Heidegger's Dwelling

In Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking (1951), he sets up a tension between dwelling and technology. Simply, he says, in dwelling we save the earth rather than mastering it. Mastering the earth, on the other hand, as he outlined elsewhere in The Question Concerning Technology (1953), is the domain of technology and the science that serves it.

Heidegger says that to dwell is to safeguard the essential unfolding of the fourfold, or quadrature. This fourfold he describes as consisting of the earth, the sky, the mortals, and the divinities. This is frankly obscure. I think it would not be doing too much violence to the Master’s thinking if I was to substitute ‘that which we know as heavy’ for the earth, ‘that which we know as light’ for the sky, ‘that which we know as being of the human finite condition (both physically and temporally specific)’ for the mortals, and ‘that which we know as unknowable’ for the divinities. To dwell is thus to safeguard the unfolding of these things: to aid this unfolding by thoughtfully living through them. If I was to rephrase Heidegger’s notion of dwelling in terms that are more accessible, I would say that it was equivalent to “living in awareness” – in awareness of the quadrature as I have described it.

Now, Heidegger’s description of dwelling is a lot more confusing than this. He both seems to straight up equate dwelling with the Being of humans, what elsewhere he refers to as Dasein, and also describe dwelling as something to be learned, to be developed or cultivated. Further, while dwelling as an activity can be cultivated, it is also a sort of cultivation itself, a ‘caring’ for the world, and thus a making of the world. Dwelling is thus also that sort of being which is similar to making. I would then like to extend my rephrasing of dwelling to “that sort of living in awareness such as resembles a making of the world.” And there I'll leave it.