time allows being to emerge as gathered into emerging beings: in other words, being is immediately defined in its scope (πέρας, τέλος), thereby bringing-forth being in such a way (i.e., into the unconcealed) and thereby not (and, indeed, never) ‘making’ being. This bringing-forth is the revealing of the concealed into the unconcealed. And bringing-forth is a giving that allows something to be known, and is this knowing itself. Bringing-forth in light of emerging—ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν—belongs to the full essence of knowing.
When Heraclitus differentiates between λέγειν and ποιεῖν, he thinks both in their originary oneness as the essential feature of knowing. And when we take note of this difference and hold fast to it, it is worth considering that it is prior [370] to the differentiation between the theoretical and the practical. The καί that stands between λέγειν and ποιεῖν does not connect, as would a mere “and,” two essential pieces that comprise σοφία: rather, the καί means something akin to “and at the same time this means.” The bringing-forth of emerging belongs to the full essence of λέγειν as the gathering self-gathering. That is why this particular gathering (i.e., this λέγειν), which gathers and forgathers in a more originary way than any other, is, in itself, ποίησις—namely, gathering into the word and purely as the word, and thereby coming to language in thoughtful and poetic saying. Because the word ‘gathers’ (i.e., harvests) the unconcealed as such in an originary and inceptually revealing way, the saying-gathering thereby becomes λέγειν in an exemplary sense: and this is why, even from early on, λέγειν as gathering also means saying. Thinking and poeticizing are, although in fundamentally different ways, originarily (and to be-gin with) the same: they are the bringing-forth of being into the word, a bringing-forth that gathers itself in the word. It is here, in the essential realm just named, where we first begin to draw nearer to the wellspring from out of which arises the mysterious interaction between Greek poeticizing and thinking in harmony with that particular bringing-forth that we know as building and creating (but which we are still far from knowing). Based on what was just said, I dare to make the assertion that still today, despite Winckelmann and Goethe (and indeed, precisely because of them), we misunderstand the entirety of Greek ‘art,’ not to mention Greek poetry.
However, the final determination of the essence of σοφία named in the second sentence of the saying has not yet been elucidated. This determination comes at the end of the saying and brings what has been said about σοφία into and together with something unsaid. The last word is ἐπαΐοντας—ἀΐω means ‘to waft,’ ‘to waft back-and-forth,’ ‘to draw-out toward something,’ ‘to draw-in.’ (Here one must not speak about the incipient essence of ΑΩ.) This is how we have determined the essence of the ψυχή. The ἐπί in ἐπαΐοντας properly means “toward something.” We have come to experience, through saying 50, that σοφόν / σοφία (i.e., knowing) consists of the attentive listening to [371] the originary forgathering (i.e., to the Λόγος). Therefore, in saying 112, we cannot determine the “that toward which” (i.e., the ἐφ᾽οὗ of ἀΐοντες) in any other way than to supplement with ἐπὶ τοῦ λόγου. ἐπαΐοντας does not mean to listen attentively to things: rather, it means to listen attentively to the Λόγος.
276 Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos