But if, as we claim, Artemis is the goddess of Heraclitus, then must not also the brother be of the same nature as the sister? To be sure, the name of Apollo is not mentioned explicitly in the words of Heraclitus’s that have been handed down to us. Although this god is not spoken of in a saying of the thinker, he is nonetheless named unequivocally, and indeed in connection with something that clarifies for us the essence of this thinking in a decisive way.7 The thinking of Heraclitus’s, in which the to-be-thought is characterized by the nearness of Artemis (brother to Apollo), is, on account of this nearness, ‘Apollonian.’ We use this designation in a sense yet to be clarified, one that differs no less from Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian than from those concepts customarily employed within ‘humanism’ and all of ‘classicism.’ The ‘Dionysian’ interpretation of Heraclitus’s thinking— already employed by Hegel [19] and then coarsened by Nietzsche and pushed further into the quagmire—is eliminated in advance through the observation that Artemis is the goddess of this thinker.
In light of this, an old fragment only now obtains its proper complexion and gravity. The story reads:
ἀνέθηκε δ᾽αὐτὸ (τὸ φερόμενον αὐτοῦ βιβλίον) εἰς τὸ τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος ἱερόν … 8
He [namely, Heraclitus] brought it (that is, his still-intact writing) into the sanctuary of Artemis, in order to shelter it there.
Thus, the word of Heraclitus’s stands under the protection of Artemis. The word, surely, though not the writings—for the latter were apparently abandoned unsheltered and broken up into pieces. For us today, only fragments of these writings are preserved. Because of this, every attempt to think-after the thinking of Heraclitus’s by bringing it into the light of understanding is difficult. We are faced with the incoherence of the isolated pieces and sentence fragments and do not know the unity in which they belong. By contrast, if we possessed the entirety of the unbroken writings, then we could easily let the thought of this thinker present itself clearly and brightly from out of its own proper cohesiveness. But this idea is admittedly misguided, and for various reasons.
Even at the time when the writings of Heraclitus’s were still preserved intact and well-known, this thinker, on the basis of his still directly accessible writings, had a reputation that has remained for centuries: ἐπεκλήθη ὁ Σκοτεινός — “He
7 See fragment 93.
8 Diogenes Laertius, IX, 6..
16 The Inception of Occidental Thinking