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PARTICIPANT: When λόγος, specifically the stoic κατάληψις [direct apprehension], gets translated and understood as conceptus [concept].
HEIDEGGER: To talk of the concept is not Greek. It is not consonant with what we will treat in the next seminar. There we must also deal cautiously with the word "quintessence."
FINK: When I speak of quintessence, I would like to lay the emphasis on συνέχον [keep together]. When the participant said {GA 15: 51} that I have explained τὰ πάντα as the quintessence of the individual, he has claimed more than I have said. I have precisely not decided whether τὰ πάντα means an entire constellation of what is individual, or whether this phrase does not rather refer to the elements and the counterreferences. At first, I understand τὰ πάντα only as the entire region to which nothing is lacking; to which region, nevertheless, something is opposed. That to which πάντα stands in opposition, however, is not alongside them; rather, it is something in which πάντα are. Thus seen, Κεραυνός is no longer a phenomenon of light among others in the entirety of τὰ πάντα. We do not deny that in the entirety of what there is, lightning too is included in a pre-eminent manner which points in the direction of a summum ens [supreme entity). Perhaps Κεραυνός as thought by Heraclitus is, however, no ens [entity] which belongs with τὰ πάντα, also no distinct ens, but something which stands in a relationship, still unclear to us, to τὰ πάντα. We have first formulated this relationship in a simile. As lightning tears open light, and gives visibility to things in its gleam, so lightning in a deeper sense lets πάντα ta come forth to appearance in its clearing. πάντα, coming forth to appearance, are gathered in the brightness of lightning. Because the lightning is not a light phenomenon interior to the entirety of πάντα, but brings πάντα forth to appearance, the lightning is in a certain sense set apart from πάντα. Lightning is, therefore, the Κεραυνός παντων κεχωρισμένος. But as thus set apart, lightning is in a certain manner also the joining and again the dismantling in reference to πάντα. τὰ πάντα ta means not only the entirety of individual things. Precisely when one thinks from out πυρὸς τροπαί [transformations of fire], it is rather the transformations of fire throughout the great number of elements which makes up the entirety of individual things. Individual things are then μικτά, that is, mixed, out of the elements.
HEIDEGGER: In what would you see the distinction between entirety and wholeness? {GA 15: 52}
FINK: We speak of wholeness in the whole structure of things which we can address as ὄλα, and of the entirety of things, of the ὄλον, in which everything distinguished is gathered and set apart in a specific ordering.
HEIDEGGER: Do you understand entirety as ὄλον or καθόλον [universal]?
FINK: But ὄλον, the entirety of πάντα, is derivative from ἕν, which is a wholeness of a completely different kind than the structural wholeness