Original scientific paper 
Izvirni znanstveni članek 
DOI: 10.32022/PHI29.2020.112-113.3
UDC: 130.3Fink E.
Abstract
The aim of the contribution is to present and then question the thesis of Eugen 
Fink, Husserl’s last assistant and Heidegger’s student, on the inability of metaphysics 
to deal adequately with the problem of death. According to Fink, metaphysics, even 
though it sees the problem of death as its “existential” motive, is unable to transform it 
into its own object, since metaphysical concepts crumble in the face of the unspeakable 
power of death. The fatal difficulty of metaphysics consists, however, in the attempt to 
Metaphysics and Death in Eugen 
Fink’s Thought
Virgilio Cesarone
D’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Department of 
Philosophical, Pedagogical, and Economic-Quantitative Sciences, 31 
Via dei Vestini – Campus universitario, 66100 Chieti, Italy
virgilio.cesarone@unich.it
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Phainomena 29 | 112-113 | 2020
conceive death in “phenomenal” terms, that is, starting from the presence of the entity 
based on its individuation; in other words, metaphysical conceptualizations always 
confront the single thing at the root of the understanding of being as presence. The 
latter is divided into three fundamental moments: the rise between earth and sky of the 
entity in its presence; the revealing of things to man, an entity endowed with reason, 
and therefore the ever-human reference of the apparition of things; the placing of man 
at the center of the totality of entities in time. But the philosophical understanding 
of death can offer us the opportunity to turn to a non-phenomenal dimension, that 
of absence, from which it is possible to fully understand the original moment of the 
evidence of things in their individuation.
Keywords: Eugen Fink, metaphysics, death, presence, absence.
Metafizika in smrt v misli Eugena Finka
Povzetek
Prispevek predstavi in nato pod vprašaj postavi tezo Eugena Finka, Husserlovega 
zadnjega asistenta in Heideggrovega študenta, o nezmožnosti metafizike, da bi 
adekvatno obravnavala problem smrti. Po Finku metafizika, čeprav v tem problemu 
razpoznava lastni »eksistencialni« motiv, smrti ne zmore spremeniti v svoj objekt, 
ker se metafizični pojmi razdrobijo spričo neizgovorljive moči smrti. Usodna težava 
metafizike namreč obstaja v poskus zajetja smrti s »fenomenalnimi« termini, se pravi, 
začenši s prisotnostjo entitete, temelječo na njeni individuaciji; z drugimi besedami, 
metafizične konceptualizacije se s posameznimi zadevami soočajo na osnovi 
razumevanja biti kot prisotnosti. Slednje sestavljajo trije temeljni momenti: dvig 
entitete v njeni prisotnosti med zemljo in nebom; razkrivanje zadev človeku kot entiteti, 
obdarjeni z razumom, in potemtakem zgolj-človeško razgrinjanje prikazovanja zadev; 
postavitev človeka v središče totalitete entitet v času. Toda filozofsko razumevanje 
smrti nam lahko ponudi priložnost, da se obrnemo k nefenomenalni razsežnosti, 
se pravi, razsežnosti odsotnosti, z vidika katere je mogoče popolnoma dojeti izvorni 
okoliščino razvidnosti zadev v njihovi individuaciji.
Ključne besede: Eugen Fink, metafizika, smrt, prisotnost, odsotnost.

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Eugen Fink’s examination of the problem of death involves different 
interpretive perspectives which unfold throughout his philosophical work. 
The first treatment starts from the analysis of the fundamental phenomena 
of human existence; the second sees death as an important moment for the 
elaboration of a shared pedagogical project based on common ideals of life; the 
third—and this is what I am going to discuss here in detail—concerns death as 
a criterion for judging the very history of metaphysics. But before we set out 
on this path, it would be good to start from Fink’s apprenticeship at Edmund 
Husserl’s school with an illustration of his discussions of the problem of death 
with his mentor.
Death and transcendental phenomenology
It is well known that Eugen Fink was Edmund Husserl’s last assistant and 
that to their synphilosophein are to be attributed the five Cartesian Meditations 
edited by Husserl himself (to which Fink added a sixth), and therefore also The 
Crisis. It is, therefore, not only plausible, but certainly legitimate to suppose that 
the assistant, who had an unconditional esteem for his master,
1
 knew very well 
what Husserl wrote in his notes drafted in the 1930s about the Grenzprobleme 
der Phänomenologie, i.e., the liminal problems concerning birth, sleep, and 
death. Although the treatment of death in Husserl’s philosophy is neither 
extensive nor exhaustive,
2
 there are many brief expositions of this problem. 
Certainly, their definition as Randprobleme does not appear congenial,
3
 as it 
1   In 1933, Fink wrote an article in defense of the master’ s transcendental phenomenology 
against the attacks of the neo-Kantians, entitled “The phenomenological Philosophy 
of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism,” which Husserl preceded by a 
brief foreword in which he wrote: “At the request of the distinguished editorship of 
Kantstudien, I have carefully gone through this essay, and I am happy to be able to say 
that there is no statement in it that I could not make fully my own, that I would not 
explicitly acknowledge as my own conviction. ” (Edmund Husserl: “Vorwort, ” in Fink 
1966, VII–VIII) 
2   Cf. Dodd 2010, 51. Another interpreter , however , emphasizes that Husserl’ s thematization 
of birth, death, and sleep is a way to approach human finitude in a phenomenological 
transcendental way, showing birth, death, and sleep as limit-phenomena, intersubjective 
phenomena, and paradoxical phenomena (cf. Geniusas 2010).
3   As the curator of Husserliana XLII states (cf. Husserl 2013, XXIII).
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could connote them as being secondary or marginal. But Husserl’s intention 
is to think of them rather as extreme problems, precisely because they are 
located at the beginning and conclusion of conscious life, and therefore 
force phenomenology, both static and genetic, to its extreme possibilities. 
The question is, in fact, one of being able to phenomenologically grasp the 
cessation of life as a vital interest, i.e. as an activity of consciousness; hence, the 
fundamental question is that of the possibility of thinking about birth, sleep, 
and death at the moment of dissolution (or suspension in the case of sleep) of 
the intentional constitution of the world.
It is clear that birth and death are fundamental events of our existence 
within the Lebenswelt. The access that Husserl initially explores is that of the 
analogy with waking and falling asleep. Certainly, the problem is the lack of 
continuity of conscious life before and after waking up, as well as the loss of 
any possibility of consciousness with a “dreamless sleep [ traumloser Schlaf]. ” 
The noematic correlates of unconsciousness [ Unbewusstsein] are therefore das 
Unbewusste, the non-conscious, that is, what does not belong to the acts proper 
to the thinking, desiring, and evaluating consciousness. Husserl’s attempt is, 
therefore, to try, through the analogy of sleeping, to make phenomenologically 
conceivable what lies beyond any datum and therefore any description, i.e., 
the subject before his experiential entrance into the world and disappearance 
as an experiential subject. This problem appears to concern the constitution 
of transcendental phenomenology: how can the transcendental self grasp the 
question of death, a fact belonging to the objective world? 
It is evident that for the transcendental subject, its own death is unthinkable, 
and yet the subject has experience of death, knows it as an “event in the world 
of men” (Husserl 2013, 78–79), an event that happens in our world, which is 
primarily nature and physical corporeity. Husserl had already committed himself 
to the analysis of death by following this approach, and had, in 1916, written: 
The objective world is the permanent being in objective time, and 
the subjects belong to the objective world as psychic subjects. But 
the objective world is world for my consciousness and a rule of my 
consciousness, and also of my empathized subjects. But I die, this or 
that one dies. (Husserl 2013, 17–18) 

57
The world that stands before my intentionality is a world that lasts, that 
has time marked by objectivity, which provides the norm and criterion to my 
conscience; well, in this world, in which I am present together with others that 
are perceived empathically, one dies, that is, I die, another one dies. Certainly, 
this death that I meet in my observation of the world, precisely because of 
its Naturhaftigkeit, because it is marked by randomness and senselessness, is 
something irrational as opposed to the rational formation of life; it is basically 
a scandal for every reason, says Husserl, and here he, it would seem, “embraces” 
the Parmenidean thesis.
Therefore, there is a problem of accessibility to the phenomenon of death 
for the ego, which reflects it phenomenologically, that is, on the basis of 
transcendental reduction: it has the possibility to experience this phenomenon 
only through others, not by itself: my death is not an experience of mine. 
However, precisely because of the experience I have of my body, I can think of 
developmental trends that are specific to my ego: my aging, my progressive loss 
of bodily operational capacity, the decrease in strength, the reduction in vision. 
