Regarding the life of Heraclitus, which fell in the decades between 540 and 480 BCE, we know as little as we do of the lives of Anaximander and Parmenides. It would be a mistake, however, to lament this lack of biographical information: for who Parmenides and Heraclitus are is alone determined from out of what they thought, and we experience nothing of this through ‘biographies.’ Thus, the biography of a thinker can be largely correct, while the presentation of his thinking remains quite untrue. This is what happened with Nietzsche, who composed quite a lively description of the ‘character’ of Heraclitus; however, this lively description did not obviate the fact that Nietzsche’s legacy on this score was to bring into circulation the most awful misinterpretation of Heraclitus’s thinking.
The question of who Heraclitus is, provided that it is asked within the limits within which it is here able to be asked at all, finds its answer in the word that the thinker, as thinker, has said. A faint glimmer of this word conceals itself in the ‘stories’ concerning the thinker that are occasionally preserved and passed on. Such ‘stories,’ even if they are invented (indeed, precisely then), contain a truth that is more originary than the correct information determined through historiographical research. Historiographical/biographical findings always (and only) move within the medium of indifference, and serve only the satisfaction of curiosity regarding the biographical.
[6] We attend here first to two ‘stories’ concerning Heraclitus. It cannot be proven that what is therein recounted actually occurred. But the fact that these ‘stories’ are preserved shows us something of the word that this thinker spoke. Of course, we understand these ‘stories’ only from out of what Heraclitus himself thought and said. Nonetheless, they can in turn serve to make us heedful of Heraclitus’s word, albeit at some remove. These ‘stories’ should not replace the missing ‘biography’ in order ultimately to introduce the representation of the so-called ‘work’ ‘biographically’; rather, the ‘stories’ should lead us to recognize the ‘biographic’ and the ‘historiographical’ as inessential. The stories let us be attentive to the realm from out of which Heraclitus’s word is spoken.
The first ‘story’ is as follows:
Ἡράκλειτος λέγεται πρὸς τοὺς ξένους εἰπεῖν τοὺς βουλομένους ἐντυχεῖν αὐτῶι, οἳ ἐπειδὴ προσιόντες εἶδον αὐτὸν θερόμενον πρὸς τῶι ἰπνῶι ἔστησαν, ἐκέλευε γὰρ αὐτοὺς εἰσιέναι θαρροῦντας . εἶναι γὰρ καὶ ἐνταῦθα θεούς…1
Regarding Heraclitus the following (story) is recounted: namely, that he spoke to the visitors who wanted to approach him. Coming closer they saw him as he warmed himself at an oven. They remained standing there (very surprised by this), on account of the fact that he bid them (including those who were still hesitating) to have courage and come in, calling with the words: “Here, too, the gods are present.”
The crowd, in its curious intrusiveness upon the thinker and his abode, is disappointed and baffled. They believe that they should be allowed to find the thinker in conditions [7] that carry the characteristics of the exceptional, the rare, and the exciting, and thus unlike the usual day-to-day life of people everywhere. In visiting the thinker, the crowd hopes to find things that (for a while, at least) will serve as fodder for entertaining chatter. Those wanting to visit the thinker hope to catch him precisely at that moment in which he ‘thinks’ in raptured profundity; not, however, in order to be affected by his thinking, but rather only so they can say that they have seen and heard someone who has the reputation of being a thinker.
However, instead of such a situation, these curious spectators find the thinker at an oven. This is an everyday and modest place where (for example) bread is baked. But Heraclitus is not even at the oven engaged in baking; rather, he abides there only in order to warm himself. He thereby reveals in this everyday place the whole indigence of his life. The sight of a freezing thinker offers little of ‘interest.’ The curious spectators, owing to this disappointing sight, lose their desire to come closer. Why should they bother? This commonplace and charmless indigence of freezing and standing at the oven can be found at anyone’s house at any time. Why, then, should they seek out a thinker? Heraclitus reads the disappointed curiosity in their faces. He recognizes that, for the crowd, the mere absence of an expected sensational event suffices to turn them toward leaving. Therefore, he tells them to have courage and prompts them to enter with these words: εἶναι γὰρ καὶ ἐνταῦθα θεούς: “Here, too, the gods are present.”
