The Anaximander Fragment
[Präsenz] of representational thinking. The decisive turn in the destiny of Being as ἐνέργεια lies in the transition to actualitas.
Could a mere translation have precipitated all this? We may yet learn what can come to pass in translation. The truly fateful encounter with historic language is a silent event. But in it the destiny of Being speaks. Into what language is the land of evening translated?
We shall now try to translate the Anaximander fragment:
κατὰ τὸ χρεών διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας
along the lines of usage; for they let order and thereby also reck belong to one another (in the surmounting) of disorder.
We cannot demonstrate the adequacy of the translation by scholarly means; nor should we simply accept it through faith in some authority or other. Scholarly proof will not carry us far enough, and faith has no place in thinking. We can only reflect on the translation by thinking through the saying. But thinking is the poetizing of the truth of Being in the historic dialogue between thinkers.
For this reason the fragment will never engage us so long as we only explain it historiologically and philologically. Curiously enough, the saying first resonates when we set aside the claims of our own familiar ways of representing things, as we ask ourselves in what the confusion of the contemporary world's fate consists.
Man has already begun to overwhelm the entire earth and its atmosphere, to arrogate to himself in forms of energy the concealed powers of nature, and to submit future history to the planning and ordering of a world government. This same defiant man is utterly at a loss simply to say what is; to say what this is—that a thing is.
The totality of beings is the single object of a singular will to conquer. The simplicity of Being is confounded in a singular oblivion.
What mortal can fathom the abyss of this confusion? He may try to shut his eyes before this abyss. He may entertain one delusion after another. The abyss does not vanish.
Theories of nature and doctrines of history do not dissolve the confusion. They further confuse everything until it is unrecognizable,
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