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the large. We must distinguish on one hand our attempt to rethink the fragments of Heraclitus and on the other hand the way that Heraclitus himself has thought.
FINK: What Heraclitus thinks in large scale, he can only say in small scale.
HEIDEGGER: Thinking and saying have their special difficulties. Is it a question of two different matters? Is saying only the expression of thinking?
FINK: The distinction between inner thinking and the articulation of thinking in language is an idea that we have from the history of philosophy. There is the view that philosophical thinking cannot say completely everything that it thinks; so that, in a certain way, what philosophy thinks remains behind the linguistic expression. The deepest thoughts are then ἄγγητον [unspeakable]. This model does not apply to Heraclitus. His sayings are no hierophantic, withholding speech about the linguistically inscrutable mystery. Heraclitus does not know the opposition of the linguistically open and the impenetrable mystery that gets thought as refugium or asylum ignorantiae [refuge or asylum of ignorance]. It is something else when we think the mystery in a completely different manner. Heraclitus speaks in a language which does not know the stark difference between inner thinking and outward saying.
HEIDEGGER: But how about thinking and saying? We will also have to say for Heraclitus that there is a saying to which the unsaid belongs, but not the unsayable. The unsaid, however, is no lack and no barrier for saying.
FINK: With Heraclitus we must always have in view the multidimensionality of speaking that we cannot fix at one dimension. Seen from the immediate statement, only the pasture animals in their manner of movement are named in πᾶν ἑρπετόν. But now we have attempted to read and interpret πᾶν ἑρπετόν as πάντα ὡς ἑρπετά, and we have referred πληγή to the lightning bolt. In this consists our jump-off into the nonphenomenal domain. Measured by the tremendously sudden movement, everything that stands under the lightning in its light-shine and is brought into its stamp has the character of an animal like, i.e., slow movement. It is to be asked, however, whether it is a matter of two levels, so that we can say: as in the sensory domain the animal herd is put to pasture by the whip blow, so in the whole all things are steered by lightning. I would like to think that we may not set both these levels off so sharply in contrast from each other. If we speak of two levels, then there is the danger that we make comparisons from the phenomenal level and begin to move into unrestricted analogies. If we suppose the two levels to be sharply distinguished, then we miss precisely their interplay. Heraclitus knows no fixed levels; but we must precisely notice, with interpretation of his fragments, that and how they interplay. The force