The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy
Page 14
20 Inwood [357]; Osborne [364]. For the interplay of cosmogonic and transcendent aspects of divinity in Empedocles’ thought, see Broadie in this volume, p. 216.
21 There are difficulties (e.g., How is the transmigrating daimôn related to the physical intelligence that Empedocles identified as a mixture of the four elements to form blood around the heart?) that Empedocles does not address directly, and modern scholarship is divided on their answers. Long [366]; Inwood [357]; Wright [358]; Kahn [365].
22 For the full text of this fragment and discussion of Empedocles’ profession of divinity, see Most in this volume, p. 355.
23 Von Fritz [212] argued that he discovered incommensurability. No ancient source directly ascribes this to him. On Hippasus, see Burkert [201] 206–8, 377, 457 ff.
24 Huffman [198] 17–35.
25 For the following account of Philolaus, see Huffman [198]. See also Burkert [201]; Kahn [217]; Barnes [14]; KRS.
26 For Philolaus’ psychology, see Huffman [198]; Laks in this volume, p. 252; Sedley [228].
27 Kahn [217] 183–85. The “breathing in” of void does not mean that it is confused with breath, as he and Furley [99] 119 maintain. The same argument would suggest that time too is confused with breath.
28 Burkert [201] 240, 267, 337–50.
29 Contra Furley [99] 57–58. Kingsley [105] 172ff. has interesting things to say about why Philolaus introduced the central fire.
30 Sedley [228].
31 Plato is simply invoking the patron of all technai rather than referring to Pythagoras, when he talks of a “Prometheus” (Philebus 16c) by whom the system was hurled down from the gods. See C. Huffman, “Limite et Illimité chez les premiers philosophes grecs” forthcoming in Études sur le Philèbe de Platon, ed. M. Dixsaut, vol. 2 (Paris, 1999) and C. Huffman, “The Philolaic Method: The Pythagoreanism Behind the Philebus” forthcoming in Before Plato: Essays in Greek Philosophy, Volume 6, ed. A. Preus (Binghamton, 1999).
32 Huffman [216]. On Archytas and Plato, see Lloyd [219].
33 G. Vlastos, “Elenchus and Mathematics,” ch. 4 of his Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Ithaca, 1991) 107–31.
EDWARD HUSSEY
5 Heraclitus
1. THE APPROACH TO HERACLITUS
1.1. Heraclitus of Ephesus must have been active around 500 B.C. Nothing is known of the external events of his life; the later biographical reports are fiction. Of Heraclitus’ book, around one hundred fragments survive. It seems to have consisted of a series of aphoristic statements without formal linkage. The style is unique.1 Heraclitus’ carefully stylized and artfully varied prose ranges from plain statements in ordinary language to oracular utterances with poetical special effects in vocabulary, rhythm, and word arrangement. Many statements play with paradoxes or hover teasingly on the brink of self-contradiction. Many seem intended as pungently memorable aphorisms. (Translations in this chapter try to capture some of the ambiguities, where this is reasonably possible.)
1.2. The meaning and purpose of Heraclitus’ book has always been found to be problematic, even by those who read it in its entirety. The Peripatetic Theophrastus (D.L. IX.6) diagnosed Heraclitus as “melancholic” (manic-depressive), on the grounds that he left some things half-finished, and contradicted himself; later Greeks named him “the obscure.” Certainly Heraclitus did not always aim at expository order and clarity as usually understood. What remains shows that he often was deliberately unclear. Like a riddle or an oracle, he practised a deliberate half-concealment of his meanings, goading the reader to participate in a game of hide-and-seek.
The overt content of Heraclitus’ remarks ranges from the internal politics of his native city to the nature and composition of the soul and the cosmos. He is repeatedly polemical, scornfully rejecting the beliefs of “the many” and the authority of those they follow, principally the poets.2 Others, less popular but with claims to wisdom or knowledge (Xenophanes, Hecataeus, and Pythagoras, DK 22 B40), are attacked also.3 In one place Heraclitus explicitly claims to have made an advance in understanding on all previous authorities known to him (B108). Only one person is praised for wisdom: the obscure sage Bias of Priene (B39).
Such polemics imply that Heraclitus is addressing himself to all who will listen, and has himself some positive teaching, with grounds for rejecting the traditional authorities and claiming a better access to the truth – on the same subjects that they had dealt with. In fact, the fragments contain many positive statements too as well as clear signs of a systematic way of thinking.
Since Aristotle, Heraclitus has often been grouped with the Ionian “natural philosophers” (physiologoi).4 This is at least partly correct. Heraclitus was concerned with cosmic processes, and with the “natures” of things: he describes himself as “marking off each thing according to its nature, and pointing out how it is” (B1). It may be significant that he does not attack any of the Milesians by name.5
Yet the great range of his subject matter suggests that he is more than a natural philosopher. This chapter presents the evidence for seeing Heraclitus as pursuing a broader and a recognisably philosophical project: a radical critique and reformulation of cosmology, and indeed of all knowledge, on a new and surer foundation. In the process, he tries to overcome the systematic problems that dogged the Milesian enterprise: those of monism and pluralism and of the foundations of knowledge.
