The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger

Heidegger’s later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names “the fourfold”—a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals—and Mitchell’s book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger’s later thought. As such it provides entrée to the full landscape of Heidegger’s postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, weather, time, language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us.

ANDREW J. MITCHELL is an associate professor of philosophy at Emory University. His previous books include Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling (2010), and translations of Heidegger’s On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The 1934–35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays (2014), Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (2012), and, as cotranslator, Four Seminars (2003).