It occurred to me this morning, the play of infinity and totality can be projected into  Anaximander’s single surviving fragment.

Simplicius transmitted the fragment as:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

 Nietzsche presented Anaximander’s maxim as:

Beings must pay penance and be judged for their injustices, in accordance with the ordinance of time.

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It seems to me that Gadamer’s idea of appropriation of tradition involves grasping older symbolic concretions in increasingly differentiated terms. (Did Anaximander himself think in phenomenological terms? Probably not. Does his thought expose a truth whose structure holds in the most rarefied phenomenological insight? Yes.) Is appropriation essentially an act of abstraction, projection and application, rather than recovery of the original idea?

Perhaps a true thought compels through its empirical fitness but persuades through manifesting universal structures which continue to apply to ever deeper empirical observations. (The universal structures are not formal rules of intelligibility, but truths revealed through application of those rules. What I am trying to do is differentiate the structures I have in mind from Kant’s tables and also from rules of logic.)

By “deeper” I mean greater intellectual dimension, downwardly into chthonic irruption, and upwardly into cultural epiphany. Depth is a function of apperceptions subsuming apperceptions. From what I’ve seen so far, it should be assumed that no apperception is ultimate. Every apperception is self-evidently ultimate until overtaken by higher apperception.

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Every apperception unjustly calls itself ultimate until it is overtaken and illuminated by higher apperception; at which time it pays penance, returning to the apeiron from which all things are articulated.

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The pain of the truth of Levinas is that of the Dionysian insight, which is knowing the apeiron.

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(Sensual overindulgence is what Dionysianism looks like from the outside, but Dionysianism seen from the outside is precisely what Dionysianism is not.)