does not faithfully follow that of the thinker. Moreover, we commit violence to his word, because we unilaterally modify the negating word into an affirming one, and thus eliminate the negation that belongs to the word. However, the fidelity we owe to the inceptual word demands that we leave it in its negating form, especially since, presumably, the negation in the inceptual word is something other than a mere form of linguistic expression. For example, for all thought and knowledge and experience, which word could be more essential than the word for ‘truth’? For the Greeks, this word bears a negation within itself: ἀ-λήθεια—un-concealment, not-concealment.
However, insofar as we first call explicit attention to the negating moment and ourselves become attentive to it through our apparently reasonable (but in truth unfaithful) effort to invert the negating word into an affirming one, it is perhaps advisable to persevere in this attentiveness. For, when we do so, we see that this combination of words in truth contains yet a second negation. How so? Not only does τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε contain [97] the particular word for ‘not’ (μή), but, indeed, submerging itself (δῦνόν) is already a negation, if indeed submergence, thought in a Greek way, is a departing and a vanishing, and thus is the not-emerging and no-longer-emerging and thereby what turns against emerging. Thus, the combination of words τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε contains a double-negation. However, the double-negation yields, as if by itself, an emphatic affirmation such that, when considered correctly, it seems once again appropriate if we forthwith translate and substitute it with a positive expression. If we think the matter in this way, we reckon well with words and put forth the ‘equation’ that a double-negation is the same as an emphatic affirmative; in this case, we are dealing here with coin-counting rather than with the foundational words of saying as such. Certainly, in this all-together cheap and calculative procedure, we renounce properly contemplating what is said and named here in an essential thinking.
Within the saying of Heraclitus’s that we prioritize before all others, thus considering it to be the first saying, there stands in first position the combination of words τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε, “the never submerging, ever.” This first word of the first saying names what, above all and before all else, inceptual thinking thinks,