In Being and Time, Dasein designates human existence, but in his non public writings of the 1930s, Heidegger attempts to think Da-sein (now written with a hyphen) in terms of a not-only-human site of being in which a world discloses itself in a fuller way. He thinks of Da-sein as a concrete time-space in which truth occurs. Such a time-space (Da-sein) happens only with beings, with words, works of art, or deeds that “shelter” truth and configure a concrete site of being, something that Heidegger elaborates, for instance, in his essay from 1936 “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Thus, we may be struck by words or works of art that open up for us a fuller sense of being or a fuller sense of world. In essays from the 1950s (for instance, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” and “The Thing”), Heidegger writes how things “gather” the world understood as the fourfold of earth and sky, mortals (humans), and divinities. His meditations on how in partaking in the configuration of a concrete site of being, things may occur in a way that they shelter truth or gather a world—these meditations occur against the backdrop of his experience of how currently in the West, things don’t really happen in this way, how they don’t shelter truth and don’t gather a world but are encountered in advance as disposable commodities swallowed up in the demand for calculability, productivity, and enjoyment.

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