Thus, from a concrete point of view, writes Husserl, I can ultimately obtain 
a sort of prefiguration of death from my intersubjective worldly experience, 
which, we remember, is always an intermonadic experience: 
My death as a world event can only be constituted for me when 
I have experienced the death of others as physical-organic decay 
and disintegration, and ⟨as ⟩ impossibility of the continuation of 
identifying empathy, ⟨as ⟩ impossibility of experiencing life in streaming 
intentionality in presentation. The death of others is the death that was 
previously constituted. […] Thus, I find my death as a world event, 
as a datum of experience on the way through other deaths; but as a 
transcendental ego it is me who constitutes the world with all the dying-
ones, the dead-ones, and my human death. (Husserl 2013, 3) 
This prefiguration also shows the inadequacy of the analogy with sleep or 
illness: I can fall ill, lose consciousness for a period of time, and at the end of 
this momentary unconsciousness return to my flow, the before and the present 
interspersed with that time when I was powerless. But death is something else: 
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“It’s over with me. ” (Husserl 2013, 2) Now, it is clear that Husserl’s conception 
is marked by an extreme pre-eminence of the present, starting from the 
temporal constitution which is proper to the synthesis of the ego. This is the 
key that makes it possible to reconnect the past to the present at the moment 
of awakening, after the temporary interruption of the flow of consciousness in 
sleep, and that is not allowed when the interruption of the flow is definitive, 
in the dreamless sleep, a definition that brings us back to the Socrates of the 
Apology. 
As we have already mentioned, Fink worked and collaborated closely with 
his master’s projects, officially embracing his lines of research, as shown by 
the closing of the essay entitled “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund 
Husserl Want to Accomplish?” Here, after recalling that, thanks to intentional 
analysis, fundamental research fields open up to phenomenology, starting 
from the clarification of the “natural attitude,” to which he adds the fields of 
investigation concerning the constitutive problem, Fink writes: 
However, even the highest “metaphysical” problems, which in 
traditional philosophy have never arisen as problems that require 
commitment, but only as “theses” (like God, death, teleology, “meaning 
of existence,” etc.), do not lie outside of the horizon of the work of 
phenomenology. Even though these problems do not offer themselves 
to an initial grasp, even if a long and laborious way leads to them, still 
a philosophy which knows that in its self-understanding it is placed 
within the innermost essence of the spirit which precedes the world and 
all Being can never capitulate in the face of ultimate “irrationalities.” 
(Fink 1966, 178; English translation: Fink 1972, 27)
 
It is clear here that Fink’s intention is to follow the long path of the 
Husserlian method in order to arrive at the clarification of metaphysical 
problems which, as such, are not objects of our experience. But is this, in fact, 
his position? The notes, which he wrote at the same time, and which have been 
made accessible by recent publications of the Gesamtausgabe, show the young 
scholar’s doubts about the viability of this path. The reduction effectuates a 
“ destruction of horizon ” with the view to acquiring a “ critical” terrain, on which 

59
the perception analysis operates. This is how the hyletic data can be obtained 
and shown as belonging to a “wakened” ego, since only a waken ego has hyletic 
data in connection with its Erlebnisse. For this reason, “ the phenomenological 
analysis of the unconscious (sleep, death, birth, and so on) cannot operate by 
constructing uniform sense fields” (Fink 2008, 116) . The problem that Fink 
seems to be facing is an impossibility of the methodology adopted by Husserl 
in his fourth Cartesian meditation, i.e., to try to make everything familiar 
through forms of variation: for the states of unconsciousness, this approach 
cannot be considered valid, because here we are faced with the reinforcement 
of consciousness, which does not offer analogies with the intentional analysis 
of consciousness, which must be conceptually understood starting from its 
Inständigkeit, its insistence.
What approach, therefore, may be adopted in order to seek access to what is 
not given to conscience? Here, Fink begins to outline the path that would lead 
him to his sixth meditation: the phenomenological exhibition [ Aufweisung] 
alone is not enough, indeed, it remains blind, while the speculative creation 
[Schöpfung] remains empty. It is thus necessary to find a unitary engagement, 
to open a new space for philosophical thought: “A philosophy that brings 
everything back to its original self-giving, excludes itself from the possibility 
of finding self-givenness there, where the common intellect does not presume 
any ‘space,’ of discovering stars in the skies which are not yet opened.” (Fink 
2008, 117) It is no coincidence, then, that immediately afterwards Fink 
mentions the problem of the cosmos, understood as the Entity’s field of action 
[Spielraum des Seienden], which he now defines with the term Umständlichkeit, 
circumstantiality . Here, conscience can never be aware of such circumstantiality , 
since the latter remains unthematized and without the possibility of being 
thematized. But how can conscience address it? Fink takes as an example the 
description of silence. Can we think of defining it as an objective happening 
without sound?  Certainly not, for it is silence that makes the presence or 
absence of sound possible. Silence, understood as a world situation, leads us to 
transcendence understood as the horizontality of the entity.
