from the way in which the Λόγος is, in itself, the for-gathering. This difference makes possible a sameness of λέγειν, which, even given this difference, concerns the same Λόγος. Who executes the gathering and the harvesting in the sense of ὁμολογεῖν? Obviously the human: for the saying of Heraclitus’s speaks to the human.

If, however, the human himself is the λέγων—i.e., the one who harvests, the one who gathers—then he can only take over and complete that particular harvesting that harvests the same as what is harvested by ‘the’ Λόγος if he himself, in his essence, somehow ‘has’ a λόγος—that is, if the essence of the human is such a harvesting. The human is ζῷον—a living being, a being that is determined by life. But what does ‘life,’ ζωή, mean? When thinking this word,¹ the Greeks, in a way similar to their thinking of φύσις, think of the ‘emerging-from-out-of-itself’ which is always, at the same time, a ‘return-back-into-itself.’ Emerging opens itself to the open, keeps it, in a certain sense, and maintains itself in the open and in this way contains the open within itself. Since time immemorial, the essence of life thus experienced, and the essence of that which lives, have been distinguished by the ψυχή: we say ‘soul,’ and call what is alive ‘ensouled.’ ψυχή means a small puff of air, a breath. However, here we are not thinking of breathing merely as the movement and functioning of the organs dedicated to it, but rather as a breathing out and in. Insofar as ψυχή as breath [281] should now designate the essence of what is alive in all of its demeanors and behaviors, breathing cannot mean the mere drawing-in and expulsion of air. Were we to take it only as such, we would at best be thinking of breathing and the organs dedicated to it in a causally scientific way as a fundamental prerequisite of the living and its existence, but not as the omnipresent, essential feature of the entire essence of what is alive. Rather, that drawing-in and drawing-out called breathing is the essential feature of the living: namely, that it emerges into the open, and by emergingly going out into the open enters into its characteristic relationship with the open, thereby bringing the open into that relationship and referring the open back to it. The essence of the ψυχή thereby rests in the emerging self-opening into the open, an emerging that each time takes the open up and back into itself, and in this manner of taking upholds itself and abides in the open. ψυχή, ensoulment, and ζωή, “life,” are thus the same, provided that we also think ζωή in a Greek way. This demands that we think ψυχή and ζωή from out of what the Greek thinkers called φύσις, in which they think the being of beings in general. All that exists ‘lives’ insofar as it is, and as something living, it is in some sense ensouled, though in a different manner in each case. This now means: the emergent relationship to the open and the openness of the open are determined in different ways, all according to the kind of ‘living being,’ and also the other way around.

Based on ζωή and ψυχή, one can see that the living can be in a way conforming to the self-opening emerging, and thus itself be a self-opening as a drawing-outdrawing- in, in the manner of the already described ‘harvesting’ and ‘gathering’ (i.e.,

¹ See The Inception of Occidental Thinking in this volume.

212    Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos