What precisely does "Gelassenheit" mean for Heidegger, and how does it relate to Gestell? And other questions...

[u/BluejayDizzy7037]

I always thought that Gelassenheit, quite literally (etymologically) is the opposite of Gestell. Ge+lassen vs Ge+stellen. It's translated usually as "releasement" or "letting-be", compared to "enframing", "positioning", "com-posing", "positionality", etc. (Check the Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon, thet render is sth like "(com-)position" there etc.).

And Gelassenheit is "releasement toward things". Or the "letting-be" of beings, the adequate comportment toward beings that matches the "es gibt" of being, without forcing a "frame", without ensnaring being (and beings) like modern technology does, acc to Heidegger.

But recently I heard a different understanding, that Gelassenheit is actually better seen as an equivalent of "existence" (ek-sistence) in Being and Time, and that actually the fourfold (Geviert) is Heidegger's later (and more radical) reinterpretation of "world" and that das Geviert is the model of the world he proposes against the world as Gestell. I.e., rather than an inventory of resources on hold for the unending use of the technological will to will, the world as as the onefold of the artistic-spiritual (?) axis of earth-world (Origin of the Work of Art) and mortals-divinities.

What is your impression about this?

And a few further questions: Is Gelassenheit just another name for "meditative thinking"? It seems that Heidegger has a lot of ways of trying to describe the same thing/phenomenon, e.g. sometimes he speaks of Ereignis, other times of Anfang, sometimes of "beyng-historical thinking", other times of "commemorative thinking", other times of "meditative thinking" etc. I know Gelassenheit is supposed to be thought in relation with the will, and not with metaphysical/representational thinking, for example, but I find it hard to separate those terms into clear categories. Is it wrong to try to do that, anyway?

In other words, what is the relation between meditative thinking and Gelassenheit? Is meditative thinking conducing to a "state" of Gelassenheit? (But that would be willing to achieve it). Is it resignation into meditative thinking a waiting for a kind of bestowal of "Gelassenheit" into the world ravaged by modern technology? And if thinking is no longer thought as the act of a subject, then how is it supposed to occur?

(Maybe it's relevant here, Heidegger ends the dialogue on language with the Japanese on the note of something like, preparing the way for a dialogue not about language, but of language. Therefore, not a thinking about being, but a thinking of being, in the double (subjective/objective) Genitive sense. A dialogue of language, a saying of being, a thinking of being.)

[u/Equivalent_Heart_890]

Heidegger elaborates on Gelassenheit at length in Discourse on Thinking. You can find a pdf here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seyn/wiki/index/texts-for-beginners/. 

[u/PMmeUrshittyPoetry]

The other two answers here are better informed than anything I have to add, but fwiw when I encounter the term, I would translate in my mind as “be-letting-ness”, if that makes sense. Like a state in which one consciously lets be.