These words cast the abode of the thinker and his occupation in another light. Whether the visitors understand these words instantly or at all, thereby seeing everything in this other light, the story does not say. But the fact this story has been told and passed down to us [8] moderns is based upon the fact that it hails from out of the atmosphere of the thinking of this thinker and thus designates it. καὶ ἐνταῦθα—even here at the oven, in this everyday and ordinary place where each thing and every circumstance, each action and every thought, is familiar through and through, common and ordinary; ‘even here,’ in this region of the familiar, εἶναι θεούς, the ‘gods presence.’ θεοί are the θεάοντες καὶ δαίμονες. The essence of the gods who appeared to the Greeks is precisely this appearing, in the sense of a peering into the ordinary in such a way that what peers both into, and out of, the ordinary is the extraordinary that presences in the region of the ordinary. Even here, says Heraclitus, at the oven, where I warm myself, the presencing of the extraordinary in the ordinary prevails. καὶ ἐνταῦθα—‘even here’—says the thinker, thereby speaking to the expectations of the visitors, and therefore, in a certain sense, in accordance with the desire and disposition of the crowd. Supposing, however, that the words of a thinker say what they say in a way that is different from everyday language, so that in each common surface meaning of his speech a subtext necessarily conceals itself, then these words of Heraclitus’s, when we heed them as the thoughtful word, have a strange meaning.
When the thinker says καὶ ἐνταῦθα (“even here”), ἐν τῶι ἰπνῶι (“at the oven”), the extraordinary presences, then he wants to say in truth: the presencing of the gods unfolds only here. Where, namely? In the inconspicuousness of the everyday. You need not avoid the customary and ordinary and chase after the eccentric, exciting, and tantalizing in the misguided hope of thereby encountering the extraordinary. You should keep only to your daily and familiar, as I do here, abiding with the oven and warming myself. Is what I do here, and how I abide, not full enough of signs? The oven gives bread. But how can humans live properly without the gift of bread? This gift of the oven is the sign for what the θεοί (the gods) are. [9] They are the δαίοντες, those who give themselves in the ordinary as the extraordinary. I warm myself at the oven and thereby remain in the nearness of the fire: the Greek πῦρ, which at the same time means ‘light’ and ‘glow.’ You find me here near the fire, in which alone the ray of light of those peering in is possible and is one with the ray of warmth, and which lets ‘emerge’ into appearance that which, in the cold, would otherwise fall victim to the numbness of nothingness.
In what follows, we must watch for whether, and in what way, the thinking of Heraclitus remains always in the nearness to, and within the region of, the thinking of fire, in order to gauge what ‘truth’ the story of the thinker at the oven conceals. But, if this story should contain something significant regarding the thinking of Heraclitus’s specifically, and not only what in a certain sense applies to every thinker, then something must be said in the word of Heraclitus’s that the story hands down, something that we have indicated but not yet properly seized.
καὶ ἐνταῦθα θεούς: “even here,” and precisely there, in the inconspicuousness of the ordinary, unfolds the extraordinariness of those who shine-in. This means: here, where I (the thinker) abide, is the inconspicuous together with the highest of that which appears and shines. Here, where I have my abode, what seems mutually exclusive has come together into one. Here, in the realm of the thinker, what stands in opposition and appears to be mutually exclusive—namely, what turns against but also toward the other—is everywhere. Perhaps this turning-toward must even exist in order that one may turn itself against the other. Where such turning-toward prevails, strife (ἔρις) unfolds. The thinker resides in the nearness of strife.
In what follows we must watch for whether, and in what way, the thinking of Heraclitus remains always in the region of [10] what the word ἔρις names, in order to recognize that this ‘story’ in particular allows a light to emerge upon Heraclitus’s thinking.
The other story concerning Heraclitus reads:
ἀναχωρήσας δ᾽εἰς τὸ ἱερὸν τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος μετὰ τῶν παίδων ἠστραγάλιζε · περιστάντων δ᾽αὐτὸν τῶν Ἐφεσίων, τί, ὦ κάκιστοι, θαυμάζετε; εἶπεν · ἢ οὐ χρεῖττον τοῦτο ποιεῖν ἢ μεθ᾽ὑμῶν πολιτεύεσθαι;2
But he had himself withdrawn into the temple of Artemis in order to play knucklebones with the children; here, the Ephesians stood around him, and he said to them: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this than to work with you on behalf of the πόλις?”
This second story gives a similar picture, insofar as the crowd, gaping curiously at the thinker, has once again come close to him and is hovering around him. The Ephesians—i.e., the countrymen of Heraclitus’s—are named. In this story, however, he does not abide in an everyday and modest place. Rather, he has gone into the holy precinct of the temple of Artemis. Thus, in this story too, the nearness to the gods is reported, but in a way that does not touch upon the astonishing fact that the gods presence in the oven. The holy precinct of the temple speaks for itself clearly enough. Certainly, here, now more than ever, there is the opportunity for astonishment. Yet, the thinker does not particularly concern himself with the goddess; rather, he plays a dice-game (ἀστράγαλος: the vertebrae; knuckles; die) with the children. A thinker, from whom even the average person expects seriousness and profundity, plays a child’s game. However, if, according to his own words from the first story, the nearness to the gods is so important to him that he found them even in the oven, how can he then, in the precinct of the house of the goddess, [11] do ἀλλότρια (i.e., inappropriate things)? Once again the thinker reads perplexed wonder in the expressions of the by-standers, and once again he speaks to them. But now his words have a different tone. The words of the first story are encouraging, inviting. Now he asks: τί, ὦ κάκιστοι, θαυμάζετε;—“What are you gaping at, you scoundrels?” These words are severe, scornful, and dismissive. The former words invited the bystanders to experience the presence of the gods with him. Now the thinker cuts himself off decisively from that with which the bystanders are engaged. The thinker, or so it appears, wants nothing to do with the πολιτεύεσθαι, the care of the πόλις.
One might be tempted to interpret this ‘situation’ in a modern way and remark that the thinker admits here to being an ‘unpolitical’ person, one who self-centeredly spins around only within the circle of his ‘private existence.’ But such modernizations and the almost inevitable ‘allusions’ by historiographers to the respective present are always unfitting, because from the start they refuse to allow the past its historically proper-essence, and thereby fail to think historically in an authentic way. It is one thing to produce a historiographic image of the past for the respective present; it is another to think historically, that is, to experience what has-been as what is unfolding as what is to come. All merely historiographical revivals of the past are always the poor facades of historical errors.
In the case of Heraclitus, it is not at all decided whether the renunciation of πολιτεύεσθαι includes a refusal of the πόλις. Indeed, how could this be so, if—when thought in a Greek way—the concern with the presence of the gods is the highest concern of the city? This is in fact the case: for the πόλις, still thought in a Greek way, is3 the pole and the site around which all appearing of essential beings, and with it also the dreadful non-essence of [12] all beings, turns. Understood in this way, and thus always thought in a Greek way, the thinker with his care for the essential nearness of the gods is the authentically ‘political’ human. Thus, πολιτεύεσθαι and πολιτεύεσθαι, even among the Greeks, are not immediately and in every case the same. Therefore, with his words to the Ephesians, Heraclitus refuses only their expectation that he, as thinker, drops out of the care allotted to him in order to degenerate into a common endeavor with them toward the πόλις (cf. fragment 121). This refusal refers indirectly to the necessity of the plight of thoughtful care: namely, to be thoughtfully concerned with the extraordinary that presences in all things ordinary.
But, when Heraclitus plays ‘dice’ with the children in the temple-precinct of the goddess, does this exhibit his care about the extraordinary and about the particular goddess of his particular πόλις? We shall ask this question, as do the Ephesians within the fragment. Heraclitus, however, in no way refuses the bystanders this question. Rather, he addresses it directly in order to properly ask about why they marvel about his present action.
τὶ … θαυμάζετε; — “What are you gaping at?” Are you surprised that a thinker, set off from commerce and its successes, spends his time only in useless games and not even pursuing his thoughts, which is the least of what may be demanded of a thinker? If they wonder solely about these things, they understand altogether nothing about his conduct. Were it a mere pastime, the game with the children would in fact be no better than the gaping of the Ephesians. Then why should this activity be granted the privilege of being better for the thinker? What truly astonishing thing conceals itself in the harmless actions of the thinker? Does the nearness to an extraordinary game lie hidden in this perfectly familiar and ordinary playing with the children? If so, then the harsh words of the thinker to the Ephesians would be unwelcoming only in appearance, just as the words at the oven had the appearance of a mere, glib invitation, as though [13] the gods let themselves be encountered by just anyone in any disposition.
In what follows we must be attentive to whether, and in what way, the thinking of Heraclitus’s is always determined from out of the nearness to a game, and whether even the to-be-thought of thoughtful thinking is revealed to him to be something like a game.
Both stories regarding Heraclitus show, albeit in varying ways and with varying distinctness, that in the thinking of the thinker a nearness to the gods prevails. If one attended sufficiently to this, one could easily explain it in accordance with the later imaginings of metaphysics through the suggestion that, precisely in thoughtful thinking, where the entirety of the world will be presented, the universal world-ground—i.e., the godly in a broad and undetermined sense—would also necessarily be represented. One can also easily prove how, in all metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche, a theological moment predominates, because of the fact that ‘the godly’ is thought therein as the universal world-cause. Herein also lies the ground for a far-reaching process within the history of the Occident: namely, the reciprocal relation between metaphysics and Christianity.
By contrast, we would do well, already at the beginning of this lecture course, to keep all theological interpretations—and thereby also the opinion that philosophy, already at its beginning, was determined through theology—away from inceptual thinking. For the gods and the godly of the ancient Greek world are not suitable for a theology, even when we take this designation very broadly and understand it not only as the rational explanation and ordering of doctrines belonging to a given ‘religion.’ There is, after all, no Greek ‘religion.’ The word religio and its concerns are essentially Roman. Because there [14] is no Greek ‘religion,’ there is also no Greek ‘theology.’
However, the fact that the essential nearness of the gods to the thinker Heraclitus has its own essence is expressed in the second story. Specifically, the goddess Artemis is named here. One would perhaps like to contend that the mentioning of Artemis is in no way characteristic of Heraclitus the thinker, but rather is characteristic of Heraclitus the Ἐφέσιος: for since ancient times, there was a sanctuary of Artemis in Ephesus. It still stood in the late-Greek period when Paul, while on his mission, preached there to the Ephesians. During an Ephesian uprising against Paul’s Christian preaching, the chant μεγάλη ἡ Ἄρτεμις τῶν Ἐφεσίων rang for two long hours.4
But the question remains whether, taken by itself, the historiographical explanation that the Artemision was a popular cause of the Ephesians can at all grasp and express the truth. It remains to be asked whether the goddess Artemis was only mentioned in the report about Heraclitus because Heraclitus was an Ephesian, or whether the thinking of this thinker in relation to this goddess is in tune with what this thinker had to think as an inceptual thinker of the Greeks.
We state the following, and for the moment only in the form of a supposition: Artemis is the goddess of the thinker Heraclitus, and not merely the goddess of the Ephesians. But she is the goddess of the thinker because she is the goddess of what the thinker has to think.
Who is Artemis? It would be presumptuous if we thought that we could respond to this question by means of some observations about ‘mythology.’ Here, the only possible and, indeed, necessary response takes the form of a responsibility that entails the historical decision regarding whether or not we choose to safeguard the ‘essence’ of this goddess and the Greek realm of gods as something having-been. Whether the forms of the gods still amuse us in a ‘literary-poetic’ [15] sense, or whether we explain them in mythological/historiographical terms, amounts to the same. In both cases, they are only the objects of our ‘lived-experience,’ which turns out in one case as moving and sentimental, and in the other as stiff and boring. It is an entirely different question, however, whether the concealed essence of the history to which we belong is compelled, from out of an essential need, into a dialogue with what was, to the Greeks, their θεοί. The proper answer to the questions ‘Who is Artemis?’ and ‘Who is Zeus?’ conceals itself still in our history to come, insofar as it alone responds to the having-been.
The observations concerning the ‘gods’ of the Greeks offered here and periodically in what follows remain, above all, cautious hints and makeshift clues that do not carry much weight. Familiarity with these observations should never lead to the opinion that, by mastering mythological evidence and the poetic description of the same, knowledge of the gods is obtained in such a way that this knowledge enacts the relation to the gods in and through which they bestow themselves to humans. Moreover, the relation of the Greeks to the gods is a knowledge, and not a ‘faith’ in the sense of a willful taking-to-be-true on the basis of an authoritative proclamation. We still do not fathom the inceptual way in which the Greeks were the knowing ones. It is not the case that they were the knowing ones because they possessed a philosophy; rather, it was because they were the knowing ones that they thereby founded the inception of authentic thinking.
Who, then, is the goddess of Heraclitus? Who is Artemis? Artemis is the sister of Apollo, and both were born on the island of Delos. The last strophe of the poem “Song of the Germans,”5 in which Hölderlin poeticized the essence of the Germans, begins with the question that the poet poses to the Muse (i.e., to the ‘angel’ of the German fatherland). The question asks, in the end, about the island Delos, [16] the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis. The final strophe of the poem reads:
Where is your Delos, where your Olympia,
That we all find ourselves at the highest festival?
Yet, how does the son divine what you,
For yours, Immortal, have long prepared?
Artemis, the sister, who along with her brother hails from Delos, bears the same signs as her brother Apollo: lyre and bow, which in a mysterious way, and hence also in their ‘outer form,’ are the same. The lyre is the symbol of ‘string music’ and its ἁρμονία. Here, the ‘essence’ of play strikes us again. The Greeks know Artemis as the huntress and as the ‘goddess of the hunt.’ Naturally, we believe we know approximately what the concept ‘hunt’ means, and apply this notion in an unreflective way to the goddess of the hunt. Hunting and animals belong in ‘nature’—i.e., φύσις. Artemis is the goddess of φύσις. Her playmates, the Nymphs, play the game of φύσις. This word names the self-opening coming-forth and emerging ‘up’ and upwards into an unconcealed standing-there and rising (πέλειν). The goddess of φύσις is the rising one. Hence she appears in an elevated form. Her beauty is one of lofty and stately appearance. Those maidens to whom Artemis is well-disposed are given great stature.6
If φύσις should prove to be what remains for the inceptual thinker the sole to-be-thought, we must then linger in amazement, at the appropriate time, at the fact that Artemis appears in the nearness of Heraclitus. Such nearness would be precisely the sign that Heraclitus is an inceptual thinker. Artemis appears with torches in both hands. She is called φωσφόρος—the Light Bringer. The essence of light (φάος, φῶς) is the illumination that first lets something appear [17] and thus lets the unconcealed come forth from out of concealment. But the essence of φύσις is at the same time the emerging and self-expanding into the open and lightened. φῶς and φάος (light) and φύσις (emerging), as well as φαίνω (to shine and appear), are all rooted in one and the same essence that neither the inceptual thinker of the Greeks, nor any later thinking, has thought in the unity of its essential richness.
(We call it by the single, but still unconsidered word: clearing. The clearing in the sense of the illuminating and opening sheltering is the inceptual hidden essence of ἀλήθεια. That is the Greek name for what is otherwise known as truth, which, for the Greeks, is unconcealment and disclosure. φύσις (nature) and φάος (light) have the ground of the concealed unity of their essence in the veiled essence of ἀλήθεια. The fact that recently modern linguistics, without any notion of the stated essential intimacy between φύσις and φάος, has come to the discovery that the words φύσις and φάος indicate the same thing, may here only be mentioned in passing. This linguistic discovery proves nothing, because it is only an addendum to, and consequence of, insights into essential intimacies that it exploits mindlessly and thoughtlessly.)
Artemis is the goddess of emergence, of light, and of play. Her sign is the lyre, which appears in the form of the bow: thus, thought in a Greek way, it is the same as the bow. The lyre, understood as the bow, sends the arrow that brings death. But the deaths that her arrow sends are ‘sudden,’ ‘gentle,’ and ‘loving.’ The goddess of emergence, play, and light is also the goddess of death, just as if light, play, and emerging were the same as death. Rather, emerging, self-illuminating, and play mark the essence of ζωή, ‘life,’ and of ζῷον, ‘the living.’ Our word ‘life’ is already so burdened by Christian and modern-day thinking that it cannot [18] designate what the Greeks understood by ζωή and ζῷον. Even if our word ‘life’ remains only an imprecise and confused translation of the Greek word ζωή, it nevertheless allows us to think that ‘life’ is the opposite of death. How, then, can the goddess of the self-illuminating, of emerging, and of play be, at the same time, the goddess of death, i.e., of the dark, of submergence, and of the rigid? Life and death turn against one another. Certainly. However, what turns against one another turns, at the moment of its most extreme opposition, intimately toward one another. Where such turning prevails, there is strife, ἔρις. For Heraclitus, who thinks strife as the essence of being, Artemis, the goddess with bow and lyre, is the nearest. But her nearness is pure nearness—i.e., farness. We must of course think nearness and farness in a Greek way, and not in the ‘modern’ sense as the numerically greater or lesser distance between two spatial points.
But if, as we claim, Artemis is the goddess of Heraclitus, then must not also the brother be of the same nature as the sister? To be sure, the name of Apollo is not mentioned explicitly in the words of Heraclitus’s that have been handed down to us. Although this god is not spoken of in a saying of the thinker, he is nonetheless named unequivocally, and indeed in connection with something that clarifies for us the essence of this thinking in a decisive way.7 The thinking of Heraclitus’s, in which the to-be-thought is characterized by the nearness of Artemis (brother to Apollo), is, on account of this nearness, ‘Apollonian.’ We use this designation in a sense yet to be clarified, one that differs no less from Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian than from those concepts customarily employed within ‘humanism’ and all of ‘classicism.’ The ‘Dionysian’ interpretation of Heraclitus’s thinking—already employed by Hegel [19] and then coarsened by Nietzsche and pushed further into the quagmire—is eliminated in advance through the observation that Artemis is the goddess of this thinker.
In light of this, an old fragment only now obtains its proper complexion and gravity. The story reads:
ἀνέθηκε δ᾽αὐτὸ (τὸ φερόμενον αὐτοῦ βιβλίον) εἰς τὸ τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος ἱερόν…8
He [namely, Heraclitus] brought it (that is, his still-intact writing) into the sanctuary of Artemis, in order to shelter it there.
Thus, the word of Heraclitus’s stands under the protection of Artemis. The word, surely, though not the writings—for the latter were apparently abandoned unsheltered and broken up into pieces. For us today, only fragments of these writings are preserved. Because of this, every attempt to think-after the thinking of Heraclitus’s by bringing it into the light of understanding is difficult. We are faced with the incoherence of the isolated pieces and sentence fragments and do not know the unity in which they belong. By contrast, if we possessed the entirety of the unbroken writings, then we could easily let the thought of this thinker present itself clearly and brightly from out of its own proper cohesiveness. But this idea is admittedly misguided, and for various reasons.
