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co-observers, the gods have a relation to death, which relation we can say though not comprehend. Their reverse relation to death has only the character of exclusion. As ἀ-θάνατοι, the gods have a relation to mortals, which relation appears in the form that the life of the immortals is the death of mortals. We are accustomed to understanding life and death in hard opposition, the hardness of which cannot be surpassed. The opposition of life and death is not the same as that of warm and cold, or of young and old. In the oppositions familiar to us, there are transitions, for example, the transition of being warm to being cold, and the transition of being young into being old. Still, taken strictly, there is no transition of being warm into being cold. Rather, that which at first has a share in being warm maintains a share in being cold. Also, being young does not turn, strictly speaking, into being old. Rather, that which at first is young turns into something old, becomes old. Such transitions are in part reversible, so that they can return their course, and in part one way and irreversible. What at first has a share in being warm and then turns cold can also turn again into being warm. However, what is first young and then old cannot become young again. In Fr. 67, which says that god is day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-hunger, Heraclitus names different oppositions that are familiar to us; however, they all have a character fundamentally other than the opposition of life and death. Is the juxtaposition of life and death in any way still measurable {152} and comparable to the juxtapositions familiar to us? In the phenomenon, the fall of living things into death is irrevocable and final. True, it is hoped in myth and religion that a new life awaits us after death, and that death is only an entrance door. This postmortal life is not the same life as the premortal life here on earth. But it is questionable whether talk of "afterwards" and "previously" continues to have any sense here at all. Evidently, there is expressed in this only a perspective of those who are living and who fill the no-man's-land with ideas of a life to be hoped for. With familiar oppositions, which we know and which have transitions, we find a going under of one into another and, roughly, the birth of the warm out of the cold and of the cold out of the warm. But do we also lind in the phenomenon a birth of life out of death? Clearly not. The birth of what lives is an issue out of the union of the two sexes. The new life is born out of a special intensity of being alive. Thereby, we do not need to share the same view with Aristotle, that the new life is already preformed as a seed in the parents, and that birth is then only the ἀλλοίωσις of a still germinal kind of being into a developed kind of being. But could we imagine how life and death are intertwined, and indeed not in the sense that life turns into death, but in the sense that the transition is thought as "to live the death of something other"? That does not mean: to come out of death into life. Let us begin with the form of