EARLY GREEK THINKING

The meditative fire is the gathering which lays everything there before us (into presenting). Τὸ Πῦρ is ὁ Λόγος. Its meditating is the heart, i.e. the lighting-sheltering expanse, of the world. In a multiplicity of different names—φύσις, πῦρ, λόγος, ἁρμονίη, πόλεμος, ἕρις, (φιλία), ἕν— Heraclitus thinks the essential fullness of the Same.

From beginning to end and back again this list refers to the phrase that begins Fragment 16: τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, the not setting ever. What is named in it must be heard in consonance with all those fundamental words of Heraclitean thinking to which we have referred.

In the meantime, we have seen that never entering into concealment is the enduring rising out of self-concealing. In this way does the world fire glow and shine and meditate. If we think it as lighting, this includes not only the brilliance, but also the openness wherein everything, especially the reciprocally related, comes into shining. Lighting is therefore more than illuminating, and also more than laying bare. Lighting is the meditatively gathering bringing-before into the open. It is the bestowal of presenting.

The event of lighting is the world. The meditatively gathering lighting which brings into the open is revealing; it abides in self-concealing. Self-concealing belongs to it as that which finds its essence in revealing, and which therefore cannot ever be a mere going into concealment, never a setting.

Πως ἄν τις λάθοι; "How then could anyone remain concealed?" the fragment asks, with reference to the forementioned τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, which stands in the accusative. In translating, we make it the object of a preposition in the dative case—"How could anyone remain hidden before it, that is, before the lighting?" Without giving a reason, the form of the question rejects such a possibility. The reason must already lie in what is questioned itself. All too quickly we are prepared to bring it forward: since the never-setting, the lighting, sees and notices everything, nothing can hide before it. But there is no mention of seeing and noticing in the fragment. Above all, however, the fragment does not say πῶς ἄν τι, "how could something ...?" but πῶς ἄν τις, "how could someone ...?" According to the fragment, the lighting is in no way related to whatever just happens to be present. Who is meant by the τίς?

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