Even at the time when the writings of Heraclitus’s were still preserved intact and well-known, this thinker, on the basis of his still directly accessible writings, had a reputation that has remained for centuries: ἐπεκλήθη ὁ Σκοτεινός—“He (Heraclitus) was called by the epithet ‘The Obscure.’” However, we can find nothing special in the fact that the thinker Heraclitus was called ‘The Obscure,’ [20] since each thinker who truly is a thinker easily (and often) attains a reputation for ‘lack of clarity’ and ‘obscurity.’ The crowd happily agrees with this reputation, since they feel insulted in the face of whatever they do not immediately understand, and retaliate by describing the thinker as ‘unclear.’ Often this reputation for ‘lack of clarity’ (where, incidentally, thinkers are safest) also carries with it the suspicion that the thinkers themselves seek to portray their thoughts as ‘difficult’ and as ‘obscure’ as possible, in order that they may appear ‘mysterious’ and ‘important.’
(Schopenhauer, whose work was Nietzsche’s downfall, demonstrated that he is not a thinker through his self-indulgent rant concerning Schelling and Hegel and their lack of clarity. Nevertheless, we should give Schopenhauer his proper due as an accomplished novelist who, in the middle of the last century, imparted to the Germans only a pale notion of what ‘philosophy’ is.)
This widespread opinion concerning the thinking of the thinker—namely, that it deliberately sheaths itself in obscurity—has an old and famous example in the view that the Roman author Cicero voiced regarding Heraclitus ‘The Obscure.’ Since, to be sure, the Romans have notoriously grasped nothing beyond this from the thinking of the Greeks, the opinion of Cicero’s concerning Heraclius is hardly surprising. Cicero believes9 that Heraclitus has purposefully written so opaquely. The German thinker Hegel, who after all must have known something about the essential nature of a thinker, has already given the definitive reply to this opinion of Cicero’s in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy.10 Hegel there says that such intentionality (as Cicero has imputed to Heraclitus) would be very vapid indeed, were it true, but that it is in fact nothing but Cicero’s own vapidity that he forces upon Heraclitus. But then Hegel himself, immediately following the aforementioned remark, gives the following judgment concerning Heraclitus’s obscurity: [21] namely, that it is probably a consequence of the careless combining of words and unrefined language.
We are tempted to reject this explanation of Hegel’s as being no less ‘vapid.’ However, we must keep in mind that Hegel in his time (i.e., the time of Goethe and Humboldt and classicism), but also in accordance with the Occidental tradition of the time, held the thinking and saying of Plato as the paradigm of classical Greek philosophy. However, at the same time, Hegel still placed Aristotle over Plato with regard to speculative power and profundity. Regarding Aristotle, Hegel says the following in the same lectures:11 “There is certainly a lack in Aristotle of Plato’s beautiful form, of his sweetness of language (the chatting) [one could almost say: the chatter], his conversational tone that is as lively as it is cultured and humane.” Given such an assessment of Plato’s language and, more importantly, given the opinion that the thinkers before Plato must only be construed in terms of this and only by means of it, and thus taken only as ‘pre-Platonic’ and preliminary thinkers, is it then any wonder that Hegel finds in Heraclitus “unrefined language” and “the careless combining of words”? We think about the thinking and the language of the inceptual thinkers differently now, in the same way that one now judges the ‘archaic style’ of Greek art differently than classical art history did, whereby it may remain undecided whether or not the now customary interpretation of the ‘archaic’ is in agreement with the Greek world. ‘Archaic’ comes from the word ἀρχή, which means ‘inception.’ Without knowledge of the inception, the interpretation of ‘archaic art’ no doubt fumbles in the dark. Furthermore, we should not measure the inceptual language of the Greek thinker by means of the yardstick of subsequent Hellenistic grammar.
Three thinkers approach us from out of the realm of Occidental thinking: Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. In the present lectures, we are attempting to become attentive to the word of Heraclitus’s. At the outset of this attempt, it may be prudent to experience straightaway the atmosphere in which the word of Heraclitus’s was said. Because Heraclitus is a thinker, the air that envelopes him is the crisp and cool air of thoughtful thinking, which is itself a daring deed. Two ‘stories’ concerning Heraclitus should help bring it about that perhaps, from time to time, we feel the draft of this air, if only from out of the farthest distance.
The first of these two stories reads, in translation:
Regarding Heraclitus the following (story) is recounted: namely, that he spoke to the visitors who wanted to approach him. Coming closer, they saw him as he warmed himself at an oven. They remained standing there. He bid the surprised ones to have courage and come in, with the words: “Here, too, the gods are present.”
