“Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fé Glauco nel gustar de l’erba
che ‘l fé consorto in mar degli altri dèi.”
Dante, Paradiso
Modern thought tends to mistake distance as mere space: a matter of steps, miles, or the reach of our outstretched hands. The scientific-technological grip. The world has taught us that to be apart is to be inaccessible, and to be near is to be conveniently touchable and, therefore, really present. Yet, according to Heidegger, the true nature of nearness and farness, i.e. of space, does not primarily belong to physical metrics. It belongs to the structure of being itself as it reveals to Dasein. We do not experience others or the world first through cold measurements but through the existential structures of care (Sorge), “being-with,” (Mitsein) and meaning (Sinn). What matters draws near, de-distancing, even when time or death itself lie in between.
In Being and Time, Heidegger introduces the notion of Ent-fernung, commonly translated as de-distancing (Division 1, Chapter 3, Sections 22 and 23). This concept reshapes our understanding of presence. To de-distance is not to physically collapse space. It is to let what we care about draw into nearness through the structure of our care, of our care as primary existential structure. The beloved, even in death or exile, can press closer to our being than a stranger who stands beside us. De-distancing is not a clever semantic trick; it is the very way in which beings unfold within our existence as aletheia or “unconcealment of truth.”
At this point, one might object: “Is this not merely old memory wrapped in philosophical jargon? Is de-distancing anything more than the mind clinging to a past that no longer exists?” It is a fair question, but one that misunderstands the depth of what is being described.
Memory archives the past, it stores and recalls experiences as snapshots of what once was. De-distancing, however, belongs not to the psychological domain of recollection, but to the ontological structure of existence itself: it is fundamental way of Dasein’s being, essentially related to the structure of spatiality and worldliness.
De-distancing describes the way what matters continues to be disclosed as existentially near, or as existential nearness, regardless of physical spatial or temporal separation. Actually, the Newtonian notion of “physical” and objective space, measurable in mathematical terms and describable through the “laws of physics,” had to be acquired through abstract reasoning and calculating representation. So de-distancing as phenomenon is not the mind replaying history; it is the being of the other opening and persisting in our meaningful world, gathering absence and presence into a unified field through care and meaning. Memory recalls; de-distancing gathers together. Memory records; de-distancing reveals.
Thus, what we speak of here is not nostalgia, but the living architecture of care; the fidelity of care about ourbeing and our world that refuses to allow meaningful presences to be flattened into the abstract condition of mere “historical facts,” i.e. a linguistic web of discourse and memory. Without a doubt, the German verb “sich erinnern” reminds us that memory and de-distancing share a common essence: the gathering-together proper to dwelling in a world.
If we seek a mythic embodiment of this reality, none shines more tragically than Orpheus and Eurydice. Their story is not simply one of loss, but of nearness sharpened by impossible distance: a living portrait of de-distancing in its most tragic form.
Orpheus, whose music could stir the stones and charm the beasts, ventures into the underworld to reclaim Eurydice, the wife stolen from him by untimely death. Through the aching beauty of his song, he moves even the cold hearts of Hades and Persephone. They grant a conditional mercy: Eurydice may follow him back to life, but Orpheus must not look at her until they both have crossed into the living world.
Here unfolds the purest stage of de-distancing: Eurydice is near, her presence pressing into the back of Orpheus’s awareness. She is near; not so much spatially, not measurably, but existentially. She opens a world for Orpheus. Her footsteps behind him beat against his consciousness like a second heartbeat. She exists in the terrible, trust-demanding space between certainty and doubt, between presence and absence: she is already present as meaning in phenomenical unity with Orpheus’ (Dasein’s) way of being as “care” (Sorge) and “being-with” (Mitsein).
Orpheus’s tragedy is not that he lacked love. It is that loving her so much made the de-distanced nearness unbearable. Thus Eurydice was lost again. Lost not because the underworld was stronger than love, but because Orpheus, faced with the unbearable weight of de-distanced nearness, succumbed to the temptation of possession. In turning to see her, he sought not her presence as freely given within the clearing of being, but her capture within the frame of physical certainty.
