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"advancing toward the matter itself, that is, to the matter" that must have stood "before the spiritual view of Heraclitus."
FINK: The question is whether, out of our historical situation, freighted with twenty-five hundred years of further thinking, we have generally removed ourselves from the Greeks and their {259} understanding of being and world; and whether, nevertheless, we remain inheritors of the Greek ontology in all connections.
HEIDEGGER: When you speak of the challenge of the Greeks, you mean a challenge in thought. But what is it that challenges?
FINK: We are challenged to turn about the entire direction of our thinking. This does not imply the mending of a historical tradition.
HEIDEGGER: Aren't the ancients also a challenge for Hegel?
FINK: Only in the sense of the sublation and further thinking of the thoughts of the Greeks. The question, however, is whether we are only the extension of the Greeks, and whether we have come to new problems and must give an account of three thousand years, or whether we have lost, in an ominous manner, knowledge of how the Greeks dwelled in the truth.
HEIDEGGER: Is our concern only to repeat Heraclitus?
FINK: Our concern is a conscious confrontation with Heraclitus.
HEIDEGGER: But we find this with Hegel. He also stood under a challenge by the Greeks. Only he can be challenged who himself ...
FINK: ... has a readiness to think.
HEIDEGGER: In what regard are the Greeks a challenge for Hegel? {260}
FINK: Hegel had the possibility to gather up, sublate, and change the tradition in his language of concepts.
HEIDEGGER: What does his language of concepts mean? Hegel's thought is the thought of the Absolute. From out of this thought, from the fundamental tendency of mediation, the Greeks appear for him ...
FINK: ... as giants, but as precursors ...
HEIDEGGER: ... as the immediate and still not mediated. All immediacy depends on mediation. Immediacy is always seen already from mediation. Here lies a problem for phenomenology. The problem is whether a mediation is also behind what is called the immediate phenomenon. In an earlier session we have said that need is a fundamental rubric in Hegel. For Hegel's thinking-which now is meant not in the personal but in the historical sense-need consisted in the fulfillment of what is thought, whereby fulfillment is to be understood literally as the reconciliation of the immediate with the mediated. But how about us? Do we also have a need?
FINK: To be sure; we have a need, but not a ground as in Hegel. We do not have a conceptual world at our disposal, into which we ...
HEIDEGGER: ... can integrate the Greeks, ...
FINK: ... rather, we must put aside the implements of this tradition.