sustained (as was the case with διηνεκῶς). Rather, δια is now being used in the sense of “asunder,” as indicated by the corresponding noun διαφορά, the bearing apart from one another, rending asunder from one another: rupture, strife (ἔρις); διαφορά then also means dissimilarity and difference more generally. But in the state of being-asunder and being-opposed that belongs to things that have been differentiated from each other, a relationship still unfolds between them: namely, a relationship of difference. Insofar as the human rends himself asunder from the Λόγος, he moves himself away from it in such a way that the presence of it that is turned toward him appears as though it were absent. The human turns away from what is turned toward him. In this turning away, what is present absences, but it can only absent itself as what is present. Therefore, διαφέρεσθαι, the rending-itself-asunder, is never a severing in the sense of a separation of things. The Λόγος presences toward the human, but insofar as he strays from it, it does not appear for him. In a certain sense, the Λόγος does not show itself at all and is akin to nothing: namely, the nothing of beings which, of course, remains fundamentally different from the nothing of beyng. Accordingly, Heraclitus thus knows very well, in his own way, of the strange and for the most part dominating absencing from the human of the continually presencing being. This—namely, the Λόγος as the originary for-gathering—holds the essence of the human toward itself in advance as somehow gathered. The forgathering Λόγος is therefore that which incessantly presences toward the human, ‘the present’ in an extraordinary sense: it is that which, in remaining turned toward the human, emerges (φύσις), and which in another fragment Heraclitus therefore calls τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε1—the not ever submerging, the always and forever emerging. In reference to this latter point, fragment 16 states: τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι; [321]—“How could a human ever conceal himself from the always and forever emerging thing?”2 The human—that is, the being that carries out λόγος—cannot do this: rather, as saying 72 (which must now be elucidated) says at its beginning, the human must be turned toward the Λόγος, bearing it most of all.
The second part of the saying is joined to the first by a καί. We translate καί not merely as “and,” but rather as “therefore also.” This indicates that we take the first part of the saying as the grounding for what is, in the second part, the essential consequence, and which, as what has been grounded, itself shines a light for our understanding back onto the grounding ground.
In both the first and second parts of fragment 72, there is talk of a relation belonging to the human. The first relationship that is named consists of διηνεκῶς ὁμιλεῖν, a turning toward that bears. It is also stated toward what this relation stands: namely, it goes toward the Λόγος. The relationship named in the second part of the
1 Translators’ note: We have supplied the ποτε, which is missing in the German volume.
2 See The Inception of Occidental Thinking in this volume.
240 Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos