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We turn now to Fr. 90: πυρός τε ἀνταμοιβὴ τὰ πάντα καὶ πῦρ ἁπάντων ὅκωσπερ χρυσοῦ χρήματα καὶ χρημάτων χρυσός. Diels translates: "Alternating change: of everything for fire and fire for everything, like goods for gold and gold for goods." We appear to interrupt the line of interpretation with this fragment. Here the exchange relationship is thought, which we could more or less think and which does not seem to go along with the way that gods and humans alternately understand themselves and being. At first the fragment seems to offer no special difficulty. The fragment speaks of an alternate counterexchange, of a counterrelationship, where the one is replaced by the other and enters the place of the other. It appears that here the relationship of πῦρ and πάντα is spoken of in comparison to an event in the market. We know a market of natural exchange, or else in the more developed form of the exchange of money, in which goods are exchanged for money and money for goods. The goods, as multitude and variety, behave toward the single form of gold like the multitude in general behaves to that which is simple, but that corresponds, nevertheless, to the multitude of goods. Is this relationship also a form of the fundamental relatedness of ἕν and πάντα? The ἕν, as the most simple and all embracing, stands in a relatedness of opposition to τὰ πάντα. In the fragment, we read: exchange of τὰ πάντα for fire and of fire for ἅπαντα. We also understand ἅπαντα here in the sense of πάντα as in Fr. 30, in which we have conceived ἅπαντα not as living beings, but as synonymous with πάντα. Heraclitus speaks of an alternating exchange {173} of τὰ πάντα for fire and of fire for τὰ πάντα. What we could say about the relationship of goods and gold, nevertheless, does not hold in the same way regarding the exchange-relationship of τὰ πάντα and fire. In reference to τὰ πάντα and fire, we could not say that there, where the one is, the other will go. The vendor in the market gives up the goods and receives money for them. Where previously the goods were, money comes in and, the other way around, where the money was, goods come in.
May we comprehend the relatedness of ἕν and πάντα so bluntly? Clearly not. The comparison becomes dearer, if we do not take gold only as a specific coinage, as a form of gold, but if we rather notice the glimmer of gold which is a symbol of the sunny. Then the sunny, illuminated gold behaves to the goods like ἕν to τὰ πάντα and, the other way around, τὰ πάντα behaves toward ἕν like the goods to the sunny, illuminated gold. The glimmer of gold suggests that it is not a question here of any simile you please, in which we could replace gold with money. In our simile it is less a matter of alternate exchange of real and token values; rather, it is a matter of the relationship of the glimmer of gold to goods. The gold stands for the glimmer of fire of πῦρ ἀείζωον, the goods for τὰ πάντα. The πῦρ ἀείζωον and τὰ πάντα in their relationship of exchange could not intelligibly he directly expressed. Likewise, the simile of gold