With that fragment of Heraclitus’s that we now take as the first in the preliminary succession we are presenting here, thinking would like to arrive at the constitutive core of what is, for thinkers of the inception and therefore for Heraclitus, the inceptual to-be-thought. We place fragment 16 at the ‘inception.’ It says:
τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι;
From the not ever submerging (thing), how may anyone be concealed (from it)?
This and all other translations in what follows should, if possible, be true to the word. ‘True to the word’ means something other than ‘literal.’ In mere literal translations, single words are confronted by almost mechanically lexical counterparts. But mere words are not yet words in the fullest sense. Therefore, when translation seeks to be not only literal, but also true to the word, the words must receive their naming power and their structure from the already presiding fidelity to the unifying word (that is, to the totality of the saying). Nevertheless, every translation remains makeshift. When the stakes are low, a makeshift approach suffices—for example, in the case of translating business paperwork. Here, both sides understand what is at stake, perhaps even too well. In the case [45] of translating the sayings of Heraclitus’s, the stakes are very high indeed. Here translation becomes a kind of transporting to the other shore, one which is hardly known and lies on the opposite side of a wide river. Such a voyage is easily led astray, and most often ends in a shipwreck. In the realm of transportive translation, all translations are poor, only more or less so. The translations attempted here will not be exempted from this judgment. Translation undertaken in the realm of general understanding and through the course of business dealings can largely be accomplished without interpretation. Translations undertaken in the realm of the vaunted word of poetry and of thinking, however, are always in need of interpretation, for they themselves are an interpretation. Such translations can either inaugurate the interpretation or consummate it. But it is precisely the consummating translation of Heraclitus’s sayings that must necessarily remain as obscure as the originary word.
τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι;
This saying of Heraclitus’s names several things. To begin with: τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε—“the never ever submerging thing”—which we can easily reformulate (but thereby also weaken) as “the never submerging thing.” What precisely it is that never submerges is not expressly said in the saying. At any rate, this appears to be so; for the saying only names it in the neuter case, “the never submerging thing.” Then the saying states: πῶς ἄν τις, “how may anyone”; a τις, an “anyone,” is therein named, not a τι, so not an object or a thing, but rather what we address in regard to itself (and its self) with the interrogative pronoun “who.” We ourselves—human beings—are so addressed. In any case, human beings are meant by the τις—“anyone.” Whether something else is also meant, [46] something else that can be addressed by the questions “who” or “who are you,” remains undecided for the time being.1 Furthermore, there is talk in the saying of λάθοι, λαθεῖν, λανθάνειν—that is, of a being concealed. More precisely, there is the question of whether anyone from the sphere of human beings can be concealed.
The saying ultimately has the form of a question. However, the question is of the sort that appears already to answer itself. Transcribed into the form of an answer, the questioning saying reads:
From the never submerging thing, no one can remain concealed.
From this modification of the saying—one suggested by the saying itself—we can, in any case, clearly conclude one thing: namely, that the saying names a relation existing between the never submerging thing and human beings. The relation is such that no human being can withdraw from the never submerging thing. We are immediately tempted to ask why this is so. We would like to know in what sense this relation exists and in what it is grounded. This leads us immediately to two questions: first, who is the human being such that, in relation to him, there can be talk of being concealed and not being concealed? And second: what precisely is that before which and in the region of which the human can never be something concealed? Heraclitus’s saying quickly becomes pervaded by questions for us, questions that practically pose themselves all at once. But this, after all, cannot be a surprise for us: for the saying itself is a question, only one out of which we have prematurely made an answer and a predicative statement that almost sounds like a doctrine. But is not the saying simply a rhetorical question, i.e., a question that is not a question at all and that thereby prohibits questioning by allowing the questionable to disappear through an easily destroyed pretense to questionability? But is it so [47] readily evident that there is no way for the human being to be concealed before the never submerging thing?
Assuming that this is so, then certainly the saying states that we should know this. But how can we know this, if we do not consider all that is being said there? And how can we consider it without questioning? Perhaps it is precisely here that questioning comes upon the unquestionable. But how shall we ever arrive there, if we do not go forth along the path of questioning in order to learn the proper way of questioning? The proper way of questioning is based upon knowing where, and in the face of what, one may no longer question. Thoughtful questioning and being able to question in the manner of the thinkers is in itself already an originary form of knowledge. We should approach such knowledge, and only such knowledge, in the manner of questioning: i.e., by taking the saying as a purely rhetorical question, which would mean not grasping it in advance as the dictum of a thinker. Additionally, when dealing with a thinker who is himself obscure, we will only attain understanding with difficulty. Therefore, we ask: what is the saying asking? It is asking: πῶς—how, and in what way and by what means, could a human ever remain concealed before the never submerging thing? In saying ‘before’ the never submerging thing, we are inserting a word not present in the Greek text. This ‘before’ inserted by us also easily leads to the misunderstanding that the ‘never submerging thing’ is some sort of object or being that everywhere stands opposite to the human and watches over him, as it were. Therefore, we formulate it more carefully in the translation: “From the not ever submerging thing, how may anyone be concealed (from it).”
Admittedly, this also brings with it the misinterpretation that the never submerging thing is some kind of watchful being in whose custody the human finds himself such that, try as he might, he can never escape from this being to safety. Yet, what kind of relation the never submerging thing has to the human, and conversely, how things stand with the relationship between the human [48] and the never submerging thing, could surely be easily determined if we finally just directly stated what the ‘never submerging thing’ is: for it is the lack of clarity surrounding this name that alone accounts for the enigmatic nature of the saying, since surely the other part that is mentioned in the saying—namely, the human being—is sufficiently known to us owing to the fact that we ourselves are human. However, precisely the opinion that we already know what the human is, and that we therefore also know how the essence of the human was experienced in inceptual thinking, is the greatest barrier we can encounter on our path toward understanding the saying. For the saying is, after all, a question. And we shall retain it as the question it is. We shall retain it even in the face of the suggestion, brought forth by the dictates of grammar, that the question is merely a pseudo-question, a so-called rhetorical question, precisely because it already contains the answer. Such a suggestion would further maintain that it is only the form of the speaking, and not the content of what it says, that has a questioning nature. Certainly, in some sense, the saying contains the answer in what it asks and how it asks. But how can someone understand an answer—and thus think of it as an answer—if he does not first take seriously the question that the answer answers? ‘Rhetorical’ questions are, in truth, themselves ambiguous. They can serve to distract from precisely what is questionable. They assume the appearance of the question, thereby giving the appearance that the question has already been posed, thus bringing it about that no further questions arise. Or, in assuming the mere guise of the question, they give themselves the appearance of an unquestionable answer, which so dismays us that it leads us to the questionable in the first place. The ‘answer’—namely, that no human could ever be concealed before the never submerging thing, as the saying of a thinker posed in the form a question—shifts into a thinking-after how, in what sense, and why that should be the case. [49] In this, however, the following question conceals itself: what is it that is named here as submerging (i.e., being-concealed)?
If no human can be concealed in relation to the never submerging thing, then it must be owing to the never submerging thing that every human—that is, every human as human (i.e., in accordance with his essence and indeed from out of the essential core of his human being)—stands in the unconcealed, so that in and through the never submerging thing the human is that which cannot conceal himself. What, however, is this τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε?
At first, we will linger with the attempt to think what has been named here in its essence. We will therefore initially only contemplate the first ‘part’ of the whole saying, and not yet pursue the question posed in it. For we can already see that the μὴ δῦνόν ποτε obviously remains the determinant from which arises the concealment and unconcealment of the human. We shall return to the question of the saying itself only when the sufficient illumination of the μὴ δῦνόν ποτε leads us there of its own accord. This illumination naturally demands that we also think through other fragments, and in such a way that the first-named fragment encompasses those inserted in the meantime.