Therefore, if phenomenology wants to replace metaphysics by renewing its 
discussion of philosophical questions, it must be able to take on the constitutive 
problems such as birth and death, however undoubtedly complicated it is to 
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deal with them. Thus, Fink attempts to establish in fundamental points what 
can be achieved through transcendental phenomenology and what its limits 
are:
1. First of all, it is clear that birth and death are not objects, since they do 
not fall within the field of experience. Moreover, transcendental consciousness 
cannot be shown in its coexistential being, since constitution here cannot mean 
the plurality of the subjective Erlebnisse, in which an identity is constituted. 
2. Therefore, it is evident that they are unattainable, both protentionally 
and retentionally, since consciousness always remains in the existence of its 
own flow. 
3. The integrity of the transcendental flow of the Erlebnisse is a temporal 
unit absconding from the present [ entgegenwärtigende Zeiteinheit]. 
4. The events of birth and death, as they are present, are always events of 
strangers to my ego.
5. For this reason, my death and my birth are necessarily a construction 
[Konstrution], and not a constitution.
6. In this construction lies the problem of generative time and therefore the 
objective worldly time.
4
Here, Fink’ s early , however concise, reflection on these themes is interrupted. 
It is possible to summarize it synthetically as a doubt about the possibility of 
making an object of an eidetic reflection upon what conscience is unable to 
thematize, especially because it is anchored to the vision, which considers 
presence as the Archimedean point, also for retention and protention. In 
this way, metaphysical questions, such as those of birth and death, risk 
being excluded from the possible access of transcendental phenomenology. 
In other words, prohibiting the speculative path would prevent Husserlian 
phenomenology from succeeding in bringing to completion the renewal of 
metaphysical thought. But, as we shall see, Husserl’s approach is flawed, and 
links him to the same tradition from which he wanted to depart.
4   Cf. Fink 2008, 122–123.

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Death from an anthropological point of view
Now, the time has come to focus on Fink’s mature reflection upon the 
theme of death, and particularly upon what is the object of an anthropological 
perspective. Primarily, death presents itself to us as a phenomenon: it is 
something that happens before our eyes continuously. But what kind of a 
phenomenon is it? The phenomena that present themselves to us can never 
be exempt from a preliminary “existential” interpretation, that is, our access 
to them is guided by the self-interpretation of existence. This means that the 
philosopher, whenever he tries to grasp universality, can do so only because 
he has a certain amount of intimacy with himself that gives access to the 
phenomena to be interpreted. Philosophy itself, after all, can also be understood 
as an attempt to give answers, which arises from man’ s belonging to the enigma 
of his nature. Man has a continuous relationship with the mystery of his own 
existence, and this can be called the preliminary access to his own fundamental 
situation. This relationship is therefore man’s most proper property: while the 
animal, according to the property of its being, can never reach a high degree of 
consciousness, only human nature happens continuously as an interpretation 
aimed at clarifying the mysteries of its own existence and of the world.
5
 This 
means, on closer inspection, that Eugen Fink is distancing himself from the 
transcendental phenomenology of his master, Edmund Husserl: man is never 
an unbeteiligter Zuschauer, a disinterested spectator, but he who continually 
gets involved by means of and with his interpretative action: “Man is a witness 
to the unfolding of his life, always bearing witness to it: in deeds and words; 
he interprets himself and these interpretations contribute to forming his own 
being.” (Fink 1995, 93) This proximity to oneself, which is expressed in the 
uninterrupted interpretation of one’s own existence, in which every man 
takes part, provides the formal structure, within which the interpretation of 
death occurs. However, one should not think that this intimacy with existence 
reintroduces traditional themes, such as the personality of the self and its 
relationship with freedom and historicity. Fink, on the other hand, intends to 
5   Eugen Fink explicitly refers to the concept of Jemeinigkeit in Heidegger’s Sein und 
Zeit (cf. Fink 1995, 98–114). 
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start from the fundamental phenomena of human existence, in order to see in 
concrete terms how, from time to time, the ipseity, freedom, and historicity of 
the ego take shape in the historical occurrence of the central phenomena of 
human existence.
