31
FINK: I understand smoke as a phenomenon that veils the distinctions of πάντα, without the distinctions disappearing entirely. For it is the nose that, in passing through the veil of πάντα, cognizes distinctions.
HEIDEGGER: Thus you take διά as "throughout the smoke." To the contrary, I understand διά as "along the smoke." διαγιγνώσκειν here means that the possible manifold, immanent to the smoke, can be gone through and cognized.
FINK: Whereas, on my preliminary interpretation, smoke veils a multiplicity, on your explication smoke is itself a dimension of multiplicity. {GA 15: 56} The question about τὰ ὄντα depends on the way we understand smoke. διαγιγνώσκειν in the sense of distinction and decision presupposes the διά in the sense of "throughout" (minced).
PARTICIPANT: If all things would become smoke, then isn't everything one, without distinction?
HEIDEGGER: Then noses would have nothing more to do, and there would be no διά. Fr. 7 denies precisely that everything that is would become homogeneous smoke. If that were the statement of the fragment, then no διαγνοῖεν could follow. We have brought Fr. 67 into play precisely because it contains an allusion to the fact that smoke is filled with a manifold.
FINK: Our attempt at interpreting the fragments of Heraclitus began with Fr. 64. Although we have already discussed a number of other fragments, this was above all because we wanted to learn in what respects τὰ πάντα are mentioned. From Fr. 64 with which we began our sequence of fragments, we now turn to Fr. 11. It runs: πᾶν γὰρ ἑρπετὸν πληγῇ νέμεται, Diels translates: "Everything that crawls is tended by (god's) (whip)blow." What can be the reason for arranging this fragment, which declares that all crawling things are driven to pasture with a blow, behind the Κεραυνός-fragment? Approaching from another viewpoint, is it also declared here how lightning steers and how it guides πάντα; or is something entirely different aimed at in this fragment? Let us proceed in the explication of this fragment from the word πληγῇ [blow]. Diels translates: with god's whipblow. True, god is mentioned in the context, but not in the fragment itself. We attempt an explication of the saying without thereby putting it in the context.
HEIDEGGER: You wish not to include the god. But with Aeschylus and Sophocles we find πληγή in connection with the god (Agamemnon 367, Ajax 137). {GA 15: 57}
FINK: In πληγή, I sec another fundamental word for lightning. It means, then, the lightning bolt. On this ground, it is justified to turn from the Κεραυνός-fragmεnt to Fr. 11. But let us first stay with the literal language of Heraclitus' saying: everything that crawls is tended and driven to pasture by the blow. The whip blow drives the herd forward and tends it while it is on the pasture. Apparently, in the literal