The other story reads:
But he (namely, Heraclitus) had withdrawn into the temple of Artemis in order to play knucklebones there with the children; there, the Ephesians (his countrymen) stood around him, and he said to them: “What are you gaping at, you scoundrels? Or is it not better to do this [what I am now doing] than to work with you on behalf of the πόλις?”
One story shows the thinker near the oven, the other shows him playing a game with children. Where, in either of these stories, is there a trace of the crisp and cool air from which hails the daring deed that is called ‘thinking’?
[23] One story shows an everyday place, the oven, where nonetheless, according to the thinker’s own words, gods are present. The other story shows, by contrast, the place of a god (i.e., the temple of the goddess Artemis); but here the thinker does not attend to the presence of the goddess, whose presence means everything to him during his stay at the oven. The sojourn of the thinker shows in each case precisely the opposite of what one expects. At the oven one is disappointed; in the temple one is surprised. Regarding the manner and the essence of the thinker, and regarding his thinking, nothing shows itself, at least not immediately, and certainly not for the mere gaping eye of the crowd: for this eye sees only what falls immediately in front of it, and only what is obvious and pleasing to it. This eye of the crowd is not inclined to notice what the appearance points to beyond itself. This eye of the crowd is not at all practiced at following what such a pointing points to in each case. The eye of the crowd is blind to signs. Whatever exceeds appearance is considered to be fantasy and fabrication by the many (i.e., the πολλοί, as the Greeks say). Against this, the crowd believes in so-called ‘reality’ and simple givenness. Moreover, the eye of the crowd does not have the sight for the inconspicuous, in which alone genuine signs are concealed. The oven points to bread and to fire and, in the ‘fire,’ to glowing and brightness. The ‘reasonable person’ just sees an oven. And whoever still today reads this harmless story of the thinker at the oven as a ‘reasonable person’ must rightly conclude that one goes ‘too far’ in finding here a sign of the fire and a hint of the glow and the light.
The children’s game of which the second ‘story’ speaks points to the relaxed and easy-going, to the dynamism and freedom of play which, as play, nonetheless has its rule and its law and thus remains [24] in the unified and circumscribed (what we call a world) in which the players are immersed without, however, drowning in it.
When we thoroughly ponder the two stories regarding the sojourns of the thinker, suddenly we no longer think of the thinker, but rather of that with which he lingers. We follow the signs that point to fire and play. We can now set aside the ‘personality’ of the thinker. We hold now only to that with which he sojourns, because it is this that determines the character of his sojourn and, from out of this, his posture and his ownmost comportment (i.e., his thinking). When we say ‘Heraclitus,’ we think not of this man as a ‘creator’ of a philosophy; rather, we think of the ‘fire’ and of the ‘play.’ We think of this because it points to what remains, for his thinking, the to-be-thought, the very one with which he stands in a friendship that is the φιλία τοῦ σοφοῦ in which the thinking that is later called ‘philosophy’ is grounded.
We must thus be attentive hereafter to whether, and to what extent, the word of this thinker speaks essentially about ‘fire’ and ‘play,’ and whether, and how, with ‘fire’ and ‘play’ something essential is named that at the same time points to the presence of the gods. We will then only later—perhaps suddenly, one day soon, or perhaps only after years—notice at once what a note-worthy explanation these two harmless ‘stories’ about the thinker Heraclitus give.
Both stories point out in different ways that a presencing of the gods belongs to the sojourn of the thinker. Both stories, however, also give us the hint that this nearness of the gods is of a unique sort. Hence, we would do well not to speak too much, too loudly, or too often about the gods. With all due caution in this regard, [25] we cannot presently ignore the peculiarity that in the second story, and also in still another narrative, the goddess Artemis is specifically named. One could, in reference to this, offer the plausible explanation that Heraclitus was, after all, an Ἐφέσιος, and that, thus, the goddess Artemis is distinctive not of Heraclitus the thinker, but rather of Heraclitus the man from Ephesus. For in ancient times there was a sanctuary of Artemis in Ephesus, the ‘Artemision.’ Artemis is also called Διώνη or ‘Diana.’ The goddess Artemis is the sister of the god Apollo. The essence of both, who according to legend were born on the island of Delos, has emerged into that world whose domain is the light and the illuminating. Artemis appears with the torches in her hands, because she is the φωσφόρος, the Light-Bringer. Artemis streaks through the mountains and wilderness and is encountered there as the Huntress. She seeks out the animals in which the ‘lively’ appears in an exceptional way, so that today still with the words ‘zoological’ and ‘animalistic’ we mean not only the animal, but rather above all the living. The Occidental definition of the essence of the human should be recalled: ζῷον λόγον ἔχον, animal rationale, the rational living being; instead of ‘living being’ Nietzsche says, for example, simply ‘animal.’
