18
Insight Into That Which Is [18,19,20]

the mirror-play of the fourfold. From it is entrusted the single fold of the four.

We name the appropriating mirror-play of the single fold of the earth and sky, divinities and mortals, the world. The world essences in that it worlds. This says: The worlding of world is neither explicable by nor grounded upon anything other than itself. This impossibility is not a matter of our human thinking being incapable of such explaining and grounding. The inexplicability and ungroundability of the worlding of the world lies much more in the fact that things like causes and grounds remain unsuitable for the worlding of the world. As soon as human knowing reaches an explanation here, it does not somehow step over the essence of the world, but rather collapses beneath the essence of world. The human will to explain does not at all reach into what is simplistic of the single fold of worlding. The united four are already suffocated in their essence when one represents them only as individuated actualities that are grounded through one another and are to be explained in terms of each other.

The unity of the fourfold is the fouring. Indeed the fouring does not happen in such a way that it encloses the four and as this enclosure only comes to them belatedly. Just as little is the fouring limited to the four, once again present at hand, merely standing next to each other.

The fouring essences as the appropriating mirror-play of the ones that are simply entrusted to each other. The fouring essences as the worlding of world. The mirror-play of world is the round dance of appropriation [Reigen des Ereignens]. For this reason the round dance does not hug the four like a hoop. The round dance is a ring that rings by its play as a mirroring. Appropriating, it lights up the four in the gleam of their single fold. Gleaming, the ring everywhere openly brings the four into the ownership of the riddle of their essence. The collected essence of the mirror-play of the world, ringing in this way, is a circling [das Gering]. In the circling of this playfully-mirroring ring, the four nestle into their united essence and nonetheless each respectively into its own essence. Supple in this way, they join pliantly and worldingly the world.

Supple, lithesome, malleable, pliant, light, this is called in our old German language ring and gering. As what is slight about the ring [das Gering des Ringes], the mirror-play of the


Martin Heidegger (GA 79) The Thing - Bremen and Freiburg Lectures

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