Death is the first fundamental phenomenon to be examined analytically, 
because it is the one which opens to the essential constitution of our existence, 
finiteness. Our mortality, in fact, pervades every possibility of human existence, 
it is “the ownmost, non-relational possibility, which is not outstripped” and 
“certain,” as Heidegger writes (cf. Heidegger 1993, 264; English translation: 
Heidegger 1962, 309). But if we consider it as a possibility, we cannot consider 
it as something that comes from the outside, it is rather something, which lies 
inside the very being of man. Thus, the potentiality of death is a potentiality 
of no longer being possible, rather than being possible. As a properly human 
phenomenon, in that it does not belong to the animal or to God, death also 
determines man’s relationship to things present in the world. Thanks to the 
knowledge of finiteness, man is able to understand the essence of what is 
artificial, distinguishing it from what is natural and consequently mortal. It 
is therefore on the basis of this elementary anthropological knowledge that 
man goes so far as to ask himself about the origin of things, grasping the 
dependence of things upon their ontological determination. In other words: to 
understand the artificiality of something means to understand the relationship 
between being and nothingness: “Only a being, who in his own essence relates 
to nothingness, can understand what is created as created. And perhaps only 
a being open to nothingness can ‘create, ’ ‘produce, ’ ‘process. ’” (Fink 1995, 116) 
In this sense, it is highly significant that Fink emphasizes how death, together 
with work and domination, reveals the ambiguous way, in which man relates 
to the world.
6
The awareness of mortality, thus, acquires a particular primacy within 
man’s understanding of his own being and of the being of entities: in this 
knowledge, Fink sees the authentic actualization of the promise made by the 
6   Cf. Fink 1995, 321. Cf. also van Kerckhoven’s essay (2003) on this subject. Recently 
published collective book of essays edited by Nielsen and Sepp (2019) is dedicated to 
the question of dwelling in reference to the essential worldly constitution of man.

63
serpent in the holy Bible: “eritis sicut Deus” did not mean that humans can 
achieve omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity, but that they can recognize 
the difference between the divine eternity and the caducity of things. Far from 
any “traditional” understanding of death, which created a mixture of elements 
taken from the animal world (disintegration of the body) and the divine world 
(eternal spark), Fink considers it necessary to access this phenomenon from 
a completely human perspective, avoiding distorting interpretations. To attain 
this access, it is necessary to start from the “case of death, ” from the fact that we 
encounter in our lives someone who dies. Now, it is clear that this knowledge is 
only valid for the one who observes, while death is always the death of the one 
who dies; this is the meaning of the Epicurean sentence, according to which 
one cannot live one’s own death, but, in any case, it must be considered that in 
observing the death of others the certain and anguished understanding of one’ s 
own death is always included: we recognize the phenomenon, which we see 
in the death of others, as something that invests others in the totality of their 
being; that phenomenon represents for them their own death. Upon deeper 
inspection, this means, however, that we truly understand our own death, not 
at the moment, in which we die, but in living, that is, during our own life: our 
own death becomes something, of which we are aware, above all, in the inner 
certainty that accompanies our entire life. This certainty cannot clearly be a 
lived experience, nor even an anticipated representation of future death as in 
Heidegger, but it consists in holding it before us every moment, while living 
our finiteness in constant waiting and in readiness.
The metaphysics of death
But, regardless of the indisputable advances, which we make through the 
analytics of existence, the question of death becomes an essential step to clarify 
the ontological problem. In the face of death, it seems necessary to adopt a 
different ontological register, in order to give meaning and significance to the 
perishing of phenomena, that is, to their disappearance in their individuality, 
with a view to the understanding of entities in general. We have now come to 
the relationship between death and metaphysics, which marks the second part 
of our paper. Let us start from a basic consideration: every understanding of 
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the being of entities is constituted by their manifestation before our eyes, that 
is, by their presence. 