Animals and the way of tracing their tracks, thereby engaging with the consummation of their ‘life,’ belong in φύσις, which one renders inadequately as ‘nature.’ The word φύσις means: emerging from out of itself into the open, into the free emerged standing-there of appearance, and giving itself within appearance to the free, and thereby still following a rule. Accordingly, ‘to unfold’ is the essence of play. Play belongs to φύσις. The nymphs, who play the game of ‘nature,’ are the playmates of Artemis. The sign of ‘playing strings,’ and perhaps of play generally, is the lyre. It appears in the shape of a bow. For the Greeks, who experienced ‘appearance’ as being, the lyre ‘is’ therefore the bow. The bow sends forth the death-bringing arrows. The Huntress, who [26] tracks the living so that it may find death, bears the signs of play and death—lyre and bow. Her other sign, ‘the torch,’ is, as the fallen and extinguished torch, the sign of death. The Light-Bringer is the Death-Bringer. Life and death, like light and night, correspond to one another, in that they at the same time ‘contradict’ one another. Artemis the elevated one, through her appearing, lets this ‘contra-diction’ peer into beings as a whole. She is the appearance of the oppositional, and nowhere and never is she disposed to balance the oppositional, or give up the oppositional entirely in favor of one side. The Light-Bringer is, as the Death-Bringer, the appearance of the oppositional. She is this because she originally lets the unfamiliarity of strife peer into the familiar. Artemis is a bringer of the essential strife, ἔρις. This strife is not only unresolved; rather, it belongs to the essence of strife to strive-against each resolution and every attempt at such.
Here, with our use of the word ‘strife,’ we clearly must stay away from the common notion of the word, which points in the direction of conflict and discord. Neither ‘battle’ nor ‘war’ attain to the richness of the essence of what is here called ‘strife,’ ἔρις. Each battle and every war is a type and variety of what is here called ἔρις, ‘strife,’ but nowhere is this in its essence and by necessity the same as ‘battle’ or ‘war.’ The attempt to consider what is for the inceptual thinker Heraclitus the to-be-thought will encounter light and fire, play and life, and will discover strife in all of them. What the goddess Artemis lets appear through her own appearing points to what is, for the thinker, the to-be-thought.
Artemis is the goddess of Heraclitus insofar as she, as goddess, is θεά, i.e., the one who peers into and is near to that which opens itself to the inceptual thinking of this thinker.
[27] The word of this thinker, as the saying of the to-be-said, stands under the protection of this goddess. However, because the word is not grounded in the reading of words, and because the word-sound only rings out as what it is from out of the inceptually soundless word, the words and the word-configurations found in writings and in books can break apart and fragment, while the word itself remains intact.
We possess only fragments of the writings of Heraclitus. How much more convenient our attempt would be to think-after the thinking of this thinker were we able to possess the writings intact! Yet, we take some steps in that direction when we hear that Heraclitus, even at the time when his writings were still accessible in their entirety, bore the epithet ὁ Σκοτεινός, ‘The Obscure.’ Thus, the thoughtful appropriation of his writings, even if they remained for us intact, would still be a difficult task. Unless perhaps the epithet ὁ Σκοτεινός is merely a label that is attached to him that obscures, through some misunderstanding, his otherwise clear thinking. If this were so, the epithet ‘The Obscure’ would originate only from the lack of understanding of others while hitting upon nothing about the essence of the thinker himself. Heraclitus has only the ‘reputation’ for obscurity, a reputation that a thinker can all too easily obtain. Cicero explained the obscurity of the thinker as resulting from a deliberate obfuscation of his own thinking. Hegel reproved this explanation of Cicero’s and set down another in its place, one that seeks to locate the reason for the obscurity in the defective combining of words in Heraclitus’s use of language. Surpassing this view, we gradually attain to the insight that the ‘primitiveness’ of the early thinkers is not characterized by lack of skill and maladroitness, but rather by the primacy of the inceptual, and the simplicity proper and exclusive to it. The language of the inceptual thinkers has the nobility of the inceptual. The word is in the inception of the saying.
1 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, A.5, 645a17 ff.
2 Diogenes Laertius, IX, 3.
3 Cf. Parmenides (GA 54).
4 Cf. The Acts of the Apostles, XIX, 34.
5 Hölderlin, Werke (Hellingrath), IV, 129–131.
6 Cf. Homer, Odyssey XX, 71: … μῆχος δ᾽ἔπορ Ἄρτεμις ἁγνή—“but Artemis the holy gives high stature.”
7 See fragment 93.
8 Diogenes Laertius, IX, 6.
9 De Natura Deorum, I, 74.
10 Hegel, Sämtliche Werke (Glockner), XVII, 347.
11 Ibid., XVIII, 314.