In the words τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, something is named whose essence determines itself in relation to δύνειν. δύνω is connected to δύω, which means to envelop, to sink. δύνω means: to enter into something; the sun enters into the ocean and dives down into it. πρὸς δύνοντος ἡλίου means: toward the submerging sun—‘toward evening,’ ‘toward the West.’ νέφεα δῦναι means: to merge beneath the clouds, to disappear behind them. ‘Submerging’ understood as δύνειν (and thus thought in a Greek way) is the disappearing from presence in the manner of departing and entering into that which envelops, i.e., that which conceals. ‘Submerging,’ thought in a Greek way, has its essence in entering into a concealment. However, in connection to the words ‘submerging’ and ‘submergence’ [50], we are prone to think of an indeterminate disappearance. ‘To submerge’ can mean to fall victim to decay or destruction. ‘To submerge’ is also to go over into non-existence. To be victorious or to submerge in defeat—to be or not to be. But ‘submerging’ understood in a Greek way, and thus in the sense of ‘entering into a concealment,’ is in no way merely a situation of no longer existing or of non-being. Submerging, in the sense of an entering into concealment, is precisely ‘a’ being—yes, perhaps even being itself, thought in a Greek way, and thus inceptually experienced. ‘Submerging’ is a becoming concealed and a concealment: in Greek, λανθάνω, λάθω, ‘submerging’ and ‘submergence’ in the sense of the submergence of the sun; the submerging of the sun is clearly not its ‘destruction’ and in no way brings about its non-existence. But certainly, since the time of Copernicus, we have known that the submergence of the sun is merely an optical illusion: for modern science holds the key to all understanding. Sunsets are now only for ‘poets’ and ‘lovers.’ The enchantment of the world has been displaced by another enchantment. The new enchantment is now ‘physics’ itself as an outstanding achievement of the human. The human now enchants himself through himself. The modern human is now what is enchanting. We have already heard it in the words of Hegel: the universe itself cannot offer any resistance to the human will to unlock it. This certainly presupposes that what the will subjugates through its unlocking is the universe, i.e., that which is oriented toward the one and singular: versus unum. The ‘universe’ is that which unlocks itself and offers itself up for pleasure. But Heraclitus speaks of the same. His saying speaks not of ‘submerging,’ but rather of its opposite, μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, the “never submerging thing.” Certainly. Nevertheless, the question remains whether what Heraclitus names as the never submerging thing is the same as what Hegel conceives of as the essentially self-disclosing.
[51] Even supposing that both were the same, Heraclitus’s saying would nevertheless be saying something different: namely, that the human cannot conceal himself before the never submerging thing. The reverse sentiment is true for Hegel’s thought (and for that of the contemporary era): namely, that the self-disclosing is that which cannot withdraw itself from the grasp of the human. However, perhaps the contemporary and the inceptual have yet another relationship with one another beyond that of a mere inversion. The inceptual word, in any case, demands that we think ‘submerging’ and ‘submergence’ in the sense of ‘entering into concealment.’
We need only to regard the saying of Heraclitus’s from the outside in order to recognize more clearly that an essential relationship exists between δῦνον and λάθοι. The only two substantive words of the saying think the same thing: namely, that which has the essential feature of concealment, that which perhaps is nothing other than concealment and self-concealment itself. In order to recognize this, we must listen to the saying even more carefully and remain mindful that it is the saying of a thinker whose thinking is different from conventional thinking. The saying of Heraclitus’s directly compels us into testing the difference between conventional and essential thinking, and thereby to practice the latter. So long as we fail to endure the test of this difference, we remain incapable of thinking-after the saying of the thinker. Thus, we must first put ourselves to the test. We must first reflect upon whether we, with all of our hurried zeal to understand the saying, are really thinking with care.
As soon as we hear the saying, we would also like to know what τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, “the never submerging thing,” is. We are therefore asking about that which never falls prey to submerging. We thereby differentiate something that submerges, or alternatively does not submerge, from submerging itself. The latter we can name the process or the event by which something—namely, the submerging thing—is affected.
Through this question we do not so much want to find out something about the event of submerging; rather, the question wants to know what that is which, as the never submerging thing, remains withdrawn from the event of submerging: for in the saying there is talk of τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε. By asking in this way, we penetrate into the substance of the saying. Or at least it appears so.
In truth, with this apparently forceful question about the submerging thing, we do not think properly about the saying of the thinker, on account of the fact that we are not thinking essentially but rather only ‘conventionally.’ How so? Where is there in reference to the talk about τὸ δῦνον—the submerging thing, or the never submerging thing—even the possibility of misunderstanding? τὸ δῦνον means, unequivocally, the submerging thing. That is what we say—we who are thinking conventionally—when we allow our conventional imagination to consider that which submerges. By this, we mean something that is subject to the process of submerging. However, τὸ δῦνον does not only mean the submerging thing in the sense thus explicated; the word τὸ δῦνον is by no means unambiguous. In fact, the very character of this word is ambiguous. Expressed grammatically, the word has the character of a participle. The word ‘participle’ is the Roman translation of something that the Grecian grammarians signified through ἡ μετοχή: ‘participation.’ The word δῦνον is characterized by [53] participation because it, as the word that it is, can participate both in the part of speech that is called a ‘noun’ or ‘substantive,’ and in the part of speech of which the participle itself is a derivation—namely, the verb, or ‘time-word.’ Thus, for example, ‘the smelling’ is on the one hand that which emits smell—say, the rose—but also the activity itself of emitting the smell, the activity by which the rose smells.
τὸ δῦνον can mean ‘the submerging thing,’ whereby we think of the substance that is subject to submergence. But τὸ δῦνον can also mean the submerging thing precisely in its submerging, and thus the activity of submerging itself understood as such. Hence, the word τὸ δῦνον, as a participle, gives two meanings according to which it may be thought.
If we keep only to the substantive meaning, as has happened thus far, then we leave out the ‘verbal’ meaning. But suppose that Heraclitus, precisely because he thinks the word τὸ δῦνον not in the conventional sense but rather as a thinker, intended only the verbal meaning. If this were the case, then by thinking the word τὸ δῦνον in the substantive sense, we would be missing the essential meaning of the word and would not at all be grasping what is here the to-be-thought. In this event, the question that we pose when we inquire about what does or does not submerge is misguided.
But by what right do we claim that the verbal meaning of the participle is the one thought by essential thinking, and thereby the one meant by the thinker Heraclitus? What is it that the thinkers think—most importantly, the thinkers at the inception of Occidental thinking and, generally, the thinkers of the Greeks? Perhaps the saying of Heraclitus’s, considered before all others, may one day give us the proper answer to this question, insofar as inceptual thinking here directly has its say, and thereby is itself not required to think ‘about’ the task of essential thinking and to deliver information ‘about’ it in a pedantic way.
However, for the time being we do not yet understand this saying. That is why we turn to a thinker of the Greeks in whose [54] thought the tradition of Greek thinking consummates itself, even though this thinking is at a distance to inceptual thinking. Let us consider a saying from Aristotle, who lived a century and a half after Heraclitus (384–322 BCE). In one of his most important treatises, Aristotle states the following at the end of the first chapter:
καὶ δὴ καὶ τὸ πάλαι τε καὶ νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ ζητούμενον καὶ ἀεὶ ἀπορούμενον, τί τὸ ὄν,…2
And so the question that from antiquity has been, is now, and shall (before all else) remain the-sought-for—i.e., that which we (when we think it) continually cannot penetrate—is: what is the being?
τί τὸ ὄν—“What is the being?,” asks the thinker. In the above-articulated definition of what the to-be-thought of the thinker is, we encounter the word τὸ ὄν—“the being”—and so once again a word possessing the character of the participle. And once again we have taken this participle according to the meaning closest to that of conventional understanding—namely, as the substantive. According to the consideration of the wording of Aristotle’s quotation undertaken thus far, the to-be-thought of the thinker is τὸ ὄν. From this we can surely neither deduce if this participial word τὸ ὄν should be understood ‘substantively’ or ‘verbally,’ or indeed in some other way entirely. However, Aristotle himself helps us out with this dilemma. The first sentence of another among his treatises, which sketches an outline of the realm in which essential thinking should reside, begins with the following:
Ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ θεωρεῖ τὸ ὂν ᾗ ὂν καὶ τὰ τούτῳ ὑπάρχοντα καθ᾽αὑτό.3
[55] It is (by chance and by inner necessity) some kind of knowledge that takes into consideration the being, insofar as it is the being, (a knowledge, therefore, that) thus also (takes into consideration) that which belongs to it (i.e., to the being insofar as it is the being).
