The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

Exquisite. I think it is the premier work on elucidating Heidegger. This is the book Heidegger would want to have written on his work. While focusing on Heidegger’s later thinking, he folds into its account their movement in relation to and away from Being and Time. Every page and every commentary on a topic and idea was elucidating and affected my thinking.Mitchell’s command of the Heideggerian corpus is dazzling. He weaves his accounts through the immense corpus with ease and always offers up citations that are at once illuminating and that also spur new awareness of the texts.One gripe: I hate when he, as other academics do, refer to texts by their place within the collected works of Heidegger., instead of using the separately published texts and books. Who among readers is actually going to have these collected works available at their fingertips to refer to and so fully engage Mitchell’s inspiring insights? Not me. It is annoying, off-putting and it feels dismissive, if not a bit insulting.What I take away from this book is the story of Heidegger’s life as a deeply committed journey to grasp the pulsating powers that shape our lives. --even to the point of making a horrible decision along that path. Heidegger never stopped thinking, always dared to start anew. This place that marked his final thoughts, that of the Fourfold, brings the historicity of human conceiving into the foreground of exposition, and releases it from the obscurity of metaphysics' "Being." As revealed by Mitchell, in these late thoughts Heidegger expresses the full power of how our living is so utterly conceptually saturated, on the axes of earth, sky, divinities and mortals, and yet cedes its power, still, to Cartesian coordinates of positionally that technology then uses to map out its exploits of scarfing up what is at hand in the ready reserve and then guarantees to us how replicable everything, including human live, has been leveled down to being..Mitchell’s accounts of all these many facets of Heidegger’s thoughts — so many of them — seem to imply that this great thinking exposes us to dimensions we can now, as never before, enter into so as to live in greater relationalities with creative, generative, revitalizing powers. He does not say that we should do so, or give us guidance has to how we might go about it. I suggest that, perhaps, dwelling with and abiding with this book for a while, maybe again and again, will inspire your own thoughts on how do do so.That said, I am still not convinced that either Dasein or Mortals are beings-unto-death. Yes, we are beings that envision the duration, slightness and mere whiling of happenings, but I read that capability as one that moves onward, through transformation to new, more expansive and more encompassing capabilities. Instead of mortality surrendering to death, I see it as the capability to be a generative, life creating power on earth, in tune with divinities, and so, as a species become a veritable sky of light, wind, rain and so be a dimension that opens to growth and creates new ways of flourishing. In my work, the ideas of Gilbert Simondon, on “transduction,” help us think this notion through to actualization. That is, of course, only if we do so.And so, from reading this magisterial book, I wonder, with this thinking laid bare for us by Andrew Mitchell, so articulately, delicately, so slightly and so daringly, do we not have placed before us a sufficient imperative to begin to make our own turn?

This is the best book ever written. Okay, well, the best book on Heidegger ever written. Okay, okay, the best book on later Heidegger ever written. But for some of us there is little to distinguish these three claims. I'm glad to be around when Mitchell is writing in the same way I was glad to be around when Elvis or Dylan came along. He's that important, I think, and offers the same potential to shape you through his reading of Heidegger. I have seldom felt so indebted to an author.

Extremely helpful in understanding the fourfold in Heidegger.

une étude incontournable!!!