is the entrance to mortal community. Mortals are no longer world-building Dasein, but so thoroughly members of a community as to forego such privilege by participating in the fourfold’s play of thing and world.
The earth is the building bearer, the nurturing fructifying, tending the waters and stones, what grows and the animals.
(PLT 176 = GA 79: 17, trans. mod.)
Heidegger’s analysis of earth during the early to mid 1930s informs the conception of earth at the time of the fourfold. With the fourfold the emphasis falls on the earth as “bearer”.9 In “The Origin of the Work of Art”, this “bearing” (tragen) is associated with ground, but the ground that the earth provides is no stable and present terra firma, but always a groundless ground.10 The earth supports and bears precisely by withdrawing; this is the great insight of the artwork essay. The earth is no substantial ground, but a withdrawal of ground, a remaining away of ground, an “abyss” (Ab-grund) as per the first draft version of the lecture, where earth is named “a ground that, as essentially and always self-concealing, is an abyss” (UKE 11). The support that the earth provides is the freedom from a substantive basis. The grounding of the earth is a liberating.
But what can such a groundless ground support? Certainly nothing of any substance. The groundless can only support the most superficial: sheer phenomenality. Consequently, the earth is named here a “fructifying”, a “nurturing” or “blooming” bringing forth.11 The earth bears by coming to fruition in phenomenal appearing. If what appears were tied to a substance beneath it, it would never be free to reach out and appeal to us. The earth withdraws ground in order to release the superficial play of appearance, the name for which is shining. Heidegger’s earlier analysis of such shining pointed to the way in which the earth receded from every attempt to quantify and capture it (see OBT 24–5 = GA 5: 33). The earth names uncontained, qualitative appearing. This is the material basis of our existence on the earth: sensible appearance.
As groundlessness that releases appearance, the earth likewise names the register of the natural world and of thriving life. Stones and animals, no longer considered worldless or world-poor, all come to participate in the earthly opening of world.
The sky is the journey of the sun, the course of the moon, the twinkle of the stars, the seasons of the year, light and twilight of the day, dark and light of the night, the favour and the inhospi-tability of the weather, the drawing of the clouds and the blue depths of the ether.
(PLT 176 = GA 79: 17, trans. mod.)
The sky is the space of the earth’s emergence, the space wherein things appear and through which they shine. The withdrawal of the earth sets things loose to radiate through the air of the sky. But in so appearing, the thing does not enter into an empty vacuum. The sky is no abstract void.12 Instead, it is a field of movement and alteration, of changing times and changing light. The sky is a medium, an “ether”, variegated and diversified, filled with relations across fields of alternating light and time. For what appears phenomenally to reach us and appeal to us, the sky as medium of all appearing is required.13
What appears under the sky is affected by so appearing. The medium does not leave the thing untouched. In so far as the thing is exposed under the sky, it enters into a transpirative exchange with what lies beyond it (such is the nature of limit and finitude – it opens relations, wished for or not). What appears under the sky is involved in the world and marked by that involvement. Exposed to the sky, the thing is weathered by it.
While the sky names a region of familiarity, it also points to the unknown. Day follows night and the seasons change in an orderly fashion. But this order is always also an experiential context for the unexpected. The sky allows us to raise our gaze and look up beyond our immediate circumstances, open to the possibility of change. But the grace of the sky is not at our behest and we can only wait for fortunate skies and the passing of inhospitable weather. And yet, whatever change might come could never arrive were there not a medium through which it could destine itself to us.
The blueness of the sky names this mediating, crepuscular character of the sky. Blue is neither the bright light of day nor the black of night.14 There is no absolute day or night (as already remarked by Heraclitus), only this time of transition. The sky names an inviting space of neither presence nor absence. Clouds are of the essence here. They keep the sky from pure appearing, preserving its distance. In so far as clouds allow something not to appear, they are like poets who remain true to an unsaid: “The clouds poetize” (EHP 34 =GA 4: 15, trans. mod.).15
The divinities are the hinting messengers of godhood.
