Aletheia (Heraclitus, Fragment B 16)
A slight transposition of the construction into the form τὸ μήποτε δῦνον clarifies at once what the fragment is talking about: the never-setting. If we change the negative expression into a completely affirmative one, we then hear for the first time what the fragment means by the "never-setting"—i.e. the ever-rising. In Greek phraseology, this would have to be τὸ ἀει φύον. This turn of speech is not found in Heraclitus. The thinker speaks only of φύσις. In this we hear a primal word of Greek thought. Unexpectedly, then, we get an answer to our question as to what it is whose setting Heraclitus denies.
But can this indication of φύσις as an answer satisfy us, so long as it remains obscure how we are to understand φύσις? And what help are impressive-sounding epithets like "primal word," if the grounds and the abysses [Gründe und Abgründe] of Greek thinking so little concern us that we can cloak them in arbitrarily chosen terms borrowed in an utterly thoughtless fashion from our current stock of ideas? If indeed τὸ μήποτε δῦνον is to signify φύσις, then the reference to φύσις, will not tell us what τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε is, but the other way around—"the never-setting" urges us to consider how φύσις is experienced as the ever-rising. And what is this latter but what is always-enduring and self-revealing? The saying of the fragment accordingly takes place in the realm of disclosure, not that of concealment.
How, and with respect to what content, must we think the realm of disclosure and disclosing itself, so as not to run the risk of chasing mere terms? The more determined we are to keep from intuitively representing the ever-rising, the {GA 7: 276} never-setting, as some present thing, the more urgent will be the discovery of what it is to which "never-setting" has been given as an attribute.
The desire to know is often praiseworthy; only not when it is rash. But we could scarcely be proceeding more deliberately, not to say fastidiously, when we remain at all times close to the words of the fragment. Have we in fact stayed with them? Or has a barely noticeable transposition of words seduced us to haste, and thus to waste an opportunity for observing something crucial? Apparently so. We transposed τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε into the form τὸ μήποτε δῦνον, and correctly translated μήποτε as "never" and τὸ δῦνον as "that which sets." We considered neither μή, which is stated independently before δῦνόν, nor ποτέ, the word that follows δῦνον.
111