enowning
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
 
Andrew Mitchell on the fourfold in things.
The fourfold is said to be "gathered" (versammelt) into things and Heidegger's use of the term warrants comment. 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 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 the world.

Pp. 209-10
 
Comments:
"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."

So long as that is understood in the context of identity and difference as being inseperable. For the thing is not the world and yet cannot be fathomed apart from the world.

I cannot help wondering if development of string theory will begin to give a theoretical confirmation of the fourfold, even while it manipulates things in the continued application of the frame.
 
You're auggesting that the gods, mortals, earth and sky, are dimensions of the thing, but they're curled up in tiny loops that we can't see? That's as empirical as string theory, so far.
 
"...curled up in tiny loops..."

Thank you for the reality reminder. Actually I was thinking of MH's references to "dance" and the appeal to "vibration" in strings and Heraclitus' change. But it is true that string theory is at the subatomic level and the four-fold is at the holistic level, so I will have to wait for a theory of everything.
 
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