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comportment toward the dark ground is to be experienced as comportment when a residue of clearing remains, because in the absolute night not only all cows are black, but also all understanding is obliterated.
HEIDEGGER: A human is embodied [leibt] only when he lives [lebt]. The body in your sense is to be understood thus. Thereby, "to live" is meant in the existential sense. Ontic proximity means no spatial proximity between two things, but a reduced openness, thus a human ontological moment. And nevertheless, you speak of an ontic proximity.
FINK: You have, one time when you came to Freiburg, said in a lecture that the animal is world-poor. At that time, you were underway toward the affinity of the human with nature.
HEIDEGGER: The body phenomenon is the most difficult problem. The adequate constitution of the sound of speech also belongs here. Phonetics thinks too physicalistically, when it does not see φωνή [speech] as voice in the correct manner.
PARTICIPANT: Wittgenstein says an astounding thing in the Tractatus. Language is the extension of the organism.
FINK: The only question is how "organism" is to be understood here, whether biologically or in the manner that human dwelling in the midst of what is is essentially determined by bodiliness.
HEIDEGGER: One can understand organism in the sense of Uexkülls or also as the functioning of a living system. In my lecture, which you mentioned, I have said that the stone is worldless, the animal worldpoor, and the human world-forming.
FINK: It is thereby a question whether the world-poverty of the animal is a deficient mode of world-forming transcendence. It is questionable whether the animal in the human can be understood at all when we see it from the animal's viewpoint, or whether it is not a proper way that the human relates to the dark ground.
HEIDEGGER: The bodily in the human is not something animalistic. The manner of understanding that accompanies it is something that metaphysics up till now has not touched on. Ontic proximity holds of many phenomena from which you want to comprehend ἅπτεται.
FINK: ἅπτεται appears at first to be spoken from a clinging to and touching on, from the sense of touch. In touching on the dark power, a neighborhood of proximity holds sway; while touching on the light is a standing in the light. What is in the light has in itself the moment of distantiality, against which, however, it is no objection that a human also touches on the power of light of σοφόν.
HEIDEGGER: How do you now understand "touching on"?
FINK: Touching on the power of light of σοφόν is a distanced touching on. To the contrary, touching on the dark power is a distanceless touching on. Such a distanceless touching on is the awake one's touching