even possibility to speak automatically of retribution upon encountering the word τίσις.
Hence we must not maintain that in antiquity these words had at first an individualized-practical-moral meaning which was then subsequently altered and transferred to nonmoral relations of beings from other regions. It is the reverse, and we must think that in antiquity individual regions of beings were not at all separated out yet. The delimitations arose for the most part only in connection with the rise of the sciences and had the effect of diverting and making murky the original comprehensive view of beings as a whole.
d) Translation of the second section of the statement
All these discussions of the basic meanings and of the origin of the cited words can and must serve in the first place only to make palpable the difference between the following two juxtaposed translations of the Greek passage: διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας.
1) “for things pay one another penalty and retribution for their wickedness.” (the usual translation)
2) “they (beings) bestow compliance and correspondence on one another in consideration of the noncompliance.”
A translation is always the result and final gathering together of an interpretation. Translation is never the mere exchange of a foreign language for the mother tongue; rather, it amounts to being trans-lated with the original power of one’s own language into the reality of the world manifest in the other language.
Our translation will receive its properly cogent confirmation only from the completed interpretation of the whole statement and of what has come down to us immediately from Anaximander. This requires first of all, however, an examination of the full statement.
We maintained that the just-discussed section of the statement is supposed to supply the grounding, as the word γάρ clearly indicates, for what was previously laid down as belonging to Being. If so, then Anaximander is trying to say that the whence and whither of appearance are the same because appearance is itself nothing other than the bestowal of compliance and correspondence in consideration of the noncompliance. Is this a grounding? What we demand of one is that it provide insight into what is to be grounded. And the presupposition for this is that the grounding itself be accompanied with insight, such that we are “content” with it. Yet is this grounding insightful? I would think it is anything but, for it notes and appeals to the fact that the bestowal happens in consideration of a noncompliance. Which noncompliance? Not just any, but the noncompliance, the one which obviously