"In Dasein There Lies an Essential Tendency towards Closeness.

"i Heidegger's Doctrine of Existential Place Peter Sloterdijk

Only a few Heidegger exegetes seem to have realized that the sensational programmatic title of Sein und Zeit also contains an embryonically revolutionary treatise on being and space. Under the spell of Heidegger's existential analytics of time, it has mostly been overlooked that this is rooted in a corresponding analytics of space, just as the two in turn rest on an existential analytics of movement. That is why one can read an entire library about Heidegger's doctrine of temporalization [Zeitigung] and historicityontochronologyand a few studies on his principles of movedness [Bewegtheit] and ontokinetics, but nothingaside from unquotable pietistic paraphraseson his work towards a theory of the original admission of space,ii or ontotopology. Heidegger's analytics of existential spatiality arrives at a positive tracing of the spatiality of Dasein as approach and orientation in two destructive steps. And indeed, the spatial concepts of vulgar physics and metaphysics must be done away with before one can address the existential analytics of being-in.

What is meant by "Being-in"? Our proximal reaction is to round out this expression to "Being-in 'in the world,'" and we are inclined to understand this Beingin as "Being in something" ["Sein in"]. This latter term designates the kind of Being which an entity has when it is "in" another one, as the water is "in" the glass, or the garment is "in" the cupboard. [] Both water and glass, garment and cupboard, are "in" space and "at" a location, and both in the same way. This relationship of Being can be expanded: for instance, the bench is in the lecture-toom, the lecture-room is in the university, the university is in the city, and so on, until we 1

can say that the bench is "in world-space." All entities whose Being "in" one another can thus be described have the same kind of Beingthat of Being-present-at-hand as Things occurring "within" the world. [] Being-in, on the other hand, is a state of Dasein's Being; it is an existentiale. So one cannot think of it as the Being-present-at-hand of some corporeal Thing (such as a human body) "in" an entity which is present-at-hand. [] "In" is derived from "innan""to reside," "habitare," "to dwell" [sich aufhalten]. "An" signifies "I am accustomed," "I am familiar with," "I look after something." It has the signification of "colo" in the senses of "habito" and "diligo." [] "Being" [Sein] as the infinitive of "ich bin" (that is to say, when it is understood as an existentiale), signifies "to reside alongside", "to be familiar with"iii

In his reference to the Old High German verb innan, "to inhabit," Heidegger already discloses the crux of the existential analysis of spatiality early on in his investigation; what he calls being-in-the-world is nothing other than the world "inside" in a verbal-transitive sense: living in it and benefiting from its already have being explored in prior acts of attunement and reaching out. Because existence is always a completed act of habitationthe result of a primal leap into inhabitation, spatiality is an essential part of it. Speaking about inhabitation in the world does not mean simply attributing domesticity within the gigantic to those who exist: for it is precisely the possibility of being-at-home-in-the-world that is questionable, and to presuppose it as a given would be a relapse into the very physics of containers that is here meant to be overcome. This, incidentally, is the primal error of reasoning that is found in all holistic worldviews and doctrines of uterine immanence and hardens into pious half-thought. Nor is the house of being a casing in which those who exist come and go, however.iv Its structure is more like that of a ball of care [Sorge] in which existence has spread out in an original being-outside-itself. Heidegger's readical phenomenological attentiveness removes 2

the foundation of the multi-millennial rule of container physics and metaphysics: man is neither a living being in the world around him nor a rational being in the firmament, nor a perceiving being inside of God. Consistently with this, the talk of the environment that has been on the rise for the last twenty years is also an object of phenomenological critique: biology does not think, any more than any other standard science. "Nowadays there is much talk about 'man's having an environment'; but this says nothing ontologically as long as this 'having' is left indefinite." (Being and Time, p. 84) But what is meant by the "aroundness of the environment"?

