by Heraclitus
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
FRAGMENTSThe Collected Wisdom of HERACLITUS
Notes
Bibliography
VIKING
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First published in 2001 by Viking Penguin,
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Translation copyright © Brooks Haxton, 2001
Foreword copyright © James Hillman, 2001
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Heraclitus, of Ephesus.
[Fragments, English & Greek]
Fragments : the collected wisdom of Heraclitus / translated by
Brooks Haxton; with a foreword by James Hillman.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-440-67928-5
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Acknowledgments
The translator would like to thank everyone at Viking who helped to see this book through publication, especially the editor, Michael Millman, for his friendly intelligence, Zelimir Galjanic for thoughtful attention to detail, and Susan Petersen Kennedy for her guiding interest and enthusiasm. Thanks also to my good friend, Ken Frieden, who read an early draft of the translation and offered helpful suggestions and encouragement.
Foreword: “I am as I am not”
Because archetypal modes of thought transcend time and place, the insights of Heraclitus are strikingly postmodern. Although conceived five hundred years before our era in the Greek city of Ephesus, his poetic aphorisms show a deconstructive mind at work. The life of thought does not necessarily progress, for, as he says, “Any day stands equal to the rest” (120). Since moving forward and moving back are one and the same (69), the latest postmodern thinking completes the circle where Heraclitus began: “The beginning is the end” (70).
Early Greek thinkers sought the stuff of which the world was made. For Thales, it was water; for Anaximenes, air; for Anaximander, a combination of hot and cold. Empedocles expanded the stuff to four indestructible elemental principles, while Anaxagoras is said to have proposed innumerable generative seeds composing the nature of things. The Atomists abstracted the seeds yet further, proposing multiple particles moving in a void. The Pythagoreans found the truth of the world lies in numbers, their proportions and relations, and Parmenides, the most metaphysical of them all, laid out his theory of the cosmos through the sheer power of logical thought.
Heraclitus took a different tack. His method is more psychological. He posited no basic substance, nor did he abstract the world of the senses into numbers, atoms, or assertions about Being as a whole. Instead he said, nothing is stable; all is in flux. Whatever you say about anything, its opposite is equally true. He brought language into the game of cosmological thinking. Declarations will always be self-contradictory, relative, subjective. “People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes” (4). “They lack the skill to listen or to speak” (6). You cannot know the world in the manner of natural philosophy or mathematics or deductive logic. Because: “By cosmic rule . . . all things change” (36). “The sun is new again, all day” (32). “The river where you set your foot just now is gone—those waters giving way to this, now this” (41).
His name for this changing flux, or process, in today’s terms, is “fire,” a metaphor for the shifting meanings of all truth. Therefore, the verbal account, or logos, of the world is also fire. Truth, wisdom, knowledge, reality—none can stand apart from this fire that allows no objective fixity.
Heraclitean fire, it must be insisted, is neither a metaphysical essence like the elements of his peers, nor a spiritual energy, nor a material substance, the fire that burns your hand. His fire is metaphorical, a psychological intensity that penetrates through all literalisms, a quicksilver fire that flows through the hand, burning away whatever tries to grasp reality and hold it firm. This fire, as the active principle of deconstruction, brilliantly deconstructs itself.
You can, however, reflect your own mind, see into your own thoughts. You can become psychological or, as he puts it, “Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within” (80). “People ought to know themselves” (106). This psychological turn means you cannot know the psyche no matter how endless your search (71), since consciousness is always also its opposite, unconsciousness. How better say this than: “I am as I am not” (81).
Statements pertaining to sleep add support to my notion of Heraclitus the psychologist. Rather than a focus upon the healing efficacy of dreams as in the Asclepian cult of his time or upon their prognostic meaning as summed up in Egyptian and later Greek writing by Artemidorus, Heraclitus simply states that the logos is active in sleep. Even while you are resting, the fire burns. Dreaming is the flickering activity of the mind participating in the world’s imagination. Whether the dream helps us feel better and sleep better, cures our distress, or prefigures our destiny, is less its essential nature than its energetic spontaneity. During sleep, we may be each apart from the commonly shared day-world, yet the never-resting logos goes on producing images ever new as the sun each day, as the river’s flowing. In our private rest, the restlessness of the cosmos continues to do its work.
For all the puzzling juxtapositions—hot/cold, pure/tainted, war/peace, plenty/famine—that quicken the reader’s speculations, Heraclitus insists on a keen practical sense of things. No lofty idealism or dulling generalities that smooth over life’s honest hardness. “Hungry livestock, though in sight of pasture, need the prod” (55). “War makes us as we are” (62). “The poet was a fool who wanted no conflict” (43). “The mind . . . needs strength” (45).
