HERACLITUS’ CHILDREN:

BODIES, BRAINS AND CULTURE AT PLAY

by

Richard Miles Ellis

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOLUNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

In Partial Fulfillment of theRequirements for the Degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY(CLASSICS)

December 2011

Copyright 2011 Richard Miles Ellis

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Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Introduction: Rethinking the Fragment 1

Chapter One: Patterning 22 Performative Gameplay (B.52,B.53) 27 On Becoming Childlike (B.121, B.101) 33 Riddling Homer to Death (B.56, B.80, A.22) 39 Heraclitus’ Children as Material Historians (B.10, B.66, B.70) 48

Chapter Two: Timeplay 57 The Context of B.52 in Lucian and Hippolytus of Rome 59 Aion in the Poetic Tradition (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides) 66 Empedocles and Heraclitus 77 Plato’s Timaeus and Heraclitus 90 Aristotle and Heraclitus 106

Chapter Three: Latent Evolution 115 Aristotle and Nietzsche’s Hidden Tempo 116 Embracing the Return of Heraclitus 124 Forgetting and Heraclitus (B.1, B.17, B.34, B.112) 127 On Concealing, Death and Heidegger (B.16, B.21, B.26, B.54) 141 Sextus Empiricus and Heraclitus’ Nocturnal Mind (B.26, B.12) 156 Thinking the Aporia (B.18, B.27, B.29, B.67, B.88) 165

Chapter Four: The Shared Logos 172 Logos, Phronesis, Polemos (B.1, B.2, B.17, B.50, B.80, B.113, B.116) 174 The Performance of Culture (B.33, B.44, B.114) 192 The Role of Noos (B.35, B.40, B.55, B.60, B.114) 200 Collaborative Fashionings (B.50. B.51) 208

Chapter Five: The Extended Psyche (B.36, B.45, B.67a, B.107, B.112, B.117, B.118) 214 Bibliography 232

ii

Abstract

This project suggests that a new reading of Heraclitus as a philosopher of mind and

cultural evolution can be discerned from the fragments concerning the play of children. While the

scholarly tradition has ignored these fragments, or viewed them at best as emblematic of

Heraclitus’ refusal to accept the normative role of lawgiver or political actor in his society of

Ephesus, I suggest that this turn to the ludic sphere is the site of Heraclitus’ philosophical

endeavor. The children represent the ideal students of Heraclitus, their game playing foregrounds

the role of coordination in thinking, just as their permeability to the information contained within

the material of the natural world and the aporiae of language models the emergence of

knowledge. Furthermore, I employ the children as a wedge in order to rupture the surface of

Heraclitus’ other fragments, inserting an alternate conception of how culture works through

shared performance and how mind functions beyond the borders of the individual. This

destabilizing presence is also a result of a Heraclitean theory of time as an efficacious force that I

trace from fragment B.52 where time, as aion, is described as a child at play. In Heraclitus’

philosophy thought, bodies, culture and time intersect in a dynamical system with creative

possibilities.

I am engaged in repositioning the valence of several key Greek terms (logos, nomos,

psyche, aion, nous and mathesis) as they are employed by Heraclitus through the lens of children.

My philological analysis of the matrix across which these terms invoke and reconfigure each

other suggests that the radical nature of Heraclitus’ materialism has been misunderstood by

previous scholars. The narrative I depict, rather, reveals Heraclitus as a thinker committed to a

materialistic conception of knowledge that emphasizes the role of the body in the activity of

thought. My analysis of this theory of epistemological and cultural emergence situates Heraclitus

as an unsettling moment in the tradition that disrupts later figures such as Parmenides,

iii

Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle. Their own attempts to modify, erase, or otherwise downplay the

contribution of Heraclitus leads me to use various modern interlocutors to bring this latent current

of ludic creativity to the surface. In particular, I employ the work of Walter Benjamin, Frederick

Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger to help unearth the forces that the play of children embodies.

Similarly, I consider that Heraclitus’ theory of a materially distributed mind, exploiting the

information stored in other bodies in the world, can be brought into clearer focus with the use of

contemporary research in the neurosciences that has mapped the way that the human brain

‘mingles shamelessly with the world’, to use Andy Clark’s phrase. I suggest that it is the work of

philosophers and scientists in this tradition, such as Mark Rowlands and Michael Spivey, who

help us to grasp the intuitive power of Heraclitus’ own limning of how mind plays across borders,

contingent upon the historical environment in which it is embedded, but also capable of moulding

its dimensions.

It is through this dialogue that I reclaim three images of mind from the ancient material

that elucidate Heraclitus’ vision. Firstly, that of the mind as a root; secondly as a gathering of

embers; thirdly as a spider organically linked to its web. These images allow us to view

Heraclitus’ famed river fragments, those that Plato took to manifest the impermanence of all,

including the possibility of fixed knowledge, as illustrations instead of the collaborative and

ongoing performance of wisdom that can flow in new directions, a flow that gestures toward the

creative indeterminacy that lies behind any perceptions of a stable self or cultural form. I hope

that this project will prompt a new engagement with Heraclitus, one that acknowledges his role

both more firmly within the burgeoning scientific investigation of the functioning of mind and

knowledge in late archaic thought, as well as recognizing how his re-evaluation of key terms such

as logos, psyche and aion, when viewed through the disruptive play of children, his true students,

affects the subsequent philosophical and literary traditions in classical Greece.

iv

Introduction: Rethinking the Fragment

The unexpressed is that critical force which on its own cannot separate appearance from essence in art but which prevents them from joining. It possesses this force as the moral word. The unexpressed reveals the exalted power of the true as it determines the language of the real according to laws of the moral world. This in fact shatters what survives as the heritage of chaos in every representation of beauty: false, arrant totality - the absolute. The artwork is only completed as it splinters into fragment, into fragments of the true world, into the torso of a symbol. Walter Benjamin - Essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities. (trans. Michael Steinberg)

The association of Heraclitus’ philosophy with obscurity and the resultant methodological

conundrum of whether to systematize and discern coherence among their parts or to let them

wither in isolation does not arise from the modern compilers of Heraclitus’ remains, but is

implanted into the text of Heraclitus from the beginning. The first reader of Heraclitus we hear of

is Socrates, who is impressed by the writings (sungraphas) of Heraclitus that he has received

from Euripides. Nevertheless, he foregrounds their impenetrability, wittily saying that, while both

the half he understands and the half he does not are excellent, they require a ‘Delian diver to

plumb their depths’ (Diogenes Laertius Vitae Philosophorum II.22). Heraclitus’ philosophical

content is here marked as out of reach, compressed in an underwater darkness that yields to no

illumination even from Socrates’ dialectic. Furthermore, the breaking of the corpus into two

sections and the image of underwater rescue suggests that meaning can only be grasped in

isolation, like a pearl on the sea floor. When Hermann Diels classified late archaic thinkers like

Heraclitus as the ‘Pre-Socratic philosophers’ in the late 19th century, he unknowingly gestures

towards this moment of transmission, positing philosophical enquiry as murky before the true

disclosure of rationality that Plato has Socrates perform. Indeed, it is notable that Plato’s

interaction with Heraclitus is rarely detailed, relying, like Aristotle, on broad brushstrokes. As we

shall see, these suppressions and willful oversimplifications of Heraclitus’ work prompt a return

of the fragmented, as it were, as Heraclitus’ limbs emerge from the margins in which they have

1

been placed to shatter the totalizing narratives that Plato and Aristotle attempt to depict,

especially with regard to the question of time, disorder and creation (see chapter 2).

