that brings him to turn away from the Λόγος, ensuring that what is the most common for him and, indeed, what makes his days sacrosanct, remains foreign. The Λόγος is that which is most perceptible, and yet it is perceived the least: it is instead [392] ignored in favor of other more pressing things. The Λόγος is the originary gathering and the forgathering that rests within itself, yet which nevertheless comes up against a strange dispersal of the human essence. The manner in which the human soul ‘has’ its λόγος, and through this remains in a relation to the Λόγος, is estranging and counter to all expectation. However, the estranging is a sign of the extraordinary, to which the human must ceaselessly grow accustomed. This is stated in the saying that has been handed down as fragment 72:
ὧι μάλιστα διηνεκῶς ὁμιλοῦσι λόγωι τούτωι διαφέρονται, καὶ οἷς καθ᾽ἡμέραν ἐγκυροῦσι, ταῦτα αὐτοῖς ξένα φαίνεται.
That to which they are most turned, carrying it out ceaselessly (i.e., the Λόγος), and that which they encounter daily, appears foreign to them.
The first part of the saying contains a wordplay that is nearly impossible to replicate, for the same word is used twice, but with opposing meanings: διηνεκῶς – διαφέρω. In the first instance (i.e., in διηνεκῶς), διά means ‘through,’ ‘along,’ ‘through time,’ ‘to carry through,’ ‘to bear out.’ However, in its second instance, διά means ‘apart’: διαφέρειν means ‘to carry apart/to bear apart,’ ‘to divide in two,’ although not (and never) to separate.
Human calculating and machinating always sees the nearest and the ‘near’ in what comes next, the next object toward which the will wills. Thereby, the authentically near is passed over by the wanderings of the human. Even if this wandering were to wander along all paths, it would never reach what is free and expansive, and it would never reach the extremities that lead to what the human, in a concealed way, remains gathered toward. On the contrary, this wandering would bump up against the confines and constraints of its self-made limitations. That is why, instead of a calm light, there ignites a burning and scorching flame within the emerging originary self-lightening clearing of the human essence, a blaze that burns and yearns to measure these paths autonomously and selfishly, a measuring that is always merely [393] a mismeasuring and, indeed, a presumptuous one (i.e., ὕβρις). Heraclitus says the following about this in fragment 43:
ὕβριν χρὴ σβεννύναι μᾶλλον ἤ πυρκαϊήν.
The presumptuous mismeasurement it is necessary to extinguish, even before the conflagration.
290 Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos