Though Heidegger's essay “The Thing" is widely available in English, it's maybe useful to also provide a PDF of it. Also, at the end of this note is a link to a PDF of the entire book (which downloads slower, maybe).
With Heidegger, keep in mind that he can only speak from his time. Television, for example, was barely invented. So, questions of our being are shared and not (like a mirrorplay of identity in difference—being together identity-in-difference). Now, we grow up as if the Internet arose from Nature. What a "Thing"!
He speaks to the future, not to his time, yet from his time calling for futural appropriation.
It's for you to find how potential for focal gathering belongs with you within and among Us now, going on, potentially originary.
Albert Hofstadter was the best translator of later Heidegger into English (late '60s—early '70s) through a translation project for Harper&Row—led by J. Glenn Gray—that sought to find an English idiom for Heidegger's ways-with-words that the Macquarrie/Robinson duo (trans. of Sein und Zeit) didn't venture (wisely). That, by the way, was all done with Heidegger, who chose what was most appropriate for first English translations that would cohere across texts, such that other work would come to be appreciated relative to the work he considered best for beginning (thinking back in light of forward thinking—re-thinking in light of The Open, so to speak).
Hofstadter writes in the Preface to Poetry, Language, Thought (which contains "The Thing") about translating 'das Ereignis' as "disclosure of appropriation”:
...It is because of [the previously rendered] interpenetrating association of coming out into the open, the clearing, the light—or disclosure—with the conjunction and compliancy of mutual appropriation, that I have ventured to translate 'das Ereignis,' in the Addendum to "Origin [of the Work of Art]," not just as "the event," "the happening," or "the occurence," but rather as "the disclosure of appropriation." This translation has survived the critical scrutiny of Heidegger himself, as well as J. Glenn Gray and Hannah Arendt, and therefore I repose a certain trust in its fitness."Interpenetration" gels with a keynote of "The Thing": "mirrorplay." As if we become the things we love; or loves become each other—in disclosive appropriating of things among us.
Is the jug a trope for a cranium? That may seem grim (What is one lost mind among millions of lives trashed by war?), but thinking involves interplays in the time-space of minding, where things change by effecting, as well as affecting, each other.
"The Thing" is a text, a chalice, by an authorship setting up an interplay between textual path and reading writing, writing in reading.
A jug, so caringly made by a craftman’s hands... Fourfolding may be manifold (like Likeness!: homologies): vase (re: Earth), crucible (re: Sky), chalice (re: Divinities), urn (re: mortality)—holding good: water, scents, wine, ashes.
Here’s a more extended experiment with fourfolding, which is also part of the “conceptual inquiry” Area of gedavis.com.
And here’s the entire book: Poetry, Language, Thought
