Even Heraclitus already knew that bending-back and re-turning belong to the essence of the human, because the human is the one who thinks (see fragment 116):
ἀνθρώποισι πᾶσι μέτεστι γινώσκειν ἑωυτοὺς καὶ σωφρονεῖν .
To the human alone it is allotted to recognize himself, i.e., to think in a knowing way.
To think, φρονεῖν, is here [400] not meant in the sense that came to be later developed by ‘logic,’ for which λέγειν came only to mean ‘to assert and to recite.’
Now the word λέγειν, translated as “to harvest,” has an entirely different valence. λόγος is that harvesting which, in a manner that draws-out, saves and brings-in and shelters the pro-vision that before all gives vision. For this pro-vision is what originarily unites all ( πάντα ) in the sole oneness of what it, as the whole of beings, is. The Λόγος is the originary harvesting that draws-in within the harvest, because retained within it is all that has already been saved. Furthermore, this harvest saves and protects so that it may, for the first time and in its own time, be uncovered and be something unconcealed. However, the soul (i.e., the emerging of the human into the open and the unconcealed) has a λόγος : for its emerging unfolds as a drawing-out saving bringing-in of that point to which the soul, on its path along its outermost extremities, reached while listening to the Λόγος in a hearkening way, and with which the soul has become familiar through this harvesting.
Perhaps we may now at least attempt to make reference to the two sayings of Heraclitus's which, as those numbered fragments 1 and 2, have been placed at the beginning of the fragments handed down to us.
According to a comment of Aristotle's (Rhetoric III 5, 1407b16), the first fragment contains the beginning of Heraclitus's treatise. According to the oldest version recorded by Aristotle (ibid.), along with another version recorded by Sextus Empiricus (who preserves the saying's second half), the first sentence, to whose elucidation we will limit ourselves, goes as follows:
τοῦ λόγου τοῦδ᾽ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον.
In relation to the Λόγος (i.e., the only one thought here and which constantly presences), humans (on their own accord, in following their own fleeting and transitory paths) arrive at an inability to bring it together, not only before they have themselves [401] heard it, but even after they have already heard it.
We will not go further into the divergent interpretations of this sentence. The conventional, albeit indefensible view is that the Λόγος is the same as what Heraclitus himself says in the saying. Accordingly, one brings the ἀεί together with
296 Logic: Heraclitus's Doctrine of the Logos