From what we have been saying, it follows that Being-in is not a "property" which Dasein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, and without which it could be just as well as it could with it. It is not the case that man "is" and then has, by way of an extra, a relationship-of-Being towards the "world"a world with which he provides himself occasionally. Dasein is never "proximally" an entity which is, so to speak, free from Being-in, but which sometimes has the inclination to take up a "relationship" towards the world. Taking up relationships towards the world is possible only because Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, is as it is. This state of Being does not arise just because some other entity is present-at-hand outside of Dasein and meets up with it. Such an entity can "meet up with" Dasein only in so far as it can, of its own accord, show itself within a world.v

The existential blindness to space in conventional thought manifests itself in the old worldviews in the fact that they integrate humans more or less automatically into an encompassing nature as cosmos.vi In modern thought, Descartes' division of substances into the thinking and the extended offers the most pronounced example of the reluctance to consider the place of "meeting" still questionable in itself. Because everything Descartes has 3

to say about spatiality remains connected to the body-and-thing complex as the only possessors of extension, the question of where thought and extension converge is one that cannot come up for him. The thinking thing remains a worldless authority that, strangely enough, is seemingly able to submit to the whim of sometimes entering into a relationship with extended things and sometimes not. The res cogitans bears some of the traits of a ghostly hunter, bracing himself up to go on forays into the realm of the recognizably extended before withdrawing once more to his worldless fortress in the extensionless domain. Contrary to this, Heidegger insists on the original being-in of Dasein in the sense of being-in-the-world. Knowledge too is merely a derivative mode of staying in the spaciousness of the world disclosed through circumspective concern:

When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always "outside" alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells alongside the entity to be known, and determines its character; but even in this "Being-outside" alongside the object, Dasein is still "inside," we understand this in the correct sense; that is to say, it is itself "inside" as a Being-in-the-world which knows. And furthermore, the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one's booty to the "cabinet" of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it; even in perceiving, retaining, the Dasein which knows remains outside, and it does so as Dasein.vii

In his positive statements about the spatiality of Dasein, Heidegger emphasizes two characters in particular: de-severance and directionality.

"De-severing" amounts to making the farness vanishthat is, making the remoteness of something disappear, bringing it close. Dasein is essentially de-severant []. Deseverance discovers remoteness. [] Proximally and for the most part, de-severing is a circumspective bringing-closebringing something close by, in the sense of procuring it, putting it in readiness, having it to hand. [] In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness. (pp. 139f.) Dasein, in accordance with its spatiality, is proximally never here but yonder; from this "yonder" it comes back to its "here"[]. (p. 142) As de-severant Being-in, Dasein has likewise the character of directionality. Every bringing-close [Nherung] has already taken in advance a direction towards a region out of which what is de-severed brings itself close [sich nhert]. [] Circumspective concern is de-severing which gives directionality. (p. 143) When we let entities within-the-world be encountered in the way which is constitutive for Being-in-the-world. This "giving space," which we also call "making room" for them, consists in freeing the ready-to-hand for its spatiality. [] In concerning itself circumspectively with the world, Dasein can move things around or out of the way or "make room" for them only because making roomunderstood as an existentialebelongs to its Being-in-the-world [] the "subject" (Dasein), if well understood ontologically, is spatial. (p. 146)

Whoever expected these mighty rhetorical overtures to be followed by the piece itself would be sorely disappointed. The existential analysis of "where" abruptly switches to an analysis of "who," without the slightest mention of the fact that the author has only pulled out the beginning of a thread that is still mostly wound up. Had it been unraveled further, it would inevitably have opened up the multi-significant universes of existential spaciousness addressed here under the catchword "spheres." Inhabitation in spheres cannot be explicated in 5

