The concept of nearness in Martin Heidegger

Abstract

After a brief introduction in which I underline the acknowledgment that Emil Kettering makes about the importance of the concept of nearness in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, but in which I also take distance from his approach to the fundamental relation between language and nearness, which I consider limited, I state that the Heideggerian ‘linguistic’ conception can be better understood if these two concepts are considered as an identity, in other words as ‘the same’ [das Selbe] in the Heideggerian sense. With the aim of giving this thesis a phenomenological foundation I approach the Heideggerian reflection on the nearness in five levels, beginning with the usual definition of nearness as ‘short distance’ and ending with its identification with language. My approach to this matter focuses exclusively on the late work of Heidegger.