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FINK: A human as a torch in the night implies that he is allied to the light-brightness of day and to the night which extinguishes all distinctions and the possibility of sight.
HEIDEGGER: The experience of sleep does not imply a mere remembering that I was falling asleep. The experience does not refer to sleep as a mere occurrence ...
FINK: ... in conscious life, ...
HEIDEGGER: ... but signifies a manner of my being in which I am implicated ...
FINK: ... and that still determines me in being awake. The brightness of being awake always stands upon the dark underground.
HEIDEGGER: Do you mean that in the actual [aktuellen] sense?
FINK: Similarly to the way the gods relate understandingly in their own life, by relating at the same time to the transient being {240} of mortals, so we relate ourselves wakefully to the manifold, ordered cosmos which is a joining. Thereby, we know at the same time in a dark manner about the ability to be extinguished in sleep.
HEIDEGGER: But this knowledge is not necessarily actual [aktuell].
FINK: No. Perhaps this knowledge may be characterized from the problem of thrownness as being abandoned to that which a human has to be, and which does not belong to reason. As soon as one speaks of understanding of the dark ground as a relationship, one already means a distantial understanding.
HEIDEGGER: When we speak of the relationship to sleep, that is an inadequate manner of speaking. Is sleep the genuine understanding of the dark ground?
FINK: Not the sleeper, but the awake one relates himself to sleep.
HEIDEGGER: Concerning this reference, is there still another ontological possibility?
FINK: If being awake is the intensity of the process of life, the tautness is supported by the possibility of being able to let loose the tension of all fixation, of distinction and contrast in relationship to things and to the brightness. Someone could say that we are dealing here with an observation to the effect that life relates to death like waking to sleep, or like sleep to being dead, and that these analogical relationships would be spoken externally. But with that, one misses our real problem, which concerns the manner in which the awake one touches on sleep and the living sleeper touches on the dead. Touching on is our problem, and not the {241} everyday observation or everyday philosophy according to which sleep is the brother of death, and life and death are regarded as mediated through the link of sleep. In Leibniz, we find the philosophical tendency to attempt to understand the being of the lower monads through dreamless sleep, impotence, and death, which is no death for him in the strict sense. The three phenomena mentioned are for him