Such a perception, or imposition, of partial legibility to Heraclitus extends beyond his

philosophical content to his syntactical form. For Aristotle (Rhetoric 1407b14), the lack of clarity

(adēlon) in Heraclitus’ phraseology arises from words making too many connections (hoi polloi

sundesmoi). They flit away in multiple directions, forging new affiliations before any stable

interpretation can be adopted. And since Aristotle’s example of Heraclitus’ quivering syntax

comes from the programmatic first line of his treatise, it is obvious that such a pattern is held to

be a recurrent, even normative, feature. Meanwhile in Demetrius’ later work (On Style 191-2),

viewing the same problem from the other side, it is precisely the absence of connection

(asundeton, lysis) that leaves Heraclitus’ words immobilized, unable to create any sense unit, and

thereby unclear (asaphes) and obscure (skoteina).1 The form infects the content, just as it

infiltrates the person, and so then does Heraclitus acquire the epithet ‘the obscure’ (Ho Skoteinos -

Strabo. 14.1.25).2 Yet the notion of such impenetrability is not only theorized from the

2

1 This dilemma is played out frequently in the modern scholarship. In particular, Charles Kahn (The Art and Thought of Heraclitus) is keen to exploit this syntactical bivalence to posit many both/and readings of difficult fragments. This strategy often yields insights that cross the tendency to isolate the fragments according to a dominant reading on one side of the man/cosmos divide. Nevertheless, as Roman Dilcher (Studies in Heraclitus) has observed, such a strategy is often a way of avoiding difficult hermeneutic decisions. If the ambiguity is deliberate on Heraclitus’ part, then it is important to inquire why it has been employed. This thesis will suggest that it is not done so in order to preclude a definite interpretation, but rather to advocate the linking together of ideas and concepts that might previously seem separate, and thereby to indicate that their juncture explains Heraclitus’ philosophy, what we might call a both/therefore relationship.

2 The word skoteinos can also mean physically blind, a condition that may appear to deny insight, but as this example from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus reveals, an inability to see can be consistent with a newly purchased awareness of reality: οὐ γάρ µε λήθεις, ἀλλὰ γιγνώσκω σαφῶς, καίπερ σκοτεινός, τήν γε σὴν αὐδὴν ὅµως (Oedipus Tyrannus 1325-6) ‘For you do not escape me, but, although I am blind, I clearly perceive your voice.’ As a solver of riddles, except the riddle of himself, Oedipus only attains true insight at the extreme cost of own sight. Heraclitus’ own philosophy invokes the hermeneutic challenge of oracular wisdom, foregrounding an alertness to the play of the signifier: ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ µαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σηµαίνει. (B.93) ‘The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives a sign.’ Being attuned to the meaning that exists between sound and darkness, Heraclitus invokes a dwelling at the margins that offers wisdom beyond the pejorative association he acquires with the epithet skoteinos.

perspective of the tradition, the partially interested audience of his philosophy. Diogenes Laertius

records that Heraclitus himself made a methodological choice to make his book (biblion) obtuse

so as to preclude its appeal to the uncomprehending masses (Vitae IX.5).3 A further physiological

explanation for their incompleteness (hemitele in Diogenes Vitae IX.6) is presented by

Theophrastus, assigning the manic creativity and unquenchable darkness of melancholy as its

cause.4

The variety of ancient responses to the challenge of Heraclitus’ philosophy, rendering it

psychologically deficient, grammatically ambiguous, willfully difficult, and beyond illumination

manifest themselves in a discourse of fragmentation. Such reactions function to mark Heraclitus’

philosophy with a self-inflicted incoherence that allows the march of his intellectual successors to

remain on the surface of his thoughts, their hidden depths left unexplored. Associating fragments

with obscurity, the tradition renders Heraclitus’ philosophy impassive, unable to speak for itself,

suggesting even that it does not want to speak for itself. A central feature of this narrative is the

containment of Heraclitus within the text. The material context of his existence on Ephesus, the

lived reality of the production of his philosophy, peppered as it is with observations and

interrogations of one’s relationship to the environment and the other bodies at play within it, is

effaced in the act whereby he is read as incomplete.

3

3 Nietzsche would later read this conscious difficulty as a mark of the quality of Heraclitus’ philosophy, a cultivated erudition that prevented lesser minds, and for Nietzsche this in particular meant the Stoics, ‘dragging him down to the level of political utility’ Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks p.65. Despite Nietzsche’s valorization of this ostentatious complexity, we would do well to bear in mind the astute reading of Lucretius whereby the very sheen of difficulty and the rewards of penetrating beneath its surface might be the very thing to attract the pretentious: omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque / inversis quae sub verbis latitantia cernunt, / veraque constituunt quae belle tangere possunt / auris et lepido quae sunt fucata sonore “For idiots admire and love all things which they can discern hiding beneath inverted words, and they consider true words that are able prettily to caress their ears and are died with graceful sound” De Rerum Natura 1.641-44.

4 We are well advised not to project our contemporary meaning of a depressive melancholy onto the ancient concept. The debate about the meaning and evolution of the term is complex, with the normative picture being that at Heraclitus’ time melancholia refers to a sort of bipolar mania rather than a depressive melancholia, based on information from the pseudo-Aristotelian Problema 30.1, often thought to have been composed by Theophrastus. For a corrective to this view, that stipulates the co-existence of both the external manic and inner depressive forms see Peter Toohey Melancholia, Love and Time.

Any modern interpretation of Heraclitus thus faces a hermeneutical choice with regard to

this question of fragmentation and coherence. Can we put Heraclitus’ text back together? Or

should we even try to discern the lineaments of systematic organization? For Hermann Diels in

the late 19th century, whose edition became the standard ordering of the fragments, the answer

was no. Arranging the words of Heraclitus alphabetically by the source in which they were

preserved Diels highlighted the aphoristic quality of Heraclitus’ philosophy, taking inspiration

from the stylistic development of one of Heraclitus’ most fervent modern admirers, Frederick

Nietzsche. Subsequent editions have, however, taken up the challenge of tracing a coherent

structure. Geoffrey Kirk positioned the fragments with respect to what he took as Heraclitus’

prime emphasis, a rigorous inquiry into the nature of the cosmos, while Charles Kahn

repositioned many of the same fragments in terms of his understanding of Heraclitus’ questioning

of the mortal condition.5 Miroslav Marcovich divided them into the three areas of ‘The doctrine

of the logos’, ‘The doctrine on Fire’, ‘Ethics, Politics and the Rest’ where such a categorization

seems to adapt the summary given in Diogenes Laertius who split the treatise into three, ‘On the

Universe; On Politics and On Theology’ giving the generic title ‘On Nature’ (Peri Physeōs) for

the whole book.6 As I will investigate in chapter 4, The Shared Logos, the question of how we

assign logos, whether as an objective formula belonging to the cosmos, or a principle of

rationality available to men can determine the sort of systematicity one perceives. Marcovich,

Kahn and Kirk choose the direction with which to situate their metaphors, referring man to the

world, or the world to man, and proceed accordingly. The edition of Jean Bollack and Heinz

Wismann adopts its own ordering as well, but as their title stresses (Héraclite ou la séparation)

4

5 G.S.Kirk Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments. Charles Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Kahn, even, ambitiously attempts to capture the ‘original order of the fragments’ by paying attention to the literary qualities and the ‘resonances’ existing between them according to the rather fuzzy term of ‘linguistic density.’