This obvious assertion becomes extremely problematic when we use the 
same ontological register to deal with the problem of death. In other words, 
the question could be addressed in this way: can we use our understanding 
of the being of an entity that we encounter in the world in its phenomenality, 
or even the understanding of the totality of entities in the cosmic perspective, 
to be able to attain an appropriate access to the disappearance of entities 
from their phenomenality? It is not possible for me to explain here one of 
the most important themes of Fink’s thought, the relationship between the 
singularity of the entity that comes to its phenomenality and the totality of 
the phenomena in their worldly constitution, and yet this crucial problem, for 
the history of metaphysics, does not affect the conception of death starting 
from the appearance of entities and the ontological register that comes from 
it. If it is true that being is always understood as “presence, ” it is also true that 
other essential aspects besides presence are connected to its phenomenal 
appearance. Fink refers to an image, dear to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the 
image of a tree that grows with its foliage towards the sky, in the light, but has 
solid roots that go deep into the dark ground, and remain inaccessible to the 
eye, and are nonetheless necessary for the tree to rise in the phenomenal world. 
Thus, the earth and the sky mark the boundaries of the space, within which it 
is possible to understand the presence of a tree, also temporally measuring its 
phenomenal duration, perceived—as all entities are—by the only entity who 
manages to understand ontologically what presents itself to the presence. 
The understanding of being on the basis of presence is grounded in three 
essential traits: firstly, an entity’s rising in its presence between the earth and 
the sky; secondly, the fact that things show themselves to an entity called “man, ” 
who is endowed with reason, and, therefore, the fact that appearances of things 
always have a human reference; thirdly, the fact that human experience is 
placed at the center of the totality of entities in time. Fink argues that, in order 
to look for new ways to develop phenomenology, it is necessary to rethink 
the very concept of phenomenon, especially the essential link that connects 
it to the subject’s ability to perceive it. In order to reach this result, it is no 
longer necessary to start from man’s external experience of things through 

65
representation, but to venture on the search of an essential link between the 
being of the thing and its manifestation, and then to try to reach its being 
itself. Fink’s way of arguing challenges centuries of modern philosophy, as 
he, renouncing the primacy of the subject and its worldly experience, tries to 
grasp the being-thing of the thing. Precisely this is the objective of the search 
for being-the-same, a search to grasp the assumption that makes every event 
experienced possible. This being-the-same should not be understood as the 
recognition of a kind of consciousness of everything that surrounds us, but 
rather as a reference to the relationship that a thing has with its being-itself, 
a relationship, which remains obscure to the eyes of the ego that represents 
it. This means that the representation can only touch the shell of what is 
shown to us and stop at the possibility of turning an entity into an object. 
Fink calls this mode of manifestation of the entity Anschein, appearance-
for-me. Yet, if we observe critically, or rather speculatively, the possibility 
of such an apparition, we recognize that there is a dimension of luminosity 
that makes such an apparition possible. This apparition does not depend on 
human cognitive capacity, but on Vorschein, appearance-in-itself. With this 
latter concept, Fink’s intent is to indicate the movement, through which the 
entity realizes its being by assuming a shape and border. With the arrival to its 
appearing-in-itself [ Zum-Vorschein-Kommen], the entity enters in the world of 
distinctions, like a flower, which grows from the womb of the earth like a baby 
grows from his mother’s womb. This appearing-in-itself is the presentation of 
the entity’s own being. But, while the human representation of an entity is 
subject to randomness, its appearance is not necessary for its essence (there are 
unknown fish in the depths of the ocean as well as unknown plant species in 
impenetrable forests); appearance-in-itself is the intimate link with the essence 
of each manifestation.
7
Thanks to Fink’s philosophical understanding of death, the links with the 
most obvious interpretations of death are broken, because we are now led 
towards a dimension that lies beyond the phenomenal world, an obscure 
dimension, that of absence. The heart of the problem of a philosophical 
interpretation of death is, thus, to understand the “negative” of death. 
7   Cf. Fink 2018, 279 ff.
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Ultimately, the problem of death is of fundamental importance in the attempt 
to overcome the understanding of being exclusively based on the phenomenal 
world, to finally arrive at the phenomenality of things. If death would simply 
be the passage to “nothing,” then Epicurus’ remedy would be effective, but 
instead we have a continuous relationship with the rising of things, which 
means, with the fact that something which previously was not there comes to 
manifestation, with the fact that something which previously belonged to the 
realm of non-being acquires evidence in the world of individuation. 
In other words, it is clear that the question of death in Fink, besides being the 
subject of fundamental significance for a full understanding of the finiteness of 
human beings, is the gateway to trying to deal with the subject of nothing, as 
he himself wrote to his friend Jan Pato čka in August 1969 in a letter, wherein 
he announced the imminent publication of Metaphysik und Tod, which he 
described as “a meditation in a failing attempt to think the nothingness, to 
which human death points as a silent, terrifying pointer” (Fink and Patočka 
1999, 70)
8
With the philosophical understanding of death, therefore, we attain a 
relationship with something, which is totally incongruent with the normal 
understanding of the being of things in the world, which is other than all 
representations that we have of being, because all our conceptual grids, which 
try to remove and exorcize the fear of death, are inadequate. But does man not 
already live in an understanding of reality which refers to something absent? 
Does what is imagined, dreamed of not open up the horizon of being other 
than mere presence? These “images” of reality, which may seem different from 
the usual understanding of being, belong to the same ontological structure 
of reality that is grounded in presence. Both the fictitious projection of a 
dreamlike inner world beyond death and the denial of the void opened by 
death seek to close the gaping chasm in the face of nothingness, since the first 
attitude seeks to inadmissibly broaden the understanding of being that refers to 
the phenomenal world, while the second blocks the way to this understanding, 
8   It should be noted that, in his subsequent letter to Patočka, Fink describes his 
Metaphysik und Tod as being “without results [ ergebnislos],” as being suitable for a 
“skeptical speculative. ”

67
putting aside the fact that the understanding of death radically questions this 
meaning resulting from closure itself. 
Fink’s “cosmological” thesis about death is, therefore, that the dead 
individual compels us to reconsider the problem of man’s being, because the 
problem of death opens a gap in the conception of the being of the self as 
individuation, since man’s death entails precisely the erasure of this self. With 
death, self-affirmation disappears and the individual ceases to have his own 
singularity. For this reason, myths and religions seek to affirm the survival 
of these aspects through perceptions and experiences that the deceased 
supposedly have in the afterlife. Faith in the persistence of a person is the center 
of the belief in immortality. But, at the same time, death offers the possibility of 
leaving the experience of “truth” in the sense of un-concealment of the entity 
and of sinking into the dark and the undifferentiated.
The methodical significance of the analysis of death is based on a 
fundamental trait of human existence, not present in animals or in God, 
which has not been exposed, but above all on the fact that it refers to 
an unprecedented tension and to an enigmatic depth of the human 
understanding of being, truth, and the world. […] Death is the most 
serious and terrible indicator that goes beyond the sphere of indication 
and dissolves the question of truth, which does not grasp what is 
individual. (Fink 1995, 204–205)
Death, in the dimension of the direction, the “sense” to which it refers 
that we want to follow, provides us with a way to start philosophically 
understanding the phenomenality of phenomena, to try to broaden our gaze 
towards the continuous play of the coming-to-light of what was not yet and the 
disappearance-from-presence into the night of what is no longer. Ultimately, 
this is the cosmological horizon, within which it is possible to understand the 
phenomenon of death, to try to grasp the spatial and temporal co-belonging of 
our death and the exit from the light of transient things. It is said that matter 
does not end, but changes its form, so that a rock shattered by the waves 
becomes sand. But is it possible to apply this representation, upon which a 
certain ontological understanding is based, to man? Or is it necessary to get 
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out of the circularity between metaphysics and death, in order to be able to 
conceptually understand death?
The certainty achieved by the Cartesian cogito does not ensure an exit 
from the realm of perishability, quite the opposite: the subject who guarantees 
the certainty of cogitata with respect to the illusion of the outside world, has 
always known of its mortality. “The ego cogito is actually a fragile res cogitans. ” 
(Fink 1969, 20) On the other hand, the wonder of the appearance of things, 
has as a counterbalance the terror of bearing-witness to their disappearance. 
The conviction, common to philosophy and science, that things hide their true 
nature from us, that something is hidden behind their appearance, also resides 
for Fink in the inability to come to a definitive agreement with death, to be 
able to understand it as a phenomenon, and this is because neither science nor 
philosophy succeed in grasping the connection between the end of man and 
the end of intra-worldly things.
Ultimately , the problem of death is of fundamental importance in overcoming 
the understanding of being that I have exclusively in the phenomenal world, 
or rather the phenomenality of things. The continuous relationship with the 
rise of things, with something coming to manifestation from the realm of 
non-being, means that, with death, through it, we arrive to the relationship 
with something that possesses total strangeness with respect to the normal 
understanding of being of things in the world, something other than all the 
representations that we have of being. For this reason, all our conceptual grids 
are inadequate to try to grasp and exorcize the fear of death. But does man not 
already live in an understanding of reality that refers to something absent as 
in the case of the imagined? Although such “images” may seem unconnected 
with reality, they do not highlight ontological structures in open contradiction 
with the obvious understanding of reality, to which we are accustomed.
