Herákleitos (Heraclitus) // Carlos

Heraclitus is the first philosopher from whom we have a large collection of fragments, all likely pertaining to a book about which, nevertheless, we ignore many things(*).

We have encountered him twice so far:

First, when examining life’s autopoiesis (**). Secondly, when analysing the Greek gods in poetical perspective and the relation between the ephemeral and the ever-living in Ancient Greece(***).

I would like to explore a little bit more here the relation between mortals and immortals in Heraclitus’s thought and in Ancient Greek culture in general.

As we have seen elsewhere, experiencing the gods in Ancient Greece amounted to experiencing the ever-living within the ephemeral, hence the immanence of the sacred, its presence here and now. And we also know that, in this context, the poet is, to paraphrase Hölderlin, the priest of the immortal gods – s/he who sings their presence by making what is mortal translucent to their divine light.

We have seen too that this simultaneous affirmation of the mortal and the immortal as, so to speak, the two sides of a single coin, with poetry, moreover, serving as their connector, is beautifully expressed by Heraclitus in fr. 51: “They do not realise that what differs agrees with itself: back-bent attunement, like that of the bow and the lyre”(****). 

Also, in fr. 60 we read along similar lines: “The way up and the way down are one and the same.” And in fr. 54: “Unapparent harmony, much stronger than any apparent harmony.”

Only an inattentive reading can perceive in all this an underlying paradox – there is none. Yet Heraclitus likes to play with words, that is, to provoke with them a surface-effect: the paradoxical lies there, at the outer expressive level, but only there, pointing from it to an underlying thought which is ultimately clear, against Aristotle’s and (his disciple) Theophrastus’s absurd claim that Heraclitus is “contradictory” and “unintelligible,” which gave rise to the legend of “Heraclitus the Obscure.”

Thus fr. 93 in allusion to Apollo (whose attributes are no other than the bow and the lyre – all interconnects in Heraclitus!): ”The lord whose is the oracle at Delphi neither speaks nor hides his meaning, but gives a sign (σημαίνειν, semainein).” So do Heraclitus’s own words. And this shows that the birth of philosophy (which is a purely Greek phenomenon, on the other hand) cannot be represented as an event, let alone as the event, by which reason would have emancipated itself from myth, as it has been too-often-and-poorly portrayed in rationalist circles since the Enlightenment onwards. For in a number of aspects religion, in Greece, was already a way of doing philosophy, and philosophy became another way of doing religion, at least to a certain extent (as Xenophanes’s criticism of the Homeric religion cannot be overlooked) until Plato and Aristotle (who pushed philosophy along two altogether-different and mutually-diverging paths). 

But perhaps the most impressive fragment of Heraclitus as regards the relation between mortals and immortals is fr. 62: “Mortal immortals, immortal mortals: the former ones living the latter’s death, the latter ones dying the formers’ life.” Gigon and Guthrie were wrong to think that Heraclitus endorses here the Pythagorean thesis of the immortality of the soul; there is no such thing in Heraclitus. Fink interprets the fragment to say that the gods witness the death of the mortals. And Heidegger affirms that the gods would not be aware of their own divinity were it not for the existence of a human (mortal) counterpoint. But it does not seem to me that the question here is one of witnessing or self-reflecting.

What Heraclitus suggests, instead, is that the gods live through us, since the ever-living forces of the world operate in this world, a world where all particular things, ourselves included, inevitably die(*****); and vice-versa, that we, mortals, are nothing compared to the life they bring us, and indeed nothing without it.

“Man is the dream of a shadow. But whenever the radiance of Zeus comes, a bright light and gentle life rests upon him,” sings Pindar. This, also, is the intuition behind the Homeric ethos. “The best (ἄριστοι, aristoi, that is, the noble ones),” writes Heraclitus accordingly, “choose one thing above all others: the immortal fame (κλέος, kleos) of mortals, while the multitude is glutted like cattle” (fr. 29, my emphasis). If Pindar can be viewed as an Homeric poet, Heraclitus must be viewed as the Homeric philosopher par excellence(******).

Further reading: Martin Heidegger & Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, 1966/67

(*) Whether Heraclitus’s book consisted in a treatise or a set of aphorisms is disputed. 

(**) In connection to fr. 30: “This world, the same for all things, did none of the gods or men make, but it always was, is, and shall be an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.”

(***) In connection, this time, to fr. 51, on which see below.

(****) Or like the more-than-one-but-less-than-two sides of a Möbius strip.

(*****) Besides, the gods themselves, in their quality of ever-living forces, are powerless before death and its darkness. Even Zeus fears the Night, who is also a goddess, but one that was there prior to the moment in which, guided by Zeus, the Olympian gods established their rule over the earth – she is a goddess among whose children figure darkness (which is another word for forgetting), but also age (which names the approaching death) and sadness. It is easy to understand, therefore, the lament of Euripides’s Iphigenia before dying: “Good bye, sweet light.”

(******) Notwithstanding the fact that Parmenides’s poem (or, rather, what we have of it) is full of encrypted Homeric references, for these are mostly of narrative nature (characters, objects, places, etc.), and that there are important non-Homeric elements in Heraclitus himself. On the Homeric ethos and the notion of kleos, see once more last week’s entry.

Ephesus ruins. Born in Ephesus, Ionia (present-day Turkey), in c. 535, Heraclitus lived there till his death in c. 475 BCE. He is famous for his views on the One and the Many, Necessity and Chance, etc. In all cases, Heraclitus is the philosopher of the relation between Identity and Difference. This applies too to his treatment of Mortals and Immortals.