"It is considered the oldest fragment of Western thinking" - thus writes Heidegger in his famous essay on the even more famous sentence of the ancient Milesian philosopher Anaximander (ca. 610-540 BCE). The "fragment" in question, of course, is preserved by the Neo-Platonic scholar Simplicius, who flourished in the early to mid-sixth century CE. Without pausing to consider what meaning, if any, we may find in the phrase "fragment of Western thinking" - as if "thinking" could produce or be held fast in a fragmentary manner - or even to ask how one is justified in assigning an age - "the oldest" - to a passage that occurs, as a quote, in the midst of a treatise produced by a writer working at the very end of a long and noble tradition, I will simply say that we fail to render the proper tribute to this statement of Anaximander if we only refer to it as a preserved piece of thinking. For thinking, as Heidegger himself has taught us, is a tending toward existence and all its questions; a tending that causes questions to grow, and calls ever more urgently for bolder and more profound acts of thought.

¶ 11:12 AM