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
58 The Inception of Occidental Thinking