Conclusions It is only once we understand techne as an operation that gathers and is gathered in and through the fourfold that we can understand dwelling as something that marks and claims. Dwelling is something that comes to us without coming from us (see Joronen, 2010). To borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty (1968), we cannot claim to be the origin of our dwelling any more than we can claim to be the origin of our heart or its beating.(7) The world is that which we have been bequeathed. The question of building, therefore, is a question of how Dasein appropriates that which it receives. How do mortals creatively enrol (through techne) and thus participate in the world in which it is gathered? The answer I have attempted to sketch out here is that Dasein builds in order to make a claim—a claim that marks out something that is ‘its own’ in the midst of the unrelenting movement of the fourfold. In this sense, mortals build tools, symbols, and landscapes to mark a site where the fourfold can be disclosed as not simply a world but our world—a place that names our being vis-à-vis the restless unfolding that the fourfold announces. Such buildings are only ever claims. The violent creative works that mortals build immediately succumb to the fourfold’s unfolding (an unfolding that marks both their origin and finitude). This is why Heidegger describes dwelling as a process of coming to be at home in not being at home (1971a; 2000). Although we discussed this idea above in terms of the disclosive dynamics of techne, we can now see it in more fundamental terms. Techne as building (ie, the disclosive act of dwelling) necessarily estranges because it builds a home where it can never properly belong. Indeed, building is the act of marking and claiming that which is never properly ours. Things, symbols, landscapes, and other buildings are not expressions of internal worlds (culturally or historically bequeathed) but are contextual aspirations. They mark out (build) ‘a claim’ to ‘a world’. Building is how we, as mortals in the midst of change, transformation, and death, endeavour to hold onto a world by claiming it as our own; it is how we work to build a place for ourselves even as such sites elude our mortal hands. This, for Heidegger, is the destiny to which we have been delivered. And to reassure ourselves with the height of our buildings, the speed of our motorways, or the sheer abundance of our material possessions is to delude ourselves from reckoning with this most basic situation; that is, the situation of not being at home, of not having a place in the world that can resolutely be called our own.
Dwelling is something that comes to us without coming from us . The question of building, therefore, is a question of how Dasein appropriates that which it receives. How do mortals participate in the world in which it is gathered The answer is that Dasein builds in order to make a claim—a claim that marks out something that is ‘its own’ in the midst of the unrelenting movement of the fourfold mortals build symbols and landscapes to mark a site where the fourfold can be disclosed as our world Such buildings are only ever claims. This is why Heidegger describes dwelling as a process of coming to be at home in not being at home building is the act of marking and claiming that which is never properly ours. Things, symbols, landscapes, and other buildings are not expressions of internal worlds but are contextual aspirations They mark out a claim’ to ‘a world’. Building is how we endeavour to hold onto a world by claiming it as our own it is how we work to build a place for ourselves even as such sites elude our mortal hands. This, for Heidegger, is the destiny to which we have been delivered