Abstract

In Heidegger’s Der Spruch des Anaximander, the problem of translating Anaximander’s fragment becomes the problem of history and the “the riddle of beingµ. How can “what always isµ have a past or a future? History is as if a single day. We as contemporary thinkers are “lateµ or evening thinkers, unaware that the remoteness of Greek thinking is actually a reflection of our own remoteness from ourselves. But evening-thinking is present in Anaximander’s time, too. There is no beginning to metaphysics, but rather, to try to pinpoint its beginning is to obscure the advent of darkness, which is the only way to dawn. Just as we attempt to define a word by tracing it to the fount from which it springs, so too we seek the unknown future by digging up the past. What we uncover is not the sight of being so much as the sight of being’s concealment.