6 M.Marcovich Heraclitus Editio Maior.

they insist that Heraclitus did not construct a coherent system of philosophy and that to group the

fragments as such is to overlook the constitutive separation that Heraclitus highlights between

things, language and reality, the signifier and the signified.7 Yet even in their more deconstructive

spirit, acknowledging a deliberate strategy on the part of Heraclitus, Bollack and Wismann depict

Heraclitus’ fragmentation as an indicator of lack and passivity, highlighting slippage without

offering an alternative.

This project will instead engage in a reading of Heraclitus’ fragments that emphasizes

their active potential, rupturing any narrative that subsumes them as one link in a chain of

predetermined progress, whether it is the development of a philosophical method of reflective

rationality or the apperception of the self as a bounded, static and fundamentally linguistic entity.

In doing so I adopt an attunement to the forces contained in the ruins, in the fragments of the past,

in the shards lying in the margins beyond the aura of official history, that takes inspiration from

Walter Benjamin. To turn back to the epitaph to this introduction, we can note how the

‘unexpressed’ (das Ausdrucklose) Benjamin traced in Goethe functioned to criticize

contemporary German aesthetic theory’s tendency to essentialize truth as an ahistorical aesthetic

phenomenon: Benjamin felt Goethe parodied this mode, locating truth instead in the transitory

experience of material life, a recognition of the value of the contingent and historical over that of

the absolute. So too can we see in Heraclitus’s philosophy a staging of an interplay between the

concealed and the apparent that foreshadows the misuse he will suffer at the hands of the

tradition. His invective rails against the inability of his audience to think through their material

encounter with their environment. Their tendency instead to position themselves as a static

subjectivity outside the dynamic flux of the world represents a desire to maintain an ahistorical

coherence, one that fails to intuit the material reality of the processes that cause the very

emergence and shaping of knowledge, culture and the self. Heraclitus’ philosophy directs us to

5

7 Bollack J, Wismann H. Héraclite ou la séperation.

the lived reality of experience and the way that meaning only acquires its contours through its

permeability to its historical, physical and cultural context. His audience, just like the bon mot of

Socrates as he denatures Heraclitus’ philosophy into an incoherent text, repeatedly refuses to

think beyond the surface in which their own reflection remains whole.

Yet Goethe’s ‘unexpressed’ cannot, on its own, separate ‘appearance’ from ‘essence’; in

Benjamin’s reading it merely prevents them from ‘joining’. It is here that the historical materialist

must step in, grasping this image as it flashes up at a moment of danger as Benjamin later put it in

his Theses on the Philosophy of History.8 Acknowledging that the present shares dimensions with

the past, and armed with a self-consciousness and demand for self-understanding, the historical

materialist is charged with blasting open the continuum of history, ‘drilling’ through the smooth

chain of causation that is held to naturally produce the present. And moreover, while Benjamin’s

historical materialism defines itself in opposition to the historicism that effaces the pressures of

the present in tacit compliance with the official, and hence barbaric, narratives of progress and

history, so then is the act of historical enquiry figured as a rescuing of these fragments, committed

to its responsibility toward the actuality of the past, secure in the principle that ‘even the dead will

not be safe from the enemy if he wins’ (Theses VI).

It is in constructing an ‘encounter’ with this image from the past that one can liberate the

forces concealed within the fragment, the counter-memories that deconstruct claims to totality

and coherence. Michael Steinberg writes with regard to the passage on Goethe that “the work of

art has an ethical position only in its self-conscious status as a fragment, in its refusal to claim

totality”.9 But this dawning of consciousness is aided through the redemptive reach of the

historian that liberates objects from their original context and the classificatory essentialism of

6

8 Though even Benjamin’s early essays, such as that of 1915 on the Life of Students considers the historical act in a similar way, cutting through ‘formless progressive tendencies’.

9 Steinberg Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History p.14.

aestheticizing and sacralizing narratives. It is important for Benjamin’s historical practice that this

constellation formed between the needs of the present and the call of the ruined fragments of the

past does not aspire toward objective truth. Attaching his method to the metaphor of drilling

rather than excavation, Benjamin highlights the uncertainty of what one may find, as the pressure

from the present fractures and releases a past that has been dormant beneath the official ground of

culture. Page duBois has elegantly invoked Benjamin’s sense of responsibility and self-

consciousness toward the present in her book on Sappho, writing that ‘only the recollection of the

past can save the present from becoming an impoverished, ruthlessly rationalized desert, a

landscape without memory, without hope.’10 Indeed, as the end of Benjamin’s essay on Goethe

reminds us, ‘hope is only given to us for those without hope.’ My construction of an encounter

with Heraclitus forms a dialectical image that attempts to revivify the fragments of the past, just

as they call out, in silence, to the questions of the present.

The challenge of Heraclitus’ fragments then redounds on the question of bringing them to

self-consciousness and rescuing them from a pejorative notion of fragmentation as passivity.

Camelia Elias’ recent study of the fragment provides a useful framework for repositioning its

status with regard to Heraclitus. She opposes her study to two dominant conceptualizations:

firstly that the fragment ‘only exists insofar as it originates in a ‘whole’ text, whose loss of

totality is marked by such words as incomplete, inconclusive, inconsequential’; secondly, that it

‘only exists as a construction whose constitution is labelled by such words as unfinished,

unstable, uncountable’.11 Adopting a Benjaminian perspective that the fragment has ‘being’ and

exists in its own right, capable of infecting other discourses, even while it is vulnerable to the

‘becoming’ that critical discourse can theorize it into, she writes of the way it resists definition, its

performative agency nevertheless working to define the edges of normative culture, “the fragment

7

10 duBois Sappho is Burning p. 13.

11 Camelia Elias The Fragment: towards a history of poetics and a performative genre, p.2.

always begins in a state of being (im)proper and gradually becomes a necessary impropriety of

the proper.”12 Elias’ view that the fragment works to secure the wholeness and coherence of the

narratives whose very margins it demarcates is a useful way to think about how Heraclitus’

philosophy is simultaneously absorbed and rendered improper in the anecdote of Euripides and

Socrates. But so too does it indicate a path with which to think how the fragment’s impropriety

can irrupt from its liminal status to reconfigure the shape of such normative readings.

As we have noted, this moment of transmission into the accepted genealogy of thought is

marked by the imposition of fragmentation onto Heraclitus’ text. Benjamin’s historical method,

however, makes us alert to the confrontation we must construct with the material object world of

the past. The ruination of the past at the hands of tradition may push such lived actuality to one

side, rendering it unfinished in its theorization as a text, but Benjamin impels us to break through

the effacement of the materiality and specificity, and historical difference, of the real processes of

production.13 An excellent example of such attention to the historical context of the PreSocratics,

acknowledging the formative effect of their exposure to developing material technologies, has

been presented by Robert Hahn in his book Anaximander and the Architects. Here Hahn notes the

influence of newly arrived Egyptian temple builders upon Anaximander’s conception of the

column-like topography of the cosmos, and thereby opens up our reading of Anaximander’s

philosophy beyond the confines of the textual tradition. It is notable that only one authentic

fragment of Anaximander survives, but our picture of his philosophy is completed through the

textual summaries of the doxographers, who by definition trace diachronic lineages of ideas,

often with a particular destination, a telos, in mind. Hahn sets this fragment free from this

8

12 Elias p.4.

13 Steinberg, p.8, is right to draw a distinction between the notion of reference and representation in the historical methodology of Benjamin. He writes “The past is indeed gone; it can be engaged through reference - which means an operation different from and opposed to representation. The latter involves the appropriation of the subject position of the represented object; reference marks the object world’s distance.”

narrative, allowing it to move synchronically out of the text and into the context of its material

object world.

But where then in Heraclitus can we perceive the self-conscious fragment, the

‘unexpressed critical force’ that actively shatters these closural strategies? And how, in

constructing an encounter with this ‘moment of danger’, do we move from the text to the body

and into the material actuality of Heraclitus’ world? The answer, I will suggest, lies in taking the

physicality of the children in Heraclitus’ philosophy as importantly foregrounded. While the

ancient Greek world tended to conceptualize children as incomplete fragments in a teleological

view of adulthood marked by assimilation to pre-established cultural and political norms, I will

argue that Heraclitus’ children disrupt this account, posing alternate trajectories that not only

critique the assumptions and readings of the established tradition, but also serve to model

Heraclitus’ theory of the collaborative and environmentally embedded interactions that lead to the

emergence of cultural and epistemological structures. Children at play embody much of

Heraclitus’ philosophy. Unlike the prevailing approach of modern scholars which considers

Heraclitus’ turn to children to be emblematic of his frustration at the inadequacy of his audience,

a retreat into games away from the serious matter of life and philosophy, I will suggest that this

move is part of a deliberate strategy for Heraclitus, using the ambiguous and unstable, and

‘fragmented’, nature of children to manifest important claims about his view of knowledge and

culture as inherently plastic. And when such established readings do consider the ludic sphere in

Heraclitus they treat it as a symbol of a higher level cosmic game of endless flux. I resist this

reading and bring attention back to the material objects and bodies intersecting in childhood play,

to the physical graspings that tessellate new patterns of cultural and cognitive organization.

As my first chapter, Patterning, will indicate, the number of remaining fragments

involving children (9 out of 125) makes them a not insignificant presence in Heraclitus’

9

philosophical corpus. But it is the playful child of fragment B.52 that places them within the

centre of it, or rather a centre which they subsequently decenter:

Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη (B.52)

Life/Time is a child playing, moving pessoi. Kingship is of the child.

The importance of this fragment is attested not only through Lucian’s deployment of this image in

his Philosophies for Sale to define the philosophical perspective of Heraclitus, but also in the

modern scholarly accounts which treat the play of the child as pointing to a central insight that

exists beyond its body. For example, for Charles Kahn the game represents the balanced natural

changes of the kosmos, while for Frederick Nietzsche, usually well attuned to the material context

of Heraclitus’ world, the child is emblematic of the world as play, an ahistorical conception that

existence can only be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.14 Despite the importance of this

fragment, then, the body of the child at play has been ignored. Reading metaphorically and

symbolically, the child becomes a vehicle for a deeper meaning, where such perspectives

disregard the material actuality of its game. We might return to Benjamin once more here, in his

elevation of allegory as a hermeneutics of historical inquiry against the tendencies of symbolism,

especially in the hands of the Athenäum circle and Coleridge, to represent the transcendence of

history, an ahistorical window onto the universal. As Michael Steinberg notes, for Benjamin, it is

the ‘historicity and specificity’ of the allegorical mode, in its limited rather than universalizing

function, that situates it, and the signs and epochs it conjoins, in the actuality of the past and the

10

14 Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus p.228. Nietzsche The PrePlatonic Philosophers p.67. Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus is something I shall return to in depth in chapter 3, Latent Evolution, as I interrogate his perception that Heraclitus directs us to a creative force flowing behind the appearances of the cosmos. But it is clear here, given the near contemporaneous composition of his lecture on Heraclitus with his Birth of Tragedy, that Nietzsche is keen to find alliance between the Dionysian drive he perceives as the cause of greatness in Greek culture, dissolving appearance in floods of becoming, and Heraclitus’ notion of play. Taking inspiration from James Porter’s call to read Nietzsche without the framework of the Birth of Tragedy as a defining boundary (in his Philology of the Future), I will also note how the actuality of the Heraclitean child returns to qualify Nietzsche’s later philosophy, in particular the doctrine of the Eternal Return as worked out in the Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

present.15 Benjaminian allegory works to reference the difference and distance of the past, as

opposed to a symbolism which, in appropriating the voice of the past, makes it speak for an

ahistorical and infinite truth. While the bodies of the children may point to a timescale of natural

alteration that extends beyond their own lives, it is also the case that such alternate durations

rebound back into the material context of their games, loading them with potential. It is in this

focal point that this project installs itself.

One scholar who has attempted to position the playing child of Heraclitus in the material

existence of the world, using it as a site for the contestation of political ideologies in the

development of the Greek polis, is Leslie Kurke. Her study Coins, Bodies, Games and Gold

explicitly orients itself around an analysis of practices of ‘symbolisation’ that ‘emblematize a

conceptual revolution in archaic and classical Greece’, and while her study rightly targets

Athenocentric accounts of the development of the city state and privileges the ‘cultural specificity

and strangeness’ of alternate sites for this conceptual battle, she nevertheless reads back from the

perspective of the dominant tradition.16 In doing so the child is rendered fragmented once more,

not so much incomplete here as impotent, a blank canvas for the imposition of an already pre-

supposed ideological framework. While ‘kingship’ may belong to the child in its game of pessoi,

Kurke’s view of Heraclitus’ child denies it agency. Instead it is the games that are the vehicle for

the ideological contest, not the players: “it is precisely their lowly, unexamined status that endows

games with extraordinary power to inculcate values within culture.’17 The choice of the word

inculcate gives Kurke’s reading away here. It suggests that games forcibly impress ideas through

repetition, where such ideas are already seen as coherent and whole. She overlooks the possibility

that the bodies of children at play could model the generation of new ideas and knowledge,

11

15 Steinberg p.9.

16 Kurke Coins, Bodies, Games and Gold p.2.

17 Kurke p.246.

starting without a pre-determined destination in mind. Indeed, as we shall see, it is the literal

sense of inculcate that maybe gets closer to Heraclitus’ deployment of children, for it is the

movement of their bodies, as they put the heel upon (in + calcare) the inadequacies of other

accepted modalities of thinking, that manifests their enacted form of cognition, thinking afresh

through physical performance. As Roget Caillois has emphasized in his corrective to Johan

Huizinga, play is uncertain and so the results cannot be determined.18 Just like Benjamin’s

reaction against the assumptions of historical causality that posit the present as a smooth and

inevitable production of the past, so should we view the play of children not as an impassive

cipher for the contestation of pre-existing values, but instead as a radically indeterminate and

creative activity, reconfiguring the material of the world in new patterns.

