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on the sleeper and the sleeper's touching on the dead. How is the relationship of the wakeful to the sleeping to be determined? The wakeful one has a knowledge of sleep that is more than simply a memory of having slept, falling asleep, and waking up. The knowledge of the wakeful concerning sleep is a manner of the dark flux of life where the I is extinguished for itself in a reduced manner. The living touch in sleep on the manner of uncleared dwelling. A human, who belongs to the domain of light and harkens to it, has in sleep a kind of experience with being returned to the dark ground, not in the state of unconsciousness but in nondistinctness. While ἕν καὶ πάντα stands for a thinking mandate for the relationship in the domain of light, the experience of the dark ground of life is the experience of ἕν καὶ πᾶν. In ἕν καὶ πᾶν we must think the coincidence of all distinctions. The experience of ἕν καὶ πᾶν is the relationship of the human, who stands in individuation, to the nonindividuated but individuating ground. But the danger here is that we speak all too easily about metaphysical entities.
HEIDEGGER: When you speak of the uncleared, is that to be understood as privation or as negation?
FINK: The uncleared is not privative in regard to the cleared. To be sure, we understand the uncleared from out of the cleared. But we are concerned here with an original relationship to λήθη. Out of the situation of an essence determined by ἀλήθεια, the human has at the same time a relationship to λήθη. He does not always stand in ἀλήθεια rather, he stands in rhythmic oscillation between waking and sleeping. The night, which he touches on in sleep, is not only to be understood privatively, but is to be understood as an autonomous moment alongside the moment of day or of the brightness to which he relates in waking. As φιλόσοφος [lover of wisdom], a human is not only a φίλος of σοφόν, but also of λήθη.
HEIDEGGER: Is λήθη to be identified with night?
FINK: Night is a kind of λήθη.
HEIDEGGER: How do you understand the uncleared? When you speak of reduced openness, that sounds like στέρεσις [privation].
FINK: Being awake is, in its tautness, suffused by the possibility of the sinking away of tension and the extinguishing of all interest. Sleep is a way in which we come into the proximity of being dead, and is not merely a metaphor for death. Perhaps one must also treat phenomena like dying ontologically sometimes.
PARTICIPANT: I believe that we must distinguish between the reduced clearedness of the dark understanding. for example, of the understanding of the dark ground in sleep, and the dark ground itself. which is uncleared pure and simple. The understanding of the dark ground, and not the dark ground itself, is half cleared.