2. EXPERIENCE, INTERPRETATION, RATIONALITY
2.1. By what authority does Heraclitus claim to know better than the many and the poets? In the first place, he appeals to the knowledge gained by firsthand experience:
All of which the learning is seeing and hearing: that I value most (B55). [Those who seek wisdom] must be inquirers into a good many things (B35).
Here Heraclitus aligns himself with the empiricism of two contemporaries, Xenophanes and Hecataeus of Miletus. The practice of firsthand inquiry (historiê), and the criticism of tradition and myth on the basis of common experience, were part of their programme. Xenophanes’ parsimonious empiricism refused, in the realm of nature, to postulate any unobserved entities, or to contradict or go beyond the realm of common experience in its explanations. It demythologised the natural world implicitly, as Hecataeus of Miletus did explicitly. These same epistemic attitudes can be observed (cf. sections 4 and 5) in Heraclitus’ cosmology and psychology.6
2.2. Yet Heraclitus also singles out these two by name for criticism, coupling them (a twist of the knife) with two others of whom they themselves were highly critical:
Much learning does not teach the mind; otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeus (B40).
Though “much learning” is necessary, it is not sufficient to “teach the mind”; that is, to produce genuine understanding. This point marks the second stage in Heraclitus’ construction of new foundations. The mind must be properly “taught,” or equivalently the soul must “speak the right language”: otherwise the evidence presented to the senses, on which all else depends, will not only not be understood, but it also will be mistakenly reported even by the senses themselves:
Bad witnesses are eyes and ears to people, when they have souls that do not speak the right language (B107).
Heraclitus is aware that the testimony of the senses is already shaped by our preconceptions. This makes it easier for him to explain how people, paradoxically, can fail to see what is before their eyes and hear what is filling their ears, as he thinks they constantly do:
The fools hear but are as though deaf; as the saying has it, they are absent though present (B34).
They do not know how to listen nor to speak (B19).
The analogy with language turns out to be omnipresent in Heraclitus, who himself exploits all the resources of the Greek language in his effort to represent the way things are.7 The possibility of understanding is correlated with the existence of a meaning. It implies the need for interpretation of what is given in experience, as though it were a riddle or an oracle:
&nbs
p; The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor conceals: he gives a sign (B93).
People are deceived in the knowledge of what is manifest, much as Homer was (though he was the wisest of the Greeks); he too was deceived by boys who were killing lice, when they said “those we took we left behind, those we did not take we carry with us” (B56).
2.3. If important messages come in the shape of riddles or oracles, the implications look discouraging: the true reality of things must be hidden, and there can be no system or fixed rules for discovering it – even though, when discovered, it will turn out to be something that in a sense has been known all along. One must be open to every hint.
Latent structure [harmonie] is master of visible structure (B54).
Nature [physis] likes to conceal itself (B123).
If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for; it is not to be tracked down or reached by any path (B18).
2.4. The finding of the “latent structure,” of the “nature”8 of things, is the solving of the riddle. Heraclitus himself claims to have read the riddles of the world and of human existence. He is asking his audience to listen to his solution. Once again the question of authority presents itself: what guarantee can he give that he has guessed right? Heraclitus, who so brutally dismisses the claims of traditional authorities, cannot evade this demand.
When one listens, not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree
[homologein] that all things are one (B50).
Logos, which appears here and elsewhere in significant contexts in Heraclitus, was a commonly used Greek word. It basically meant “what is said,” that is, “word” or “story”; however, even in ordinary Greek speech it had rich ramifications of meaning. It had acquired the secondary senses of “mathematical ratio,” and more generally “proportion,” “measure” or “calculation”; in a further extension from these senses, it appears by around the time of Heraclitus in compounds with the sense of “right reckoning,” or “reasonable proportion.”9
Characteristically, Heraclitus both revels in the multiplicity of senses, and wants to bind them together into one. For him, logos has a special significance, in which each of its ordinary uses is allowed some resonance and is exploited as occasion serves. At the most basic level, Heraclitus’ logos coincides with what Heraclitus is saying: it is his story about the way things are. Yet, as in the remark just cited (B50), it must also be distinguished from Heraclitus’ words: it is not as Heraclitus’ “story,” that it commands assent, but because it shows what it is wise to think. (It is, though, still something that speaks, and that can be listened to; it still is the story of somebody or something, with language as its vehicle.) Heraclitus is not laying claim to any merely private revelation or purely personal authority.10
Just what kind of authority does he claim for the logos?
Though the logos is shared, the many live as though they had a private source of understanding (B2).
Those who speak with mind must affirm themselves with what is shared by all-as the city does with a law, and much more strongly… (B114), part).
The logos is something “shared by all”: publicly accessible, not the product of private fantasy. Its authority, deriving from these properties, makes those who use it “strong” in their affirmations, as the law makes a city strong by being impersonal, universal, and impartial. (On cosmic “justice,” cf. section 6.) The oppositions between these properties and the private illusions and misunderstandings of “people,” are elaborated in the programmatic declaration which stood at the beginning of the book:
Of this logos which is always people prove to have no understanding, both before they hear it and when once they have heard it. For though all things come about according to this logos, [people] are as though they had no experience, though they experience such words and deeds as I set forth, marking off each thing according to its nature and pointing out how it is. But other people do not notice what they do when awake – just as they do not notice all the things they forget about when asleep (B1).