No sloppy emotionalism either. Heraclitus would hardly be found among enthusiastic revivalists or holistic healers of the New Age. “Dry, the soul grows wise and good” (74). “Moisture makes the soul succumb . . .” (72), which I have understood to be a warning against drowning in easiness. Comfortable, complacent, content—these soporifics extinguish the fire of the soul.
Moreover, no religiosity. Fragments 116 onward state pithy truths that do not let us escape into wishful denials of realities. “Those who mouth high talk may think themselves high-minded” (118). Neither your hope nor your fantasies tell you anything about what comes after death (122). The unknown is not revealed by faith (116). Fate is not governed from elsewhere, but is in your character, the way you bear yourself each day (121). Because humans understand so little of the gods (126), the initiations and mysteries we practice are not true holiness (125).
Haxton’s English captures Heraclitus’s toughmindedness: “One thunderbolt strikes root through everything” (28). “War, as father of all things, and king . . . (44). “Hunger
, even in the elements, and insolence” (24). “The mind . . . that strains against itself, needs strength, as does the arm . . .” (45).
The Heraclitean vision is Greek: the inhuman nature of the gods is borne out by the facts of nature and by the tragic flaws in human biography. The fire is demanding, and it takes its toll.
As well as giving a vision of the nature of things and the truth of the world we live in, the passages state a poetics of dissonance—another reason Heraclitus has appeal for writers, artists, and psychologists. In the heart of the mind there is a tension. We are pulled apart, enflamed, and at risk. Therefore, our expressions must hold the tension so as to bespeak accurately and poignantly the actual soul as it exists. “How, from a fire that never sinks or sets, would you escape?” (27).
Heraclitus has also bequeathed to Western culture a mode of expressing this fire: the aphoristic phrase. The body of work attributed to him consists in a collection of incendiary sparks that scholarship calls “fragments,” as if to say the work is incomplete, only shards of a lost whole. But scholarship misses the fact that the style is the message. The snapshot, the aperçu, reveals things as they are: “The eye, the ear, the mind in action, these I value” (13). To speculate about the lost book distracts from the power of the fragments and their message: all things change, all things flow. The world is revealed only in quick glances. There can be no completion. “Things keep their secrets” (10), because they cannot be fixed into the comprehensive formulations of a book. No sooner known and explained, the event has changed. Therefore, “the known way is an impasse” (7).
Faced with this impasse, usual thinkers try to grasp the flow either by religious mystification or by overprecise and reductive explanations (11). Whereas the thinker (the “true prophet”) who is on track speaks in signs, much like gestures, hints, and metaphors that neither reveal nor conceal. These signs allow for many meanings with ambiguous and suggestive possibilities. Again, I see a parallel with the psychological approach to interpretation. It favors responses in metaphors, images, sharp-pointed insights that stir the mind to awakened observation and deepened reflection.
We are still riddling out these “fragments” generation after generation in ever-new, and necessary, fresh translations. Translations age, even though the original texts do not. In fact, classic texts are rejuvenated by virtue of fresh translation. If all things flow, then each translation must be different from every other one, yet still be the same, much as Heraclitus’s river. Or, to say it otherwise, the sun is new every day—and Haxton offers a translation for this day, our day.
Heraclitus has moved philosophers from Plato through Nietzsche, Whitehead, Heidegger, and Jung, and as Haxton says in his admirably condensed introduction, it is mainly from philosophers (ancient writers and Church Fathers) that the fragments have been culled and passed on. Therefore, everything we read and refer to as “Heraclitus” is second- or thirdhand—even fourth, in that the Greek and Latin have been turned into English. What Heraclitus actually said, or wrote, we have only signs pointing to the authority of a half-revealed, half-concealed author. I like to think he would have enjoyed this deconstruction of his lasting words through the centuries of time.
James Hillman
Introduction
When the iron hoe was a new invention, Pythagoras saw mathematical logic as a language of cosmic prophecy. Now, when we say E = mc2, we are stating in mathematical terms the thought of Pythagoras’s contemporary, Heraclitus, who said that energy is the essence of matter. Heraclitus put it in the ancient Greek this way:All things change to fire,
and fire exhausted
falls back into things.
Einstein agreed. For him, the earth, the sun and moon and stars, the winds and waters, everything, became energy in flux, in relativity, and the world was staggered by mental shock, then by physical explosions. But the wisdom of Heraclitus held true twenty-five hundred years after his death.
Heir to the throne in Ephesus, one of the world’s richest and most powerful cities, Heraclitus gave up the kingdom and chose, instead of the trappings of power, to seek the Word of wisdom. His writings survived the Persian empire, dominant in his time, and then the Greek, and Roman. For hundreds of years, great writers, Plato, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and others, quoted him with respect. Then, his book, with thousands of the finest works of that world, disappeared forever.
