Reflections on the Fourfold
The basic issues to which Heidegger refers with the technical term das
Geviert ("the fourfold, the quadrate, the foursome") emerged in all likelihood from Heidegger's concern with the poetry of Friedrich Holderlin. In his poems, Holderlin often speaks about the gods and the mortals, about heaven and earth.
The term itself appears for the first time in the published works in the lecture "The Thing". In this lecture Heidegger describes Being as a fourfold polyvalence, the four basic dimensions of which he specifies there with the help of an analysis showing the four basic aspects of a pitcher, which are intimately related to the dimensions of the fourfold, heaven and earth, gods and mortals. Heidegger adds there that these four dimensions are complementary; to think one of them thoroughly is to think all of them as a unity.
They are said to mirror each other, and in this mutual mirroring each becomes properly itself. The event of mirroring each other appropriates and liberates each unto its proper self; yet it also binds what is so liberated in the oneness of their essential belonging
together.
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