9
The usual statements regarding death concern the fictitious projection of a 
dreamlike inner world that lies beyond death and the denial of an emptiness 
traced with death. As has been mentioned, both possibilities seek to close 
the gaping chasm in the face of the tremendous nothingness, since the first 
affirmation seeks to inadmissibly broaden the understanding of being that 
9   Cf. Fink 1978, 178. On these topics cf. Schmidt 1996.

69
refers to the phenomenal world, the other instead speaks of a closure of this 
understanding, putting aside the fact that the understanding of death radically 
questions this comprehension, this closure. Upon this ground, also the 
respectful but difficult duel with Heidegger took place during the seminar on 
Heraclitus. Here, Fink, on the basis of an interpretation of the “The Obscure” 
of Ephesus, interprets the earth, not as something phenomenal, and not even 
from a formal point of view, but symbolically, as a positive and real-life power, a 
power of re-enactment. In his dialogue with Heidegger, Fink tries to underline 
the opacity of the earth, on which the boundedness of the open domain of 
light rests. We mortals dwell on the opaque earth whose boundary is marked 
by light. The darkness is not the one of night, illuminated by the stars, but that 
of a closedness of the soil, into which no light is able to penetrate: “In contrast 
to the closedness of the earth, the dark of night has by itself fundamental 
illuminability. ” (Heidegger and Fink 1979, 43)
It is clear that Fink, discussing the un-phenomenality of the earth, the un-
phenomenality of the night,
10
 is trying to arrive through a metaphorical, almost 
mythical language to the speculative dimension, through which it would be 
possible to overcome the non-transparency of death, that is, of nothingness. 
This is the aspiration which Finks expressly states in front of Heidegger’s 
relentless questioning: 
Heidegger: With my questions, I would only like to get at the place 
from which you speak of another night. 
Fink: If I have spoken of another, more original night, of the nightly 
abyss in explication of the sun fragment, I did so in preview of the 
death-life fragments. From there I have viewed the deeper sense of the 
phenomenon of closedness of the earth and in a certain way also of the 
sea as the boundary of the sun’s domain. Only when we first consider 
the relation of life and death will we see how the realm of life is the sun’s 
domain and how a new dimension breaks open with the reference to 
death. The new dimension is neither the domain of openness nor only 
the closedness of the earth, although the earth is an excellent symbol for 
10   On this subject cf. the essay by Barbarić (2005).
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the dimension of the more original night. Hegel speaks of the earth as 
the elementary individuum into which the dead return. The dimension 
of the more original night is denoted by death. That dimension, however, 
is the realm of death, which is no land and has no extension, the no-
man’s-land, … 
Heidegger: … that cannot be traversed and that also is no dimension. 
The difficulty lies in addressing the domain denoted by death. (Heidegger 
and Fink 1979, 54)
 
The decisive confrontation takes place on this terrain: Heidegger thinks 
that only starting from the there [Da] of the clearing [Lichtung] a chance can 
be given to understand what is comprehensible of the darkness, while for Fink 
it is important to point out that, if we grasp the hiddenness [ Verborgenheit] of 
the darkness starting from the clearing, we risk to consider the darkness only 
as the limit of openness.
11
 
Without the claim to utter any final words in what is only a mere sketch of 
the issue, it can be claimed in conclusion that for Fink the wisdom of thought 
must not be founded in the pure standing in the clearing, but rather as entering 
into the night of the earth.
12
 The question of death contains in itself, therefore, 
the access, problematic and unattainable, through which it is possible not only 
to grasp, in all its concrete authenticity, the fragility of our existence, but also 
to try to approach the mystery of being and its relationship with nothingness.
11   “Heidegger: The dark is in a certain sense also the openness, if a light is kindled in 
it. This dark openness is only possible in the clearing in the sense of the Da. // Fink: 
I would suppose that we may think the concealment of the dark not only out of the 
relationship of clearing of the Da. There is the danger that one understands the dark 
only as boundary of what stands open, as the exterior walling of the open. I would like 
above all to indicate that a human relates himself at the same time to the open and 
to the concealing darkness. ” (Heidegger and Fink 1979, 130) Cf. Vetter’s essay (2011) 
regarding the comparison between the thoughts of Heidegger and Fink in relation 
to the question of Nothing. For an overall phenomenological interpretation of the 
Heraclitus fragments cf. Ardovino’s book (2012).  
12   Cf. Fink 1977, 238.

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