According to this sentence of Aristotle’s, essential thinking is some sort of knowledge. This knowledge is characterized by its consideration of what is to be known by it. What is considered is τὸ ὄν, the being, but it is considered ᾗ ὄν—this means that the consideration is in view of the fact that the being is a being. In regard to beings, it is not what lies nearest that should be gaped at—namely, that the being is a house or a tree, a donkey or a man, or something else entirely. Rather, the being should ‘only’ be considered in regard to what is seemingly distant, insofar as the being is determined as a being. But the being is only a being because it ‘is’: i.e., it is only a being by virtue of ‘being.’ τὸ ὄν, the being, is τὸ ζητούμενον, the sought-after; but what is sought-after in the thinking of the being is the being of beings, and whatever belongs to it.
In Greek, being is called τὸ εἶναι. This word εἶναι is the infinitive of the verb whose participle is τὸ ὄν. From this it becomes clear that, when the thinker thinks τὸ ὄν, he does not take this word in its substantive sense, but rather in its verbal sense. The abridged and thereby ambiguous question—what is the being?—is indeed the guiding question of thinkers. But in pursuing this question they do not ask if the being is a rock or a bone or a donkey or a triangle. Rather, the question asked by the thinker—what is the being?—means only this: what is the being of the being? What is that in and through which something that ‘is’ is? What is it that characterizes the ‘being’ as such? [56]
Now, what characterizes ‘the free’ as such, and what designates ‘the free’ as ‘the free,’ language calls ‘freedom.’ Similarly, justice is what makes the just the just. Correspondingly, we may be allowed to say, even if the conventional understanding rebels against it, that what characterizes the being as such is ‘beingness.’
This word, however, is only the literal translation of the Greek word οὐσία, the word that was translated by the Romans as substantia and was thereby distorted in its meaning. In Aristotle’s sense, the thinker is seeking what the being as being is, i.e., he is seeking the being of beings—or, phrased otherwise, he is seeking beingness. That is why Aristotle elucidates the first of his quotations considered here—in which the eternally sought for, but also the forever newly question-worthy, is the question τί τὸ ὄν—with an addendum that immediately follows. It reads: τοῦτό ἐστι τίς ἡ οὐσία: “this—namely, what is actually sought-for in regard to beings—is, for us, beingness.” οὐσία, being, is that whence each being as such comes: the origin of beings, γένος. In this way, Plato and Aristotle designate being in relation to beings. Because being is the origin to which each being as such owes itself, being, in its relation to every being, is τὸ κοινόν (to follow Plato and Aristotle here)—the commonality that concerns every being καθόλου (i.e., every being as a whole and generally).
If, therefore, the thinker thinks τὸ ὄν, he thinks τὸ εἶναι—the being (of beings). He thinks being as that from which all beings originate. Being ‘is,’ with respect to beings, always already the ‘older.’ When being is thought, the being is conceived as that which it already was—τί ἦν. That is why Aristotle determines what the thinker is to think—τὸ εἶναι—more precisely as τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι: being as that which, for beings, always already is, i.e., “what was.”
The way of thinking the being of beings briefly outlined above was established by Plato and Aristotle. By thinking the being in a manner [57] that proceeds out of beingness and is oriented toward it, this thinking moves beyond the particular being under consideration. In Greek, movement from one over to the other is designated by the word μετά. Beings—the sea, the mountains, the forests, the animals, the heavens, but also the human and the gods—which of their own accord lie before, sometimes in one way and sometimes in another, without the assistance of the human, are what-occur-in-the-fore, are the coming-forth, and are thereby the lying-before—i.e., ὑποκείμενον (i.e., what approaches the human and encounters him). Here, what is present, which the human does not first need to produce, appears. What is present presences ‘toward’ the human and concerns him in such a way that it comes upon him and even assails him. Those things that appear from out of themselves as ‘presencing toward’ the human are, for the Greeks, authentic beings, because the Greeks, for reasons about which we cannot yet inquire, only experience being in the sense of a presencing-toward. That which emerges from out of itself and is therefore what appears and, in all of this is the presencing-toward, is called τὰ φύσει ὄντα, or τὰ φυσικά. This appears as what abides here-and-now and there-and-then—i.e., the particular thing that abides. But when τί τὸ ὄν is asked, the question is not aimed at that particular being, but rather beyond it (μετά), ‘over’ it toward the being of beings. The question τί τὸ ὄν does not think τὰ φυσικά, but rather μετὰ τὰ φυσικά. The thinking that thinks οὐσία—i.e., beingness—moves beyond the particular being and over toward being. It is a thinking μετὰ τὰ φυσικά—that is, “metaphysics.” From Plato and Aristotle up to the current day, Occidental thinking is ‘metaphysics.’ By contrast, the thinking of the inceptual thinkers is not yet metaphysics. However, they too think being, yet they do so in another way; they too are aware of beings, but they experience them in a different way. When, therefore, the inceptual thinkers say the words τὸ ὄν/τὰ ὄντα/the being, then they are not for the most part thinking, as thinkers, the ‘participial’ word substantively, but rather verbally; τὸ ὄν, the being, [58] is thought in the sense of its being, that is, in the sense of being. τὸ ὄν—or, according to the older formulation, τὸ ἐόν—means, for Parmenides, the same as τὸ εἶναι.
We will remain with the question of how to think the participle τὸ δῦνον in the saying of Heraclitus’s. We have said that it must be thought according to the way of the thinkers. The thinkers think the participle τὸ ὄν verbally. We must accordingly think τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε—the not ever submerging thing (i.e., the never submerging thing)—in a manner analogous to how the thinker thinks the word ‘the being’: namely, in the sense of being. Therefore, we must think τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε verbally as ‘the never submerging.’
We will therefore change the translation of the saying we initially gave to now say: “from the not ever submerging, how may anyone be concealed (from it)?”
Now, one could surely object that what applies to the philosophical understanding of the participle τὸ ὄν need not also be applied to the participle τὸ δῦνον. However, this concern is too superficial to allow ourselves to tarry with it for long. Regardless of which way in particular ‘submerging’ and ‘never submerging’ relate to ‘being,’ it is clear that each are a manner of being. The participle τὸ ὄν—i.e., the being, i.e., being—is the participle of all participles, because the word ‘being’ is the word of all words. In every word—even in the word ‘nothing,’ into which we let all beings drift—being is thought and named, even if we never expressly think about it or speak it. Supposing, therefore, that in the saying of the thinker the word δῦνον is meant in the sense of essential thinking, then what is thought and named by it is being, understood ‘verbally.’ Instead of verbum (verbal), a term used by Latin grammarians, we will say ‘time-word.’ The word being, as the word of all words, is the inceptual ‘time-word’ as such. The time-word ‘being,’ as the word of all words, names ‘the time of all times.’ Being and time inceptually belong together. Thinking must think this [59] togetherness of ‘being and time’; otherwise, it runs the risk of forgetting what remains, for the thinkers, the to-be-thought.
There is another concern, however, that is weightier than the apparently frivolous consideration of whether the verbal sense of Heraclitus’s word τὸ δῦνον necessarily follows from the meaning of the foundational word τὸ ὄν, which itself must be thought verbally.
We are speaking in a circuitous way of the never submerging thing and of never submerging; we are speaking, before all else, of beings and of being. We are speaking empty words which bring nothing to mind, and we fail to find ourselves in an immediate relationship with what is meant by those words. We are being led around in an abysmal region of a strange manner of speaking and ushered through an elucidation of words and word meanings, and thus are passing by the things themselves. The suspicion arises, and it has been spoken of and repeated often enough, that an empty sorcery with words is being practiced here. ‘Word mysticism’ is the polite term used by those who suspect all of this to be mere word games. It would indeed be dangerous were we simply to shove aside the suspicion and the impression that only words are being negotiated with here: for this impression—namely, that it is only mere words that are being manipulated here, words through which we fail to represent anything actual to ourselves—does not arise from this lecture alone. Rather, the observations made here merely bring our attention to a state of affairs that we otherwise disregard hourly, daily, and often for a whole lifetime.
That state of affairs is this: in our explicit, but also our implicit speech, we constantly use the little word ‘is.’ We are now thinking, for example, without saying it [60], that this lecture ‘is’ boring; the theme being covered ‘is’ dry. You need not speak these sentences out loud; rather, you, as though half-asleep, simply think unreflectively “this lecture ‘is’ boring.” Yet, even here—in this indeterminate, unreflective thinking—you nevertheless understand the unuttered, entirely unremarkable and inconspicuous word ‘is.’ Please—take a moment and test yourselves whether you can ‘imagine something’ in relation to the word ‘is.’ Even if not, the word ‘is’ is not just some empty sound. Everyone understands it, yet no one grasps what is thereby understood. Only rarely can someone be motivated even to pay any attention to this ‘is.’ How often in the course of days and nights, how often and in what manifold connections do we say, mean, and understand this ‘is’? It never bothers us that we cannot imagine anything by it. But what else is the little word ‘is’ but a variant of the word ‘being’? Presently, however, we are making a fuss about the fact that one cannot imagine anything in relation to the words ‘being’ and ‘beingness.’ And it is good that we are making a fuss about this, and even better if we become outright agitated about it; it is best if we never inhibit this agitation surrounding our continual use of the word of words and the demands we make of it to mean something, while at the same time failing to conceive anything by it when we are suddenly asked: what do you actually mean when you utter the little word ‘is’? It is best if we become horrified that the human, whose essential characteristic consists in ‘having the word’ and being able ‘to say something,’ never thinks about the word of words and, by neglecting to think about it, forgets the very word in which all saying sways and rests.
The impression that discussions about beings and being are carried out through an empty sorcery of mere words [61] may very well remain. What’s more, it does no harm if thinking continually makes the ‘impression’ on the thoughtless (which it must necessarily make) that it is a consciously contrived devilry to make contemporary thinking even more difficult than it already is. Someday perhaps those who are spirited enough will lay hold of the insight that the estranging impression left by thinking does not have its origin in the circuitous thinking of the thinkers, but rather in ourselves: namely, in the simple and thereby also frightening event [Ereignis] that we all, as historical humans, no longer think of being, but only chase after beings. This forgetfulness of being hangs like a cloud over historical humanity, and due precisely to this forgetfulness, this cloud is also the reason that considerations about the ‘substantive’ or ‘verbal’ meanings of the word ὄν seem empty and foreign to us.
If, however, it is the case that the word ‘being’ and its variants—especially the little and familiar word ‘is’—constantly pervades all of our thoughts and behavior, and in such a way that without an understanding of this word we, even while amidst beings, could not relate to it and ourselves be beings; if everything and all, the highest and the lowest, only encounters us in the ‘ether’ of being, how close must being still remain to us, notwithstanding all of this forgetfulness? If we can first ponder this, then perhaps the moment will one day arrive at which the horror at this forgetfulness of being will turn into astonishment in the face of our nearness to that which first only appears as the esoteric sorcery of an errant thinking—i.e., our nearness to that which names the most vapid of all common words (i.e., the most inconspicuous ‘is’): nearness, namely, to ‘being.’ Yet, this is also the sole thing that awards itself to the thinkers as the ‘to-be-thought.’
[62] (Once we have considered all of this, we will perhaps wish to become more attentive to the apparently merely circuitous explanations of the words τὸ δῦνον and τὸ ὄν. If, since the inception of Occidental thinking, the forgetfulness of being has spread beyond all measure—spreading, indeed, into philosophy as well—then we should not be surprised if the attempt to think toward the inception of Occidental thinking must itself be slow beyond measure. Haste is anathema to essential thinking. Certainly, it is imperative that we make haste, if by that we mean that we think toward the ‘to-be-thought’ without delay or neglect. But such a hastiness of diligent care is not the same thing as rapidity.
The hastiness of essential thinking is subject to the law of slowness. Slow haste determines the way toward the inceptual. The inceptual word demands of us the kind of diligent care in which every step allows the next to come forth from it.)
The attention that this lecture is attempting to steer toward the word of Heraclitus’s places fragment 16, in distinctive to the usual order of the fragments, at the inception. It says:
τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι;
From the not ever submerging thing, how may anyone be concealed (from it)?
A parenthetical remark on the task of translating should briefly allude to the fact that one can [63] easily criticize any translation, but can only rarely replace it with a ‘better’ one. This occurs only occasionally, and only owing to much experience. Such a case is exemplified by the recently published translation by Karl Reinhardt of Sophocles’ Antigone. The sovereignty and beauty of this translation guarantees that some, at least, are on the right path. Every translation, taken just on its own without its corresponding interpretation, remains subject to all manner of misunderstandings: for every translation is in itself already an interpretation. Silently it carries within itself all the attempts, aspects, and layers of interpretation from out of which it originates. The interpretation itself, on the other hand, is only the carrying out of the translation which, still silent, has not yet been brought into the consummating word. Interpretation and translation are, in the core of their essence, the same. That is why, even in one’s own language, translation is constant and necessary, given the fact that the words and texts of the mother tongue are often open to interpretation. All speaking, all call and response, are translation. Therefore, the essence of translating does not consist in two different languages entering into a dialogue. We Germans, for example, must each time translate Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in order to understand it. Such translation does not entail degrading the sophisticated language of the work down to the level of everyday speech: rather, it means transporting the thinking of this work into a thinking and saying that engages and confronts it. By this process it occasionally appears, strangely, that the interpreter ‘actually’ understands the thinker ‘better’ than the thinker understood himself. For the empty vanity of the ‘heady’ pendants, this appearance is dangerous: for they conclude from this that, in this case, Kant himself did not quite know what he himself wanted, but that now the subsequent interpreters know it precisely. However, the fact that a thinker may be ‘better’ understood than he understood himself, is surely not a deficit that may be attributed to him retroactively; rather, it is a sign of his greatness. [64] For only originary thinking harbors that treasure within itself the pondering of which remains forever inexhaustible, and which can be ‘better’ understood each time it is pondered (i.e., can be understood as other than what the words only apparently mean). Mediocre thinking, by contrast, contains only the easily intelligible, and possesses nothing that continually compels toward a more originary understanding and interpretation. Moreover, mediocre thinking cannot call forth those epochs that are compelled once again to recognize and translate what is taken to be familiar.
(That is why thinkers, and only thinkers, have the experience that they one day come to understand themselves better in light of what they have already thought, in such a way that the entire edifice of their earlier thought suddenly collapses, even though they always think the same. But this ‘same’ is not the boring emptiness of the identical, which is only a semblance of the same. There are those, however, who do not know of the restiveness of the same, and who are proud of the fact that they, at seventy, still think the same as what they already thought and knew as high school students.)
Only what is truly thought has the good fortune of being continually ‘better’ understood than it first was. This superior understanding, however, is never due to the merit of the interpreter, but is rather a gift bestowed by what is interpreted.
We will now attempt, from the outside and with insufficient preparation, to dissect the saying of Heraclitus’s in a crude way. In this saying there is talk of the “never submerging thing”; furthermore, the word τις is mentioned—“anyone,” a word that in every case designates a human. (Whether it designates the human alone is a question that must remain open.) Moreover, there is talk of a “being concealed.” The saying itself has the form of a question that already seems to bring its answer with it.
