Heraclitus B32 · B32

Heraclitus's god is a matter of a name held at arm's length. The 'one wise thing' — <em>hen to sophon</em>, the single wisdom that steers all things (B41) — 'does not wish and does wish' to be called by the name of Zeus. It refuses the name because Zeus is the Homeric sky-father, a person with a biography, thunderbolts, quarrels, lusts; Heraclitus's divine is impersonal, the ordering intelligence of the whole. Yet it accepts the name, because Zeus is the highest word the Greeks have for the governing power, and no better one is at hand.

There is a buried pun the Greek ear would catch. The genitive he chooses is <em>Zenos</em>, not the ordinary <em>Dios</em>, and <em>Zen-</em> chimes with <em>zen</em>, 'to live' — an etymology the Greeks themselves drew, making Zeus 'the living one' or 'that through which we live.' So the very name half-fits: the one wise thing is indeed that through which all things live. The saying enacts Heraclitus's whole attitude to language (B48, the bow named 'life' but working death; B1, most people missing the <em>logos</em>): names are true and false at once, and the wise thing consents to be named only on the condition that you hear what the name really says.

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