149
grades of receding differentiation of understanding. For Leibniz, being dead is still a manner of life, that is, of undifferentiated representation, since, strictly speaking, the monads cannot die. Thereby, he interprets the seriousness of death in terms of an extreme weakness of consciousness. He interprets sleep, impotence, and death in reference to a scale of regression of differentiation of living representation of the lower monads.
Heraclitus' Fr. 26, however, is not concerned with an observation concerning life and death and their mediation through waking and sleep, but with a statement on the essence of humanity. A human, as the one who is able to kindle fire and as the one who is able to touch on the power of light, is at the same time also the one who is able to touch on the dark in sleep and in death. But what is the meaning of touching on the dark which does not have the distantiality of one who grasps and what is grasped within the brightness? Here we cling to the troublesome expression of ontic proximity. We are concerned with the philosophical problem of the double relationship of the human with the relationship to light and to fire, which is a distantial understanding of one who grasps in reference to what he grasps, and with the understanding which is oriented to the immediacy of ἅψις [touching] in which the distinctions between grasping and grasped escape us. We have here only the modes of escape and absorption, and we cannot say more because otherwise we easily decline into a speculative mysticism.
HEIDEGGER: The relationship to death includes the question about the phenomenon of life and sleep. We cannot circumvent the problem of death, because death occurs in the fragment itself. We cannot come to grips with the problem independently on the basis of sleep alone.