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the tradition. We can speak only out of the conversation that is fundamental for think
Perhaps it would be appropriate if you, Mr. Fink, indicated the further step that you have in view for the progress of the seminar, setting out from the allusion to the reference of the mutual open-standing character of gods and humans that characterizes the phenomenon, "to live the death of another, to die the life of another." Thus the participants will see where the way leads us.
FINK: I believe that one must drive on from the doctrine of fire and the πυρὸς τροπαί to the question of the relatedness of ἕν and πάντα, for which we receive help from the fragments in which the life-death relationship is thought. The relationship of gods and humans is not to be equated with the relatedness of ἕν and πάντα. In the standing open for one another of gods and humans, we have, as it were, a brake against thinking what is said in Fr. 90 simply as a change-over of familiar kind, or as transformation of stuff into another form, or on the model of the exchange of goods. We have indicated that in χρυσός [gold], the glimmer of gold must also be thought. Here a relationship is thought between the light-character of fire and that into which it turns. We must not understand the turning bluntly in the sense of a change of stuff.
HEIDEGGER: We must think the radiant, the ornamental, and the decorative element together in κόσμος, which was for the Greeks a customary thought.
FINK: But the most beautiful κόσμος is also, when measured against the fire, a scattered junk heap. To be sure, it is in itself the {189} most beautiful joining, but in reference to the ἕν it compares like a junk heap.
HEIDEGGER: I would still like to add something as to the relationship of gods and humans. I have called the mutual self-understanding the open-standing character. But if the gods, in their relationship to mortals represent ἕν in its relationship to πάντα, then the ἕν-character gets lost ...
FINK: ... and indeed because the gods, as representatives of ἕν, stand in the plural, and thus appear as foreign forms. But in his theology, which we will tum to later, Heraclitus thinks the coincidence of oppositions in the god. In order now to clarify the further course of our interpretation of Heraclitus, we must attempt to go from the fragments that treat the relationship of life and death and the intermediate phenomenon of sleep over to a fundamental discussion of all oppositions and their coincidence in the god, and finally to Zeus, with which name ἕν τὸ σοφὸν is unwilling and yet willing to be named. Before this, we would also have to deal with the series of flux- and movement-fragments, then with the problem of ἀρμονία ἀφανής (hidden harmony), life and death in the lyre and bow, the intertwining of life and death proper in the