Given to Thinking: The Poetic and Philosophical Endowment of Martin Heidegger's Fourfold

Abstract

The claim of this thesis is that the poetic and philosophical endowment given to thinking by Heidegger’s conception of the fourfold (das Geviert) deserves to be better understood. In pursuit of this understanding, I draw on the work of several poets to show how, in the poetic thinking of Heidegger’s fourfold, relation is even more fundamental than what is related. Indeed, the fourfold is relation. The four elements—earth, sky, divinities and mortals—of the fourfold amount to what Heidegger names “world”, which is what allows beings to appear by way of a “fugal” articulation. As gathered into the fourfold, beings cannot but show up as entwined, resisting any hierarchical pretention, presented in such a way that any being is always related to something that lies outside itself. The poets in this thesis all say this worldly relation. They evince the Heideggerian idea of a “bringing-forth” as an arising of something from out of itself in the unveiling of the fourfold. They show how gathered things in the fourfold “intend” beyond themselves and towards us, there where we find ourselves involved, often under duress, in a larger array of relations. Finally, the poetry in this thesis brings us closer to understanding how language speaks in the fourfold. The poems demand that we pay attention to the claim of language itself and its relation to relation. For it is not just what language is related to, but that there is relation in the first place, that is at stake in poetry.