58
FINK: This thought is hard to carry through. So long as we read the fragment naively, we must say that the talk is of an eternal living fire that always was and is and will be.
HEIDEGGER: The ἦν and ἔσται have no sense in reference to ἀείζωον'.
FINK: The ἦν means what is gone; the ἔσται means being not yet. It is not fire that is past and will be; rather, fire first and foremost opens the way fur arising in time, tarrying in time, and going under in time. Fire as the time-allowing time first and foremost breaks open the three time ecstacies of past, present, and future.
HEIDEGGER: There is the possibility for passing, so that it itself cannot always have been. But when you speak of time-allowing, in what sense do you mean that?
FINK: In the sense of apportioning of time.
HEIDEGGER: You understand the allowing as apportioning. But how is time meant in the time-allowing? {GA 15: 99}
FINK: We must distinguish time-allowing and the apportioned time that things have in such a way that they have already been for a while, are present, and will also be yet a while. This manner of being-in-time belongs only to things; it does not, however, belong to the eternal living fire which first lets the three time ecstasies break out. πῦρ ἀείζωον is the tearing open of having-been, being-now and coming-to-be. That which stands in the shine of fire receives the time apportioned to its tarrying from this original opening of time. The fire sets measures. The hardness of the problem would disappear if one supposed that πῦρ ἀείζωον were determined by the temporal evidence of being-in-time. The question, however, is whether it is meant that the fire always was and is and will be, or whether a productive relation is to be thought between the fire and ἦν, ἔστι, and ἔσται.
HEIDEGGER: When you speak of the time-allowing of πῦρ ἀείζωον, don't you mean that in the ordinary sense, as we sometimes say, "someone allows another time"?
FINK: The time that the fire allows, by apportioning time to things, is no empty time form, no medium separated from content, but is, so to speak, time with its content.
HEIDEGGER: Of the time thus given, one must say: it tarries. It is not a depository in which things appear as dispensed; rather, time as apportioned is already referred to that which tarries.
FINK: To what is individual.
HEIDEGGER: Let us leave aside what is individual. But do you wish to say that we go beyond the ordinary comprehension of time with your interpretation of time and of time-allowing?
FINK: I proceed first from the strangeness that πῦρ ἀείζωον in Fr. 30 is mentioned as a process in time, while it is precisely {GA 15: 100} not in time;