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imagining, then the assertion has a harder specification. Also in this world, grasping does not suffice. We always move in a {251} correct and incorrect grasping. There is error and illusion in life. Heraclitus, however, says that the grasping that we are acquainted with and place in the service of our life conduct is not sufficient for the postmortal domain. There is no grasping capable of penetrating into the no man's land.
I go to Fr. 111: νοῦσος ὑγιείην ἐποίησεν ἡδὺ καὶ ἀγαθόν, λιμὸς κόρον, κάματος ἀνάπαυσιν. Diels translates: "Sickness makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, toil rest." This fragment appears to be simple. One could wonder that such an everyday experience turns up formulated among the sayings of Heraclitus. We could, however, take it as an entry in the fragments that think the contraries in an unusual manner. When it is said that sickness makes health pleasant, is it then as simple as when Socrates says in the Phaedo that, after he is freed from the painful shackle, he now feels the pleasant sensation of scratching? Here the pleasant feeling comes out of the past discomfort. Heraclitus says that sickness makes health good and sweet. Either the past or the following health can be meant thereby. Sickness-health is no distinction of a fixed and opposing kind, but a phenomenon of contrast of such a kind that health can develop out of sickness. The same holds for hunger and satiety, and for toil and rest. It is a matter of a procedure of opposites going over into their counterpart, of the phenomenal yoking of contrasts in transition. ἡδύ [pleasant] and ἀγαθόν [good] are not specified as qualities in themselves, but are specified as coming out of a negative state from their counterpart, which is left behind and abandoned. Past riches make the following poverty bitter and, conversely, past poverty makes the following riches pleasant. These relationships of opposites are familiar to us. What is important here is only that ἀγαθόν and ἡδύ are specified only out of the contrast.
With this, I go to Fr. 126: Τὰ ψυχρὰ θέρεται, {252} θερμὸν ψύχεται, ὑργὸν αὐαίνεται, καρφαλέον νοτίζεται. Diels' translation runs: "Cold things become warm, the warm cools, the wet dries, the arid is moistened." Diels translates ψυχρὰ, θερμόν, ὑλρόν, καρφαλέον by cold, warm, wet, arid. But what is meant thereby? It is a matter of neutral words that are problematic because, on the one hand, they express a specific state of something and, on the other hand, they can mean simply being cold, being warm, being wet, and being arid. If a specific state of something is meant, then we say that the cold thing that warms up goes out of the state of being cold into the state of being warm. The going over of a thing from a state into an opposite one is something different from the going over of being cold into being warm as such. The going over of something out of being cold into being warm is a familiar phenomenal movement of change. Therewith, less is said than with the πυρὸς τροπαί. For here we are concerned with the transmutation of fire itself into something else. It is noteworthy