From The Philosopher's Gaze,  by David Michael Levin, U. of California Press, 1999. Footnotes are omitted, and the word homolegein is transcribed from Greek.

Gestalt Gestell Geviert:
The Way of the Lighting  (116 ff.)

[For one meaning of "lighting," read forward to page 142--

The same themes—lighting and perceiving—are elaborated further in Heidegger's 1943 study, "Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B16)." According to Heidegger, Heraclitus

tells of the lighting whose shining he attempts to call forth into the language of thinking. Insofar as it illuminates, the lighting endures. We call its illumination the lighting [die Lichtung]. What belongs to it, and how and where it takes place, still remain to be considered. The word "light" means lustrous, beaming, brightening. Lighting bestows the shining, opens what shines to an appearance. The open is the realm of unconcealment and is governed by disclosure.]

Pages 117-120--

...I will argue, in an elaboration of a phenomenology I consider to be implicit in Heidegger's thinking, [1] that there is, in our ordinary, everyday way of looking and seeing, an inveterate tendency to totalize and reify the perceptual Gestalt , bringing its dynamics to a standstill, a state of permanence and availability for which Heidegger, possibly with Schelling's text in mind, used the term Bestand ; [2] that this is a tendency which undoubtedly characterized even the vision of the early Greeks, but which has become increasingly pronounced since the beginning of the modern epoch inaugurated in the humanism of the Rinascimento; [3] that the reification and totalization of the perceptual Gestalt , a process that takes place through the subject's acts of re-presentation  (Vor-stellung ) within the subject-object structure, is a manifestation, a primary site and instance, of what Heidegger calls the Gestell (enframing, or the universal imposition of a total grid of interpretation), effecting a certain disfiguration (Verunstaltung ) of the figure-ground formation; and finally [4] that, with the introduction, in his later thinking, of the concept of the Geviert (the fourfold of earth and sky, gods and mortals), Heidegger was attempting to articulate, at least in a provisional and preliminary way, the potential for a new historical Gestalt formation, a disclosive gathering and laying-down no longer disfigured by the perceptual processes operative in and as the enframing of Gestell .

This account will bring out into the open ways in which the ocularcentric discourse of metaphysics reinforces the false sociocultural reality—the unreconciled social condition of our own construction—that it nevertheless accurately reflects; but we will also discover that, in spite of its hegemony, this discourse is compelled to acknowledge experiences with vision that permit a breaching of its power and even the articulation, if only in its margins and interstices, of a different way of looking and seeing—a vision of different character.

In the third section, I will examine Heidegger's writings on the pre-Socratics, arguing that, in heeding the articulations of the phenomenon of the lighting, his rigorously hermeneutical phenomenology lets the claim (Anspruch ) on our capacity for vision itself—a claim first laid down for our eyes by the presencing unconcealment, the giving and the givenness of the field of lighting—suggest and evoke the traits (Grundzüge ) of an historically different way to look and see: somehow, even in these historically dark times, and in the face of the most extreme, most penetrating and pervasive sociocultural pressures, to receive nevertheless, in a receptively appropriate (geeignet, geschickt ) way, and to whatever extent be possible, the gift (the Es gibt , i.e., both the giving and the givenness) of this lighting, that by grace of which alone a field of visibility, an open space delimited by its horizon and the concealments of the invisible, is first opened up and laid down for us. (My words "by grace of" are not at all meant to reinscribe vision in the myths of ontotheology, but rather to recognize that the lighting is something beneficent that we receive as given and take for granted, even if only in its ontically degraded and not in its ontologically engaged dimensionality.) 

The most appropriate way to relate to the presencing of being is called, in Greek, the homolegein [correspondence] and it is a deep, ontological, mimetic correspondence between the lighting of the visual field—that as which the being of beings presences for our vision—and our own way of looking, seeing, and making visible. This correspondence essentially requires the overcoming of the ontologically forgetful habitus of ordinary, everyday vision, a vision of restricted dimensionality (Einschränkung ), and also, beyond this, the achievement of a radically different interactive relationship with the ground of perception—a relationship that might be described as mimesis , since it would bring forth an isomorphism or correspondence between our ontic vision and its ontological ground, the primordially disclosive opening-up, laying-down and gathering of the field itself, which is the gift of the lighting.

