On Heidegger, Dwelling, Art, and the Fourfold

A process piece reflecting on our discussion of two essays by Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1936) and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (1951), with particular emphasis on how he rethinks the object of art and our sense of place. Heidegger's essays attend to the experience of alienation from what he calls "the fourfold," our relation to our own mortality, to the earth, to the sky, and to the divine. A key element in this, I claim, is the question of tradition. How has a sense of "the West" or "Europe" as an intellectual and human tradition been modified by the worst/essence of modernity? And what possibilities remain for thinking about being in modernity yet also outside modernity? And, most importantly, how do Heidegger's ideas travel from reflections on a Greek temple (the putative origin and foundation of European identity) to other sites of gathering of the divine, of memory, of moments of origin or transformation?