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of his sayings consists in the fact that working from the large scale, Heraclitus can also say something in reference to the everyday.

HEIDEGGER: Perhaps you have already said too much.

FINK: Our starting point, however, in explicating the fragments, consists in the more or less known traits of the phenomena. I want to attempt to clarify still another fragment which has already concerned us. Fr. 99 reads in translation, "If the sun were not, it would be night on account of the other stars." Here is pronounced not only a eulogy of the power, of the strength of Ἥλιος which drives out darkness, but we see in the other stars the possibility of being lights in the darkness. Light shines in the darkness. That means that the circuit of lights is surrounded by the night. The stars and the moon indicate the possibility of the lights being imbedded in the dark of night. Here lies the jump-off for our question. Could it not be that as the stars are imbedded in the night, the open-endless domain of the sun is also imbedded in a nonphenomenal night?

HEIDEGGER: When you speak of "endless," that is no Greek idea.

FINK: With the expression "open-endless" I mean only the phenomenal feature that we see no wall when looking up, but rather only the character of running out and of not arriving. {GA 15: 91} The phenomenal state of affairs addressed in Fr. 99, that lights can be imbedded in the dark of night, has put before us the question whether or not the sun's domain, and thus Ἥλιος in his reference to τὰ πάντα, can have μέτρα on his part which we cannot immediately see. In jumping-off from the phenomenal imbeddedness of the stars in the night, we have attempted to take in view the nonphenomenal encirclement of the sun's domain by a nonphenomenal night. We have attempted to clarify what the μέτρα of the sun pertain to in three ways: first, as the μέτρα of the sun in her course; second, as the μέτρα which are apportioned by the sun to everything lying under her; and finally, as the μέτρα in the sense of the τέρματα named in Fr. 120, which encircle the sun's domain, the domain of the sun's brightness and the πάντα found in it.

HEIDEGGER: In this connection, you have spoken of the night. But how do you understand the night?

FINK: The four τέρματα confine the sunny world at its four ends. This encircled domain is characterized by the temporary presence and absence of the sun, from which the problem of day and night arises. As seen from the phenomenon itself, we are all of Hesiod's opinion. Immediate seeing indicates that day and night alternate. Against this, Heraclitus formulates the provocative sentence and says: although Hεsiod appears to understand most about human works and days, he has not understood that day and night are one. For our part, we have asked whether this being one is to be read directly as it is said, or whether we must avail ourselves of a more difficult rendition. In the latter case we


Martin Heidegger (GA 15) Heraclitus Seminars