The isomorphism would take place when, through a process of recollection, we not only [i] realize that, in forming a figure-ground structure within the lighting, our way of looking, seeing, and making visible is itself—like the primordial lighting—an opening-up, laying-down, and gathering, and [ii] realise that our opening-up, laying-down, and gathering is derivative from and dependent on the primordial opening-up, laying-down, and gathering of the lighting, that by grace of which alone our looking and seeing are made possible, but also [iii] translate this understanding into our worldly comportment, looking, seeing, and making things visible in the clearings we ourselves open up, lay down, and gather in such a way that the lighting—which as ground withdraws from visibility into self-concealment—is nevertheless to some extent unconcealed in its presencing, made visible as the primordial opening-up, laying-down, and gathering of a field of visibility and invisibility, as the clearing within which vision as we know it first becomes possible. Thus, the homolegein would be an attempt to learn from the lighting another way of looking and seeing, another way of receiving the presencing of beings.

As a way of looking and seeing, this homolegein would thus be in a hermeneutical relationship to the interplay of concealment and unconcealment, manifesting as an interplay between the visible and the invisible. By calling the homolegein "hermeneutical," I mean that it would be a way of relating to that which is presencing which preserves and protects the interplay, preserves and protects the dimensionality of the invisible, caring for concealment. Here, then, we shall consider hermeneutics to be a discipline of interpretation that understands, respects, and protects the most deeply hidden, the ever-invisible, realizing in paradoxical principles both of theory and of practice that it is actually only through invisibility and concealment that the truth of perception is preserved and protected—from dogmatism, from captivity in enframing, and from the commodifications of the marketplace. This hermeneutical "as" is not just a strategy for reading texts; it is also precisely the "as" that is involved, for example, in the possibility of our seeing the lighting as the presencing of being; it is the "as" that is involved in seeing the figure-ground differentiation as an instance of the ontological difference between being and beings; and it is also the "as" that is involved in the imaginative effort to see the disfigured perceptual Gestalt , releasing the figure-ground structure which typically forms in the epoch of the Gestell , as a Geviert released from its metaphysical reifications, released into the gathering openness of its deepest, most redemptive, most reconciled truth. (This hermeneutical "as" figures also in Wittgenstein's "seeing as," as in our seeing the dawning of an aspect.)

Now, the gathering of re-collection, as a return to the opening ground, a Rücknahme in den zu eröffnenden Grund , would be crucial to the transfiguration of the figure-ground Gestalt: its release from the disfigurements of enframing (Gestell ) and its emergence and becoming as a gathering of the fourfold. The opening, gathering, and laying-down that would take place in and as the ring of the Geviert is therefore to be understood as entering into a figure-ground formation, a Gestalt , that our looking and seeing would have opened up, gathered, and laid down by virtue of their being (or say by virtue of their character as) a hermeneutical re-collection of being, gathering the presencing of the lighting, the boundless giving-to-be-hold of the field, into the pain and the thankfulness of memory.

See also page 147--

Were there a looking and seeing that could "accomplish the lighting" and "bring it to the fullness of its essence," this would be a way of looking and seeing that, by virtue of its homolegein , [i] releases the figure-ground Gestalt which it gathers and lays down from pressures toward closure, keeping it ever open to the immeasurable openness of the ground and field, and correlatively [ii] checks its drive toward total graspability, total visibility, letting what presences be gathered into a Gestalt that opens out into the invisible and lets this invisible be gathered up hermeneutically, i.e., without violence to its being invisible. Were there such a looking and seeing, gathering and laying down in accordance with the ontological "normativity" of the methodological principles formulated in Heidegger's extremely radical conception of hermeneutical phenomenology, the Gestalt would become a Geviert , a gathering of the fourfold. But such a "moment of vision," such an Augenblick , as Heidegger calls it in Being and Time , is hardly more than thinkable in today's tragic world.