The oblivion of the public, shared world in sleep is shown by the substitution for it of private, unshared, and illusory dreams (a supposed “private source of understanding”), as confirmed by a later paraphrase: “Heraclitus says that for those who are awake there is one shared world, but that each sleeper turns aside into a private world” (B89).11
2.5. What then is this authority that the logos enjoys, and which is characterised sharply if obliquely in these statements? It can be none other than the impersonal kind of authority that is intrinsic to reason or rationality. Nothing short of that fits in with what is claimed of it, and logos, as already noted, was at this time already developing connotations of “reasonableness” and “proper proportion.” It is consonant too with the riddle and oracle analogies: when once the solution to a good riddle is found, there is no doubt left that it is the solution, because everything fits, everything makes sense, though in an unexpected way.
Heraclitus, then, is claiming that his way of seeing things is the only rational way. How much work he is prepared to do to support this claim in detail, remains to be seen. At the least, it shows that he is committed to the recognition that there is a system, though a concealed one, in things, and a systematic way of thinking about them, once the clue, the “latent structure,” has been found. For Heraclitus, the clue consisted in the structural pattern that may conveniently be called “unity-in-opposites.” This is what gives substance to his claim that “all things are one.”
3. UNITY-IN-OPPOSITES
3.1. Among the surviving sentences of Heraclitus, one group stands out as showing an intended common pattern, both verbal and conceptual. This is the pattern which it is convenient to refer to as “unity-in-opposites.”12
Unity-in-opposites appears in Heraclitus in three distinct ways: (1) He presents, in suitably plain language, mostly without comment, examples of the pattern taken from everyday experience; (2) he generalises from these examples, in statements where the language verges on the abstract, seemingly in an attempt to state the pattern in itself; and (3) he applies the pattern in the construction of theories, in particular to cosmology (section 4) and to the theory of the soul (section 5).
3.2. First, the examples from everyday life. These are visibly twofaced. They are (where the original wording is preserved) mostly so arranged that the first word specifies, with emphasis, the one single thing, in which both the opposites are manifest. This recurrent verbal pattern helps to draw attention back from the interesting and paradoxically related opposites to the one thing, the “unity,” in which they coexist.
A road: uphill, downhill, one and the same (B60).
Beginning is together with end [on a circle] (B103).
The path of carding-rollers [cylindrical rollers used in carding felt], straight and crooked (B59).
Into rivers, the same ones, on those who step in, different and different waters flow (B12).
The barley-drink too comes apart if not stirred (B125).
Disease it is that makes health pleasant and good, hunger fullness, weariness rest (B111).
Physicians cut and burn people, and ask for a fee on top of that (B58).
Donkeys would choose garbage rather than gold (B9).
… “Those we took we left behind, those we did not take we carry with us.” (B56, part).
All of these remarks might be the material for riddles, as the last one was (cf. section 2.2). In play or in philosophy, they are examples of something amusing, disconcerting, and even confusing: that opposites, by means of which we structure and find our way about so much of our experience, are not purely and simply opposed and distinct. They are not to be thought of, as in Homer’s and Hesiod’s myths, as pairs of distinct individuals who simply hate and avoid each other. On the contrary, they are found in ordinary life to be copresent, interdependent, liable to change into one another, tacitly cooperating. If there were no such thing as disease, not only would we not find health enjoyable, there wou
ld be no such thing as health. Roads could not go uphill if they did not also, and at the same time, go downhill. Rivers can never stay the same except by a constant change of water. The paradoxical behaviour of doctors – who expect rewards for doing unpleasant things to people – and of donkeys – who prefer humanly worthless garbage to humanly valued gold – shows that the same thing can at the same time be both valued and rejected for the very same qualities.
Such remarks have sometimes been read as implying (a) that the oppositions in question are unreal, because the opposites are either illusory or in fact identical; or (b) that they are merely relative, to a point of view or a context.
(A) For the reading on which oppositions are unreal, there is no support in heraclitus’ own words. When he claims that day and night “are one” (B57), he does not mean that they are identical, but, as B67 makes clear, that they are “one thing” in being the same substratum in different states.13 In fact, as will be seen, Heraclitus’ thinking presupposes both the reality, and the real opposedness, of opposites.
(B) The reading on which opposites are always relative fails, equally, to account for the theoretical weight Heraclitus ultimately wishes to give to opposites. It is true that some examples show Heraclitus exploiting phenomena that are naturally explained by relativity: the different preferences of donkeys and human beings, or those of cattle, pigs, poultry, or apes (B4, 13, 37, 82), in contrast with those of human beings. So too the observations about disease and health, and so on, might just be pointing at the relativity of our assessments of what is pleasant and good. Such a reading could then go on to relativise the other examples: the road’s being uphill or downhill is relative to the direction of travel; the river’s being the same or different is relative to whether it is considered as a single river or as a collection of water.