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whether a background lies therein, such that a phenomenally unfamiliar transition and flowing-into-one-another of otherwise fixed contraries is seen. Fr. 126 is ambiguous. On the one hand, it has a banal sense, and on the other hand, a problematic sense, which concerns not the relationship of cold and warm things, but rather the mutual going over of being cold as such into being warm as such and vice versa. The going over of being cold into being warm behaves like the going over of life into death and of death into life. A human life, which goes over into being dead, is not now meant in this going over. The real challenge of the fragment is to be seen in the gradual equation of opposites, and not in the going over of states of a thing.
HEIDEGGER: The challenge lies in going over as such ...
FINK: ... in the going over of what otherwise stand as contrary. Perhaps the contrariness of life and death is also fixed like that of being cold and being warm. In the domain of reference of this contrariness, a movement of things can happen such that something which is first cold then becomes warm, and vice versa. But the question before us is whether more is said in the fragment than the banal conception, whether the provocative thesis also lies in it according to which the fixed contraries go over into one another.
PARTICIPANT: The relationship of being warm and being cold is a going-into-one-another.
HEIDEGGER: You are thinking about Aristotle's ἀλλοίωσις. {255}
FINK: ἀλλοίωσις presupposes a ὑπομένον [what is underlying] on which the μεταβολή [change] is carried out. Then we have a going over into one another of opposed states on a thing. A conductor can first be found in the state of zero degrees temperature, and then warm up in increasing degrees. We can thereby ask where the coldness goes to and from where the warmth comes. So long as we refer such phenomena of going over to an underlying substance, these goings over are not problematic.
HEIDEGGER: But is ἀλλοίωσις still a philosophical problem?
FINK: I agree with that. It is above all problematic because Aristotle ultimately also interprets coming to be and passing away from out of ἀλλοίωσις.
HEIDEGGER: His philosophy of movement belongs to a specific domain. We must thus distinguish three things: first, how a cold thing becomes warm; second, we must interpret this becoming as ἀλλοίωσις, which is already an ontological problem because the being of what is becomes specified; and third, ...
FINK: ... the going over of being cold in general into being warm in general. Therewith, the distinction of being cold and being warm gets sublated in thought. The going over of a thing out of the state of being cold into being warm is only a movement of a thingly substrate. The