Our elucidation of the saying must first attempt to make clear, in a general way and from out of the thinking of Heraclitus itself, [65] what this talk of the “never submerging thing” means. How is “submerging” to be thought here? Certainly, it needs to be thought in a ‘Greek’ way. δύνειν signifies submerging in the sense of an entering into a concealing. We speak here of ‘submergence’ in the sense in which we still speak of the “submerging of the sun” that disappears behind the mountains or sinks into the ocean, in the manner poeticized, for example, by Stefan George in his poem “Song of the Sea”:
When along the horizon in soft fall
Dives down the fiery red ball,
I halt on the dune and rest
To see if to me shows itself a dear guest.
Jean Paul once wrote:
I have thought to myself a hundred times that, were I an angel, were I to have wings, were I to have no specific weight, I would soar upward just enough so that I could see the evening sun glimmer at the edge of the earth; and while I flew along with the earth, though at the same time against its axial motion, I would maintain myself in such an attitude that I could gaze for an entire year into the mild, wide eye of the western sun.… But in the end I would sink down, drunk on the resplendence, like a stupefied bee in the grass overfull on honey!4
However, for the contemporary imagination, insofar as it clings to the true (or what it values as ‘the true’), the sight of the submerging sun is untrue and mere appearance. ‘Since Copernicus’—and please note that I said ‘since,’ and not ‘owing to,’ Copernicus—the ‘world’ has appeared differently. Listeners who are quick to make up their minds—perhaps, after all, they are only eavesdroppers—may now think that ‘Copernicus’ was mentioned in the previous hour owing to the fact that the commemoration of Copernicus was last week. I regret to say, however, that this lecture cannot be so ‘close-to-life.’ There are certainly more substantial reasons to think of ‘Copernicus’ in connection with the elucidation of Heraclitus’s [66] μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, reasons to which the eyes of some may perhaps be opened over the course of this semester.
In those notes of Nietzsche’s that serve as the draft for a planned magnum opus to which he occasionally lent the title The Will to Power, one finds statements regarding a plan for the presentation of ‘European nihilism.’ The note in question (written in 1885/86) begins: “Nihilism is standing before the door: whence does this most uncanny of all guests come to us?”5 Nietzsche then sketches out, point for point, the ‘consequences’ of nihilism, which have already begun to appear. Under point number 5, Nietzsche says the following:
The nihilistic consequences of contemporary natural science (in addition to its attempts to escape into the otherworldly). From out of its practice follows finally a self-subversion, a turn against itself, an anti-science. Since Copernicus, the human has been moving out of the center into the X.
The last sentence means to say that, since then, the place of the human has become an X, that is, it is still undetermined and therefore must be determined. Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power is meant to accomplish the new determination of the place of the human. The earth, and the human of this earth, shall regain their lost meaning anew. The ‘meaning of the earth’ is the ‘over-human,’ that is, the human who goes over and beyond the prior human, the one who experiences all that is real—and thereby also experiences itself—as a configuration of the will to power. With this most modern of all modern humans, the human not only moves back ‘into’ the center; rather, the human himself now [67] finally becomes the center itself. A saying of Nietzsche’s from 1888 may illustrate this most concisely:
All the beauty and grandeur that we have bestowed upon actual and imagined things, I shall reclaim as the property and creation of the human being as its most beautiful apology. The human as poet, as thinker, as god, as love, as power: oh, what kingly munificence with which he has endowed things, precisely in order to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched! His most selfless act heretofore has been to admire and to idolize and to know how to conceal from himself the fact that he himself has created those things that he admired.6
The saying unequivocally states this: everything that is, only is insofar as it is “the product” and thereby the “property” of the human—namely, of the human as the highest configuration of the will to power. The human is precisely that concrete thing from whose gaze nothing may remain concealed and from whom no being can withdraw, for the human alone and in the first place stamps all beings with the mark of ‘being.’ In the above-quoted note of Nietzsche’s regarding the nihilism of modern natural science, he criticizes it for still attempting to ‘escape into the otherworldly,’ that is, of still occasionally speaking of ‘providence’ and a ‘divine plan.’ By contrast, Nietzsche wants an absolute nihilism, one that does not teach that everything is merely ‘nothing,’ but rather that the human is everything. Nietzsche himself describes his metaphysics as an ‘active’ and ‘classical’ ‘nihilism.’ In it he sees the proper and positive consequence of the Copernican revolution, as well as the future of Europe. Here nothing remains before which the human could still be concealed or not concealed, for the human himself has become the judge of what appears and what, by virtue of its appearing, ‘is,’ as well of what does not appear and therefore ‘is not.’ [68] We say too little, therefore, if all we do is point out the abyss that gapes between the consummation of Occidental metaphysics in Nietzsche and the saying of Heraclitus’s positioned at the inception. However, from this we can anticipate approximately which interpretation of Heraclitus must manifest itself, if Nietzsche sees his metaphysics already modeled in Heraclitus’s thinking.
One more comment must be added here, however, before we put an end to all this unavoidable but, admittedly, annoying beating around the bush. The attempt being dared here to elucidate Heraclitus’s saying in no way plans on ‘renewing’ this inceptual thinking, or even being able to erect it as an ‘archetype.’ In the historical context of the centuries of modernity, through which not only beings in their entirety but also being itself is jeopardized, not one free moment remains to reproduce something from an earlier era, if such a thing were even possible. Since there is no longer time for ‘reproduction,’ we must make do without those archetypes that themselves can only be continually recreated, refreshed, or replaced. This renunciation of historiographical archetypes of ages, styles, tendencies, situations, and ideals is the sign of an extreme and distressing need that we and future generations must first endure before it announces what it conceals. In order that we or those who come after us are even able to hear the saying, we must first slowly learn how to listen to the thinking word.
If we now think δύνειν (submerging) in a Greek way as the entering into a concealment, then we recognize that, between δύνω and λάθω, there stands an essential relation.
(The necessity governing any translation is variously determined in accordance with the dominant ‘need’ at the time. These ‘needs’ span from the lowly depths demanded by hurried business communications, to the merely academic engagement with foreign literatures, upward to the peaks of those moments in which inceptions of history gesture toward one another in recognition [69], and where a dialogue from peak to peak awaits consummation. Here, in the valleys between these peaks of history, every historiography (i.e., the learned, comparative conveyance of ages and cultures in the indeterminate space of an ideal braced up in accordance with educational norms) fails. All historiography must necessarily cling to an archetype (indeed, any classical one) because the passing back-and-forth between styles, tendencies, and situations arising necessarily from out of its own historiographical activity of mediation is threatened by the merely mediate and comparative, i.e., the relative. Any implementation of a classical model and a classic age is in itself already Classicism, which is an offspring of historiography—that is, of the calculating and fundamentally technical relation to history.
However, because the philosophy of the ancient Greek world, along with all of antiquity, is often counted as belonging to the ‘Classical,’ it is important to consider that for us the inceptual thinkers cannot be archetypes for the single reason that we may no longer be permitted to contemplate mere reproductions. For to do so would mean closing off our thinking to the fact that the temples of the earth have either collapsed in upon themselves, have left the holy sites where they once were, or are now only inhabited by empty convention and have therefore lost their historical essence. Not only does it remain to be decided whether or not the German people will remain the historical people of the Occident, but it is also the case that the human, along with the earth to which he belongs, is jeopardized—and, indeed, by the human himself.)
In the saying of Heraclitus’s, the two foundational words τὸ δῦνον and λάθοι appear. Since ‘submerging,’ thought in a Greek way, conveys an entering into concealment, and λάθω means “I am concealed,” and since being concealed is being asked about in relation to that which never enters into concealment, the saying is, at the first attentive glance, pervaded by a singular thinking oriented toward concealing and not concealing. But given that a thinker [70] is speaking here, we must immediately strive from the very first to hear the word within the realm of essential thinking. The elucidation of the word τὸ δῦνον, which seems to be merely grammatical in nature, can help us get there.
