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the one who grasps by seeing and what is grasped. This distantial distance is a fundamental way of understanding. Contrary to that would be an understanding grounded in a being-in-the-proximity in the sense of immediate touching on. Touching on is an understanding that does not come out of the survey, out of the expanse, or out of the region toward what is grasped.
HEIDEGGER: But what about when I now give you my hand?
FINK: That is an immediate touching of hands. In περὶ ψυχῆς [On the Soul], Aristotle calls flesh the medium of the sense of touch. But a phenomenological objection must be made here, because flesh is not the medium in the proper sense for touching and what is touched. Seeing is referred to a visible thing, to a visible object, which, however, meets us out of a region. Encounter out of the open ambit, which is cleared by the brightness, is distinctive of the special kind of grasping that consists in the distance between the one who grasps and what is grasped.
HEIDEGGER: And how does it relate with the reaching of hands?
FINK: The reaching of hands is a coming up to one another of touching hands. Between the touching hands there is an immediate proximity. But at the same time, the hands can also be seen by us. Touching ourselves is also a special phenomenon. A minimum of distance holds sway between what touches itself. {229} Feeling and touching are proximity senses, and as such they are the way of an immediate standing at and lying near to an immediate neighborhood. One must understand the relationship of the waking to the sleeping, and of the sleeping to the dead, from the immediacy of the neighborhood of touching on.
PARTICIPANT: In a phenomenological analysis of seeing and hearing as the two distance senses, you have worked out the phenomenological structure of the region that is identical with the space of seeing and hearing, or with the field of seeing and hearing. You have then further indicated that, in distinction to the two distance senses, feeling and touching as proximity senses are due not to the phenomenological structure of the region but to immediate proximity. Now it only concerns me to indicate that the phenomenologically obtained structure of region in the domain of both distance senses is not synonymous with the ontologically understood region in the sense of the openness and the clearing in which something present meets a human being. For not only what is seen and heard, but also what is felt, is encountered out of the ontologically understood region. If I have understood you correctly, you have employed the phenomenological distinction between distance sense and proximity sense, that is, between the region out of which the seer encounters the seen and the hearer encounters the heard, and the immediate proximity of feeling and felt, as springboard for a speculative thought according to which two different ways of understanding being are distinguished. Setting out from the immediate touching of feeling