index
Heidegger
click on images for full-size:
Heidegger's fourfold (from the National Arboretum collection of bonsai and penjing)
Time and Word in the darkness in Berlin
For Heidegger the 'world' does not stand revealed by being in contrast to other worlds. Any contrasts are within the world. Yet the world's features and its structure and its earth can be revealed. How can this happen? The very basic phenomenological processes or structures can't be revealed as standing in comparison with others, because they condition and make possible all such comparisons. Some theories say they can be revealed in contrast with what they make possible: Hegel: in pure thought; Husserl: in properly disciplined intuitions. Heidegger doesn't quite take that route. He looks for phenomena within the world that can be the appearance of the world as such; hence the famous analyses of anxiety, conscience, being toward death, and later of artworks and poetry. The structures he finds revealed, early and late, refuse to be organized into hierarchies. For instance, with his fourfold, the earth might seem to be an immediacy, but the play of the fourfold is supposed to reveal internal non-immediacy even in the earth. That non-immediacy is no dialectic; it is a play, as one of the equiprimordials. No firsts.