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HEIDEGGER: Wittgenstein says the following. The difficulty in which thinking stands compares with a man in a room, from which he wants to get out. At first, he attempts to get out through the window, but it is too high for him. Then he attempts to get out through the chimney, which is too narrow for him. If he simply turned around, he would see that the door was open all along.
We ourselves are permanently set in motion and caught in the hermeneutical circle. Our difficulty now consists in the fact that we search for a clue about the meaning of τὰ πάντα in central Heraclitean fragments without having already involved ourselves in a detailed interpretation. For this reason our search for the meaning of Heraclitus' τὰ πάντα must also remain provisional.
PARTICIPANT: If we attempt to make clear to ourselves the meaning of τὰ πάντα starting from a fragment, can't we revert to Fr. 50 in which it is said, "Everything is one?"
HEIDEGGER: But everything we have of Heraclitus' fragments is not the whole, is not the whole Heraclitus.
FINK: I don't imagine that one can jump at Heraclitus' obscure saying as a maxim for interpretation. Likewise, we cannot appeal to Fr. 60, which says that the way up and the way down are one and the same, for an understanding of what a way is, for instance, a way in philosophy or a way through the fragments of Heraclitus. Here Heraclitus does not express the customary understanding of way. It also pertains to the hermeneutical difficulty mentioned by us that each fragment remains fragmentary in its explication, and in connection with all other fragments, it does not yield the whole of Heraclitus' thought. {GA 15: 34}
HEIDEGGER: In the course of our seminar we must make the attempt to come through interpretation into the dimension required by Heraclitus. Indeed, the question emerges how far we implicitly or explicitly interpret, that is, how far we can make the dimensions of Heraclitus visible from out of our thought. Philosophy can only speak and say, but it cannot paint pictures.
FINK: Perhaps also it can never even point out.
HEIDEGGER: There is an old Chinese proverb that runs, "Once pointed out is better than a hundred times said." To the contrary, philosophy is obligated to point out precisely through saying.
FINK: We begin with the passages in which πάντα are mentioned in order to look at how πάντα are spoken of. We begin with Fr. 1, which has already concerned us. The phrase which alone now interests us runs: γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον. We ask in what respect πάντα are mentioned. πάντα are designated as γινόμενα. But what does that mean? If we conceive γίγνεσθαι narrowly, it means the coming-forth, the burgeoning of a living being from another. But in order to understand the extent to which πάντα are γινόμενα in Fr. 1, we must bear in mind the