OFF THE BEATEN TRACK


collapsea of thought into the sciences and into faith is the balefulb destiny of being.

At the dawn of being's destiny, the being, τὰ ἐόντα, comes to language. What, from out of the measured abundance of what in this way arrives, does Anaximander's saying bring to utterance?

According to what looks to be the genuine text, the saying reads


... κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας.


In the standard translation:


... according to necessity; for they pay one another punishment and penalty for their injustice.


The saying still consists of two clauses; of the first only the final words are preserved. We begin with the explication of the second clause.

The αὐτά refers to what is named in the previous clause. What is meant can only be τὰ ὄντα, what presences in its totality, presently and unpresently present in unconcealment. Whether or not this is expressly named by the word ἐόντα may, on account of the uncertainty surrounding the text, he left open. The αὐτά names everything that is present, everything that presences in the manner of staying: gods and men, temples and cities, sea and land, eagle and snake, tree and shrub, wind and light, stone and sand, day and night. The things that presence belong together in the unity of presencing in as much as each presences to the others within its duration. This multiplicity (πολλά) is not an assembly of separate objects behind which something stands, embracing them as a whole. Rather, in presencing as such there prevails the staying-with-one-another of a concealed gathering. This is why Heraclitus, catching sight of this collecting-unifying and disclosing essence within presencing, calls the Ἓν (the being's being) the Λόγος.

But first of all, how does Anaximander experience the totality of the things that presence: their having arrived to stay awhile with one another in unconcealment? What is it, basically, that runs everywhere through what is present? The last word of the saying gives the answer. It is with it that we must begin the translation. The word names the fundamental trait of what is present: ἡ ἀδικία, literally translated, injustice. But is the literal translation


a First edition, 1950. Collapse into beings through the oblivion of being; compare Being and Time.

b First edition, 1950. But not "bad."


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