the word, its meaning, and the thing meant by it results on its own accord from the mere conglomeration of these places. Behind the history of such foundational words—a history which, notwithstanding historiographical recalculation, is only known in a few respects—another history conceals itself, one that cannot be reached by any historiographical inquiry and that no human thinking can reach on its own if it is not first offered to the human. But, even then, the human can and will err in the reception of this offering.)
What does λόγος mean? We can gather the first clue from a few sayings of the thinker Heraclitus, who also bears the epithet ‘The Obscure.’ What Heraclitus calls the Λόγος, and what he thinks with this word, is the most obscure of all that is obscure pertaining to this thinker. One oft en thinks that the obscurity belonging to a thinking only lies in the fact that conceptual clarity has not yet been achieved and has yet to be consistently mastered. But, regarding the to-be-thought, the obscurity lies within this itself. However, considered in this way, the essence of obscurity remains, for the most part, misunderstood. In an everyday sense, the obscure is the absence of light; the obscure hardly exists. In fact, the obscure is always something other, and always something more. The obscure can be the light that drives toward darkness. But the obscure can also be the brightness that keeps to itself. The obscure can also vacillate between [243] these two ways of being. If this vacillation calcifies into indecision, then the obscure is always the obscurity of confusion. However, the authentically obscure is all of this together in such a way that the inner gravity of its essence is suspended in the very obscurity that is also the brightness that keeps to itself. The thinking of Heraclitus’s is authentically obscure in such a way. Given this, how can the saying mentioned here presume to give illumination and to offer up a straightforward enlightenment?
The first of the sayings that we are choosing to assist us in elucidating the word λόγος in Heraclitus is fragment 50, which says:
οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι.
186 Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos