But this very embeddedness is a source of richness, or so I would like to suggest in this paper. In the case of Heraclitus, one theme in which the issue of listening is again and again embedded is that of wakefulness—a wakefulness that seems to be the necessary context for the very possibility of the listening that Heraclitus has in mind. Accordingly, in this essay I begin with a reflection on the significance of wakefulness in Heraclitus and allow that to lead, as it seems to in his thought, to the question of listening. That allows me in turn to reflect on the profound significance of our choice of metaphors for knowing that Heraclitus’s own choice, listening or hearing, exhibits.

Four of the sayings introduce what I take to be the guiding force of the image of wakefulness, one often still engaged by us today. That is the image of wakefulness as a higher state of consciousness than sleep and therefore a desirable state for which to strive and to preserve. “Sleep” is the obvious contrast here, and Heraclitus often chastises most of us for living in such a way as to be in effect “asleep while awake.” Here are the four basic sayings:

Heraclitus announces in this first saying what will be the primary sign of whether we live wakefully or not: do we or don’t we listen to the λόγος, and, as he will soon say, do we attune ourselves to the λόγος and so speak and act in attunement with it? D-K 71 says, “We should not act and speak like those asleep.” This announces an especially important Heraclitean theme: wakeful living will never be simply a matter of holding the right doctrines or even just speaking the truth. It will always also be a matter of acting in accordance with what we have heard. I think this can never be emphasized enough: for Heraclitus, simply hearing the λόγος—as we would say, “knowing” it—is not sufficient. One must also act in accordance with it. Or rather, “knowing” for Heraclitus seems not merely to be an act of mental cognition but must be exhibited in living to be genuine knowledge. This—listening, speaking, and acting in accordance with the logos—will be wakeful living. It will even be what Heraclitus calls “wisdom.”

D-K 112 famously says, “To be sophron is the greatest virtue, and wisdom is speaking and acting the truth, hearkening to the nature of things” (σωφρονεῖν ἀρετὴ μεγίστη, καὶ σοφίη ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας).⁵ We might speculate that with what little we have of Heraclitus’s predecessors, the Milesian philosophers, “wisdom” was already on the way to being construed largely in terms of what is said. Thales, we are told, said that the arche of all was water, Anaximander said that it was to apeiron, and Anaximenes said that it was air. Their “wisdom” was thus in what they said. We are already, it seems, on the way to a conception of wisdom (and so truth) as a property of what is said, as propositional, as entirely cognitive. Heraclitus immediately interrupts that direction, even before it can become hegemonic. Wisdom is a matter of speaking and acting, of speaking and acting the truth, which itself thus is a matter of speaking and acting in a certain way, of paying heed or hearkening to the nature of things (and again, the evocation of the auditory in the word hearkening should be heard here). In this, the Platonic Socrates will forever be a Heraclitean. Philosophy for him too is not a body of beliefs, as when we ask, “What’s your philosophy?” and expect in response a statement of a set of beliefs about this or that. Philosophy for Socrates as for Heraclitus will always be a matter of living in a certain way—of hearing, speaking, and acting the truth. Perhaps part of the so-called crisis of philosophy in our time is our forgetfulness of this Heraclitean wisdom. Sure that wisdom is a matter of propositions, of knowing and saying what can be verified, we might wonder, are we the sleeping philosophers?

D-K 89, the third saying quoted earlier, announces a crucial consequence of the difference between wakefulness and sleeping: “The cosmos of the waking is one and shared, but those asleep turn aside each into a private world.” One characteristic of the wakeful is that theirs is an experience of a cosmos, an ordered whole, which is one and shared (ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν). The sleeping, by contrast, experience a world that is not shared but private for each person and hence not one but manifold, “relative,” as we now say. Immediately, we must wonder what it is that is “one and shared” that makes the world of the wakeful a cosmos and from which those who live as asleep are cut off. The answer has already been limned in the first saying above: it is the λόγος that is the unifying force in the world and that makes it, to those sufficiently awake to hear it, a shared world. Clearly, then, much (not to say everything) hinges on the character of the λόγος, to which we must presently turn.

The fourth saying above, again exhibiting the guiding theme of wakefulness, enjoins us to “rise up” (perhaps already a metaphor for wakefulness) and become “wakeful guardians of the living and of corpses.” Guardians (φύλακας), a word that Plato would soon make famous in the Republic, is sometimes translated as “watchers,”⁶ but I think that word is too suggestive of passivity, not to mention of the sight metaphor, which Heraclitus employs with striking infrequency. Guardians better captures what we have already heard Heraclitus insist, that the mark of wakefulness is not just a certain cognitive ability but acting in a certain way, being wakeful guardians of “the living and corpses.” We must ask, what conduct will determine the “wakeful” living that would make us good guardians of the living? And what would it mean to be also good “guardians of corpses,” the corpses whom Heraclitus elsewhere directs us to “throw out faster than dung”?⁷

Heraclitus’s response to the first question—and perhaps indirectly the second—has already been limned. Guardians, to speak in a Heideggerian mode, are those who preserve and shelter the living, who free them and allow them to be what they are.⁸ And what will that mean for Heraclitus? At least this much, or at least to begin with this: to “speak and act the truth, hearkening to the nature of things.” Clearly, this hearkening to the nature of things is the very condition for the possibility of our “speaking and acting the truth.” And what about corpses? What will it be to “guard” them? Perhaps to shelter and preserve them too, precisely in their difference from the living? Questions abound.

We may get some help—never without questions—from the four other explicit references to wakefulness. But before we turn to them, let us underline what has been said so far: the first four sayings reveal that wakefulness names a certain way of being, a certain attunement or openness to what is shared, the λόγος, as well as a certain responsiveness to what we share, a “speaking and acting the truth, hearkening to t...