Thales is a step back from life, not caught up in the everyday and so falls in a well while thinking, and the Thracian slave girl laughs at him.

Heidegger argues (FCM, 183) all creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, whether we are clearly aware of this fact or not, whether we speak at length about it or not. All creative action resides in a mood of melancholy, but this is not to say that everyone in a melancholic mood is creative. Aristotle already recognized this connection between creativity and melancholia when he asked the question: “Why is it that all those men who have achieved exceptional things, whether in philosophy, in politics, in poetry, or in the arts, are clearly melancholies? (Problemata 30.1)” Aristotle explicitly mentions Empedocles, Socrates and Plato in this context.  As a creative and essential activity of human life, philosophy stands in the fundamental attunement of melancholy. This melancholy concerns the form rather than the content of philosophizing, but it necessarily prescribes a fundamental attunement which delimits the substantive content of philosophical questioning.  Thinking requires stepping back from life.

The masses are lost in beings and so can’t see the forest for the trees.  They need to take a step back.  They are like the prisoner in Plato’s cave or a person in a bad romantic relationship who is too close to it and so can’t see it’s dysfunctional, though the dysfunctionality is conspicuous to her friends.  Plato determined whatness, to ti einai, as what is constant in something despite the various particular instances of it (house as such, for instance). For Plato, the particulars are me on, not nothing, but deficient with respect to the universal because a particular is not in the fullness of its possibilities but restricted to a particular form.  But why was the constant so prized by the philosophers?

With Heraclitus, the not ever submerging can be thought positively as the perpetually emerging (to ei phuon) or he phusis, like the seed emerging from the earth as the plant or the emerging sun.  More primarily, it is the way the world reveals itself to the human through speech: taking-as.  Heidegger notes “the original experience of emerging and coming-forth from out of the concealed and veiled is the relation to the ‘light’ in whose luminance the seed and the flower are first grasped in their emergence, and in which is seen the manner by which the seed ‘is’ in the sprouting, and the flower ‘is’ in the blooming (68).”  And so, the human “is” in the manner of “taking as,” which is shown when the process breaks down and we take the rustling dead leaves in the wind at our feet mistakenly as a living thing. 

This is further determined negatively as how beings are experienced in the light of in relation to the way a group of young Swabians understood Heraclitus’ hen panta einai, that all beings are in relation to the ground of beings. This ground as the One, hen is as ground what everything else, pan, is in it, in the ground. Hen kai pan. The One is also the whole and the whole is also the One … Hen kai pan, this followed Heraclitus’ fragment hen panta einai, Fr. 50, and was according to the spirit of the time the chosen motto of the three young Swabian friends, Schelling, Hegel, and Holderlin. (S, 68).  And so, the being is encountered in the light of einai, Being; choris, separate from; ton allown, the others; and kath auto, in itself (also cf N, 193).  We see this emerge when Antisthenes puts this into question and denies it by him thinking beings are addressed in simplicity, yet Antisthenes unwittingly adopts a whole slew of ontological determinations.  So, we encounter the dog “as not me,” or the unity of the sock when it’s torn and so the unity “emerges” as a lost unity.  Antisthenes believed that “logos” fundamentally meant “speech” or “word,” focusing on the proper use of language to convey truth. He was known for his strict adherence to definitions, arguing that language should correspond directly to reality. This is encapsulated in his famous saying, “I see a horse, but not horseness.” This reflects his belief that we can only truly name what we can directly perceive, not abstract concepts or essences.

We want to think about life and death.  By death we don’t mean the no longer living, because life encompasses a whole sphere that encompasses things that aren’t alive, such as when we say the thinker is “not” close to life.  Thinking death in a Greek way, we need to think the restless wanderings of the shades, since the Greeks thought everyone was immortal. There is a connection between the thinker and hunting adventurousness. At one point Heidegger says of himself and those who read him “adventurer-like, we roam away into the unknowing (WCT, 169).”  What is life?  Following what has been said, we shall add that “to lay, by its letting-lie-together before means just this, that whatever lies before us involves us and therefore concerns us (EGT, Logos: Heraclitus fragment, 62).” Hence, logos is intimately related to our concerns (cf WCT, 202).

Because the thinker is a step back from life, he sees the soft luster of life, “[e]veryday opinion seeks … the endless variety of novelties which are displayed before it. It does not see the quiet gleam (the gold) of the mystery that everlastingly shines in the simplicity of the lighting (EGT, Heraclitus, Aletheia, 122; also cf EGT, Moira: Parmenides, 100).”  Life then is the gathering together of what presses on us.

Heidegger comments that

Aristotle, Plato’s disciple, relates at one place (Nicomachean Ethics, Z 7, 1141b 77ff ) the basic conception determining the Greek view on the essence of the thinker: ‘It is said they (the thinkers) indeed know things that are excessive, and thus astounding, and thereby difficult, and hence in general ‘demonic (daimonia)’ – but also useless, for they are not seeking what is, according to the straightforward popular opinion, good for man.’ … The Greeks, to whom we owe the essence and name of ‘philosophy’ and of the ‘philosopher,’ already knew quite well that thinkers are not ‘close to life.’ But only the Greeks concluded from this lack of closeness to life that the thinkers are then the most necessary – precisely in view of the essential misery of man (P, 100)

We say of the hovering bird now this is nature or this is life, “the animal through whose swaying and hovering the free dimension of the open unfolds, and through whose singing the tidings the call and the enchantment unfolds so that its bird essence whiles away and disperses in the open. (72).”  The particular entity recedes into concealment as Being emerges.

“The never submerging, ever” is for Heidegger is the saying of Heraclitus that prioritizes and guides interpreting the rest (73-4).  Heidegger interprets Heraclitus by translating his Greek into German (76).  Physis is the perpetually emerging, where nature thought of “now this is nature” of the hovering bird emerges.  It “is” in the manner of emerging. 

The human troubles himself only with what comes next, and so ignores the nearness of Being.  Being is that which is encountered by someone who has suffered enough to be able to find it (80).”  One must feel Being and then begin to question it.  Heidegger says “everywhere the Za (life) correlates to what manifests like a god peering it, like a storm erupting, like a fire emerging into luminescence.