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Nu], in order to then draw everything into itself, which is to say, to desert-ify [ver-wüsten].
Older Man: Yet what then is the desert? With this name we associate the idea of a waterless sandy plain and a process of increasingly turning to sand, although one also speaks of the “watery desert” of the ocean, by which is probably meant its immeasurable surface as a plain of lifelessness.
Younger Man: The desert is the wasteland [die Öde]: the deserted [verlassene] expanse of the abandonment [Verlassenheit] of all life. And this abandonment extends to such depths that the wasteland allows for nothing that emerges [aufgeht] of itself, in its emergence unfolds itself, and in unfolding calls others into a co-emerging.2 The desolation [Verödung] extends so far that it no longer even allows any perishing [Untergehen].
Older Man: We are thus transferring the geographical idea of a desert, for example the Sahara, onto the process of the desolation of the earth and of human existence [menschlichen Daseins].
Younger Man: So it appears. It seems to me, however, that the geographical concept of the desert is just the not yet sufficiently thought-out idea of desolation, which proximally and thus mostly comes into our view only in particular circumstances and conditions of the surface of the earth.
Older Man: And so we are thinking the desert as the deserted [verlassene] expanse of the abandonment [Verlassenheit] of all life. The desert is what really devastates. Hence devastation consists in that everything—world, human, and earth—enters into the abandonment of all life.
Younger Man: Here we are thinking the word “life”—as has often been done since ancient times in occidental thinking—in such breadth that its sphere of meaning coincides with that of the word “being.” [213]
Older Man: But now, insofar as the devastation consists in the abandonment of being, then after all it no longer allows for any beings, such that anything whatsoever that could be affected by it is lacking. Or may we call a historical age in which a form of “life” still in some manner holds sway, “the age of devastation”?
Younger Man: If we may or even must do this, then world, human, and earth can be—and yet, having entered into the devastation, they can nevertheless remain abandoned by being.
2. What emerges of itself, was von sich aus aufgeht, is for Heidegger one of the essential traits of the Greek notion of physis. While physis gets translated into Latin as natura (nature), according to Heidegger it was one of the principal early Greek words for “being” as such.—Tr.