One world for the waking
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τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι
For those who are awake there is one common world.
Preserved by Plutarch (On Superstition 166c). The omitted second clause says that sleepers each turn aside into a private world of their own — only the first clause is given verbatim here.
Plutarch preserves the line with its lost second half: for the waking there is one shared world; the sleepers each turn aside into a private one. <em>Koinos</em>, 'common,' is a load-bearing word in Heraclitus — the <em>logos</em> is common (B2), thinking is common (B113), war is common (B80). To be awake is to inhabit the shared order; to sleep is to secede into a world of one's own.
The single κόσμος of the waking is the same 'world-order, the same for all' of B30. Sleep here is less about the eyes than about attention: the many 'live as though they had a private understanding' (B2), which is itself a kind of waking sleep. The common world is not simply handed to us — it is the achievement of staying awake to what is shared, and the ordinary person, dreaming his own meanings, keeps stepping out of it.
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