that is, the human is open to being, and is so on account of being. Only insofar as the essence of the human in this gathering depends upon, and is based upon, being, can the human relation to being also be un-gathered, dis-sipated, and a-stray, i.e., bewildered by confusion. Strictly speaking, metaphysics in truth only knows the question concerning the relation of the human (as one being among others) toward beings as such and as a whole; the modern iteration of this question is the one concerning the relation of the subject to the object. However, the subject–object relation is grounded, in all ways, in the metaphysically ungraspable relation of being toward the human essence. Moreover, this relation is not properly thought or inquired into in pre-metaphysical thinking, however abstractly experienced and named it may be. Perhaps metaphysics and its entire history bears this fate within itself: namely, that it is only through metaphysics and its history that the differentiation of being and beings is at all brought to light in order to be experienced and questioned someday as this differentiation, a questioning in which being itself first approaches thinking in its question-worthy truth and transforms thinking itself.

Heraclitus’s saying, numbered as fragment 50, deals with the homological relation of the human λόγος to the Λόγος. To what extent is fragment 45 in harmony with fragment 50? Fragment 45 does not mention [297] ‘the Λόγος’; by contrast, it mentions “a” λόγος, specifically, a “deep” one that the human soul “has,” and evidently ‘has’ as a foundational aspect of its essence. The saying (fragment 45) says that the furthest extremities of the soul, to which in its reaching the soul essentially extends, cannot be detected by the human, owing to the fact that the λόγος of the soul is an exceptionally “deep” one. Even though the relation of the human essence to the Λόγος is not addressed in this, we may nevertheless presume that ‘the Λόγος’ referred to is that toward which the soul, in its extending, directs its outermost extremities. However, how is it then possible, as stipulated in fragment 50, for the human himself to hearken to and submit to the Λόγος, if ‘the Λόγος,’ as fragment 45 suggests, is undetectable by him? The two sayings do not appear to be in harmony, for indeed they contradict one another insofar as they make contradictory statements regarding the relation of the human λόγος to the Λόγος.

In order to see more clearly here and, most importantly, to grasp the proper content of fragment 45, a more extensive elucidation is needed. It is clearly stated: the ψυχή—namely the one of the human, who traverses it—has a λόγος, indeed, a “deep” one. To what extent can the ψυχή as such have a λόγος? To what extent is a λέγειν, in the sense of the designated gathering and harvesting, possible in the ψυχή, so that even the ψυχή itself, by way of the λόγος that it ‘has,’ first arrives in the authentic realm of the possibility of its essence? What is the ψυχή if we think it from out of that along with which it is constantly named, and if we thereby think in a Greek way all that is to-be-thought, leaving aside modern conceptions of the ‘psyche’ and also the allegedly well-known, primitive ideas about the ‘soul’ (of which ethnology and anthropology believe themselves to have accounts)? To think the ψυχή in a Greek way means: to think its essence from out of its belongingness

224    Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos