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problematical coincidence of being cold with being warm is something else. A still more difficult problem is the sameness of Hades and Dionysus (ὡυτὸς δὲ Ἀίδης καὶ Διόνυσος).
HEIDEGGER: Can one bring the distinction of cold and warm into relation to the distinction of life and death?
FINK: Life and death is a much harder distinction ... {256}
HEIDEGGER: ... with which there is no comparison.
FINK: The distinction between being cold and being warm is a distinction which resides only in life.
HEIDEGGER: The distinction of cold and warm belongs in the domain of thermodynamics, ...
FINK: ... while the distinction of life and death does not allow itself to be grasped in a going over such as from cold into warm. The cold and the warm are substantivized qualities. The cold can mean at once the cold thing or being cold as such. The matter stands in a similar fashion with τὸ ὄν. On the one hand, it means what is, what comes to being, and on the other, the being of what is. The ambiguity holds for the cold, the warm, the wet, the dry. If one reads Fr. 126 without seeking a deeper sense, then it is a matter only of thermodynamic phenomena, which concern the going of cold things over into warm things and vice versa. One runs into the problem of ἀλλοίωσις, but it apparently contains no provocative meaning, which we otherwise know of in the Heraclitean disturbance of the standing opposites. If we read the fragment in the sense that it brings to view a going over of being cold as such into being warm as such, then it brings the contrary, which otherwise remains as the fixed structure of the phenomenal world with all change of things, not indeed into ἀρμονίη φανερή [visible harmony], but into the ἀρμονίη ἀφανής [hidden harmony].
HEIDEGGER: I see the difficulty in the fact that one does not know in which Heraclitean context Fr. 126 is found. Thus you do not mean the going over, familiar to us, of a cold entity into a warm entity, and you also do not mean the determination of the character of being of this going over, but ...
FINK: ... the sameness of being cold and being warm which we termed provocative. {257}
HEIDEGGER: Can one approach this sameness from the distinction of being cold and being warm, and not just from the contrariness of life and death?
FINK: I would still like to go into Fr. 8: τὸ ἀντίξουν συμφέρον καὶ ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν. Diets translates: "What struggle against each other harmonizing; out of what goes apart, the most beautiful joining." τὸ ἀντίξουν [what struggle against each other] is a neuter noun.
HEIDEGGER: This word occurs only once in Heraclitus. I have never