Scholars describe this lost book as the first coherent philosophical treatise. But the existing fragments resemble prophecy and poetry as much as they do philosophical discourse. After all, philosophy had just begun. Pythagoras had only lately coined the word “philosopher,” meaning lover of wisdom. But the pursuit of wisdom is much older than Pythagoras or his word for himself as a serious student.
Heraclitus uses the word for wisdom, sophos, thirteen times in the surviving fragments of his work. The one time he mentions philosophers, he speaks of their need for learning. But he says that wisdom is beyond learning and beyond cleverness: “Of all the words yet spoken none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said.” “Wisdom,” he says, “is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.” For Heraclitus, wisdom, much like fire, is the very essence of the cosmos.
Before Heraclitus, the traditions most attentive to this oneness existed in various cultures as wisdom poetry. Farther to the east, Gautama Buddha, another prince who deserted his kingdom for the pursuit of wisdom, was an exact contemporary of Heraclitus, as were the legendary Lao-tzu and Confucius, all closely associated with poetic traditions of wisdom.
Wisdom poetry is often allied with religion, but it is distinct from the religious poetries of prayer, praise, and narrative, because it focuses above all on the task of speaking wisdom. The wisdom books best known in European cultures are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. Anyone can see marked similarities between the so-called pessimism of Heraclitus and that in the Book of Ecclesiastes, written not far to the south during the same century.
Equally striking similarities may be found between the wisdom of Heraclitus and that in other traditions. A man disillusioned to the point of wanting to die, in the famous Egyptian Dispute Between a Man and His Soul, for example, feels trapped, like those said by Heraclitus to be “confined in the sodden lumber of the body.” The Egyptian seeks “the movement of eternal return.” He awaits “the Mystical Encounter with the Lord of Transformations hidden in [his] body,” this Lord being the falcon god Sokar, who disappears with his prey into the fire of the sun.1
All this represents the body, fire, death, and transformation much as Heraclitus would describe them more than a thousand years later. Heraclitus says of the dead: “Corpses, like night soil, get carted off . . .”; “Souls change into water on their way toward death . . .”; and “Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher.” The Egyptian poet says of the dead man “cast from his house and flung upon the hill” that “the flood takes him, the sun takes him, fish talk to him in shallow water.”
Most germane to Heraclitus of all these traditions may be the Persian. Persia in his time, consolidated under Darius to control almost all of Asia Minor, was the inheritor of the legacy of Sumer, with a two-thousand-year-old tradition of wisdom poetry. Persia’s most powerful new religion was the worship of the Lord Wisdom, Ahura Mazda, as taught by the prophet Zarathustra, who lived earlier in the same century as Heraclitus. A tenet of Zoroastrian teaching was the identification of wisdom with an ever-living fire, pyr aeizôon, as Heraclitus calls his version.
Such resemblances are too poignant to ignore, and who would want to ignore them, and why? But historical connections are doubtful. Heraclitus never mentions the Lord Wisdom. Yet the word theos does appear nine times among the fragments. Scholars differ in their exact sense of the tone and meaning of this word, which is translated most literally as “god.” Clearly, Heraclitus meant to distinguish his attitude from others more prevalent at the time. He says:They raise their voices
at stone i
dols
as a man might argue
with his doorpost,
they have understood
so little of the gods.
The conventional presences of the Greek gods hover at the edges of these fragments, especially Apollo, god of prophecy and cosmic fire, but theos also refers to a presence distinct from any mythological person. This presence is as vital to the thought of Heraclitus as are wisdom, the Word, and fire. Heraclitus makes this clear when he speaks of the rule of theos in fragment 36:
By cosmic rule,
as day yields night,
so winter summer,
war peace, plenty famine.
All things change.
Fire penetrates the lump
of myrrh, until the joining
bodies die and rise again
in smoke called incense.
In another of the fragments, Heraclitus hints at his kinship with the poets and prophets, when he says, “Without obscurity or needless explanation the true prophet signifies.” The very closeness of this association may account for the need in Heraclitus to set his work apart, when he says outright, “We need no longer take the poets and myth-makers for sure witnesses about disputed facts.”
Heraclitus is at equal pains to distinguish himself from philosophers he mentions, and from his contemporaries in general, from the few who consider wisdom, without understanding, and from the many who make no attempt.
To a sober mind, the drunkenness of cultic worshippers must have been particularly unappealing in a cosmopolitan city like Ephesus, with gods of wine on every side, drunken Greeks initiated into the Thracian ecstasies of Dionysus running amok with drunken Phrygians worshiping Sabazius, Lydians possessed by Bassareus, and Cretans in the frenzy of Zagreus, all claiming in their cups to have transcended understanding.