the essential, it could lead us onto the path toward a mindful consideration. It is then up to us whether or not this mindful consideration endures.
Since time immemorial, it has been noted that Heraclitus speaks of λόγος . The ordering of the remaining one hundred and thirty fragments familiar to us today even counts the first and second fragments (of this ordering) among those utterances concerning λόγος. However, we purposefully do not begin our interpretation with fragments 1 and 2. By contrast, we place fragment 50 at the center and move fragment 45 into its vicinity. We will initially ask about the inner connection between these two sayings. We will now hear them anew and add the translation which in the meantime has become clearer:
Fragment 50: οὐκ ἐμοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι.
If you have listened not merely to me, but rather have obediently regarded the originary forgathering, then (the) knowledge (which subsists therein) is to gather oneself toward the forgathering and to be gathered in the ‘one is all.’
[309] Fragment 45: ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο, πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόμενος ὁδόν · οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἔχει.
On your course, you will surely not be able to find the outermost extremities of the drawing-in drawing-out, even if you were to wander down every single path: so far-reaching is its gathering.
Fragment 50 speaks of the relation of the human to ‘the Λόγος.’ This relation has the way of ὁμολογεῖν. Thus, a λόγος appertains to the human, whose λέγειν reaches all the way to ‘the Λόγος.’ The human λόγος stands before the claim which ‘the Λόγος,’ as it speaks-out, makes. In order once again to drive the point home expressly, we are now differentiating, based on the two fragments, what had already become capable of being differentiated based on fragment 50 alone: namely, we are differentiating between ‘the Λόγος’ as such (that is, the Λόγος simpliciter) and the human λόγος. The Λόγος is the originary forgathering, the being of beings as a whole. The human λόγος is properly the self-gathering toward and into the originary forgathering.
In distinction to fragment 50, fragment 45 does not speak of ‘the Λόγος’ to which the human should attend. However, it does state expressly that the human ‘soul’—that is, the human in his essence—has a λόγος. This λόγος, as a faculty proper to the human, is surely one and the same as that from out of which, and in which, the particular ὁμολογεῖν of which fragment 50 speaks fulfills itself. However, at the same time fragment 45 also states that the human λόγος, owing to its ‘depth,’ prevents the human from reaching the outermost extremities of his essence.
232 Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos