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ἀθάνατοι. ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες. Diels translates: "Immortal: mortal, mortal: immortal, for the life of these is the death of those, and the life of those is the death of these." Heraclitus speaks here in a short, tightly worded way. Here we have the formula, "to live the death of something other," in a special way. Diels-Kranz separate the "immortal mortal" and "mortal immortal," each time with a colon. One could suppose that in one instance it is a matter of a determination of θνητοὶ [mortals] and in the other a determination of ἀθάνατοι [immortals]. In the first case ἀθάνατοι would be the subject and θνητοὶ the predicate; in the second case θνητοὶ would be the subject and ἀθάνατοι the predicate. Does it mean that there are immortal mortals and mortal {150} immortals? Doesn't the phrase contradict itself? Or is a relationship of the immortals to the mortals thought here, a relationship which is fixed by their being placed together?
HEIDEGGER: It is noteworthy that θνητοὶ stands between the ἀθάνατοι.
FINK: Do you take ἀθάνατοι as the subject of the sentence? One could ask what kind of a distinction is thought in ἀθάνατοι and θνητοὶ? A simple answer would be that ἀθανατίζειν [to be mortal] is the negation of θάνατος [death].
HEIDEGGER: How is θάνατος to be determined in reference to what we have said up to this point?
FINK: We cannot give such a determination yet, because we have moved till now in the domain of τὰ πάντα in reference to πῦρ ἀείζωον. Perhaps one could view death from ἀείζωον, if one thinks it as the always living, in contrast to the experience that every living thing is finite. But it is difficult to think the ἀείζωον.
HEIDEGGER: Don't we learn from Fr. 76 that θάνατος is distinguished in contrast to γένεσις?
FINK: There it is said that through the death of one, another comes forth.
HEIDEGGER: Does θάνατος mean φθορά?
FINK: I regard this identification as doubtful. Death and life are not normally referred to fire, air, water, and earth, in any case so long as one does not understand fire in the sense of Heraclitus. Looked at from the phenomenon, we speak of life and death only in the domain of living things. In reference {151} to the domain of what is lifeless, we could speak only in a figurative sense of death and life.
But let us remain at first with Fr. 62, in which ἀθάνατοι and ονητοί are mentioned. We could say that the immortals are the gods, and that the mortals are humans. The gods are not deathless in the sense of an α-privitum [alpha-privative]. They are not unrelated to the fate of death. Rather, they are in a certain way referred to the death of mortals through the reverse relation to death, from which they are free. As