Bogen und Leier: Eine medienphilosophische Perspektive auf Heraklits Kosmosbegriff

“Bow and lyre”—this famous double image from Heraclitus’s fragment (Diehls and Kranz 22, B 51) not only plays a significant role in Homer’s Odyssey XXI/XXII, but also shows in a concise way how poetic myth and philosophical logos turn into each other without cancelling each other out in Heraclitus’s cosmos-philosophy. His thinking, in terms of content and form, always moves between opposite ends of a tension. In our media-philosophical consideration of “bow and lyre” as two attrib­utes of Apollo, not only will the playful opposition of Eris and Eros in Heraclitus become clear, but a media-historical change will also become apparent: compared with the Pythagorean logoi, Heraclitus’s cosmos of thought represents in itself the transition between orality and literacy in Archaic Greece.

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