Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)
"To bring to language" usually means to express something orally or in writing. But the phrase now wishes to think something else: "to bring to language" means to secure Being in the essence of language. May we suggest that such an event prepared itself when d Λόγος became the guiding word of Heraclitus' thinking, because it became the name for the Being of beings?
Ὁ Λόγος, τὸ Λέγειν, is the Laying that gathers. But at the same time λέγειν always means for the Greeks to lay before, to exhibit, to tell, to say. Ὁ Λόγος then would be the Greek name for speaking, saying, and language. Not only this. Ὁ Λόγος, thought as the Laying that gathers, would be the essence of saying [die Sage] as thought by the Greeks. {GA 7: 232} Language would be saying. Language would be the gathering letting-lie-before of what is present in its presencing. In fact, the Greeks dwelt in this essential determination of language. But they never thought it—Heraclitus included.
The Greeks do experience saying in this way. But, Heraclitus included, they never think the essence of language expressly as the Λόγος, as the Laying that gathers.
What would have come to pass had Heraclitus—and all the Greeks after him—thought the essence of language expressly as Λόγος, as the Laying that gathers! Nothing less than this: the Greeks would have thought the essence of language from the essence of Being—indeed, as this itself. For ὁ Λόγος is the name for the Being of beings. Yet none of this came to pass. Nowhere do we find a trace of the Greeks' having thought the essence of language directly from the essence of Being. Instead, language came to be represented—indeed first of all with the Greeks—as vocalization, φωνή, as sound and voice, hence phonetically. The Greek word that corresponds to our word "language" is γλῶσσα, "tongue." Language is φωνὴ σημαντική, a vocalization which signifies something. This suggests that language attains at the outset that preponderant character which we designate with the name "expression." This correct but externally contrived representation of language, language as "expression," remains definitive from now on. It is still so today. Language is taken to be expression, and vice versa. Every kind of expression is represented as a kind of language. Art historians speak of the "language of forms."
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