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FINK: ... in order to avoid the phenomenon of transformation.
HEIDEGGER: You mean thereby the dawn of the world and not of a specific day, just as you have in view the world-fire and not the sun. {137}
FINK: But in the phenomenal sun, we can think fire.
HEIDEGGER: How should we think fire? In order to heighten the difficulty, I refer to Fr. 54, in which the word ἀφανής [invisible] comes to the fore. The fire is invisible; it is the fire which does not appear.
FINK: As we have said at the outset: the fire is that which is not there in τὰ πάντα.
HEIDEGGER: If you proceed from day to world-day, so we could think from the sun thither to fire.
FINK: Nowhere do we find the sudden change of fire into sea as an ontic phenomenon.
PARTICIPANT: To what is θαλάσσης referred?
FINK: To τροπαί. For the turning over of sea into earth and breath of fire is a continuation of τροπαί.
HEIDEGGER: I propose that we bracket Fr. 31. The difficulty we got into lies in this, that we have not spoken clearly enough about πῦρ, which we still have to do. I understand neither the interpretation which is accompanied by chemical ideas nor can I follow through the attempted correspondence of day and world-day. For me, there is a hole here.
FINK: The difficulty will perhaps clear itself up if we come to Fr. 76, in which fire, sea, and earth appear in repeated sequence. The most important thing there is the manner in which τροπαί are characterized. What is named only as turning over in Fr. 31, is here spoken of as "to live the death of the other." With that, we {138} meet a new, surprising thought. At first, it should sound noteworthy to us that the dark formula of death, which first becomes clear to us in the domain of the living, is referred to such entities as neither live or die, like water or earth. In the small domain of human ambit, we know well that phenomenon that fire vaporizes water and water quenches fire. Here we can say that fire lives the destruction of water and water lives the destruction of fire.
HEIDEGGER: To live would mean here "to survive" ...
FINK: ... to survive the passing of the other, to survive in the annihilation of the other. Rut we have here only a poetic metaphor. In order to understand the τροπή-character, we must get away from the idea of a chemical change. Starting from the life-death fragments, we must represent to ourselves what Heraclitus thinks by life and death. From there we can also understand the ἀνταμοιβή. that is, the exchange of πάντα for fire and of fire for πάντα. This is a relationship like that of gold and goods, in which connection it is more a matter of light than the value of gold. We do not understand the turning over of fire into what is not fire in the sense of a chemical change or in the sense of an original substance that changes (ἀλλοίωσις) or in the sense of an original element