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HEIDEGGER: But what do you understand by the ontic proximity? When you say proximity, do you not then mean a small distance?
FINK: The ancients knew two principles of understanding; like cognized through like and unlike cognized through unlike. A human is distinguished from all of what is. Nevertheless, that does not preclude him from understanding and determining all the rest of what is in its being. Here the principle functions that unlike is cognized by unlike. But in so far as a human is a living being, he also has still another character of being with which he reaches into the nightly ground. He has the double character: on the one hand, he is the one who places himself in the clearing, and on the other, he is the one who is tied to the underground of all clearing.
HEIDEGGER: This would become intelligible first of all through the phenomenon of the body ...
FINK: ... as, for example, in the understanding of Eros.
HEIDEGGER: Body is not meant ontically here .. .
FINK: ... and also not in the Husserlian sense, .. .
HEIDEGGER: ... but rather as Nietzsche thought the body, even though it is obscure what he actually meant by it.
FINK: In the section "Of the Despisers of the Body," Zarathustra says, "Body am I entirely, and nothing else; ..." Through the body and the senses a human is nigh to the earth.
HEIDEGGER: But what is ontic proximity?
FINK: Human lack of ontological affinity with other entities belongs together with the ontological understanding of his manner of being. But if a human exists between light and night, he relates himself to night differently than to light and the open, which has the distinguishing, joining together structure. He relates himself to night or to the nightly ground in so far as he belongs bodily to the earth and to the flowing of life. The dark understanding rests as it were on the other principle of understanding according to which like is cognized through like.
HEIDEGGER: Can one isolate the dark understanding, which the bodily belonging to the earth determines, from being placed in the clearing?
FINK: True, the dark understanding can be addressed from the clearing, but it doesn't let itself be brought further to language in the manner of the articulated joining.
HEIDEGGER: When you say ontic proximity, then no small distance is meant in what you call proximity, but a kind of openness ...
FINK: ... but a twilight, dark, reduced openness that has no history of concepts behind it, to which we may have to come sometime. A human has his place between heaven and earth, between the openness of ἀλήθεια and the closedness of λήθη. Nevertheless, we must say that all