Jesús Adrián

Autonomous University of Barcelona

What Does It Mean to Dwell? Heidegger on the Relationality of Things

29 March 2022, 17h00 (Lisbon Time – GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy) | School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

In August 1951, Heidegger hold a conference in the city of Darmstadt entitled Building, Dwelling, Thinking. Since its publication, architects, town planners, environmentalists, designers and artists have engaged in a fruitful dialogue with Heidegger —particularly focusing on the relation on space and place, the difference between dwelling and residing, or the problem of contemporary rootlessness. Having this dialogue in mind, the lecture will tackle three questions open to a later discussion with the audience: i) the ontological meaning of space; ii) the difference between dwelling in the technological era of positionality (Gestell) and dwelling in the fourfold (Geviert); and iii) the development of an ontology of relationality. In my presentation, I argue that Heidegger’s late thinking develops an interesting phenomenology of things. The bulk of his writings —such as the 1949 Bremen lecture cycle, Insight Into That Which Is, The Question Concerning Technology, Building Dwelling Thinking, or The Thing —explore new phenomenological routes to think of the immediacy and proximity of things. As Mitchell shows, the concept of the fourfould (Geviert) provides an account of the things as inherently relational. Unlike the encapsulated object of modern philosophy, the fourfould presents things as unfolding themselves in opening relations with the world beyond them. The things are utterly worldly or, to put it differently, things are immersed in the world. It is the field of their interaction. In this sense, the fourfould is the key to understanding the relational, mediated and finite nature of things. Therefore, we could speak of the passage from an ontology of substantiality to an ontology of relationality.