Heraclitus

The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos

Martin Heidegger, Julia Goesser Assaiante, S. Montgomery Ewegen, Julia Goesser Assaiante, S. Montgomery Ewegen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780826462411
• eBook ISBN:
  9781474249201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Fenomenología en filosofía

Heraclitus is the first English translation of Volume 55 of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. This important volume consists of two lecture courses given by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg over the Summers of 1943 and 1944 on the thought of Heraclitus. These lectures shed important light on Heidegger's understanding of Greek thinking, as well as his understanding of Germany, the history of philosophy, the Western world, and their shared destinies.

§ 1. Two stories concerning Heraclitus as introduction to his word

Regarding the life of Heraclitus, which fell in the decades between 540 and 480 BCE, we know as little as we do of the lives of Anaximander and Parmenides. It would be a mistake, however, to lament this lack of biographical information: for who Parmenides and Heraclitus are is alone determined from out of what they thought, and we experience nothing of this through ‘biographies.’ Thus, the biography of a thinker can be largely correct, while the presentation of his thinking remains quite untrue. This is what happened with Nietzsche, who composed quite a lively description of the ‘character’ of Heraclitus; however, this lively description did not obviate the fact that Nietzsche’s legacy on this score was to bring into circulation the most awful misinterpretation of Heraclitus’s thinking.

The question of who Heraclitus is, provided that it is asked within the limits within which it is here able to be asked at all, finds its answer in the word that the thinker, as thinker, has said. A faint glimmer of this word conceals itself in the ‘stories’ concerning the thinker that are occasionally preserved and passed on. Such ‘stories,’ even if they are invented (indeed, precisely then), contain a truth that is more originary than the correct information determined through historiographical research. Historiographical/biographical findings always (and only) move within the medium of indifference, and serve only the satisfaction of curiosity regarding the biographical.

[6] We attend here first to two ‘stories’ concerning Heraclitus. It cannot be proven that what is therein recounted actually occurred. But the fact that these ‘stories’ are preserved shows us something of the word that this thinker spoke. Of course, we understand these ‘stories’ only from out of what Heraclitus himself thought and said. Nonetheless, they can in turn serve to make us heedful of Heraclitus’s word, albeit at some remove. These ‘stories’ should not replace the missing ‘biography’ in order ultimately to introduce the representation of the so-called ‘work’ ‘biographically’; rather, the ‘stories’ should lead us to recognize the ‘biographic’ and the ‘historiographical’ as inessential. The stories let us be attentive to the realm from out of which Heraclitus’s word is spoken.

a) Heraclitus’s thinking in the region of fire and strife and in the nearness to play

The first ‘story’ is as follows:

Ἡράκλειτος λέγεται πρὸς τοὺς ξένους εἰπεῖν τοὺς βουλομένους ἐντυχεῖν αὐτῶι, οἳ ἐπειδὴ προσιόντες εἶδον αὐτὸν θερόμενον πρὸς τῶι ἰπνῶι ἔστησαν, ἐκέλευε γὰρ αὐτοὺς εἰσιέναι θαρροῦντας . εἶναι γὰρ καὶ ἐνταῦθα θεούς…¹

Regarding Heraclitus the following (story) is recounted: namely, that he spoke to the visitors who wanted to approach him. Coming closer they saw him as he warmed himself at an oven. They remained standing there (very surprised by this), on account of the fact that he bid them (including those who were still hesitating) to have courage and come in, calling with the words: “Here, too, the gods are present.”

The crowd, in its curious intrusiveness upon the thinker and his abode, is disappointed and baffled. They believe that they should be allowed to find the thinker in conditions [7] that carry the characteristics of the exceptional, the rare, and the exciting, and thus unlike the usual day-to-day life of people everywhere. In visiting the thinker, the crowd hopes to find things that (for a while, at least) will serve as fodder for entertaining chatter. Those wanting to visit the thinker hope to catch him precisely at that moment in which he ‘thinks’ in raptured profundity; not, however, in order to be affected by his thinking, but rather only so they can say that they have seen and heard someone who has the reputation of being a thinker.

However, instead of such a situation, these curious spectators find the thinker at an oven. This is an everyday and modest place where (for example) bread is baked. But Heraclitus is not even at the oven engaged in baking; rather, he abides there only in order to warm himself. He thereby reveals in this everyday place the whole indigence of his life. The sight of a freezing thinker offers little of ‘interest.’ The curious spectators, owing to this disappointing sight, lose their desire to come closer. Why should they bother? This commonplace and charmless indigence of freezing and standing at the oven can be found at anyone’s house at any time. Why, then, should they seek out a thinker? Heraclitus reads the disappointed curiosity in their faces. He recognizes that, for the crowd, the mere absence of an expected sensational event suffices to turn them toward leaving. Therefore, he tells them to have courage and prompts them to enter with these words: εἶναι γὰρ καὶ ἐνταῦθα θεούς: “Here, too, the gods are present.”

These words cast the abode of the thinker and his occupation in another light. Whether the visitors understand these words instantly or at all, thereby seeing everything in this other light, the story does not say. But the fact this story has been told and passed down to us [8] moderns is based upon the fact that it hails from out of the atmosphere of the thinking of this thinker and thus designates it. καὶ ἐνταῦθα—even here at the oven, in this everyday and ordinary place where each thing and every circumstance, each action and every thought, is familiar through and through, common and ordinary; ‘even here,’ in this region of the familiar, εἶναι θεούς, the ‘gods presence.’ θεοί are the θεάοντες καὶ δαίμονες. The essence of the gods who appeared to the Greeks is precisely this appearing, in the sense of a peering into the ordinary in such a way that what peers both into, and out of, the ordinary is the extraordinary that presences in the region of the ordinary. Even here, says Heraclitus, at the oven, where I warm myself, the presencing of the extraordinary in the ordinary prevails. καὶ ἐνταῦθα—‘even here’—says the thinker, thereby speaking to the expectations of the visitors, and therefore, in a certain sense, in accordance with the desire and disposition of the crowd. Supposing, however, that the words of a thinker say what they say in a way that is different from everyday language, so that in each common surface meaning of his speech a subtext necessarily conceals itself, then these words of Heraclitus’s, when we heed them as the thoughtful word, have a strange meaning.

When the thinker says καὶ ἐνταῦθα (“even here”), ἐν τῶι ἰπνῶι (“at the oven”), the extraordinary presences, then he wants to say in truth: the presencing of the gods unfolds only here. Where, namely? In the inconspicuousness of the everyday. You need not avoid the customary and ordinary and chase after the eccentric, exciting, and tantalizing in the misguided hope of thereby encountering the extraordinary. You should keep only to your daily and familiar, as I do here, abiding with the oven and warming myself. Is what I do here, and how I abide, not full enough of signs? The oven gives bread. But how can humans live properly without the gift of bread? This gift of the oven is the sign for what the θεοί (the gods) are. [9] They are the δαίοντες, those who give themselves in the ordinary as the extraordinary. I warm myself at the oven and thereby remain in the nearness of the fire: the Greek πῦρ, which at the same time means ‘light’ and ‘glow.’ You find me here near the fire, in which alone the ray of light of those peering in is possible and is one with the ray of warmth, and which lets ‘emerge’ into appearance that which, in the cold, would otherwise fall victim to the numbness of nothingness.

In what follows, we must watch for whether, and in what way, the thinking of Heraclitus remains always in the nearness to, and within the region of, the thinking of fire, in order to gauge what ‘truth’ the story of the thinker at the oven conceals. But, if this story should contain something significant regarding the thinking of Heraclitus’s specifically, and not only what in a certain sense applies to every thinker, then something must be said in the word of Heraclitus’s that the story hands down, something that we have indicated but not yet properly seized.

καὶ ἐνταῦθα θεούς: “even here,” and precisely there, in the inconspicuousness of the ordinary, unfolds the extraordinariness of those who shine-in. This means: here, where I (the thinker) abide, is the inconspicuous together with the highest of that which appears and shines. Here, where I have my abode, what seems mutually exclusive has come together into one. Here, in the realm of the thinker, what stands in opposition and appears to be mutually exclusive—namely, what turns against but also toward the other—is everywhere. Perhaps this turning-toward must even exist in order that one may turn itself against the other. Where such turning-toward prevails, strife (ἔρις) unfolds. The thinker resides in the nearness of strife.

In what follows we must watch for whether, and in what way, the thinking of Heraclitus remains always in the region of [10] what the word ἔρις names, in order to recognize that this ‘story’ in particular allows a light to emerge upon Heraclitus’s thinking.

The other story concerning Heraclitus reads:

ἀναχωρήσας δ᾽εἰς τὸ ἱερὸν τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος μετὰ τῶν παίδων ἠστραγάλιζε · περιστάντων δ᾽αὐτὸν τῶν Ἐφεσίων, τί, ὦ κάκιστοι, θαυμάζετε; εἶπεν · ἢ οὐ χρεῖττον τοῦτο ποιεῖν ἢ μεθ᾽ὑμῶν πολιτεύεσθαι;²

But he had himself withdrawn into the temple of Artemis in order to play knucklebones with the children; here, the Ephesians stood around him, and he said to them: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the πόλις?”

This second story gives a similar picture, insofar as the crowd, gaping curiously at the thinker, has once again come close to him and is hovering around him. The Ephesians—i.e., the countrymen of Heraclitus’s—are named. In this story, however, he does not abide in an everyday and modest place. Rather, he has gone into the holy precinct of the temple of Artemis. Thus, in this story too, the nearness to the gods is reported, but in a way that does not touch upon the astonishing fact that the gods presence in the oven. The holy precinct of the temple speaks for itself clearly enough. Certainly, here, now more than ever, there is the opportunity for astonishment. Yet, the thinker does not particularly concern himself with the goddess; rather, he plays a dice-game (ἀστράγαλος: the vertebrae; knuckles; die) with the children. A thinker, from whom even the average person expects seriousness and profundity, plays a child’s game. However, if, according to his own words from the first story, the nearness to the gods is so important to him that he found them even in the oven, how can he then, in the precinct of the house of the goddess, [11] do ἀλλότρια (i.e., inappropriate things)? Once again the thinker reads perplexed wonder in the expressions of the by-standers, and once again he speaks to them. But now his words have a different tone. The words of the first story are encouraging, inviting. Now he asks: τί, ὦ κάκιστοι, θαυμάζετε;—“What are you gaping at, you scoundrels?” These words are severe, scornful, and dismissive. The former words invited the bystanders to experience the presence of the gods with him. Now the thinker cuts himself off decisively from that with which the bystanders are engaged. The thinker, or so it appears, wants nothing to do with the πολιτεύεσθαι, the care of the πόλις.

One might be tempted to interpret this ‘situation’ in a modern way and remark that the thinker admits here to being an ‘unpolitical’ person, one who self-centeredly spins around only within the circle of his ‘private existence.’ But such modernizations and the almost inevitable ‘allusions’ by historiographers to the respective present are always unfitting, because from the start they refuse to allow the past its historically proper-essence, and thereby fail to think historically in an authentic way. It is one thing to produce a historiographic image of the past for the respective present; it is another to think historically, that is, to experience what has-been as what is unfolding as what is to come. All merely historiographical revivals of the past are always the poor facades of historical errors.

In the case of Heraclitus, it is not at all decided whether the renunciation of πολιτεύεσθαι includes a refusal of the πόλις. Indeed, how could this be so, if—when thought in a Greek way—the concern with the presence of the gods is the highest concern of the city? This is in fact the case: for the πόλις, still thought in a Greek way, is³ the pole and the site around which all appearing of essential beings, and with it also the dreadful non-essence of [12] all beings, turns. Understood in this way, and thus always thought in a Greek way, the thinker with his care for the essential nearness of the gods is the authentically ‘political’ human. Thus, πολιτεύεσθαι and πολιτεύεσθαι, even among the Greeks, are not immediately and in every case the same. Therefore, with his words to the Ephesians, Heraclitus refuses only their expectation that he, as thinker, drops out of the care allotted to him in order to degenerate into a common endeavor with them toward the πόλις (cf. fragment 121). This refusal refers indirectly to the necessity of the plight of thoughtful care: namely, to be thoughtfully concerned with the extraordinary that presences in all things ordinary.

But, when Heraclitus plays ‘dice’ with the children in the temple-precinct of the goddess, does this exhibit his care about the extraordinary and about the particular goddess of his particular πόλις? We shall ask this question, as do the Ephesians within the fragment. Heraclitus, however, in no way refuses the bystanders this question. Rather, he addresses it directly in order to properly ask about why they marvel about his present action.

τὶ … θαυμάζετε; — “What are you gaping at?” Are you surprised that a thinker, set off from commerce and its successes, sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Translator’s Foreword
• THE INCEPTION OF OCCIDENTAL THINKING: HERACLITUS
• Preliminary concerns: Philosophy as the authentic thinking of the to-be-thought. On the inception of “Occidental” thinking
• INTRODUCTION: PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATION OF THE INCEPTUAL AND THE WORD
• § 1 Two stories concerning Heraclitus as introduction to his word
• § 2 The word in the inception of thinking
• MAIN PART: THE TRUTH OF BEING
• § 3 The inception of the inceptual to-be-thought. Fragment 16
• § 4 The foundational words of inceptual thinking (φύσις, ζωή), and their relation to metaphysical thinking and to the thinking of being
• § 5 Exposition of the essential connectedness of emerging and submerging. Fragment 123
• § 6 Emerging and submerging. Favor (φιλία) as the reciprocal bestowing of its essence. Notes on fragments 35 and 32
• § 7 φύσις as the essential jointure (ἁρμονία) of emerging and submerging (self-concealing) in the reciprocal bestowal of its essence. Indication of the same in emerging and submerging. Fragments 54, 8, and 51
• § 8 The essence of φύσις and the truth of being. φύσις in view of fire and cosmos. ἀλήθεια thought in the μὴ δῦνόν ποτε (φύσις) as the dis-closing into the unconcealment of being. Fragments 64, 66, 30, and 124
• LOGIC: HERACLITUS’S DOCTRINE OF THE LOGOS
• Preliminary remark
• FIRST SECTION LOGIC: ITS NAME AND ITS MATTER
• § 1 The term ‘logic’
• § 2 Logic, ἐπιστήμη, τέχνη. The related meanings of ἐπιστήμη and τέχνη. An analysis regarding the questionable relationship between thinking and logic
• § 3 Logic and λόγος. The discipline and the matter. Logic and Occidental metaphysics
• SECOND SECTION THE RECLUSIVENESS OF THE ORIGINARY Λόγος AND THE PATHS TO APPROACHING IT
• § 4 Preparation for the listening to the Λόγος
• § 5 Three paths toward answering the question: what is the Λόγος?
• § 6 The absent presence of the Λόγος for the human and the indication of the objectless region of the originary Λόγος
• THIRD SECTION RETREAT INTO THE ORIGINARY REGION OF LOGIC
• § 7 On the illumination of being, experienced through inceptual thinking. Fragments 108, 41, 64, 78, 119, 16, 115, 50, 112
• § 8 The human, the Λόγος, and the essence and truth of being. Final part of the interpretation of saying 112
• Supplement
• Editor’s afterword
• German to English Glossary
• English to German Glossary
• Copyright