10
HEIDEGGER: I was not present at the last seminar session. I am asked to express myself on the course of thought. That, however, is a different matter from immediate participation in the discussion. For there is the danger that I approach the matter from the outside.
First, I would like to touch on the difficulty that was prevalent in the last session: the determination of the relationship of gods and humans in relation to the relatedness of ἓν and πάντα. It is thus a question of a relation between relationships. I intentionally speak formally now in order to let the structure be seen that lies at the basis of the thoughts of the last session. If we notice the approach and the course of the sessions till now, the difficulty appears to me to have been to find the transition from a relationship, still undetermined, of lightning, sun, seasons, and fire to τὰ πάντα, to the relationship of gods and humans in their relation to the relatedness of ἓν and πάντα. The difficulty can be seen in the way ἓν suddenly reveals another character. So far as I have understood the course that Mr. Fink has in view for the seminar, it is that of deliberately setting out from the fire-fragments and only then to bring into view all that which one knows as logos-fragments and as specifically Heraclitean. In this, I see the difficulty that by the interpretation of the peculiar state of affairs, "to live death, to die life," which is said of gods and humans, a correspondence-and not an equation-becomes visible to the actual, thematic relatedness in question of ἓν and πάντα. When we speak of the "relatedness of ἓν and πάντα," then it seems as if we were thinking about a connection between both which we have localized concretely and for which relatedness we then sought a bow which spanned them. In the end, however, the matter stands in such a way that ἓν is the relatedness, and that it relates to τὰ πάντα by letting them be what they are. So understood, the relatedness is, in my opinion, the decisive point that our determination must reach; thereby the idea of two terms is eliminated. Precisely this idea must henceforth be held off, even though it is not yet settled what all the references are which belong in the wholeness of πάντα, and what the reference is of all the references to ἓν or in ἓν itself.
Something is conspicuous to me terminologically in the summary of the last session. You, Mr. Fink, make a distinction between "cosmic" and