What was meant to remain an unconcealed revealing —an aletheia— was instead enclosed by his doubt and his need for graspable proof. He attempted to convert the event of presence into an object of possession, collapsing de-distancing into enframing (Gestell), annihilating the freedom of her appearing. The tragedy lies not only in human fragility, but in the profound violence against the very nature of love, i.e. in the refusal to let Being reveal itself without the domination of reifying enframing. Thus de-distancing opens a twofold horizon of ontological possibility: the openness and nearness of letting-be in freedom, and the closedness and farness of enframing, where beings are forced into objecthood and the clearing conceals itself within the structure of domination.
In Building Dwelling Thinking, Heidegger deepens this thought: He shows how true “space” is not empty extension but a gathering of meaning. To dwell is not merely to occupy a structure. It is to let beings, memories, presences, and futures gather themselves around us in a meaningful clearing. Thus, the pain of missing someone is not evidence of delusion or weakness.
It is evidence that we have dwelled—that we have allowed another to shape the very clearing in which we move and exist.
Orpheus was dwelling with Eurydice, even when she was unseen. His care gathered her into his world so fully that the space between them was alive with presence. His turning, his desperate reaching for her face, was the final proof that the existential nearness had become unbearable to bear without embodiment.
This phenomenon of distance intensifying presence is not isolated to ancient myth.
It echoes powerfully through the structure of love that crowns the most sublime lives. Nowhere is it clearer than in Dante’s relationship with Beatrice. In the Divine Comedy, Beatrice is not merely a memory. She is the guiding light through the heavens, the force that anchors Dante’s soul even as he traverses the terrifying landscapes of Inferno and Purgatorio. Beatrice, having died young, is no longer part of the world in any physical sense. Yet her absence does not dilute her nearness. It intensifies it, modifying the meaningfulness (Bedeutsamkeit) of her beloved’s world.
Beatrice’s death initiates a profound transformation: She becomes the manifestation of divine wisdom and grace, pulling Dante toward salvation. Dante’s entire journey is, in a sense, a pilgrimage through de-distancing: an odyssey where the beloved, unreachable and transcendent, becomes the clearest axis around which the soul can revolve.
Here, too, the physical absence is not erasure. It is an existential magnetism that pulls the soul across cosmic distances. Dante does not grieve Beatrice as a lost past; he follows her as an ever-present calling. Her absence is a space that gathers him more tightly into himself, orienting his journey toward truth.
Certainly, this existential structure of de-distancing finds a special expression in the relationship between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Their love, complicated by betrayal, politics, exile, and decades of physical separation, persisted through the clearing of absence. Though their affair ended, and though history itself placed vast distances between them, their correspondence reveals a deeper truth: physical distance did not erase existential nearness. Rather, it strengthened it because the ontic-ontological structures of care and being-with have preeminence before self-consciousness and quantifying thought.
The meaning of their bond was not preserved through continuous physical presence or shared life, but through the gathering of each other within the openness of care. Their letters, full of philosophical reflection and quiet longing, disclose the lived phenomenon of de-distancing: the way a being, once meaningfully encountered, remains near through the fidelity of care even across space, silence, and historical catastrophe.
Heidegger spoke of letting beings be, of dwelling within the openness of a world shaped by care. In Arendt, he did not find an object to possess, nor a certainty to control. He found a presence that could only be honored through aletheia: the free unconcealment of the meaning of being, allowed to appear without being forced into the frame of “nearness” as possession and, therefore, to dis-appear into the self-determined “farness” of freedom.
Thus, Heidegger and Arendt’s fractured, enduring relationship mirrors the twofold horizon of de-distancing itself: the risk of enframing love into an object to be seized, and the higher possibility of allowing love to abide freely, across distances that no map could measure. The essence of space is gathering together. A system populated by beings whose essence reveals and conceals itself in the horizon of time.
Heidegger and Arendt’s (i.e., Dasein’s) story is not merely biographical curiosity; it is the lived ontology of nearness without possession, the resolute fidelity to the meaning of Being in a world that Being itself reveals, into which Dasein in thrown, and in which Dasein is confronted with a twofold possibility: being authentic in resoluteness and anxiety, or being inauthentic in the general determination of the “They” (das Man).
Thus, eros is essentially intertwined with the existential structures of care, being-with, and de-distancing. When we “miss” someone—when someone’s presence unconceales itself in Dasein’s temporality—we are not clinging to fantasy. We are participating in the gathering of a world. We are bearing witness to the way eros carves nearness out of pure absence. When we experience the presence of another inscribed within their absence, when the contours of their being press against the void they have left behind, when we extend ourselves into empty spaces that still vibrate with their significance, we are not deluded, nor are we succumbing to Ophelia’s madness. We are enacting the fundamental structure of dwelling.
We are inhabiting the clearing where love gathers absence and presence into a single, unbearable unity. Apprehending someone’s absence in the nearness of de-distancing is not simply an act of memory but a way of being. Space is the vital understanding of the meaning of things for Dasein. Cartesian-Newtonian, even Einstein’s space is just a possibility of intellectual representation of worldliness as being-with.
Yet “existential” space as meaningful spatiality precedes quantifiable physical-mathematical space, because existing is being-there dwelling in the place where we can build around a world of meaning that gathers together Dasein and beings, and exposes Dasein to its ownmost way of being: care, worldliness as being-with, openness as being-possible, and being-toward-death. In both Orpheus and Eurydice, and Dante and Beatrice, love across distance is not a faded echo. It is often the sharpest and truest form of presence. De-distancing does not “fix” the absence by removing it. It gathers absence into meaning: a world in which Dasein dwells.
Yet here the two paths of love across distance diverge. Orpheus, confronted with Eurydice’s unseen presence, turned toward empirical confirmation and betrayed the freedom of her revealing: the existential nearness was forced to show its empirical farness. Dante, by contrast, remained loyal to Beatrice’s aletheia. He honored her presence not through grasping or calculation, but by dwelling within the open clearing where her absence gathered more profoundly than any visible presence could. For Dasein, the essence of space is its ontological significance.
To love across distance is not a distortion of reality. It is reality deepened: the space where the finitude of beings reveals itself through care. De-distancing, then, is not a flaw to be cured. It is a mark of care’s gravity and the way Dasein propriates its being-toward-death in a world that emerges primary as meaning and being-with.
And perhaps—if we are very patient—we come to understand that de-distancing is fundamentally bound to angst and authenticity: it is, in its deepest essence, a form of remaining loyal to the very structure of our ownmost being. It is fidelity to the fact that caring is what makes space ontologically real, that space, as dwelling, gathers meaning, and meaning, in turn, opens the world. Mathematical space, with its neutral coordinates, only arrives a posteriori. Primordially, we are not spatial points scattered in a void res extensa; we are Dasein, beings whose very mode of being is existential before it is measurable, gathered into nearness by the gravity of care itself.
Orpheus turned back and lost Eurydice, clogging the clearing and violating the intrinsic freedom of aletheuein, the event of unconcealment itself. Dante, by contrast, followed Beatrice into eternity, honoring the truth and freedom of her self-revealing. The difference between Orpheus and Dante is not the strength of their love, but the depth of their fidelity to the nature of presence itself. It is a dangerous blessing, this capacity for de-distancing. It allows us to carry others within ourselves across infinite separations, but it also ensures that physical absence will be inscribed in us with the sharpness of unconcealment.
Heidegger remained nearer to Hannah Arendt than the scholars who crowded her public career without ever grasping her essence: the ones we carry in the present absence of de-distancing, we have carried more deeply in nearness than any simple touch could hold, whether within the Newtonian space of material bodies or the abstract farness of mathematical ghosts.
