Heraclitus B2 · B2

The Logos is ξυνόν — common, shared, belonging to all alike, the way a city's law belongs to every citizen. Yet the many live as if each carried a private understanding (ἰδίαν φρόνησιν). The Greek sets ξυνός against ἴδιος, the public against the private — the same polarity that runs through Greek civic life, where the ἰδιώτης is the man closed up in his own affairs (the word, through Latin, becomes our 'idiot'). To live by a wisdom of one's own is, for Heraclitus, to be asleep: elsewhere he says the waking share one common world while each sleeper turns aside into a world of his own.

The undercurrent is a buried pun. ξυνός, 'common,' all but sounds out ξὺν νόῳ, 'with sense' — a play Heraclitus makes explicit in B114, where those who would speak <em>with mind</em> (ξὺν νόῳ) must hold fast to what is <em>common</em> (τῷ ξυνῷ), as a city holds to its law. So the common Logos is also the sensible one: to share in it is to have mind; to wall yourself into private opinion is to lose it. The complaint is B1's again — the many are ἀξύνετοι, un-put-together, each mistaking his own fragment for the whole.

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