origin-creating sense, on account of our being accustomed to thinking—when we think of it at all—only of a retroactive pushing and driving together of something that has been dispersed.

Regarding the second point enumerated above: when we attempt to think harvesting and the harvest, gathering and forgathering, in the sense just elucidated, then perhaps we may eventually come to intuit the originary essence of the Λόγος, and that means to think its essence as one with what the early thinkers of the Greeks named when they used the name φύσις/ἀλήθεια. From the saying of Heraclitus’s we learn that λόγος unveils itself as ἓν πάντα εἶναι, as the all-uniting One. It is hardly necessary now to call special attention to the fact that the Λόγος, thought as the originary harvest and forgathering, cannot unveil itself as anything other than [270] the all-uniting One. But, with all of this we are only at the beginning of the attempt to think the Λόγος. Only one thing has been established thus far: namely, that the common meaning of λέγειν and λόγος—that is, in the sense of assertion, saying, speech, word, and word-meaning—does not allow the originary essence of the Λόγος to appear. We can, however, already see the following as well: that the common meaning of λόγος as speech and assertion is not suited to making the essence of λόγος, which has been shown to be harvest and gathering, accessible and understandable. However, it is very possible that a way may reveal itself that allows us to see how the common meaning of lesen as a taking-up and grasping of writing and the written word, speech and the spoken word, originates from out of the originally thought λέγειν: reading as gathering.


REVIEW

1) Expanded reconsideration of λόγος within the horizon of the meta-physical doctrine of ideas and of the to-be-thought pre-metaphysical essence of the Λόγος as the naming of being

Logic thinks λόγος as the assertion. In an assertion, something is being addressed as something. That in terms of which the particular thing is even capable of being addressed constitutes what is addressable about that thing. What something is—i.e., the what-being of something (for example, the house-ness of a house, the blooming of a blossom)—is conceived of by Plato as the ἰδέα, the look, the visage, which reveals the thing in question in such a way that through this it shows itself in its what-being. However, these ‘visages’ of things and of particular beings are, when judged from the perspective of their visibility, not visible in a sensible


Answering the question: What is the Λόγος?    205

Heraclitus (GA 55) by Martin Heidegger