(PLT 176 = GA 79: 17, trans. mod.)
The divinities (die Göttlichen) name the fact that godhood (die Gottheit) has been sent to us. The divinities are not God or the gods (der Gott or die Götter), but the god-like: ones sharing in the divine and sharing it further as messengers. Particular gods play no role here and Heidegger makes explicit that the mortals “do not make them [the divinities] into their gods and do not pursue service to them as idols” (PLT 148 = GA 7: 152, trans. mod.). Rather than such personifications, at stake are the arriving hints of a message of godhood.16
The hint (der Wink) appears throughout Heidegger’s work as a way for what is absent nonetheless to announces itself: “The hint is the message of a lighting veiling [des lichtenden Verhüllens]” (OWL 44 = GA 12: 133, trans. mod.). Such an existence is a showing of concealment, an interruption of the rigid opposition between presence and absence, and hints exhibit the same ambiguity. Hints go unremarked by most, but for those with a sense for them they intimate collusion and clandestine communication. Godhood is sent through messengers who hint in this manner.
But godhood is a strange message, to say the least, and requires that we consider Heidegger’s thinking of the holy (das Heilige), which he terms the “essential sphere of godhood” (PM 258 = GA 9: 338, trans. mod.) and understands as the context in which what is “hale” or “whole” (das Heile) can appear. What is hale in this manner is a mode of presencing that resists the total availability of the standing-reserve and includes concealment at its essence. For us today, such a mode of being can only be that of the trace: “not only does the holy remain hidden as the trace of godhood, but even what is hale, the trace of the holy, appears to be extinguished” (OBP 221 = GA 5: 295, trans. mod.). But it only appears to be extinguished; it is “not yet” so. There remains a glimmer of concealment and this is what the divinities signal to us and why they can only hint at it.
To be a messenger is to be defined by something foreign, a message that one harbours without being its source. But the divinities’ message is no transmittable content. Instead, they themselves are it. Their belonging in the fourfold, their gathering at the thing, opens the dimension of a beyond in which any decision regarding the otherworldly or divine can first take place.17 The divinities announce the communicativity of existence, that it is not entirely available, but that there is still a space for decision. This openness is the presupposition for any question concerning God or the gods: “From out of their [the divinities’] holy reign, the god appears in his presence or withdraws himself in his veiling” (PLT 148 = GA 7: 151, trans. mod.).
There is no fourfold without the things that gather it into place. The elements of the fourfold each articulate a limit of the thing that opens it on to relations. The limits of the fourfold serve to weave the thing into place; they open the register of relations whereby the thing is contextualized within the world. If existence is ecstatic when outside itself, then things, too, exist ecstatically, as each member of the fourfold describes a way for the thing to be outside itself. In so doing, each one exposes the thing through an event of withdrawal that pours the thing out on to the space outside it. Each member forms a bridge by which the thing relates to the world.
This relational limit is what the fourfold share and what gathers them together. Heidegger refers to it as a “mirror-play” (Spiegel-Spiel; PLT 178 = GA 79: 19), which is the essence of each of the four and also what allows them to come together as the fourfold: “The appropriative mirroring sets each of the four free into its own, but it binds these free ones into the simplicity of their essential being toward one another [ Zueinander]” (PLT 177 = GA 79: 18). As mirroring, each of the four casts itself out to the others (Zueinander) and is likewise cast back from them: “Each of the four mirrors again in its own way the essence of the remaining others” (PLT 177 = GA 79: 18, trans. mod.). The mirrorplay of the four names the way in which the finite always transpires with the beyond (just as an outside is required for mirroring and for the mirror to be what it is). Mirroring thinks the expropriation at the heart of appropriation and belonging (“within their mutual appropriation, each is expropriated into what is its own”; PLT 177 = GA 79: 18, trans. mod.). It articulates the gathering of the four in the thing and opens the spacing of the world.
This world is a world of things that, according to the lecture “Language”, are gestures of world: “The things gesture [gebärden] world. World grants [gönnt] the things” (PLT 199 = GA 12: 21, trans. mod.). We might understand gesture here in terms of what Heidegger says of it in the 1953–4 “A Dialogue on Language”, where a gesture is “borne along by an appeal from far away calling still farther out, because carried forth out of silence” (OWL 16 = GA 12: 99, trans. mod.). Things motion beyond themselves in an unfurling of world. But world grants things a reception of their excesses. All this is to say that there is no “world” in the abstract, but always only a populated and articulated one of particular situations at particular times, and likewise no encapsulated things, but always these outpouring gestures of relationality, so many bridges thrown between world and thing. In this thinking of thing and world, what phenomenally appears (earth) does so in a medium (sky) that fosters community (mortals) and communication with a beyond (divinities).
In closing, as a thinking of contextuality, it is worth noting the various contexts in which the fourfold itself is first mentioned in Heidegger’s essays and lectures. In the lecture cycle “Insight Into That Which Is” in Bremen, a shipping centre and port city, Heidegger stresses the challenge placed on the fourfold by the ordering and delivering drive of technology; in “Building Dwelling Thinking”, a lecture held in the war-bombed city of Darmstadt, Heidegger raises the fourfold in a thinking of place and dwelling; at the Bühlerhöhe sanatorium, Heidegger delivers the lecture “Language” and treats the fourfold in conjunction with poetic language and pain; finally, in the letter to Ernst Jünger, “On the Question of Being”, the fourfold names the non-present essencing of being itself (a being that is crossed through) as a response to nihilism. The fourfold addresses all of these major concerns of Heidegger’s later work and stands as a crucial turning point along his path of thinking.
1. Egon Vietta as cited in Petzet (1993: 56).
2. In what follows I shall cite the original lecture version of “The Thing” as published in GA 79. The essay was later published in a slightly revised format in Heidegger’s 1954 volume Vorträge und Augsätze (VA 157–79). Since my English translation of GA 79 is currently still in preparation, reference will also be made to corresponding passages in the English translation of the published version of the essay in Poetry, Language, Thought (PLT).
3. In the same lecture cycle, Heidegger’s reflections on technology reach their apogee (he first coins the term “Ge-stell”, “enframing”, there). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, the fourfold must be understood in conjunction with Heidegger’s views on technology (see Chapter 13). The thing is always singularized as unique by its relational existence within a context and this singularity is precisely what is challenged by the circulation of standing-reserve under the aegis of enframing.
4. See also the 1935–6 lecture course Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen (GA 41; translated into English as WT), which concludes with a conception of “the between” (das Zwischen) quite in keeping with the thinking of the world of the fourfold.
5. The failure to recognize the metaphysical identity of presence and utility is what gives the lie to so many contemporary “pragmatist” accounts of Heidegger, accounts that tend to adhere to Being and Time (and often even only Division One). Among Heidegger’s numerous charges against pragmatism are the claims that it depends on a traditional understanding of the human as homo animalis (PM 268 = GA 9: 352) and obstructs any real thinking of technology (MHNS 61 = GA 16: 677).
6. To name only a few, after the 1949 Bremen lectures the fourfold is explicitly named in “Language” (1950, in BW), “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951, in BW), “The Question of Being” (1955, in PM), “Hölderlin’s Earth and Sky” (1959, in EHP), “Sprache und Heimat” (1960), the “Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture ‘Time and Being’” (1962, in TB) and the Zähringen seminar (1973).
7. As Heidegger himself points out in “Hölderlin’s Earth and Sky”, to wit: “This number is never expressly thought or said by Hölderlin. Nevertheless, throughout all his sayings, the four are first caught sight of out of the intimacy of their togetherness [Zueinander]” (EHP 195 = GA 4: 170).
