is, and we are only beginning to ask. Most importantly, however, we are attentive to the fact that knowledge, as the standing-within-the-message—a standing that both says and does—sways and weaves within an attending-to that is κατὰ φύσιν, i.e., that is along with, and in accordance with, what shows itself from out of a self-emerging. According to this, the hearkening relation (i.e., listening) is somehow oriented toward φύσις. Yet, can one ‘listen to’ φύσις? From fragment 50 we have already gleaned that if there is to be a knowledge it is necessary to listen to the Λόγος. According to fragment 112, listening is oriented toward φύσις. Could it be the case, then, that the Λόγος has more of an essential relationship with φύσις than with speech, language, and enunciating?
In the obedient relation to the Λόγος lies the initiation into authentic knowledge. We add the explanatory word ‘initiation’ in order to indicate that this knowledge is not simply made and arranged by the human, but that it comes to him, namely, through a hearkening to the Λόγος. But wherein does this authentic knowledge exist, when it is? Heraclitus says: ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν.
ὁμολογεῖν—Heraclitus places that wherein authentic knowledge exists before σοφόν ἐστιν. Moreover, the ὁμολογεῖν in which λέγειν and λόγος are named comes, through this combination of words, into close proximity to the Λόγος: ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας—ὁμολογεῖν. What does the verb ὁμολογεῖν mean? Literally, and essentially, it means: to say the same as what another says. This could mean: to repeat, in a simple and unreflective way, the exact wording of what someone else has said. But it is precisely this that ὁμολογεῖν does not mean, from which fact, if we are keenly attentive to it, we can already recognize that this λέγειν, this saying, and λέγειν in general cannot have their essence in linguistic expression and utterance. ὁμολογεῖν—saying the same as someone else—does not only signify that one person says the same thing as another, so that [250] somewhere and at some point two identical opinions exist. Rather, ὁμολογεῖν means: to stand equivalent to what another has said, to admit to it, and thereby to concede and agree to what has been said. ὁμολογεῖν is an acknowledging in such a way that what someone else has said shows itself, by virtue of showing itself, as something requiring concession and agreement. To concede and to acknowledge what someone else has said is therefore already a concurrence with the other. ὁμολογεῖν is the conceding, acknowledging concordance. Concordance, therefore, does not consist in the same opinion existing in both the one and the other, but rather in the fact that one human and the other, as distinct individuals, are in agreement with each other in acknowledging that the same thing addresses them both. ὁμολογεῖν—to say the same as another. Every sameness, and above all the sameness of ὁμολογία, is grounded in difference: only what is different can be the same. It is by virtue of its differing from the same that the different itself remains self-same. Upon the self-same and its sameness, both the difference of the different, and the sameness of the same, depend. A sentence applies here that has barely been thought through, but must now be spoken, owing to the fact that it belongs to ‘logic’ properly