Proceeding now to the individual words, we find ἀδικία translated as guilt, wickedness, and we read elsewhere of an ἄδικος ἵππος,6 a guilty horse, or a profligate one, or even a sinful one. That is of course not the meaning; it is a matter instead [6] of a horse that is not broken in, a horse that will not | run in harness, does not fit in, is not pliant, is without compliance—here a noncompliance reigns. Compliance—that is harmonization, the dovetailing of the totality of something coordinated in itself. Compliance therefore characterizes something inter-related; we see this in phenomena such as day-night, birth-death, etc. Its opposite is noncompliance, where the being is somehow out of order; ἀδικία is noncompliance, in this original sense. Certainly at times ἀδικία means injustice or something similar, and later it takes on this sense exclusively. In our context, however, the word has no moral-juridical meaning, but just as little does it mean “structure” in a neutral sense or the like.
How we need to take the counter-concept, δίκη, is thereby already expressed: compliance (cf. also “with full compliance” [mit “Fug und Recht”], as we say). Compliance: that which incorporates something, which provides the cadre for something and which has to accommodate this something. None of the usual notions of justice, judgment, penalty, and recompense may be admitted here; and so also the third concept, τίσις, cannot immediately be translated as “retribution” or “atonement.” Instead, τίω originally means “appreciate,” take the measure of something in its relation to something else, determine whether and how it corresponds to something else. Therefore we will translate not with “retribution” (“atonement”), but with “correspondence.” Whereas δίκη—compliance—emphasizes the belonging together as such, τίσις brings out the respective measuring off of the correspondence. It is clear that this meaning of τίσις supersedes its meaning as retribution and atonement, and it is just as clear that there is no necessity or even possibility to speak automatically of retribution upon encountering the word τίσις.
Hence we must not maintain that in antiquity these words had at first an individualized-practical-moral meaning which was then subsequently altered and transferred to nonmoral relations of beings from other regions. It is the reverse, and we must think that in antiquity individual regions of beings were not at all separated out yet. The delimitations arose for the most part only in connection with the rise of the sciences and had the effect of diverting and making murky the original comprehensive view of beings as a whole.