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FINK: Perception of the sunset is the right of the naively encountered world as against the scientific interpretation of the world. Through cultivation and indirect knowledge, a human can come to the point where he no longer sees what lies before his eyes, to the point, for instance, where he no longer sees the sunset as that which displays itself immediately to his view, but displays itself only in the manner seen in scientific explanation.
HEIDEGGER: The truth of the immediate experience of the world disappears by reason of the scientific interpretation of the world.
FINK: In earlier times, two hundred years ago for instance, life was still centered in the nearby region. Information about life at that time came out of the neighboring world. That has fundamentally changed today in the age of world wide transmission of news. Hans Freyer, in his book Theorie des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters, describes the technical world as an environment of surrogates.25 For him, scientific knowledge of the environment is a surrogate. I regard this description as an inappropriate view, because in the meantime technological things have become a new source of human experience. Today a human exists in the omnipresence of complete global information. The world is no longer divided into neighboring zones, distant and more distant zones; rather, the world that was once thus divided today becomes covered over by technology that, through its skilled intelligence service, makes it possible to live in the omnipresence of all information.
HEIDEGGER: It is difficult to comprehend how the world, divided into near and distant zones, gets covered over by the technological environment. For me, there is a breach here. {146}
FINK: To a certain extent, modern man lives schizophrenically.
HEIDEGGER: If we only knew what this schizophrenia meant. But what we have said up to now is sufficient to see that we are not talking about out of the way matters. The problem for us is the reference of ἕν and πάντα. From where do we experience this reference, from πάντα or from ἕν or from the to and fro in the Hegelian sense? How would you answer this problem with reference to Heraclitus?
FINK: The beginning of our interpretation of Heraclitus by way of lightning was supposed to indicate that there is the basic experience of the outbreak of the whole. In the everyday manner of life, this experience is hidden. In everyday life we are not interested in such experience. In everyday living we do not expressly comport ourselves toward the whole, and also not when we knowingly penetrate into the distant Milky Way. But a human has the possibility of letting become explicit that implicit relationship to the whole as which relationship he always already exists. He exists essentially as a relationship to being, to the whole. For the most part, however, this relationship stagnates. In dealing with the thinker Heraclitus, one can perhaps come to such an experience in