context of this understanding of the human and his relationship to himself that one translates fragment 101. However, this translation not only carries the modern understanding of the essence of the human back into early Greek thinking, it also neglects to ask whether this saying of Heraclitus’s [313] should not first be thought from out of the context of his own thinking. Lastly, it must also be noted that the verb δίζημα properly and simply means ‘to seek something.’

However, ‘to seek something’ in no way means the same thing as ‘to examine something’ or ‘to search something thematically,’ thereby ‘researching’ it. ‘To seek something’ initially and simply means ‘to seek after it in its place and to seek this place.’ Thought in a Greek way, ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν means: “I have sought after myself.” The thinker has sought after himself, but not as one who is singular, special, and individuated. If that were the case, he would have understood himself in his subjective condition as an isolated subject, which would subsequently be dissected with an eye toward discovering the conditions of its soul. The thinker has sought himself as the human. He has sought after the human on the way to the question: to where does the human, as human, belong? Among beings, where is the place of the human? Whence is the placeness of the place of the human determined? The thinker is seeking the human: he thinks toward where the human stands. This seeking is separated from a psychological examination of the human soul by an abyss. Such a seeking can never be ‘psychology,’ for psychology, like any science, must presuppose that its object is given and that the place of its essence is accounted for, or that it remains unimportant within the realm of psychological questioning. Fragment 101 can therefore not be marshalled as evidence that Heraclitus harbored a special interest in psychological self-observation. The same is also true of fragment 116, which we shall not examine further at the present time. It can be shown without difficulty that fragment 101, when thought in a Greek way, is in simple harmony with fragments 50 and 45, but also with the other fragments that address λόγος.

Because psychological thinking is foreign to Heraclitus, the content of fragment 45 is as little related to the psychological examination of the soul (in particular, [314] the difficulty of finding a fitting ‘concept’ for the essence of the human soul) as is the content of fragment 101. The other reason why the common interpretation of fragment 45 is invalid consists in the fact that the word λόγος, which appears in this saying, does not mean ‘concept,’ and therefore also does not mean ‘sense/meaning,’ owing to the fact that λόγος cannot mean this. The word only gains this meaning based upon Plato’s metaphysics through Aristotle. If in the saying of Heraclitus’s, λόγος cannot mean ‘concept,’ then it is also impossible for the saying to be speaking about the difficulty of finding a fitting concept of the soul.

However, it is admittedly true that Heraclitus says that the human ψυχή has a βαθὺν λόγον, a “deep” λόγος. After all that has been said, we must now attempt to understand the λόγος named here from out of the originary essence of λέγειν in the sense of gathering and harvesting. However, we will first ask: what is the ψυχή such that it can even have a λόγος in the sense of gathering? We will think the