Another key term that has been overlooked in this fragment, besides children, is the term

for time, aion that I consider in detail through the literary and philosophical traditions in chapter

2, Timeplay. As its valence appears to shift from the span of a human generation in Homer

through to representing infinity in the transcendental world of Plato’s Timaeus so again do we

find Heraclitus in the middle of a linear narrative of smooth development. But once more it is the

association with the active agency of children that upsets this chain. The classical tradition is well

aware of the importance of children’s education, recognizing the need to implant concordant

rhythms into their young minds so as to preclude future problems. Such a perspective starts from

the premise of the disordered and discordant arrangement of their minds, radically open to

influence from the world and thus in need of being carefully monitored. For Plato (Tim.44a)

childish brains confuse sameness and difference, while for Aristotle (Physics VII.247b19) the

violent motion still yet to settle renders them deficient in memory. Children represent the site for

the transmission of cultural knowledge, as well as the destabilizing possibility for the instantiation

of an alternate trajectory. As I shall explore, it is Heraclitus’ highlighting of the temporal process

12

18 Roger Caillois Man, Play and Games.

of differentiation behind the appearance of sameness and timelessness that most clearly manifests

his theory of the plasticity of cognitive and cultural structures as they are amalgamated with the

world. And it is with children that this discordant harmony is embodied, where time is not merely

a marker of change, but an active participant, another catalyzing fragment in a game without an

end. It is in this sense that the playing children indicate Heraclitus’s attempt to think through the

question of historical time, challenging the smoothness of tradition and highlighting the ruptures

through which cultures, both conceptual and material, reorient themselves with respect to the

past. And just like Benjamin’s sense of allegory, so do time and the child proceed by a process of

reference that situates their constellation as one which validates the material actuality of both

sides, rather than the representative mode of symbolism which shadows the historical body of the

child for the ahistorical gleam of a universal time. Time, like the child, is a force that insists, that

creates the future through its pressure in the present, a pressure loaded with the weight of the past.

I adopt an approach throughout this dissertation that conceives of Heraclitus as a temporal

thinker, one committed to interrogating time’s interaction upon the bodies of the world.

Hiding in full view, this fragment about children, play and time can be reactivated to limn

a theory of cognition in Heraclitus that involves the participation of bodies, time, and the material

environment as fragments that intersect in new patterns. The failure of scholars to acknowledge

this perspective upon cognition in Heraclitus, such as Andre Laks in the recent Cambridge

Companion, lies in their reading back, just as with Socrates and Euripides, a pejorative

fragmentation and incompleteness into Heraclitus. For Laks the failure of Heraclitus to draw an

epistemological framework is figured as a result of the ‘paradoxical identity’ of the soul.19 Such a

viewpoint starts from the Platonic conception of the dianoetic soul guiding contemplation of the

forms and considers the complexity of Heraclitus’ picture of the soul (psyche) to be an incoherent

version of the Platonic translucence, rather than admitting that it might pose an alternative view

13

19 Andre Laks ‘Soul, sensation, thought’ p.254 in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy.

of how knowledge is acquired, one where embodied cognition slashes across the borders between

the mind and the world.

Indeed, in brushing against this Platonic narrative we will find more resonance between

Heraclitus and Homer in their picture of the materiality of knowledge, that does not act to

confirm the undeveloped nature of Heraclitus’ thought but rather provides an important precursor

for an account of cognitive activity that speaks across time to many present scientific theories.

The recent work of Jeffrey Barnouw and his discerning of the visceral thinking in Homer’s

Odyssey as exemplified in words such as phren, noos and thumos provide a powerful interlocutor

here, noting how, for example, thumos paints the physical act of thinking like seething oceans.20

So too will my analysis of the use of noos suggest that its intuitive grasping of a situation is not

so much a reflective act of deliberation, as J.H.Lesher and Daniel Graham consider it to be, but

rather a movement whereby the subject enters into and blurs with the information contained in the

object.21 As such the reading of Bruno Snell in his influential The Discovery of Mind can be

viewed in a different light. Where Snell places Heraclitus against Homer on the path toward the

recognition of an autonomous and demarcated cognitive realm, we can find an unexpected

kinship between them. Snell’s claim that Homeric ‘man is the open target of a great many forces

which impinge upon him and penetrate his very core’ will serve not to draw an opposition with

Heraclitus, but rather to illuminate his theory of how knowledge is acquired through a material

process precisely marked by the permeability of the individual to information stored in the

exterior world. While the men of Heraclitus’ philosophy may cling to the vision of a separate and

secure mental realm, it is Heraclitus’ children who are embedded in the world, performing

14

20 J.Barnouw Odysseus, Hero of Practical Intelligence.

21 J.Lesher ‘Early Interest in Knowledge’ in Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy pp. 225-249. Daniel Graham ‘Flux, Order, Knowledge’ in The Oxford Handbook of PreSocratic Philosophy.

knowledge in a dance of multiple forces and bodies. Their fragmentary nature is rather a mark of

their openness to new connections, not a solipsistic boundedness.

Laks has noted well how the Pre-Socratic philosophers, though he excludes Heraclitus

from this list, pay attention to the ‘physiological functions of sensation and thought’, to the

movements and ‘traveling’ and ‘reaching’ through which information from objects materially

intersects with the ‘perceiving organ’. Taking Aristotle’s comment that early Greek thinkers used

touch to explain the working of the other senses, Laks suggests that whether by emanations from

objects, or by literal physical contact, the question of perception can be viewed as a ‘topology’, a

site through which information passes and is received. The absence of any testimony concerning

the minutiae of pores and effluences and the workings of sight compared to thinkers such as

Empedocles, Democritus and Diogenes, is taken to indicate Heraclitus’ lack of interest in

cognitive mechanisms. Nevertheless, the focus of Empedocles, Democritus et. al. upon the

passages and trajectories of sensory information is held by Laks to occur at the expense of any

investigation of the processes of epistemology. But such a model already assumes the sort of

analysis of mind he is looking for - a separate cognitive realm capable of exercising judgement

and assent upon the information of the senses. Adapting Laks’ useful notion of the topology, I will

rather assert that Heraclitus’ vision of the functioning of mind, fundamentally amalgamated with

the world in a materialized process of cognition, precludes such a distinction between the

cognitive and the physical. As such Heraclitus’ conception of the embodied play of children as

they manipulate information in the environment, from material objects to natural beings to the

slippage in language, acts precisely as a topology for the intersection of forces. A topology that

manifests a cognitive theory defined not by its self-contained coherence, but by the fissures and

fragments that make it permeable to the world. While Laks appears to follow Plato’s claim in the

Theaetetus that Heraclitus’ assertion of flux precludes the possibility of any stable knowledge, I

will assert that it is this very plasticity which Heraclitus takes to represent the activity of thought.

15

As we shall see throughout the surviving fragments, Heraclitus foregrounds the material

processes of knowledge. The opposites that structure the world, coalescing high into low, and

divergent into convergent, and dissonant into consonant, are apprehended in fragment B.10 with

the word syllapsies, literally meaning grasping. Men are required to think through the way they

encounter the world (enkureousin B. 17), where such an interface is figured as literal hitting upon.

And what is it his audience is meant to grasp, even as they fail compared to the embodied

performance of Heraclitus’ insights in the activity of children? The hidden harmony (harmonie), a

term that bespeaks the material world of woodwork and music and warfare (polemos), another

word that occurs frequently. Adults fail, in Heraclitus eyes, to properly comprehend the meaning

of their material encounter with polemos, a structure that is viewed, together with strife (eris), not

as forces threatening to tear the world asunder, but rather as the dynastic and just principles that

cause the very emergence of all things (B.53). Polemos is described as a king (basileus), just like

the child at play, and so here do we find further evidence of the destructively creative agency of

children at play. Just like polemos, the children shatter claims to coherence and permanence, alert,

like Benjamin’s historical materialist themselves, to the aporetic moments within language and

the latent forces within the objects of knowledge. The cosmic fire enacts a form of judgement that

literally separates (krinei) and seizes (katalepsetai), while justice herself (Dikē), like the just

polemos which invokes the similarly kinglike child at play, seizes (katalepsetai) those builders

(tektones) of lies. I will adopt the close reading techniques of a philological approach to analyze

the implications of the matrix of associations these terms create as they invoke and modify each

other across the fragments. Thus we will see how when the children at play in fragment B.56

grasp lice and pose a riddle involving both their bodies and language that confounds Homer,

Heraclitus does not distinguish between a physical world of objects and a demarcated cognitive

realm of judgement. The children think through objects. The topology is not just a matter of

16

information arriving at the site of perception, but always an active encounter where the mind and

body are coupled with the world.

This reading of Heraclitus’ account of epistemology, glimpsed in the actuality of children

at play, and buttressed by the matrix of words that invoke the activity of thought as a material

process of grasping, seizing, constructing and separating, all in the name of apprehending a

harmony that is manifested in physical objects, has a certain resonance with the physical view of

the world of the Stoics. Thomas Habinek has recently argued that the perceptual and cognitive

processes of Stoic thought are dynamically open to alteration through interaction with the

material of the world. He continues that this interface between the mind and the universe

demands that the ‘articulation of the order in the material universe’ required of Stoic reason need

not be manifested purely in language.22 So then in Heraclitus do words point us back to objects,

not as the secondary manifestation of linguistic knowledge, but as its primary site of occurrence.

As I shall argue in chapter 4, The Shared Logos, Heraclitus conceives of the activity of thought as

a collaborative process that situates individuals in the material world, and the perception of the

order in the universe, or in Heraclitus’ case constitutive disorder, is attained through the blurring

of the self as one enters into the objects and natural processes of the physical environment. I too

position myself against views of logos in Heraclitus that reduce it to a linguistic category of

understanding, just as I define myself against the generally stoicising approach of a Heraclitean

scholar such as Geoffrey Kirk who located the logos as the external order, or rational principle, of

the universe. It is the mark of the Heraclitean view of mind, I will argue, to entwine the cognitive

and cosmic spheres, making both flexible to the performance of knowledge.

The question of a Heraclitean theory of mind suffers from both this residual logocentrism

and the desire to marginalize the playful fragments outside the accepted account of the progress

toward a theory of unified psychological life. A recent collection from 2010 entitled Ancient

17

22 Thomas Habinek ‘The Tentacular Mind’ p.77 in Barbara Stafford ed. A Field Guide to a New Meta-Field.

Models of Mind contains a mere 4 references to Heraclitus, none of which acknowledge any

attempt on his part to interrogate this question.23 While accounts that do recognize the

‘beginnings’ of a theory, such as those of Martha Nussbaum and Roman Dilcher, associate what

they see as the demarcation of a separate cognitive realm and a bounded self with the linguistic

capability of the individual.24 For Daniel Graham the world is a text that must be parsed and the

notion of the person as unified and possessing a stable self is constructed as a result of reading

one’s self out of this flux. Replicating the mistake of the adult audience that Heraclitus berates

throughout his fragments, such perspectives refuse to acknowledge that the constitutive

immersion of the individual into the world is not something that can then be forgotten. As

Heraclitus reminds us, ‘How can one escape that which never sets’ (B.16). Such a desire seeks to

posit an interpreting and secure subjectivity outside the world, no longer permeable to the

material within it. The perception of a separate and linguistically based cognitive realm in

Heraclitus owes as much to the legacy of Platonism as it does the classical cognitivism so

dependent upon the notion of a disembodied soul, the ‘ghost in the machine’ as Gilbert Ryle

remarked on Descartes’ legacy. Complicit with a tradition that has validated the distinction

between the bounded world of the mind (as a secular equivalent of the soul) and the degraded

material actuality of existence, such scholarly perspectives fail to account for the possible

difference of Heraclitus, and the way that the children playing at the margins of his philosophy

embody an alternative vision of a material mind that is distributed and extended into the world.

The children as fragments shatter this teleological narrative, resisting its closural tendencies that

seek to impose limits and boundaries.

18

23 David Sedley and Andrea Nightingale eds. Ancient Models of Mind. That this volume was commissioned from a conference in honor of A.A. Long who has explicitly called for the PreSocratics to be considered as investigators of topics beyond the narrow confines the tradition has sewn them into (see his introductory essay to The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy) makes the omission all the more remarkable.

24 See Nussbaum ‘Ψυχή in Heraclitus’ in Phronesis Vol.17, No. 1 (1972), pp 1-16;153-170. Dilcher Studies in Heraclitus esp. pp. 75-82. I critique their arguments in more detail in chapters 4 and 5.

Part of the constellation I bring to bear on this question in seeking to limn a Heraclitean

theory of the mind comes from the continuity psychologists within neuroscience who are

challenging the long accepted model of the mind as a ‘rational deliberator’ to use Andy Clark’s

phrase. Just as scholars such as Margaret Graver and Thomas Habinek have employed the

perspectives of neuroscientific work to ‘defamiliarize’ the Stoic theory of reason, so do I hope

that the emphasis by thinkers such as Marc Rowlands on the amalgamated mind, whereby the

mind is not only embedded in the world, but actively employs the material of the world in the

process of thinking, will help to illuminate Heraclitus’ epistemology without recourse to a

logocentric view of consciousness. At the end of the thesis in chapter 5, The Extended Psyche, I

test out the applicability of such a neuroscientific interlocutor to look at two visions of the psyche

as a spider, one assigned to Heraclitus (even though it only survives in Latin), and one to the early

Stoic Chrysippus. The rapidly evolving field of neuroscience not only enables us to view Stoic

and Heraclitean theories of mind afresh without the domineering narrative of Platonic ideality, but

it also provides the tools to articulate subtle, yet significant, differences between the Stoic and

Heraclitean models.

Throughout his philosophy Heraclitus himself foregrounds the need to look beyond the

obvious and accepted, to pay attention to the hidden harmonies rather than the visible ones, to

interrogate the sleepy margins where things have been forgotten, to mimic the model of nature

which loves to conceal itself, and to install oneself in this indeterminate and overlooked location.

In following these injunctions myself I join the man of fragment B.26 who is said to strike a light

for himself in the darkness, offering an illumination where others fail to look. For Kahn, Kirk,

Marcovich et. al the obscurity of nighttime marks man’s isolation from the world, but it is in

paying attention to these shadowy spaces, as Heraclitus directs us, that we can grasp images

subsumed by the tradition. In addition to the spider, I reactivate two other images of the mind that

survive in the late Sceptic Sextus’ Empiricus’ summary of Heraclitus, and which can throw off the

19

shackles of Stoic contamination likely to have affected Sextus, to revivify the literally radical

nature of Heraclitus’ theory of a distributed mind: firstly, the image of the mind as a collection of

embers, and secondly as a root. Discussed in chapter 3, Latent Evolution, these images serve to

corroborate the collaborative and creative view of thought modeled through the fragmentary

children, their own play threatening to kindle the established tradition and sprout anew upon its

soil.

In following Heraclitus’, and Walter Benjamin’s, imperative to look awry into the

shadowy realms beyond the light, I also employ the readings of Frederick Nietzsche and Martin

Heidegger. In separate, but complementary ways, both thinkers compel us to think into the

concealed spaces of Heraclitus’ philosophy and to think upon what forces can be traced there.

Insisting that to dwell in, or affirm, this address of the concealed is to both run the risk of losing

one’s sense of self, as well to gain a fresh appreciation of the possibilities for new relations that

can be borne from asserting contingency and finitude, Nietzsche and Heidegger provide another

perspective upon how to deal with the call of the past and the question of historical memory.25

Nevertheless, while both these thinkers orient their interrogation of the PreSocratics from the

demands of the present, it is through bearing in mind Benjamin’s call to the actuality of the past

and the redemptive need to acknowledge its fragmentary force that we can avoid the tendencies

of Heidegger and Nietzsche to essentialize such moments as the ahistorical luminosity of Being

or the aesthetic purity of the world as play. As I will indicate it is through the bodies of playing

children that Heraclitus anchors us back in the material world, whence he postulates a theory of

20

25 Indeed, Heidegger’s influence on Heraclitus studies has largely failed to cross into the Classical scholarship as narrowly defined by Classical Philosophy departments, where work on influence and genealogy and narrow logical issues still seems to find a place for itself but it has obviously found followers with more of a phenomenological bent. The collection edited by David Jacobs. The Presocratics after Heidegger (New York, 1999) neatly gathers together several of these thinkers and includes essays on Heraclitus by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Charles Scott and Walter Brogan that all toe the Heideggerian line with regard to a focus on the ‘one in all that is differentiated’ (Gadamer), ‘the oblivion at the heart of all presence’ (Scott), and ‘the ambiguity and fragmentation at the heart of all signification’ (Brogan). See also James Luchte’s recently published volume Early Greek Thought (London, 2011) for a thoroughly Heideggerian approach to the subject.

cognitive and cultural emergence that acknowledges our dynamic coupling to our environmental

context. An environment whose contours both shape the pathways of thought, determining the

trajectories we think along, but which is also mutable enough to accommodate our collaborative

refashionings. It is the children who offer a model of the fragmentary and permeable attitude

toward the world, one that is not to be read as lack and incompleteness, but as an openness to

fresh connections. And finally, it is the children who embody the possibilities to be achieved

when, like roots, embers, and spiders, we incorporate material and energy from around us in order

to weave our minds into new spaces. It is my hope that this project will provoke a new

commitment to reading Heraclitus as a materialist thinker, one who posits a conception of the

functioning of mind and the emergence of culture that speaks powerfully to present questions and

debates about subjectivity, cultural borders and the rhizomatic new forms of alliance that traverse

them.

21

Chapter One: Patterning

There is, it seems to us,At best, only a limited valueIn the knowledge derived from experience.The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies,For the pattern is new in every momentAnd every moment is a new and shockingValuation of all we have been. T.S. Eliot. The Four Quartets: East Coker

Under παίς (pais -‘child’), the index in volume three of Diels and Kranz’ Fragmente der

VorSokratiker reveals that only two of the many PreSocratic thinkers they grouped together

discuss children at any length.1 Democritus of Abdera, the late 5th century thinker whose work

spans the physical doctrines of atomism to hortatory sayings on a wide rang of pragmatic matters,

has seven references, all of which tend to revolve around a fairly typical constellation of ancient

conceptions of childhood. That is to say they conceive of children from the teleology of matured

adults and judge them accordingly lacking in terms of physical, moral and intellectual abilities.2

Their natures are malleable and thus susceptible to bad influence under the example of inadequate

parents (B.228, 279); they must study the curriculum of music, gymnastics and letters to develop

the appropriate reverence - aidos (B.179); and though this education can easily be afforded (B.

280) there are many problems in rearing them as one doesn’t know how they’ll turn out (B.275)

so it may be best not to have them at all (B.276); but if you absolutely must, then adopt them

from friends when they are well grown and their characters defined (B.277).

22

1 Their grouping of sophists and orators and mystical figures together with philosophers makes it a much larger sample than subsequent editions. Throughout I will use this edition of Diels and Kranz (1964) Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Hildesheim, for the numbering of the fragments. They categorize the material into three areas: A.Life and works; B.Authentic Fragments; C.Imitation. The fragments that I will employ are mostly, therefore, identified by a B. followed by the number assigned by Diels and Kranz. In analysis of sources, summaries, and indirect quotations the text is marked by an A. followed by a number.

2 The pejorative connotations of childhood lurking behind Democritus’s sayings have been well noted by scholars of this field, such as Mark Golden (1990) Childhood and Children in Classical Greece and Ada Cohen and Jeremy Rutter (eds.) (1997) Constructions of Childhood in ancient Greece and Italy (Hesperia Supplement no. 41, 2007).

