Logos

Logos is a method of gathering.  For the Greeks, the gathering acts to bring everything apprehended into relations.  What Heidegger shows us is that logos is not only a method of gathering, but it is metaphysics: a rule for gathering.The opening up of beings happens in logos as gathering. Gathering is originally accomplished in language. Thus logos becomes the definitive and essential determination of discourse. Language, as what is spoken out and said, and was what can be said again, preserves in each case the being that has been opened up. What has been said can be said again and passed on. (198) Aristotle perfected this sense of logos as a rule by creating definitions, logic, grammar, etc.

However, Heidegger’s example of Sophocles’ Antigone demonstrates the initial inceptive moment of language coming into being through gathering.  Only the human being in Being-human can experience the world in a poetic way.  In losing this poetic way, we also lose Sophocles’ ability to see things come into Being through language.

Sophocles, in Heidegger’s terms, is putting logos to work, which is to say he establishes metaphysics at the moment of inception.  To put logos to work is the work of the poet and artist—it is to create art.  To put logos to work is not a technical ability, nor a skill, but a passion for knowing as questioning.…art may be regarded as the ability to set to work, pure and simple, as techne. Setting-to-work is putting Being to work in beings, a putting-to-work that opens up. This opening-up and keeping open, which surpasses and puts to work, is knowing. The passion of knowing is questioning. Art is knowing and hence is techne. (170)

In delineating a literate metaphysics based on logos as reason and logical propositions, Aristotle a method for achieving correctness and truth—pure reason.  We are after a way to establish a method for practical reason.