c) On the hearing and saying of being in inceptual thinking: λόγος and signs. The signs of Apollo as the self-showing of φύσις. Fragment 93. On the truth and the word of beyng in Occidental history

The previously discussed sayings signify that φύσις is διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῶι συμφερόμενον—that which pulls together with itself while pulling asunder. This essence of φύσις, the inconspicuous jointure of favor, appears in the bow and lyre, the signs of Artemis. Apollo, the brother of the goddess Artemis, bears the same signs. He is, along with his sister Artemis, the god of Heraclitus. A saying is preserved in which the thinker names this god himself, a naming that makes him visible in his essence. Heraclitus states here in what manner Apollo is the one who peers in and appears, and how he, in his appearing, beckons toward being. The god himself must, insofar as he is a god, correspond to being (i.e., to the essence of φύσις). Fragment 93, which we take as the tenth saying, reads:


ὁ ἄναξ, οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει.


The supreme one, whose place of the intimating saying is Delphi, neither (only) reveals, nor (only) conceals, but rather gives signs.


λέγειν is here clearly used as the opposite of κρύπτειν and thus means ‘revealing’ in contrast to ‘concealing.’ [178] We have here the simple confirmation of our interpretation of the fundamental meaning of the word λέγειν in the sense of “to harvest” and “to gather”; thought in a Greek way, ‘to gather’ means to let appear that One in whose oneness is gathered what is essentially together in itself and forgathered from itself. ‘Forgathered’ here means: to remain held together as one within the originary oneness of the jointure. It is because the calling and saying word has, as word, the fundamental feature of making manifest and letting appear, that the saying of words can for the Greeks be named a gathering, λέγειν. This is why with Parmenides, the other inceptual thinker, νοεῖν is the grasping of the One together with λέγειν.

It is only because being is experienced as jointure and φύσις, and because the saying word is recognized as the fundamental way of hearing being, that saying itself must, given its character as the opening relation to the oneness of the jointure, be grasped as a gathering (i.e., as λέγειν). If we fail to bear all of this in mind, then it can never be grasped how ‘harvesting’ and ‘gathering’ could constitute the fundamental feature of saying. λόγος—another foundational word of Heraclitus’s—thus means for him neither “doctrine” nor “talk” nor “meaning,” but


The essence of φύσις    133

Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking

Heraclitus

GA 55 p. 177