Still today we must contend with the puzzling fate that in the Occident, for more than two millennia, the relation to the word has been determined by grammar; that grammar, for its part, is grounded in what is commonly called “logic”; that “logic” itself, however, is merely one (and not the only) interpretation of thinking and saying: namely, the interpretation of the essence of thinking that is proper to metaphysics. Any explanations about the word—be these psychological, physiological, aesthetic, or sociological—are, according to grammar and logic, merely added on to the word understood grammatically as a linguistic sign. Moreover, if we consider that in the modern world the word is generally only ‘evaluated’ as ‘language,’ and language itself is evaluated only as an instrument of communication, then it is not surprising that every consideration of the word immediately appears to be merely an empty reflection on a kind of thing that one calls “words,” “with” which “scholars,” as one says, “occupy” themselves. Words are a type of useful object that one should best leave to the arbitrariness of unrestricted usage.
Now, certainly there would emerge a distinct image of the modern relation to the word, were one to present this relation only as a neglect of language. Over against this—but also dependent upon it—are the efforts of some writers who practically form a cult out of the technics of language and reckon themselves to be members of The Guild of “Splitting-Hairs.” Here, however, even with all due care, language has merely a technical character or, in the idiom of Ernst Jünger, a “work-character.” The word is an instrument of the hunt and the strike [71] in the ‘process’ and the ‘work’ pertaining to the ‘bulletproof’ objectification of all things. The machinegun, the camera, the ‘word,’ and the billboard all have this same fundamental function of seizing and arresting the object. The technical precision of the word is the counterpart to the neglect of language that occurs when it is treated as a mere means of conveyance. Considered metaphysically, both relations stay on the level of that particular relation to reality which, since Nietzsche, appears as the “will to power,” and both experience reality itself as the will to power.
Were we now to abandon ourselves to the common relation to the word (which is in fact an uncanny and skewed relationship), we would never be able to consider a saying of Heraclitus’s. Therefore, we must first, through some kind of ‘reflection,’ approach the inceptual word. However, it is not as if the inceptual thinkers produced ‘reflections’ ‘about’ the word; it is only we who need to take such long detours to the word, on account of the fact that our much-acclaimed ‘immediate experience’—not in its ‘content,’ but rather in its basic structure—is perhaps the most abstract and abstruse form that Occidental history has ever taken. However, since we have not yet found a way other than that of grammar in order to grasp, even just superficially, the word in its essence, this provisional path must suffice.
The word δῦνον is a participle. As such it takes part in both the substantive and verbal meanings. ‘The submerging thing’ can mean that which is either subject to submergence or not; but it can also mean the submerging thing in its submerging, that is, the submerging thing during its submerging and in the endurance of it. Which meaning the thinker intended, and thereby which meaning we must think, cannot yet be decided. Seen in terms of form, we can think the participle either nominally or verbally; but there also exists the possibility of understanding the participle as simultaneously both ‘nominal’ and ‘verbal,’ in which case the emphasis can be placed [72] either on the verbal or the nominal aspect. All of these possibilities of understanding reside in the so-called ‘participle,’ and indeed within a unity proper to it. In this unity, the richness of the word flourishes in a way that cannot be exhausted by grammatical dissection. The word whose meaning has come to be reduced to a single form has still another richness precisely because it comes from the originary unity of speaking and saying.
In order to see a path along which we could arrive at the way of thinking by which the Greek thinkers thought such participial words, we now address our question to that thinker in whose word the thinking of the Greek world consummated itself. However, in doing so we must be careful not to impose the later thoughts of Aristotle back onto the thinking of the inceptual thinkers. In Metaphysics Z 1, 1028b2 and following, Aristotle states:
καὶ δὴ καὶ τὸ πάλαι τε καὶ νῦν καὶ ἀεὶ ζητούμενον καὶ ἀεὶ ἀπορούμενον, τί τὸ ὄν,…
And so the question that from antiquity has been, is now, and shall (before all else) remain the-sought-for—i.e., that which we (when we think it) continually cannot penetrate—is: what is the being?
τί τὸ ὄν—this is the question that directs the thinking of the thinker. Once again the to-be-thought is named through a participial word: τὸ ὄν—the being.
With this word, we initially think of things, living beings, humans, the heavenly vault, and—in order to imagine these things as the Greeks did—also the gods. [73]
The question “what is the being” thereby initially means: what are things, what are plants, what are animals, what are humans, what are gods? In order to find the answer to each question regarding each particular thing asked about, we turn to what is named and seek to grasp what it is. In doing so, however, we shall never find that about which the question “what is the being” asks, even if we should spend an eternity searching.
The question “what is the being?” does not demand information about this or that particular being, but rather about being. What is asked about here, as Aristotle states at the beginning of the discourse Metaphysics Γ 1, is ὂν ᾗ ὄν: the being, but with regard to the fact that it is—in other words, with regard to the being of the being. That to which our gaze is drawn is τοῦτό ἐστιν: τίς ἡ οὐσία—it is the beingness of the being. The suffix -ness (as in ‘just-ness,’ ‘free-ness,’ ‘rapid-ness’) means that which, for example, is proper to all that is just as such, to all that is free as such, and to all that is rapid as such. For example, all that is proper to trees as trees is ‘tree-ness.’ One therefore likes to designate this quality as the universal, the ‘general.’ But tree-ness is not proper to individual trees because it is the ‘universal’ in distinction to the particular specimen. Rather, this universal only is the universal because it is the tree-ness of trees: it is their γένος, that from which every tree as tree, δένδρον ᾗ δένδρον, derives. The οὐσία, the beingness, is τὸ γένος, the origin, that from which every being as being originates. In short: τὸ εἶναι, being, and τὸ ὄν, the being, are not thought substantively, but rather verbally in view of the being of the being.
To name beingness and being, Aristotle uses a term he likely coined himself: τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι, i.e., being as that which every being, insofar as it is a being, already was. In the determination of that which for thinking is the to-be-thought, Plato’s thinking advanced beyond the thinking of Aristotle’s, who [74] listened to Plato over the course of two decades and thereby learned to think. Plato himself names the to-be-thought of beings by means of an idiom that the Greeks, as a thinking people, could be trusted to understand. What the thinkers think is τὸ ὄντως ὄν, “the being in terms of being” [das seienderweise Seiende], the being solely in view of being. This then is also considered ‘what is of the utmost being’ within beings [das Seiendste am Seienden].
Now, admittedly the designations ὂν ᾗ ὄν, οὐσία, τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι, and ὄντως ὄν communicate next to nothing to our stuffed and stubborn ears. These designations are like empty word husks. The reasons for this state of affairs cannot be found solely in the contemporary inability and disinclination to think. The reason Plato’s thought in particular, and above all the philosophy of Aristotle as an expression of Greek thought in its originary directness, remains closed to us, is owed to the fact that the philosophy of Aristotle, by way of Jewish–Arab thought in the Middle Ages, was transformed by ecclesiastical theology into an entity that has only the words in common with the Greek Aristotle, and even these are translated into the language of Latin.
How immovably Aristotle’s thought lies entombed by the Middle Ages is shown in the fact that even a thinker such as Leibniz was incapable of scaling the wall that medieval theology, through its own particular use of the Aristotelian doctrines, erected between the Greek thinker and the later ages of the Occident. Even the classical philology of recent decades, from which one could perhaps expect an inkling of the Greek essence, interprets the philosophy of Aristotle in terms of the theology of Thomas Aquinas. That is why even today most people think that when one says ‘Aristotle,’ it is Thomas Aquinas who is meant, or that when one says ‘Thomas Aquinas,’ [75] a justifiable claim has been made to knowledge of Aristotle and his thought.
As a result of this widespread thoughtlessness, a few years ago a rector of the local university informally suggested removing the figure of Aristotle from the main entrance of the university building, since today we are no longer concerned with the ‘Middle Ages.’
But perhaps it is good that Aristotle, as the last thinker of the Greeks, continues to stand in proximity to the first poet of the Greeks and the Occident [i.e., Homer]. These two figures are right where they should be. However, I often think that all of this is lost on those of us who simply sit there on the steps allowing our slightly thoughtless brains to fry in the sun.
Fragment 16 of Heraclitus’s, to which we have tried to attend thoughtfully as the first in the ranking of sayings, speaks in the form of a question:
τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι;
From the not ever submerging thing, how may anyone be concealed (from it)?
