later metaphysics. This is the situation that came to pass, and it is still happening now. Indeed, we even have metaphysics and its thinking about λόγος to thank for the fact that any sayings from the pre-Platonic thinkers, and particularly those of Heraclitus’s, remain for us at all.


2) The return to the pre-metaphysical Λόγος through λόγος as assertion. Fragment 50

However, on the path that our attempts to think the essence of the Λόγος traverse, another course of action is necessary. We do not take ‘logic’ to be a divinely granted, definitively decided doctrine of λόγος that can, at most, only be modified. Our questioning through logic toward the Λόγος is, more precisely, a questioning regarding how it has become possible that λόγος as assertion ascended to the role of a guiding thread for the discovery of the foundations of beings in metaphysics. We think- aft er whether, and how, the Λόγος was thought before the emergence of ‘logic’ within metaphysics and before metaphysics itself. When we seek to understand what a pre-Platonic thinker (namely, Heraclitus) thought about the Λόγος, then we leave aside the metaphysical understanding of λόγος. At first, this closing- off of the horizon of metaphysical understanding is merely something negative. In addition to this negative move, we will also need a horizon in which what Heraclitus says about λόγος becomes visible, [259] graspable, and sayable. However, there is little that can immediately be said about this particular horizon of consideration. Within it we will surely come upon an enigma. To take hold of this enigma is alone what matters. The enigma consists of the following: namely, that from early on for the Greeks, λόγος meant “to say” and “to speak,” but that, at the same time, this was not the original meaning of λόγος. Indeed, even around the time that the metaphysical understanding of λόγος had already coalesced, something of the original meaning remained within the concept of λόγος.

At the present moment, it is not important that we solve this enigma of the ambiguity of λόγος: rather, it is only important that we first recognize this enigma and allow ourselves to be guided by it.

We will now hear a few sayings of Heraclitus’s that speak of λόγος, and that have been placed into a specific order. The first is fragment 50, which says:

οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι.

(In the provisional but nevertheless already clarifying translation, we will leave the decisive word Λόγος untranslated for now; the fact that we are translating the other word that also echoes Λόγος —namely ὁμολογεῖν —with “to say” is not meant


Preparation for the listening to the Λόγος    197

Heraclitus (GA 55) by Martin Heidegger