Article

Theory, Culture & Society

29(4/5) 36–42
Nearness and Da-sein: ! The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276412448828

and Time tcs.sagepub.com

Peter Sloterdijk
University of Art and Design, Karlsruhe, Germany

Abstract
This paper focuses on the latent spatial philosophy in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’,
highlighting a key aspect of the Heideggerian oeuvre that has mostly been overlooked
by commentators. It outlines the concept of an original spatiality of being that is
opposed to the philosophies of space in both physics and Cartesian metaphysics.
Through an elaboration of the essentially relational character of Da-sein, it is argued
that Heidegger’s vocabulary in ‘Being and Time’ yields an onto-topology that shows
Da-sein’s primary spatial embeddedness in the world. Finally, the paper argues that
Heidegger’s concept of spatiality remained cursory due to its residual existentialist
focus. In this context, it attempts a re-evaluation of its intellectual trajectory within
the realm of the Spheres project.

Keywords
Heidegger, space, spatiality, Da-sein, Sloterdijk, spheres, Spheres project

An essential tendency toward nearness lies in Da-sein. (Heiddegger,

1996: 98)

Only very few commentators on Heidegger have noted the nascent but
revolutionary treatise on being and space that underlies the sensationally
programmatic study of Being and Time. Under the spell of Heidegger’s
existential analytic of time, it has mostly been overlooked that the former
is grounded in a corresponding analytic of space and that both are fun-
damentally rooted in an analysis of movement. Therefore, we can find
entire libraries filled with studies of Heidegger’s onto-chronology, his
doctrines of Temporalizing (Zeitigung) and Historicity and read various

Corresponding author:
Peter Sloterdijk, University of Art and Design, Karlsruhe, Germany
Email: rektorat@hfg-karlsruhe.de
http://www.sagepub.net/tcs/
Sloterdijk 37

treatises on his philosophy of movement, or onto-kinesis. Concerning his

attempts at a theory of an originary ‘making-room’ (Einräumen) of space
or onto-topology, however, we find nothing but scattered, unciteable and
pietistic paraphrases.
Heidegger’s analysis positively delineates the spatiality of Da-sein as
Approaching (Näherung) and Orientation (Orientierung) through two
destructive steps. The spatial concepts of both, ‘vulgar’ physics as well
as metaphysics, must effectively be cleared away before the existential
analytic of Being-in (In-Sein) can be elaborated.

What does being-in mean? Initially, we supplement the expression

being-in with the phrase ‘in the world,’ and are inclined to under-
stand this being-in as ‘being-in something.’ With this term, the kind
of being of a being is named which is ‘in’ something else, as water is
‘in’ the glass, the dress is ‘in’ the closet.. . . Water and glass, dress
and closet, are both ‘in’ space ‘at’ a location in the same way. This
relation of being can be expanded; that is, the bench in the lecture
hall, the lecture hall in the university, the university in the city, and
so on until: the bench in ‘world space.’ These beings whose being
‘in’ one another can be determined in this way all have the same
kind of being-that of being objectively present-as things occurring
‘within’ the world. . . . In contrast, being-in designates a constitution
of being of Da-sein, and is an existential. But we cannot understand
by this the objective presence of a material thing (the human body)
‘in’ a being objectively present. . . . ‘In’ stems from innan-, to live,
habitare, to dwell. ‘An’ means I am used to, familiar with, I take
care of something. It has the meaning of colo in the sense of habito
and diligo. . . . Being as the infinitive of ‘I am’: that is, understood
as an existential, means to dwell near . . . to be familiar with. (1996:
50–51)

By alluding to the Old German verb innan, to inhabit, Heidegger

quickly reveals the crux of the existential analytic of spatiality. What
he calls being-in-the-world means nothing other than to ‘inn’ the world
in the verbal-transitive sense: to dwell in the world and to enjoy its open-
ness through an initial attunement (Einstimmung) and expansion
(Ausgriff). Because Da-sein is always already a completed act of inhabit-
ing – the result of a primal leap into dwelling – spatiality and existence
are inseparable. To speak of dwelling in the world does not mean to
presuppose a domestic relationship between existing beings and vast,
unbounded space: it is exactly this concept of being-at-home in the
world that must be questioned, as to simply accept this condition as a
fact would mean to fall back into the logic of container-physics that
needs to be overcome. All holistic philosophies and teachings of
38 Theory, Culture & Society 29(4/5)

mother’s-womb-immanence fail at exactly this task and are thus reified

into pious forms of half-baked thought. Nor is the house of Being a
simple cubicle that existing beings enter into and exit out of. Its structure
is more akin to a globe of care (Sorge) in which Da-sein has spread in its
ex-stasis (Außersichsein). Heidegger’s radical phenomenological attention
delegitimizes both the century-old realms of container-physics and meta-
physics alike. Man is never simply an animate creature in its environment
or a rational entity in the house of heaven. Nor is he the devotional being
of God’s creation. Consequently, the ecological chatter that emerged in
the 1920s is just as much subjected to a phenomenological critique:
Biology thinks just as little as any other standard science. ‘The saying
used so often today, ‘‘Human beings have their environment’’, does not
say anything ontologically as long as this ‘having’ is undetermined’
(1996: 54). But what is meant by the ‘environ’ of environment
(Umhaften der Umwelt)?

