4
surpassing or even destruction, and it will enable us to establish a certain common ground appropriate to inquiring discourse. Perhaps a preview of the particular language of Heraclitus' sayings is premature before we have read and interpreted them individually. The language of Heraclitus has an inner ambiguity and multidimensionality, so that we cannot give it any unambiguous reference. It moves from gnomic, sentential, and ambiguous-sounding expression to an extreme flight of thought.
As assigned text in our seminar, we will work with Fragmente der Vorsokratiker by Hermann Diels.2 For our part, we choose another arrangement. This should cast light on an inner coherence of the fragments' meaning, but without pretending to reconstruct the original form of Heraclitus' lost writing, Περὶ φύσεως [On Nature]. We shall attempt to trace a thread throughout {GA 15: 13} the multiplicity of his sayings in the hope that a certain track can thereby show itself. Whether our arrangement of the fragments is better than that adopted by Diels is a question that should remain unsettled.
Without further preliminary considerations, we shall proceed directly
to the midst of the matter, beginning our interpretation with Fr. 64
: τὰ
δὲ πάντα οἰακίζει κεραυνός. This sentence is clearly intelligible to
everyone in what it appears to mean. Whether it is also intelligible in
what this meaning concerns, however, is another question. But first, we
ask what this sentence means. As soon as we reflect on it somewhat more,
we immediately depart from the easy intelligibility and apparent familiarity
of the sentence. Diels' translation reads: "Lightning steers the universe."
But is "universe" the fitting translation of τὰ πάντα? After due
deliberation, one can indeed come to equate τὰ πάντα and "universe."
But first of all, τὰ πάντα names "everything" and signifies: all things, all
of what is {Seiende}. Heraclitus speaks of τὰ πάντα vis-à-vis Κεραυνός [lightning].
In so doing, he enunciates a connection between many things and the
one of lightning. In the lightning bolt the many, in the sense of "everything,"
flash up, whereby "everything" is a plural. If we first ask naively
about τὰ πάντα, we are dealing with a quintessential relatedness. If we
translate τὰ πάντα as "all things," we must first ask, what kinds of things
there are. At the outset, we choose the way of a certain tactical naïveté.
On the one hand, we take the concept of thing in a wider sense, and then
we mean all that is. On the other hand, we also use it in a narrower sense.
If we mean things in the narrower sense, then we can distinguish between
such things as are from nature (φύσει ὄντα) and such as are the
product of human technics (τέχνη ὄντα). With all the things of
nature—with the inanimate, like stone, and with the living, like plant,
beast, and human (in so far as we may speak of a human as a thing)—we
{GA 15: 14}
mean only such things as are individuated and have determinate outlines.
We have in view the determinate, individual thing that, to be sure,
also has a particular, common character in itself, as being of a certain
2. See Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966). Though Freeman has been consulted, Diels' renditions of the fragments are newly translated throughout the present work. (Tr.)