8. See “Building Dwelling Thinking” (PLT 151 = GA 7: 155), “The Thing” (PLT 172 = GA 79: 13). The term also plays an important role in the cotemporaneous “Logos” (EGT 70 = GA 7: 225).
9. See Heidegger’s descriptions of the earth as “die bauend Tragende” (the building bearer; PLT 176 = GA 79: 17), “die dienend Tragende” (the serving bearer; PLT 147 = GA 7: 151).
10. There Heidegger speaks of “der tragende Grund” (the bearing ground; OBT 47 = GA 5: 63; on “earth” in the artwork essay, see Chapter 9). Contributions to Philosophy articulates a “remaining-away [Weg-bleiben] of the ground” (CP 265 = GA 65: 379, trans. mod.).
11. See Heidegger’s descriptions of the earth as “die nährende Fruchtende” (the nourishing fructifying; PLT 176 = GA 79: 17, trans. mod.), “die blühende Fruchtende” (the blooming fructifying; PLT 147 = GA 7: 151, trans. mod.).
12. Technically speaking, this would give the lie to the overt argument of Luce Irigaray (1999), who charges Heidegger with precisely a forgetting of these material conditions of exposure. The world of the fourfold seems the perfect counter to the abstractions that she finds operative in Heidegger’s work.
13. The earlier prefigurations of the fourfold found in Heidegger’s work throughout the 1930s omit this crucial aspect of the sky and present instead a conjunction of Dasein, gods, earth and world, for instance. Such constructions miss both the weathering aspect of exposure provided by sky as well as the fact that the world of the fourfold is utter relationality born out of the expropriative play of the fourfold, as will be shown.
14. Heidegger’s fullest treatment of blueness is to be found in “Language in the Poem: A Discussion of Georg Trakl”, delivered in 1953 (included in OWL).
15. The “Letter on Humanism” concludes with the thought that “language is the language of being as clouds are the clouds of the sky” (PM 276 = GA 9: 364).
16. Thus we cannot follow Julian Young’s assertion that the divinities would “clearly” be identified with the realm of culture as opposed to “nature” (2006: 375), especially given Heidegger’s utter repugnance for anything “cultural” (the Greeks had no culture, we might recall). Nor should the divinities be understood as reinscriptions of the “hero” from Being and Time, as he also suggests (ibid.: 375). Both attempts miss the divinities’ role in a “hermeneutics” of the hale (das Heile), as will be shown.
17. Regarding the god who accompanies a metaphysics of presence and absence, the god of philosophy, Heidegger writes, “man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god… The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy… is thus perhaps closer to the divine god [dem göttlichen Gott]” (IDS 72 = GA 11: 77, trans. mod.). On the question of god(s) in Heidegger’s thought, see Chapters 16 and 17.
Irigaray, Luce 1999. The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, M. B. Mader (trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Petzet, H.W 1993. Encounters & Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, P. Emad & K. Maly (trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Young, J. 2006. “The Fourfold”, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 2nd edn, C. Guignon (ed.), 373–92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
See Heidegger’s What Is a Thing?; “On the Question of Being”, in Pathmarks, 291–322; “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven”, in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, 175–207; “The Thing”, “Language” and “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, 163–84, 187–208 and 143–59, respectively; and Insight Into That Which Is: The Bremen Lectures and The Principles of Thinking: Freiburg Lectures, A. J. Mitchell (trans.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
See Pöggeler (1987: 200–216); Richardson (2003: 566–94); J. F. Mattéi, “The Heideggerian Chiasmus”, in Janicaud & Mattéi (1995), 39–150; and J. Young, “The Fourfold”, in Guignon (2006), 373–392. See also F.-W von Herrmann, “Die vier Weltgegenden als das Geviert”, in Die zarte, aber helle Differenz: Heidegger und Stefan George, 259–82 (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999).