THE FOURFOLD
these there appears the god in his essence, withdrawing him from every comparison with what is present. [. . .]
The mortals are the humans. They are called the mortals because they are able to die. Dying means: to be capable of death as death. (GA 79, 17/BFL, 16–17)
These four elements of the fourfold are what join together to constitute the relational thing. Each warrants comment in turn.
The earth is perhaps the most familiar of the four components of the fourfold. The earth is materiality. The earth is the material out of which things are composed. But we go wrong to think this material quality of the earth as anything substantial or stable. To understand this earth, we must rid ourselves of such substantialist prejudices. This is just what Heidegger’s emphasis on the earth as a “bearer” (Tragende) is meant to do. In the fourfold the earth names the way that things exist as sensuously and materially apparent. Heidegger’s name for this is “bearing.”
Bearing is not to be confused with “ground” (Grund) or grounding. In the typical grounding scenario, that which is grounded, the object, is traced back to a substantive, eternal basis, its essence, for example. What is grounded is dependent upon the ground and follows from it. With bearing, Heidegger indicates instead a cobelonging. What is borne (das Getragene) requires its bearer (der Träger), but it likewise constitutes that bearer through the state of being borne. In a similar sense, we might say that a parent is only a parent thanks to the child. While the parent bears the child, it is only through the child that the adult first becomes a parent.
What this means is that there ultimately is no ground, or no ultimate ground. The only traction that we find in this world is through a reciprocal relation of holding each other afloat. We bear each other, we bear the world, but those same others and that same world bears us up in turn.
With such a flimsy support of thingly existence, it is no wonder that the earth can be nothing substantive. Instead what the earth bears is called a “fructifying” (Fruchtende). What the earth bears comes to fruition, it blossoms into appearance. The earth bears the sensuous appearance of things. And it is only in this sense that it can be the “material” of things. The earth as sensuous gleam (Glanz) is what things are composed of. Things do not exist materially, they exist phenomenally. They are composed not of inert, dead matter, but of shining, phenomenal radiance. They make up a world that reaches out to us, radiates to us.
The nature that Heidegger lists in his depiction of the earth—stone, water, plants, and animals—all make appearances in his work of the late 1940s and 1950s. Each is rethought in terms of just this manner of existing, a nonsubstantive bearing relation. Nothing is simply inert, stones speak, rivers poetize, and both plants and animals move past any presumed encapsulation in an environment (Umwelt) or “disinhibiting ring” (Enthemmungsring).
If the earth is the phenomenal appearance of things, then it needs some space in which to appear. The sky is this space. The ungrounded earthly appearing that gleams in an untethered radiance can only do so through a medium capable of receiving it. The sky is that medium. Without the sky, there would
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