According to what we have said, being-in is not a ‘quality’ which

Da-sein sometimes has and sometimes does not have, without which
it could be just as well as it could with it. It is not the case that
human being ‘is’, and then on top of that has a relation of being to
the ‘world’ which it sometimes takes upon itself. Da-sein is never
‘initially’ a sort of a being which is free from being-in, but which at
times is in the mood to take up a ‘relation’ to the world. This
taking up of relations to the world is possible only because, as
being-in-the-world, Da-sein is as it is. This constitution of being is
not first derived from the fact that besides the being which has the
character of Da-sein there are other beings which are objectively
present and meet up with it. These other beings can only ‘meet up’
‘with’ Da-sein because they are able to show themselves of their own
accord within a world. (1996: 53–54)

Conventional thinking’s existential blindness to space manifests itself

in the old worldview that integrates man more or less seamlessly into an
all-encompassing realm of nature, thought as cosmos.1 In modern
thought, Descartes’ division of substance into a thinking and an exten-
sive part gives the clearest example of the unwillingness to question the
place of their coincidence. Because Descartes reduces spatiality to the
aggregates of ‘body’ and ‘thing’ that become the only bearers of exten-
sion, the question of the meeting-place of thinking and extension cannot
arise. The thinking thing remains a worldless entity that appears to have
the capacity to occasionally enter into relations with things in extension.
The res cogitans thus seems akin to a ghostly hunter who goes on the
prowl in the land of cognizable extension just to withdraw again into his
worldless fortress of no extension. Heidegger counters this with an
Sloterdijk 39

originary being-in of Da-sein in the sense of being-in-the-world. Even

cognition is only a specific mode of dwelling in the spaciousness
(Geräumigkeit) of the world that is opened through circumspect heedful-
ness (Besorgen):

In directing itself toward . . . and in grasping something, Da-sein

does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially
encapsulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always
already ‘outside’ together with some being encountered in the world
already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when
Da-sein dwells together with a being to be known and determines
its character. Rather, even in this ‘being outside’ together with its
object, Da-sein is ‘inside’, correctly understood; that is, it itself
exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception
of what is known does not take place as a return with one’s booty to
the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it.
Rather, in perceiving, preserving, and retaining, the Da-sein that
knows remains outside as Da-sein. (1996: 58)

In his positive statements on the spatiality of Da-sein, Heidegger specif-

ically highlights two of its characteristics: de-distancing (Ent-fernung)
and directionality (Ausrichtung):

De-distancing means making distance disappear, making the

being at a distance of something disappear, bringing it near.
Da-sein is essentially de-distancing. . . . De-distancing discovers
remoteness. . . . Initially and for the most part, de-distancing is a
circumspect approaching, a bringing near as supplying, preparing,
having at hand. . . . An essential tendency toward nearness lies in
Da-sein. (1996: 97–8; emphasis in original)

In accordance with its spatiality, Da-sein is initially never here,

but over there. From this over there it comes back to its here.
(1996: 100)

As being-in which de-distances, Da-sein has at the same time

the character of directionality. Every bringing near has
always taken a direction in a region beforehand from which what
is de-distanced approaches. . . . Circumspect heedfulness is a direc-
tional de-distancing. (1996: 100)

Letting innerworldly beings be encountered, which is constitutive

for being-in-the-world, is ‘giving space’. This ‘giving space,’ which
40 Theory, Culture & Society 29(4/5)

we call making room, frees things at hand for their spatiality. . . . As

circumspect taking care of things in the world, Da-sein can change
things around, remove them or ‘make room’ for them only
because making room – understood as an existential – belongs to
its being-in-the-world . . . the ‘subject,’ correctly understood
ontologically, Da-sein, is spatial. (1996: 103)