detail, however, as long as existence [Dasein] is understood primarily in terms of a supposedly natural inclination towards loneliness.viii The analytics of the existential "where" demands for all suggestions and moods of essential loneliness to be parenthesized, in order that we can verify the deep structures of accompanied and augmented existence. In the face of this task, the early Heidegger remained an existentiale in the problematic sense of the word. His hasty turn to the "who" question leaves behind a lonely, weak, hysterical-heroic existential subject that thinks it is the first to die, and remains pitifully uncertain of the more hidden aspects of its embeddedness in intimacies and solidarities. A quixotic "who" in a confused "where" may have nasty surprises in store for itself if it attempts to anchor itself in the next best collective. When Heidegger, carried away by imperial enthusiasm, sought to rise to greatness in the nationalist revolution, it became apparent that without a radical clarification of its position within the political space, existential authenticity leads to blindness. From 1934 on, Heidegger knewalbeit only implicitlythat his fervor for the National Socialist awakening had been a being-sucked-in: time had become space. Whoever falls prey to this suction lives in a different sphere while seemingly still here; on a distant stage, in an uncomprehended Yonder. Heidegger's late work discreetly draws the conclusions from this lapse. The cheated vlkisch revolutionary has few expectations left of the history unfolding around him; he has retired from the work of the forces. In future he will seek salvation in even more intimate exercises in closeness. He doggedly sticks to his anarchic province and offers guided tours of the House of being, languagethe perfect magical concierge, equipped with heavy keys, always ready to offer profound hints. In emotional moments he invokes the sacred Parmenidean orb of being as if he had returned to the Eleatic, weary of historicity as an unholy specter. Heidegger's late work keeps acting out the figures of resignation offered by a revolutionary deepening of thought, without ever returning to the point from which he might once more have taken up the question of the original admission [Einrumung] of the world. 6

The present project, Spheres, can also be understood as an attempt to recoverin one substantial aspect, at leastthe project wedged sub-thematically into Heidegger's early work, namely Being and Space, from its state of entombment. We believe that as much of Heidegger's interest in rootedness as can be salvaged comes into its own here through a theory of pairs, of geniuses,ix of augmented existence. Finding a rooting in the existing duality: this much autochthony must be retained, even if philosophy attentively continues to practice its indispensable emancipation from the empirical commune. For thought, it is now a matter of working anew through the tension between autochthony (ab ovo and in terms of the community) and release (in terms of death or the infinite).

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), p.

140.
ii

The word translated here as "admission" is Einrumung, whose literal meaning is an assignment of space

[Raum]; this creates an ambivalence between the literal and figurative meaning in the phrase "admission of space" [Einrumung des Raums]. In the translation of Sein und Zeit cited here, the term is rendered as "giving space" or "making room" (trans.).
iii iv v vi

Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 79f. The word for "casing" [Gehuse] is directly related to that for "house" [Haus] (trans.). Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 84. In his analytics of place, Aristotle already provided a marvellously explicit attempt to address the problem of

an "existential" topology, even if the being of "something in something" precisely could not interest him in existential terms. The fourth book of his Physics contains the following exposition of the eightfold sense of "in": "Next, we had better come to understand in how many ways we use the expression 'One thing is in another.' First, there is the sense in which we say that a finger is incorporated in a hand and, in general, that a part is incorporated in a whole. Second, we also say that a whole consists in its parts, in the sense that there is no such

thing as a whole over and above its parts. Third, we say that 'man' falls within 'animal' and, in general, that a species falls within a genus. Fourth, we also say that a genus is included in a species and, in general, that any part of the species is included in the definition of the species. Fifth, we say that health inheres in hot and cold things and, in general, that form inheres in matter. Sixth, we say that the affairs of Greece are in the power of the Persian king and, in general, that things are in the power of their original agent of change. Seventh, we say that things are centered in their good and, in general, their end or purpose. Finally, the most fundamental sense is when we say that something is contained in a vessel and, in general, in a place. It is not easy to decide whether something can be in itself, or whether nothing can, in which case everything is either nowhere or in something other than itself." (Aristotle, Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield [Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 83)
vii viii

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 89. This is the case in Heidegger's most important Freiburg lecture, "Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt

EndlichkeitEinsamkeit," given in the winter semester of 1929-1930, Gesamtausgabe vols. 29-30, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, second edition (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1992). The title given on the department notice board had contained "isolation" [Vereinzelung] instead of "loneliness" [Einsamkeit].
ix

The word is used here in the sense of the divine nature embodied in individual beings (trans.).