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.
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
1 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, A.5, 645a17 ff.
8 The Inception of Occidental Thinking