Object Lesson VII: The Fourfold One

Heidegger’s fourfold, to me, encapsulates a concept towards which much of the rhetorical scholarship I’ve read this semester seems to be headings: the breaking down of distinctions and divisions; the acceptance of a holistic worldview. Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert also assert that “Seeing the world as a deep and interconnected stitchwork of things that lays claims on us…stands to recompose our way of being in the world,” going on to suggest that such a way of seeing will reshape humans’ relationship with the “things” they live with in an age of mass-technology. Despite the fourfold’s quadruplicity it is still referred to as a “one,” recognizing, as humans always have, the differences between “things” while simultaneously accepting their inextricability. This calls to mind Jenny Edbauer’s notion of an ecology of rhetoric; she formulates a notion of the rhetorical situation as “a mixture of processes and encounters,” which decentralizes human subjects by recognizing the interplay between they and the objects (or, more appropriately, “quasi-objects” ala Latour) which Heidegger designates as “things.” Edbauer goes on to prescribe a model for discussing this interplay; one such model, perhaps, is the Gaia hypothesis.

I first encountered the Gaia hypothesis in the book of the recently dearly-departed biologist Lynn Margulis (former wife of Carl Sagan), titled Dazzle Gradually. In one chapter she describes the Earth as an organism onto itself, one simultaneously sustained by and sustaining all the organisms and non-organic processes which constitute the world as we know it. The water and weather cycle is Earth’s circulatory system, ensuring that the water required by life is delivered where it is needed; the atmosphere is a skin, one which protects from numerous external hazards while ensuring the homeostasis of our internal environment; living creatures function just like the microscopic organisms and organelles which perform various tasks in the human body, each having a certain effect upon the ecosystem as a whole. Life evolved in response to the conditions on Earth, but Earth has also evolved in response to life.

James Lovelock used the model of Daisyworld to explain the Gaia hypothesis. The following videos give a good overview of the hypothesis—a description of Daisyworld can be found starting at about 5:00 on the second video and continuing into the third.

Essentially, this idea argues that Earth is the way it is because we are the way we are-- when the hypothetical planet achieves conditions conducive to growing daisies they begin to spread. Because the black daisies reflect energy from the Sun the planet itself begins to warm until the white daisies are able to thrive, causing the entire planet to be overtaken by white daisies-- then the temperature drops again until conditions are ideal for black daisies to begin thriving, and thus the organisms influence the planet and vice-versa.


This hypothesis may not seem directly related to rhetoric, but the whole idea of a holistic notion of mutual influence between all things ultimately comes down to elementary physics-- things governed by forces bounce around together in spheres, causing chains of reactions that can only be understood if all elements in the equation are accounted for. This is how I understand Heidegger's fourfold.