Lovitt: GE-EIGNET / GATHERING INTO HIS OWN

The translation “gathered into his own” for ge-eignet takes cognizance of the prefix ge-, which Heidegger has separated from the verb eignen (to be one’s own). Heidegger repeatedly stresses the force of ge- as meaning “gathering.” Cf. e.g., QT 19. Here the suggestion of gathering points to man’s belonging within the wholly mutual interrelating of the fourfold of sky and earth, divinities and mortals. The ensuing allusions to “the divine” and “the god” bespeak the same context of thought (cf. “The Thing,” Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 178 ff.). Ge-eignet speaks specifically of that bringing into its own which is the disclosing coming-to-pass (Ereignis) of the “insight into that which is” that is the in-flashing of Being into its own enduring as presence — the in-flashing that brings to pass, in Being’s manifesting of itself to itself, the worlding of world and the thinging of the thing. (QCT p. 47)