In-der-Blog-sein

VoegelinView on the nearness of the neighbor.

Heidegger gives a spatial presentation of the neighbor in “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Though this text is concerned foremost with dwelling and building, not the neighbor, Heidegger purposely attaches dwelling to neighbor in his etymological tracing of the German nachbar (“neighbor”). This German word has its root in the Old English neahgebur: “neah, near, and gebur, dweller.” Heidegger thus defines the neighbor as “the near-dweller, he who dwells nearby.” This definition seems simple enough and, upon first impressions, bears little significance. But, for Heidegger, “dwells” in this definition assigns it greater importance, because dwelling in the case of this essay replaces the traditional word for being. That is, “man is insofar as he dwells.” Heidegger goes so far as to declare that “Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.” The neighbor, therefore, is he who dwells near me, the one who is near to me.

The horrifying is the uniformly distanceless neighbor, even more uncanny than out of place neighbor; The Point of Reference.   ¶ 6:37 AM