of logos . . . then be the inconspicuous foretoken of a long return?"41 What is possible or to come, reaching beyond everything actual, is the return of the simple consent to the ever changing flow of alētheia, of unconcealment. In that potential of our era the historical and the aletheiological concepts of origination come together.
But their alliance is still far from the proper locus where Ursprung can be grasped. Its proper locus remains incomprehensible as long as legein, 'gathering', is considered to be something man undertakes. The proper locus of origination can be glimpsed—but still only glimpsed—when we think the agreement between the legein performed by man and the Legein which is presencing. Their agreement, Heidegger writes, is a "relation between relationships, that is to say, a pure relation, originating nowhere."42 The gathering performed by man (for the modems: by the subject) is already a relation, namely, of man to the things that he selects and retains from the mass of present entities. The gathering which is phusis (for the moderns: nature) also constitutes a relation, namely, between presence and absence. The relation between these two relations, Heidegger says, "originates nowhere." There is nothing more originary, it seems, than the homolegein between man and presencing. "Being itself cannot be experienced without a more originary experience of the essence of man , and conversely . . . Only the relation between these two, as their origination, (is] the true."43 This clearly recalls Heidegger's The Essence of Truth: the essence of truth is the essence of freedom—the opening in which man 'ek-sists'. However, the 'ecstatic' opening cannot disown its antecedent, transcendental subjectivity. The event of origination, on the other hand, proves to be as unthinkable in terms of existence as it is in terms of subjectivity. Hence Heidegger's recourse to the Presocratic 'basic words. " Furthermore, origination remains equally unthought in its simplicity when it is construed as the "relation between the two logoi,"44 as if presencing and human doing were two processes to be coordinated. In the foreword to the lecture course on the doctrine of Logos in Heraclitus, Heidegger introduces the task he assigns himself as the search for "the originary logic." This requires that the idea of homologizing human projects and given situations be renounced and that a single Logos be discovered: "'Logic' as the thinking 'of' the Logos will be originary only when the originary Logos is thought."45 The conjunction of thinking (which includes acting) and presencing must be reexamined, then, if the simple origination of all phenomena is to be found. This cannot consist in some rudimentary version of the conformity theory of truth.
Heraclitus could only point to simple origination from a distance, but he could not think it. If it is "being as time," then the Greek fundamental words, "each of which utters the originary essence of the initial thinking,"46 can only serve as guideposts for "the other thinking" and the other inception. We must think "even more originarily than Heraclitus." Thus Heidegger's reading of Heraclitus is expressly dictated by "the other thinking."47
41. GA 55 240.
42. GA 55 328.
43. GA 55 293. For homologein, see below, sec. 25.
44. GA 55 345.
45. GA 55 185.
46. GA 55 361 f. On the expression "being as time," see above, p. 18, 4.
47. GA 55 343 f.