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the sea is also meant. In Fr. 76, a revolution of fire, air, water, and earth is perhaps mentioned. The overturnings mentioned here cannot quite be followed through by us.
In this connection, we look at Fr. 36: ψυχῇσιν θάνατος ὕδωρ γενέσθαι, ὕδατι δὲ θάνατος γῆν γενέσθαι, ἐκ γῆς δὲ ὕδωρ γίνεται, ἐξ ὕδατος δὲ ψυχή. Diels translates: "It is death for souls to become water, but for water, death to become earth. But out of earth comes water, and out of water comes soul." The turnover is here named with the hard and obscure word, γένεσις [to become]. The issuance and the hard change of soul over into water, of water into earth, of earth into water, of water into soul, do not allow the idea that the same original substance lies behind its transubstantiations. The fragment mentions γενέσθαι and γίνεται and the hard word ἐκ [out of]. We must ask ourselves whether ἐκ in the sense of the issuance of something is also to be understood in the sense of the whence or else in the sense of the Aristotelian ἐξ οὗ [out of itself], as that which lies at the base and would change over in a μεταβολή [change]. At first, it is striking that in Fr. 36 the four elements are not clarified more. Rather, ψυχαί [souls] are mentioned. What could ψυχαί be? What is thought by ψυχαί? Do we abandon the apparent way of alternating change over of elements when the rubric ψυχαί now emerges in issuance and passage? I am of the opinion that the soul in the sense of the human soul is not primarily meant by ψυχαί. An element of endowment with consciousness does not enter into the activity of the elements with ψυχαί.
Perhaps we can ascertain this in a reference to Fr. 77: ψυχῇσι τέρψιν ἢ θάνατον ὑγρῇσι γενέσθαι. The second part runs: ζῆν ἡμᾶς τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον καὶ ζῆν ἐκείνας τὸν ἡμέτερον θάνατον. Diels' translation is: "For souls it is desire or (?) death to become {149} wet. We live the death of those souls and they live our death." When it says that we live the death of the souls and that the souls live our death, when, in other words, the souls stand in relationship to us so that they live our death and vice versa, then they cannot easily be identified as humans. But we also have no motive for determining ψυχαί. We could at first only say that a new thought motif in the turning of fire appears with ψυχαί.
HEIDEGGER: The difficulty here is that one does not know where the matter under consideration belongs, and where it has its place in Heraclitus' thought.
FINK: I have taken up this fragment because the formula, "to live the death of something," also occurs in it, even though we still do not know who or what lives death as ψυχαί. This strange, most surprising formula must be thought explicitly by us, if we wish to keep away from pure ideas of chemical transmutation, the ἀλλοίωσις and the emanation of the turns of fire.
We turn to a first consideration of Fr. 62: ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