Who at this point would have expected a main argument to follow

this mighty prelude remains gravely disappointed. The existential where-
analysis abruptly gives way to an existential who-analysis without any
further mention of the thread that Heidegger had only begun to unravel.
Following this thread further would have inevitably revealed the mani-
fold universes of existential spatiality that gain a renewed thrust through
the terminology of spheres. The inhabitation of spheres, however, cannot
be fully explicated as long as Da-sein is understood as having an essential
tendency towards solitude.2 The analytic of the existential ‘where’
demands that all suggestions of and allusions to essential solitude are
bracketed in order to gain reassurance of the deep structure of an accom-
panied and complemented Da-sein. In the face of this task, the early
Heidegger problematically remained an existentialist. His hasty turn
towards the who-question leaves us with a lonely and weak hysteric-
heroic subject that always believes itself to be the first to die and that
remains miserably ignorant concerning its embeddedness within relations
of intimacy and solidarity. Such a hypertensive ‘who’ in an uncertain
‘where’ can indeed experience unpleasant surprises when it tries to bind
itself to the next best nation it finds.
When Heidegger’s imperial enthusiasm sought fulfilment and grandeur
in the ‘national revolution’, it became clear that an existential authenti-
city (Eigentlichkeit) that doesn’t radically clarify its position easily turns
delusional. From 1934 onwards, Heidegger knew, if only implicitly, that
he had been carried away in his engagement in the national-socialist
awakening. In it, time had effectively turned into space. Whoever
enters into this vortex lives in a different sphere, on a different stage in
an impenetrable inner space while he appears to be right here in the
present. Heidegger’s later work discreetly draws the conclusions from
this lapse. The betrayed völkisch revolutionary does not expect much
of lived history anymore; he retires from the worldly game of powers.
Instead, he seeks salvation in more personal exercises in self-intimacy.
With tenacity, he remains in his anarchic province and hosts organized
tours through the house of being and through language – like a magical
concierge equipped with heavy key chains, always ready to give
Daedalean advice. In emotional moments he conjures up the
Parmenidean holy globe of being as if he tired of historicity and returned
to the eleatic. Heidegger’s late work continues to repeat the ever-same
wary figures of an original deepening of thought without ever again
Sloterdijk 41

reaching the point from which the question of an originary, always

already shared making-room of the world could have been fruitfully
posed.
The Spheres project can be seen as an attempt to salvage from oblivion
a certain element of the project of Being and Space that remained trapped
in Heidegger’s early work. We hold the opinion that through a theory of
couplings, of genius and of complemented existence, we can save all there
is to save from Heidegger’s interest in rootedness. To have established a
ground in the existing duality: this much nativity or anchorage in the real
must be kept even if philosophy intently pursues its indispensable separ-
ation from the empirical community. The contemporary task for think-
ing, then, is to rework the tension between autochthony (ab ovo or
starting from community) and release (starting from death or infinity).
Translated by Peer Illner

Notes
1. In his analytic of place, Aristotle had already fantastically approached the
problem of an existential topology even if for him being of ‘something in
something else’ couldn’t have been addressed as an existential problem. In
Physics Book IV, we find the following explanation of the eight different
significations of ‘in’: ‘The next step we must take is to see in how many
senses one thing is said to be ‘‘in’’ another. (1) As the finger is ‘‘in’’ the
hand and generally the part ‘‘in’’ the whole. (2) As the whole is ‘‘in’’ the
parts: for there is no whole over and above the parts. (3) As man is ‘‘in’’
animal and generally species ‘‘in’’ genus. (4) As the genus is ‘‘in’’ the species
and generally the part of the specific form ‘‘in’’ the definition of the specific
form. (5) As health is ‘‘in’’ the hot and the cold and generally the form ‘‘in’’
the matter. (6) As the affairs of Greece centre ‘‘in’’ the king, and generally
events centre ‘‘in’’ their primary motive agent. (7) As the existence of a thing
centres ‘‘in’’ its good and generally ‘‘in’’ its end, i.e. in ‘‘that for the sake of
which’’ it exists. (8) In the strictest sense of all, as a thing is ‘‘in’’ a vessel, and
generally ‘‘in’’ place. One might raise the question whether a thing can be in
itself, or whether nothing can be in itself – everything being either nowhere or
in something else’ (Aristotle, 1930: 56).
2. This remains the case in Heidegger’s most significant lecture course in
Freiburg, from the winter term 1929–30. On a notice-board of the institute,
Heidegger had written ‘Singularisation’ (Vereinzelung) instead of Solitude in
the title (Heidegger, 2001).

References
Aristotle (1930) Physika, trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye. Oxford: The
Clarendon Press.
Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Heidegger, M. (2001) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World –
Finitude – Solitude. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
42 Theory, Culture & Society 29(4/5)

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher, cultural theorist and writer. He

is the director of the University of Art and Design, Karlsruhe, professor
of philosophy and media theory and visiting professor at Bard College,
New York, the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris) and E.T.H
(Zurich). He currently co-hosts the German TV show Im Glashaus. Das
Philosophische Quartett. The trilogy ‘Spheres’ is Sloterdijk’s magnum
opus, which develops several Heideggerian themes in the context of the
history of modernity and globalization. The present article is taken from
a second and previously untranslated book on Heidegger.

Peer Illner is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College,

London. He has studied sociology, media studies and art theory at
Concordia University, Montreal, and Goldsmiths College, where he
completed a dissertation on the topic of education and systems of meas-
ure and an AHRC-funded research-project on pedagogies of the
Enlightenment, focusing on Kant and Heidegger. He is currently work-
ing on a project entitled ‘The History of Theory’ in collaboration with
Humboldt University, Berlin.