that of Anaximander, speaks of Being in its essential connection to δίκη.
Heraclitus, likewise, names δίκη at a point where he determines something essential about Being. Fragment 80 begins: εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνὸν καὶ δίκη ἔριν … , “but it is necessary to keep in view confrontational setting-asunder <Aus-einander-setzung> essentially unfolding as bringing-together, and fittingness as the opposed …”70 Δίκη, as the enjoining structure, belongs to the opposed setting-apart-from-each-other as which φύσις, in emerging, lets what appears shine (come to presence) and thus essentially unfolds as Being (see fragments 23 and 28).
Finally, Parmenides himself is a definitive witness for the thoughtful use of the word δίκη in the saying of Being. Δίκη for him is the goddess. She guards the keys that alternately close and open the doors of day and night, that is, the keys to the ways of (unveiling) Being, (disguising) seeming, and (closed-off) Nothing. This means that beings open up only insofar as the fittingness of Being is sustained and maintained.71 Being as δίκη is the key to beings in their structure. This sense of δίκη can be derived unambiguously from the thirty mighty opening verses of Parmenides’s “didactic poem,” which have been preserved for us in their entirety. So it becomes clear that both the poetic and the thoughtful saying of Being name Being, that is, establish and delimit it, with the same word, δίκη.
70. Conventional translation: “But it is necessary to know that war is common to all and justice is strife.”
71. In the last two sentences Heidegger uses three verbs, verwahren, wahren, and bewahren, which all have a similar meaning: to preserve and safeguard. We have translated them as “guard,” “sustain,” and “maintain.” It should be noted that the German word for “true” is wahr.