In order to get to the essential core of this question, we must first interpret the words that, through their ‘content,’ bear the sentence. What does the particular combination of words τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε—“the never submerging thing”—mean? And how is the participle τὸ δῦνον to be thought? In order to get a Greek answer to this question we asked Aristotle, the last thinker of the Greeks, through whom the following was revealed: the principal question in accordance with which thinkers since Plato think is τί τὸ ὄν;—“what is the being?” Once again we encounter a participle referring to what is being examined by the thinkers: τὸ ὄν—“the being.” However, the thinkers think the being ᾗ ὄν—i.e., they think the being in view of the fact that it is a being. The thinkers bring the being into the essential view [76] of being. Thus, Aristotle elucidates the above-quoted question as τί τὸ ὄν, and then further transcribes it into the question τίς ἡ οὐσία;—“Which and what is the beingness of beings?” Seen from the perspective of the being, what accounts for the commonality of beings such that every single being (ἕκαστον) is subject to this commonality (κοινόν)? Instead of the name οὐσία (beingness), the word εἶναι (“being”) (the infinitive of that particular verb whose ‘present’ participle reads ὄν) also occasionally appears.
When the thinkers think the ὄν in view of the εἶναι, they thereby understand the participle ‘verbally.’ Thought philosophically, τὸ ὄν always means the being in its being. Why, then, do the thinkers not directly and exclusively use the infinitive εἶναι in order to state clearly what they are thinking? What purpose, then, does the ambiguity of the participle ὄν—i.e., the participle ‘being,’ which can be understood both nominally and verbally—have? It almost seems as though the common suspicion that philosophers purposefully express themselves ‘stiltedly’ and ‘awkwardly’ applies no less to the thinkers of the Greeks.
Now, it cannot be denied that the participle is included within the structure of the question of all questions. Aristotle asks τί τὸ ὄν, and not τί τὸ εἶναι. Therefore, we must postpone our peculiar desire for straightforward expressions. ‘We,’ with our perhaps very limited intellect, must conversely try for once to think about the fact that thinkers on the level of Plato and Aristotle perhaps did have their reasons for using the ambiguous participle τὸ ὄν. One who attempts to think in the manner of these thinkers must indeed think the participle nominally as well as verbally, so that the nominal and verbal meanings can be thought in their own determined relatedness.
With Plato and Aristotle, the guiding question for all thinkers was brought onto a pathway on which, even if one allows for all of the differences in the basic positions of later thinkers, it still remains today [77]. The questions is: “What is the being?” This question unfolds itself more clearly into the question: What is the being of the being? Here the question is directed from out of the being toward being, and from being back toward the being, all with the sole purpose of thereby determining the being itself specifically in its ‘being.’ Because the being is here thought with regard to being, the only proper naming of what the thinkers think remains, in truth, the participle τὸ ὄν, which expresses both the nominal and the verbal.
The nominal sense of τὸ ὄν, according to which the being—and, indeed, beings as a whole—is meant, can be transcribed more clearly through the plural τὰ ὄντα, and the verbal meaning can be more clearly transcribed as τὸ εἶναι. After being thus amplified, the guiding question τί τὸ ὄν means: τί τὸ εἶναι τῶν ὄντων;
Thus, strictly speaking, it is only conditionally true when we say that the participle ὄν, thought in the manner of the thinkers, must always be understood verbally. Philosophy—or, as we could now also say, metaphysics—does indeed constantly think being, but it exclusively thinks the being of the being: that is, it in fact thinks the being, and indeed with regard to being. The casual manner of speaking that often sneaks its way into the thinkers’ speech speaks at one time of ‘the being,’ when the being of the being is meant, but at another time of being, when the being is presented with regard to being. One speaks even more casually and more vaguely of the ‘question of being,’ saying that this is the question concerning being, when in fact, already after a short reflection, it becomes clear that one is actually asking about the being, about what the being is. In the oft-mentioned ‘question of being,’ one asks so blindly and implicitly about the being that one cannot hear a different sort of question that suddenly, and for a change, asks about being and its truth. One hears only what one wants to hear.
[78] Aristotle, in fact, gives us an elucidation of how the participle ὄν is to be understood and how the guiding question of the thinker reads—τί τὸ ὄν;—but it nevertheless remains doubtful whether we can directly interpret the doctrines of Aristotle back into the thinking of the inceptual thinkers, even though he, like them, is Greek through and through. To be sure, such retroactive interpreting happens constantly. Indeed, Aristotle himself is in fact the originator of the attempt to locate the metaphysical manner of thinking that begins with him and Plato already in the thinking of the ‘pre-Platonic’ thinkers. Aristotle habitually begins each of his treatises with a critical review of the prior doctrines of earlier thinkers that he then contrasts with his own doctrine, but only after having already translated their doctrines in such a way that they are on the level of his own manner of questioning. The manner in which Aristotle, and also already Plato, distinguish themselves from earlier thinkers, still today remains the paradigm according to which the sketch of the outlines of earlier thinking is carried out. According to this paradigm, one compares, and does so from the perspective of the later thinkers. Thus, it naturally results that the earlier thinkers appear as those who did ‘not yet’ know what afterwards was thought by Plato and Aristotle. That is, in fact, the case. However, the question remains whether the later thinkers are, precisely because they think what the earlier thinkers did ‘not yet’ know, the ‘progressive ones.’ Perhaps they are in truth the pro-gressive ones—but the question remains whether this pro-gress is not in fact an e-gress away from the inceptual. It is certainly the case that, from Heraclitus to Aristotle, thinking ‘developed.’ But the question remains whether ‘development,’ only because therein something ‘develops,’ is itself already the true and protects the true. It is the same question that we must also direct at modern science when ‘researchers’ are being applauded for (as the strange formulation has it) ‘driving research forward.’ Forward? To where, if you please? Perhaps to the shattered cities on the Rhine and the Ruhr? What is going [79] on with this mere driving forward for its own sake? Does it even have a meaning, especially when one has forgotten to ask along what path one is driving, and who, after all, is doing the driving? ‘Driving research forward’—why forward, and by what right? What are fore and aft here? In any case, we must not take forward-driving and forward-driven ‘modern research’ as a schema in order to construct a so-called ‘historiographical’ development from Heraclitus to Aristotle. For us the question here and now is precisely this: whether the inceptual thinkers, because they did ‘not yet’ think as Plato and Aristotle did, remain ‘behind’ the thinking of later thinkers, or whether they, because they did ‘not yet’ think as Plato and Aristotle did, were already thinking ahead of all later thought, and indeed so essentially far ahead that all later thinkers up to the present day have yet to make up this leap ahead, and indeed cannot even perceive and experience it as a leap ahead. The question that is thus touched upon about the relationship between the inceptual thinkers and the later beginning of ‘metaphysics’ is for us not a historiographical question that only compares past positions of thinking: for if the inceptual thinkers thought ahead of all that came later, and thereby thought beyond even today’s thinking, then what comes to light in their thinking is what already and only lies before us as the fatefully sent that has yet to approach us—that is, what lies before us as history.
This consideration also reveals that the common representation of time as a consecutive succession is in no way adequate to properly think history as it is. However, insofar as history is presented as historiographically and chronologically ordered, this chronological conception of time leads to the fact that only a superficial understanding of time has bearing upon our consideration of history. Through this view, we see [80] the inceptual as what came earlier and has passed: it lies behind us. So understood, we must only count backwards in order to find the inception. However, we will never find the inception of Occidental thinking as long as we count backwards in a historiographically comparative way. We will only find the inception when we think ahead in a manner that experiences history.
If we consider this, then surely the information we have requested of Aristotle regarding the meaning of the participle carries less weight. Indeed, it becomes questionable if we may continue, without sufficient consideration, to take the δῦνον of Heraclitus’s in the sense of Aristotle’s ὄν. We could easily eliminate this concern by saying that δῦνον, in comparison with the ὄν, is something singular—i.e., that the submerging or, on the other hand, the never-submerging, is only a type of being: the δῦνον thus belongs, as does emerging and any process whatsoever, ‘under’ the general concept of the ὄν. Moreover, if the never-submerging ‘is’ something at all, and if the submerging ‘happens,’ a being and a being [ein Seiendes und ein Sein] are present here.
