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are the same; young and old are the same. Heraclitus declares the sameness of what seems to be different. How is ταὐτό [the same] to be understood here?
HEIDEGGER: We could understand it as "belonging together."
FINK: Indeed, each pair, living and dying, waking and sleeping, young and old, belongs together. But how do living and dying, for example, belong together in a "same"?
HEIDEGGER: In reference to what is same.
FINK: If being alive and being dead are the same, then they form a sameness that hides itself. The distinctness of life and death becomes clear for the most part when they are posited as analogous to the former two relationships. Sleeping and waking, as well as being young and being old are familiar differences to us, which are referred to the course of time of our lives. Waking and sleeping are alternating states in the course of time, being young and being old are two distinctive phases in the course of time of our lives. Against that, life and death is a relationship of the entire lifetime to something that overshadows it but that does not occur in the lifetime.
Is the saying of the thinker Heraclitus a slap in the face to the current opinion that insists on the distinctness of life and death as well as on the difference between waking and sleep, being young and being old? Is it a matter of directing the thrust of his thinking against the trend toward a world that is divided up in differences, and doing so with respect to a sameness? This would not mean that phenomena would loose their distinctions; rather, it would mean that they are ταὐτό in relation to ἕν. Heraclitus says that being alive-being dead, waking-sleeping, and being young-being old, are the same. {157} He does not say, as Diels-Kranz translate and therewith interpret: "the same which dwells in us." ἡμῖν [us] is added to ἔνι [within] by Diels. It is precisely questionable whether we are the place of the sameness of great oppositions of life and death or whether the place of sameness must not rather be sought in ἕν, to which humans comport themselves and which they thus resemble in a certain sense. Certainly it is at first a matter of a dictatorial assertion that the living and the dead, waking and sleeping, the young and the old, are the same. It is not said that the three opposing pairs of opposites are the same, hut rather Heraclitus names three oppositions that stand in a specified correspondence and he thinks the ταὐτό in relation to each one of the oppositions. The lifetime forms the common basis for the threefold opposites. The entire lifetime is confined by death. Within life, sleep is the analog to death, being old has a specific reference to death, and waking and being young are most related to being alive. But in Fr. 88, there is no mention of life and death, hut of what is alive and what is dead. But how arc the expressions "the living" and "the dead" to he understood? If we say the just (τὸ δίκαιον) and the beautiful (τὸ