132
HEIDEGGER: Do you thus mean that in waking up we are at the edge of sleep? But in the fragment it is a matter of an essential reference of waking and sleep and of sleep and death ...
FINK: ... and it is not a matter of what is accidentally given. Here it is a matter of the human as the one who is between-night-and-day.
HEIDEGGER: For me, the in-between is still not the da. Also, we sometimes call a wakeful human a bright, lively {214} one. His attention is directed toward something. He exists in that his bearings are directed toward something.
FINK: The relationship between waking and sleep is similar to that between gods and humans. Comportment toward the sleep that permeates all wakefulness belongs to the self-understanding of being awake.
HEIDEGGER: Being waked up includes in itself the reference to sleepiness. Naturally, that is not meant in Fr. 26. It is not a question here of external relationships but of inner references. As understanding comportment toward the mortal being of humans belongs to the self-understanding of the gods, so also the understanding reference to sleep belongs to the self-understanding of those who are awake. Something of the meaning of sleep in the life of humans shows itself here.
FINK: The countertension to sleep belongs to being awake. But the sleeper touches on death. Sleep is the way of being engulfed and being untied from all that is many and structured. Thus seen, the sleeper comes into the neighborhood of the dead, who have lost the domain of the distinctions of πάντα.
HEIDEGGER: For the Hindu, sleep is the highest life.
FINK: That may be a Hindu experience. Sleeping is a manner of being alive, as waking is the concentrated and proper manner of being alive. Those who are awake do not immediately touch on the dead, but only indirectly through sleep. Sleep is the middle part between waking and being dead. Being dead is viewed from sleep.
HEIDEGGER: Do you say that the experience of sleep is the condition of possibility of the experience of death? {215}
FINK: That would be saying too much. Sleep is a way of being similar to being dead, but a way that does not occur only in an objective biological sense. For in the understanding of sleep we have a twilight understanding of being dead. In a certain manner it is true that like is cognized through like and unlike through unlike.
HEIDEGGER: Isn't the correspondence of sleep and death a rather external view? Can one experience sleep as sleep?
FINK: I would like to answer this question positively in the same way that one says that one can encounter death internally. There are dark ways of understanding in which a human knows himself to be familiar wiτh uncleared being. We know of sleep not only in the moment of waking up. We sleep through time.