Therefore, what applies to the ὄν as the most universal also applies to the specific case of the δῦνον. The possibility, and perhaps even the necessity, of construing Heraclitus’s δῦνον in the sense of the Aristotelian ὄν thus rightly persists.
Yet, there is a matter that still remains undecided, for, indeed, it has not even been asked yet: namely, whether the δῦνον, or more precisely the μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, is only a singular appearance and occurrence within the ὄν (i.e., within what is), or whether the relation of the μὴ δῦνόν ποτε to the ὄν must be thought altogether differently and in a way for which we find no model in common ways of thinking.
[81] Through the preceding lecture we have decided, almost in one fell swoop, to think the δῦνον ‘verbally,’ thereby hearing the saying in such a way that therein the word of the never-submerging has become audible. Initially, this emphasis on the verbal meaning only has the purpose of allowing the thoughtful gaze to align itself to the viewpoint within which the thinking of the thinkers moves when they name ‘the being.’ In this sense, the ‘never-submerging’ would be a process—something that is, after all—and that therefore still belongs to the category of being. In any case, this relationship between the never-submerging and being must be illuminated, if indeed the thinkers think the being of beings, and Heraclitus, as a thinker, thinks the never-submerging.
The question that remains can hence be captured in the following formulaic way: is the never-submerging only one manner of being among others, or does the concealed essence of ‘being’ perhaps altogether rest in the never-submerging? If the latter is the case, whereto are we being led—or thrown—by the saying of Heraclitus’s when it asks: “From the never-submerging, how could anyone be concealed from it?” Is not the appeal uttered within this saying, which has withstood the fleeting timespan of two and a half millennia, directed to us? Who, if not us, is being addressed therein—we who are sitting here, and who are perhaps still of the opinion that this lecture on Heraclitus is enacting a flight into ‘intellectual history’ and antiquity? Certainly, we could simply process this saying in a purely historiographical way and designate it as the erstwhile opinion of a past philosophy. We could indeed do this. The saying certainly does not suffer as a result: however, the question remains if perhaps we suffer as a result. The saying does not need us: but the question remains whether someday we will need this saying that speaks to us in a hidden way about being. Should this prove to be the case, then it is perhaps good if we ourselves gain some clarity about how we—those of us sitting and standing here, [82] listening and speaking—all relate to ‘being.’ It is perhaps good if we consider, for once, on what terms we are with the most common and fleeting word wherein being speaks itself: namely, with the unremarkable word ‘is.’
We say ‘is’ constantly, even when we are not saying it expressly. We think it in the form of every time-word; we think it in every naming, every call and command, every appeal and every greeting. We think it constantly and understand it everywhere, and yet utterly fail to grasp it and reflect upon it. We think it in every silent reflection; we think it in thoughtless opining; we think it even when we believe ourselves merely to be ‘feeling’ or ‘experiencing’ something. The word of all words; the very ether of language; the word that names that in which all saying and all silence are suspended: for us, this word has remained up until now the most innocuous of all that is innocuous. It is surely strange how carelessly the human proceeds with the word that is always already named in advance of all his often hasty and loud pronouncements, even though it is not always spoken aloud.
According to the Occidental determination of its essence, the human is that being who has found its distinction in λόγον ἔχειν, in having “speech,” in “having the word.” The human has the word in the sense that for the human—and, as far as we know, only for the human—that to which he is relating addresses him, and he is able to respond to this address by speaking, so that everything that appears also and at the same time comes into the word, even if it is not spoken aloud each time. This event [Ereignis]—namely, that whatever comes to appearance already comes from out of the word—is the sole reason that the human is also occasionally affected by the un-sayable. The un-sayable would not appear if all appearing did not remain originally interwoven with the sphere of saying and the word. Every statue, every temple, every playing of the flute would be nothing, if it could not find a home in the realm of the word. [83] What is revealed, however, through a consideration requiring the courage to embrace the simple, rather than the profound or the scholarly, is this: namely, that the human, who in its essence ‘has the word,’ ‘has’ just lost the word of all words, insofar as he thoughtlessly says the word ‘being’ as though it were the most trifling of all trifles. At the same time, the human never fully throws this word away, since doing so would apparently bring about the loss of his own essence.
Let us imagine, if only for a few minutes, what would become of the human if it came about that every possibility of saying and understanding the words ‘is’ and ‘being’ were revoked. No catastrophe that could befall the planet can be compared with this seemingly most trivial of events [Ereignisse] in which the human’s relation to ‘is’ is suddenly suspended. But this catastrophe has long since arrived, only no one has noticed it in its essence. The human, in its history, has reached the point where he has forgotten the ‘is’ and ‘being,’ insofar as he renounces any consideration of what is named by this word. Indifference to ‘being’ has besieged the planet. The human being allows himself to be washed over by the flood of this forgetfulness of being. But, in truth, this is not even a ‘diving into’ the flood anymore, for that would still require an awareness of the forgetfulness of being. Precisely this forgetfulness of being has itself already been forgotten, which is surely in accordance with the essence of forgetting, sucking up everything in its radius like an undertow.
But what do the thinkers of metaphysics say who, since Plato, have been appointed as the ‘guardians’ of the being of beings? What does the last thinker in the history of metaphysics say about the being of beings? Nietzsche says: ‘being’ is the last vapor of an evaporating reality. Is not the forgetfulness of being justified here by metaphysics itself? Certainly. So, it is not worth our while anymore to remember something [84] that is a mere vapor. It is enough if the human ‘lives’ and acts ‘true to life’ and ‘true to reality.’ Why does the human need being, if beings and reality are already enough for him to, as it is often said, ‘fulfill’ his life? With this, one concedes that otherwise there is obviously an emptiness. In fact, through Nietzsche’s metaphysics, ‘being’ is rendered into a mere value: however, this devalued ‘being’ is ‘worth’ even less than ‘becoming,’ i.e., even less than the will to power. For in Nietzsche’s metaphysics the being of beings, which has remained the to-be-thought for all metaphysics, evaporates in one last vapor, which is why Nietzsche’s metaphysics is the end of all metaphysics: for in this final stage a decision is made about being, against which any patchwork solution on the part of a prior metaphysics or a flight into a rehashed Christianity is no longer viable.
But how stubbornly and tirelessly must metaphysics remain within its forgetfulness of being if, as it seems, even two world wars cannot wrest the historical human from out of his mere engagement with beings and awaken humanity’s fear regarding the forgetfulness of being, placing the human before being itself.
Suppose that, however, we were to be placed before being in a less painful way. Suppose that, with one fell swoop, the modern human were to be deprived of such things as the movie theater, the radio, the newspaper, the theater, concerts, boxing matches, and ‘travel.’ Suppose it came about that the human were forced to subsist with only the simple things: he would rather ‘die’ than remember being!
But if we are all so unfamiliar with being and cannot find our way into a thinking of it, how can we be expected to be able to think, as if overnight, what is thought in advance within the inception of our hidden history? Here the only help [85]—if it is indeed any help—comes from the care with which we think-after the inceptual word. This care also entails that we are already attentive to the possibilities of the appropriate translation. By now it has come to light that the thinkers, when they think words that are essentially participial, primarily think the verbal meaning of those words. In accordance with that thinking, and perhaps even somewhat hyperbolically, we now translate Heraclitus’s saying as: “the not submerging ever.” We can contract the “not–ever” into “never,” thus yielding: “the never submerging.”
1 Cf. fragments 30 and 53.
2 Met. Z 1, 1028b2 ff.
3 Ibid., Γ 1, 1003a21–23.
4 Jean Paul, Werke (E. Berend), §1, V, 265.
5 Nietzsche, Werke, XV, 141 ff.
6 Ibid., XV, 241, The Will to Power, between aphorisms 134 and 135.