still be a difficult task. Unless perhaps the epithet ὁ Σκοτεινός is merely a label that is attached to him that obscures, through some misunderstanding, his otherwise clear thinking. If this were so, the epithet ‘The Obscure’ would originate only from the lack of understanding of others while hitting upon nothing about the essence of the thinker himself. Heraclitus has only the ‘reputation’ for obscurity, a reputation that a thinker can all too easily obtain. Cicero explained the obscurity of the thinker as resulting from a deliberate obfuscation of his own thinking. Hegel reproved this explanation of Cicero’s and set down another in its place, one that seeks to locate the reason for the obscurity in the defective combining of words in Heraclitus’s use of language. Surpassing this view, we gradually attain to the insight that the ‘primitiveness’ of the early thinkers is not characterized by lack of skill and maladroitness, but rather by the primacy of the inceptual, and the simplicity proper and exclusive to it. The language of the inceptual thinkers has the nobility of the inceptual. The word is in the inception of the saying.
22 The Inception of Occidental Thinking