of λέγειν and λόγος). ζωή and ψυχή, the living, can thereby have a λόγος. If the living being has a λόγος, then the drawing-out and drawing-in—i.e., the relationship to the open—is determined as ‘harvesting’ and ‘gathering.’ If that is so, then the living being is in the manner of the human: the ‘harvesting’ and ‘gathering,’ the λέγειν of the human, is ὁμολογεῖν. This emergent and thus unfolding being— i.e., the human—is open to the Λόγος.
[282] Does Heraclitus tell us something about the living being called ‘the human’ from this perspective (i.e., from the perspective of λόγος)? Heraclitus says enough. But what does he say? What does he who expressly demands the ὁμολογεῖν of the human say about the ψυχή of the human? A saying that is counted as fragment 45 states:
ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο, πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν · οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει.
The outermost extremities of the soul you will surely not be able to find on your course, even if you were to wander down every single path—so far-reaching is its harvest (gathering).
According to this, the ψυχή, the essence of the living being ‘the human,’ has a λόγος, and this λόγος is βαθύς—“deep”; indeed, it is “deep” in an exceptional sense. As previously mentioned, for the most part we understand the deep only as the opposite of what is high (and, correspondingly, height). In that sense, the deep contains within itself an orientation downward. However, that is not the essential thing regarding βαθύς. We speak of a ‘deep woods’; even Homer already uses this turn of phrase in the Iliad.2 The deep is the far that entirely reaches into the concealed, and thereby it is somehow that which gathers. In what way can a λόγος be deep? Harvesting and gathering draw out. Indeed, this drawing-out even determines all gathering drawing-in and what is able to be drawn-in. The drawing-out is the reaching into the farness, from out of which harvesting first allots the gathering. The λόγος of the ψυχή is, as λόγος, deep, and in such a way that this depth consists in the drawing-out reaching to the far, from out of which the gatheredness of what is to-be-gathered determines itself. Insofar as the soul has such a λόγος, the drawing-out reaching into the farness belongs to its self-opening and taking-up-taking-back. Whereabouts this reaching-far reaches, there the ψυχή as ψυχή has its outermost extremities, through which it is open for that toward which its λόγος, as such, intimates.
[283] Fragment 45 reads: ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο, πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν · οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει.
2 See German page 329.
Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos