It is above all those who have gone missing from the world who begin to define what the world is as a whole. To be able to specify the world in its basic features, one must have already experienced the possibility of negating it— or perhaps we should say, of losing it or distancing oneself from it. Whoever speaks of the world as a whole is returning to it out of the artificial nighttime of meditation, or rediscovering its obstinate appearance and endurance following the soul’s voyage to heaven. It is always still there—this balloon of beingness in general, this massif of sensual appearances, this ball of Being, which contains and is all things. Thus, the great world-predications of metaphysics, all the sublime fundamental sayings, all the sentences that start with “The world is all that . . .” or “All life is. . . ,” are accompanied by an imperceptible wave of the hand, a subtle mudra, a finger that points with highest delicacy and utmost gravity to the world, as if the speaker were facing it like a distance mountain range, a mysterious constellation, a fatal archive. In this gesture, ascesis becomes theory, contemplation becomes a speech act. Its grammatical traces are demonstrative pronouns in the absolute application: “this is,” tat, tode ti; “this world,” “this life,” “this body.” Which reminds us that metaphysics, even before it becomes narratological or eschatological, is primarily deictic, ostensive, demonstrative, indicating the block of the world and pointing up at its transcendence. The god of philosophers incarnates himself in the fingertip that points to the impossible whole named “world,” as if it were something present before us; at once fatal and imperceptible, this gesture evokes the panel painting of totality, comprising figure and ground in one. What the pointer knows is in any case the direction in which he has to point: that is what’s actually “there.” At that which is “there,” one may point: as at a “world-region,” a region called world. Raphael’s The School of Athens illustrated such a sublime finger pointer in the divine Plato, who, with the Timaeus in one hand, advances through the center of the hall; the thinker lifts his free hand toward the sky and points with his finger at all that is the case “up there.” His point is the uranic world, of which “our” world represents a clouded downward projection. Plato’s fingertip moves quasi-critically from below to above, from here to there—like the gesture of a man who was undoubtedly “there” himself at some time or another, albeit now he has rejoined us here below in the half-dark region of mortals—presumably to execute the office of transition assistance.

The Raphaelian reference represents a rather harmless case of ideaheavenly romanticism—a breath of metacosmic nostalgia envelops Plato’s gesture. Not so with the darker successors of this philosophical psychocosmonaut. The finger-pointing of many later gnostics—all the way up to Heidegger—distinguishes itself from that of the Raphaelian Plato through the radical risk taken by those who point to the world from the opposite direction. With demonstrative pronouns and thin fingers they point directly to our world, to “this” given and present world, as if they had pulled off the ecstatic stunt of completely dislocating themselves and remaining in “this world” only in appearance or errantly-provisionally. Classical examples of such ecstasies, pointing to the world with the finger, are offered by certain great aphorisms from the Gospel of John—in the first place the enabling word of the Christian age which read: “In the world (this world) you are anxious/fearful, but I have overcome the world (this world)”. From then on, the factual world is dismissed like a demonic past and distanced like the sum of all revocable errors. Also in Philo of Alexandria we find formulations like this, that according to our intelligible soul we are strangers in “this world,” who sojourn in it like migrants in a foreign city (peregrini) until they have fulfilled their measure of lifetime and wander back to their great Wherefrom. Such words displace the speaker and localize him in a zone that Wittgenstein in the Tractatus called the “border of the world.” From the border one can point to the land, the continent of being as if to a strange land, a distant continent. By pointing, the pointer actualizes his borderline nature. The metaphysician is not a patriot of being; he may have settled down quite well “here”—or as the Christians say “down here”; still he must admit that he, in Fichte’s formulation, “no longer has any heart at all for the transitory,” winged as he is by candidacy for citizenship beyond the border.

Peter Sloterdijk, Out of the World