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Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann
In the seminar on Heraclitus held during the winter semester of 1966/67 at the University of Freiburg the dialogue between Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink was governed, sometimes explicitly and at other times implicitly, by the difference between their respective approaches to the interpretation of Heraclitus. This difference of approach may be expressed in terms of the difference between the problem of man’s relation to the disclosure of Being and the problem of the relation of world, which lets beings appear, to beings within the world. The book Heraklit renders word for word this highly significant dialogue. Now for the first time, in addition to the numerous Heidegger lectures that have been published, a complete text of a Heidegger seminar is at hand; it shows an intensified immediacy and vitality in Heidegger’s reflections and discussions, carried out in his role as intellectual leader in the dialogue with a philosopher congenial to him.
Bracketing the strictly philological problematic, both thinkers ponder over what Heraclitus has already thought in order to break through to the issue for thinking caught sight of therein. The roles of the partners in dialogue are distinct. Fink offers an interpretation in which the fragments appear as having an inner coherence of meaning. Heidegger on the other hand lays major importance on critically and questioningly clarifying the pathway of this interpretation in regard to the issue that is thematic therein. The phenomenological seeing is decisive for the thinking of both thinkers, but the manner of seeing takes diverging paths. Heidegger thinks along the way of language. For him the phenomena reveal themselves in language and its junctures. Heidegger’s returning to the roots of language has nothing to do with etymology, but rather is phenomenology grounded on language.
With Fink the situation is different. His phenomenological seeing—the most important fruits of his daily philosophical association over the period of a decade with the founder of modem phenomenology, Edmund Husserl—is directed toward the things as they show themselves within the manifold ways of our perceiving, without directing his gaze—as Heidegger does—primarily at the junctures in language, within which the phenomena become understood. The path of phenomenological seeing leads to a true liberation in the interpreting of the fragments of Heraclitus, which are not easily accessible. It sets Heraclitus free from the often abstruse sounding explanations which the history of philological and philosophical research up to the present has superimposed upon the coherence of meaning that Heraclitus had seen running through everything, sometimes distorting that meaning. At the same time it also frees our relationship to Heraclitus, which is now mediated solely by means of the issue to be thought. In the phenomenological manner of seeing, even the most obscure fragments gain a clarity and simplicity of thought which allows an insight into the meaning of this early Greek thinker that is removed from all fantastic doctrines, as for example the doctrine of world conflagration.
When Heidegger, in his earlier publications, puts Fr. 16 at the beginning of his own interpretation of Heraclitus ( ‘ ‘How can one hide himself in the face of that which never goes under?”), then the relation of man to the disclosure of Being is thereby placed at the center of his own thinking as well. Likewise, Fink’s divergent starting point (Fr. 64: “The lightning flash steers all beings.”) is indicative of his philosophical approach. He sees the all-encompassing and pervasive fundamental coherence in the totality of world in its relation to the things that it lets appear within it. At one time Fink himself defined his philosophical task to be that of thinking the cosmological horizon of Heidegger’s question of Being; this says that, along with the unique difference, made visible by Heidegger, between Being and beings [Sein und Seiendes] in its reference to the essence of man, we must also think the totality in Being: the world in its difference from all that comes to appear within it. But where is man’s place within the relation of world to all that is within the world? Does man have the same essential place in it as every other living organism or thing in the world? Or can the relation of all-disclosing Being to what is disclosed be thought in proper measure only in terms of the relation of Being to the essence of man, which would then be seen as primary? Does not the proper character of man ’s essence show itself in his being “needed” [gebraucht] for the appearing of beings from out of the unconcealment of Being? Does man belong among beings only because he belongs above all to Being? With that Heidegger’s question as well as his answer are brought into words.
For Fink the compelling question is whether the relation of world to what is within the world does not overwhelm man in spite of his relation of understanding to Being. Man is indeed man only in terms of his understanding of Being and world. But is he thereby a participant in the universal process of letting what is within the world appear? Does world in its universal letting-appear have dominance over man’s relation to world? Indeed, there are ways of appearing that things within the world have only as objects of man’s ways of knowing. But is it not the case that things can appear as objects of knowing only insofar as they and man have, within that process in which world lets things appear, first of all come to appear within the world? Is man the disclosing one only in a reduced manner? Does world also hold sway without man’s relation to world, or does the coming to appear of everything finite have a necessary relation to human knowing? Questions of this kind cannot be decided at random, but rather only in an unpretentious thinking toward the issue to be thought.
By means of his cosmological problematic—formulated in a series of publications—Fink has elaborated a question that allowed him, as a former student of Heidegger’s, to become Heidegger’s partner in dialogue. Therefore Heidegger ends the dialogue on Heraclitus with two quotations from one of the Seven Sages of Greece. The first sentence: μελέτα τό παν—“take into care the whole as whole”—applies to Fink’s effort in thinking. The second sentence: φύσεως κατηγορία—“making φύσις visible”—refers to his own thinking. The concluding juxtaposition of these two ancient Greek sayings indicates that what is named in them belongs together and could become a task for future thinking.
From the book Heraclitean Fragments: A Companion Volume to the Heidegger/Fink Seminar on Heraclitus