The theme of indeterminate development and the recommendation for adult adoption is a

trope well worn by 5th century orators such as Lysias, and the notions of appropriate education

and a syllabus designed to inculcate civic obedience are issues that will be theorized at length by

Plato, and to a lesser extent Aristotle.3 This teleological reading, taking an adulthood marked by

political and cultural assimilation as its goal, situates childhood as the space where a child’s

innate mimetic faculty must be carefully directed toward the incorporation of appropriate cultural

knowledge. Plato, in the political treatise The Republic, writes that:

οὐκοῦν οἶσθ᾽ ὅτι ἀρχὴ παντὸς ἔργου µέγιστον, ἄλλως τε δὴ καὶ νέῳ καὶ ἁπαλῷ ὁτῳοῦν; µάλιστα γὰρ δὴ τότε πλάττεται, καὶ ἐνδύεται τύπος ὃν ἄν τις βούληται ἐνσηµήνασθαι ἑκάστῳ. (Rep. 377b) You also know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. (trans. Jowett)

The child is like any other artifact that needs shaping, an attitude that testifies to a lack of agency

among children. It is raw material waiting to be marked and given significatory connotation. But

for those doing the moulding there is thus a concomitant need not to imprint any potentially

disruptive rhythms into this young material, and any irregularities are liable to have disastrous

consequences:

ὡς τοίνυν διὰ βραχέων εἰπεῖν, τούτου ἀνθεκτέον τοῖς ἐπιµεληταῖς τῆς πόλεως, ὅπως ἂν αὐτοὺς µὴ λάθῃ διαφθαρὲν ἀλλὰ παρὰ πάντα αὐτὸ φυλάττωσι, τὸ µὴ νεωτερίζειν περὶ γυµναστικήν τε καὶ µουσικὴν παρὰ τὴν τάξιν, ἀλλ᾽ ὡς οἷόν τε µάλιστα φυλάττειν, φοβουµένους ὅταν τις λέγῃ ὡς τὴν “. . . ἀοιδὴν µᾶλλον ἐπιφρονέουσ᾽ ἄνθρωποι, ἥτις ἀειδόντεσσι νεωτάτη ἀµφιπέληται”, µὴ πολλάκις τὸν ποιητήν τις οἴηται λέγειν οὐκ ᾁσµατα νέα ἀλλὰ τρόπον ᾠδῆς νέον, καὶ τοῦτο ἐπαινῇ. δεῖ δ᾽ οὔτ᾽ ἐπαινεῖν τὸ τοιοῦτον οὔτε ὑπολαµβάνειν. εἶδος γὰρ καινὸν µουσικῆς µεταβάλλειν εὐλαβητέον ὡς ἐν ὅλῳ κινδυνεύοντα: οὐδαµοῦ γὰρ κινοῦνται µουσικῆς τρόποι ἄνευ πολιτικῶν νόµων τῶν µεγίστων, ὥς φησί τε Δάµων καὶ ἐγὼ πείθοµαι. (Rep. 424b-c)

23

3 See eg., Lysias 2.13, 14.17, 20.34. Plato Rep. 441b, 536e, 539d; Leg. 797. Arist Pol. 7.133b.

Then to sum up: This is the principle to which our rulers should cling throughout, taking care that neglect does not creep in - that music and gymnastics be preserved in their original form, and no innovation made. They must do their utmost to maintain them intact. And when anyone says that “Mankind most regard the newest song which singers have” (Odyssey, i, 352), they will be afraid that he may be praising, not new songs, but a new kind of song; and this ought not to be praised, or conceived to be the meaning of the poet; for any musical innovation is to be shunned, as likely to bring danger to the whole State. So Damon tells me, and I can quite believe him;-he says that when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.

The capacity for innovation (neōterizein) is predicated upon the notion of the young child

(neos) , while the word for laws (nomoi) is also able to mean musical rhythms, especially

involving the lyre, and hearkens back etymologically to nomeus as the shepherd who divides the

flock.4 Plato, in a sense, is trying to limit the linguistic valences of this word, to denude its

alternative meanings for the sake of his ideal city. A child playing music displays semantic links

to legal novelty, and thus the need for appropriate modulation is important for the guardians of

the state. The rhythms of the childish material are able, in combination, to reach a resonance of

potentially revolutionary intensity, unbalancing moral and political harmonies.

Democritus shifts his focus towards the young dancers themselves in one of his

fragments, implying that the ground on which they move may already be rigged, and thus the

danger may face them as opposed to the political conductors:

οἱ φειδωλῶν παῖδες ἀµαθέες γινόµενοι ὤσπερ οἱ ὀρχηταὶ οἱ ἐς τὰς µαχαίρας ὀρούοντες, ἤν ἑνος µούνοι <µὴ> τύχωσι καταφερόµενοι, ἔνθα δεῖ τοὐς πόδας ἐρεῖσαι, ἀπόλλυνται. χαλεπὸν δὲ τυχεῖν ἑνός. τὸ γὰρ ἴχνιον µοῦνον λέλειπται τῶν ποδῶν. οὕπω δὲ καὶ οὕτοι, ἤν ἁµάρτωσι τοῦ πατρικοῦ τύπου τοῦ ἐπιµελέος καὶ φειδωλοῦ, φιλέοθσι διαφθείρεσθαι. (B.228) The children of misers, if they are reared in ignorance, are like those dancers who leap between swords: if they miss, in their leap downwards, a single place where they must plant their feet, they are destroyed. But it is hard to alight upon the one spot, because only the space for the feet is left. So too with the children of misers: if they miss the paternal character of carefulness and thrift, they are apt to be destroyed.

24

4 LSJ 1180.

The embodied dance of cultural knowledge, in Democritus’ simile, always sketches its

choreography across a dangerous ground. The pattern of movement, contingent upon the

positioning of obstacles elsewhere in the system, assumes, in its iteration, the marking out of

cultural pathways that exist only through dialectic with the anomic threats of straying off course,

out of rhythm.5 But parental guidance is that which maps the contours of a treacherous youth for

Democritus and a child bereft of these directions, without sufficient agency, could not survive on

its own. This invocation of the topography of childhood as a space riddled with death appears to

chime well with the peremptory comment of Moses Finley who wrote that “Childhood in

antiquity was a preparatory stage for adulthood, to be traversed as rapidly as was biologically

reasonable and nothing more.”6

The nine references to pais in Heraclitus, however, linger very much within the space and

time of child’s play, allowing instead an active and unsettling agency to children which permeates

the rest of his philosophy.7 As we shall see their activities model principles of cosmic organisation

(B.52), just as their word-play undoes linguistic structures, exposing the contingency at the heart

of language, and criticizing the (over) matured systems of adult, established knowledge (B.56).

They stand as a political alternative (B.121), but they are also at danger of negative influence

from their parents (B.20 and B.74). The matter of their games is epistemological (B.70), but they

themselves are pieces in the eternal becoming that balances the world in fluctuating tension (B.

25

5 Thomas Cole’s work Democritus and the Sources of Greek Anthropology (1967) gestures in this direction in its provocative sketching out of a possible theory on the development culture within Democritus consonant with his physical doctrines of the arbitrary flow and coalescence of atoms.

6 Finley Economy and Society in Ancient Greece p.6. Or compare Fränkel Early Greek Philosophy and Poetry on the characterisation of childhood in the time of Heraclitus as “a useless contemptible state preliminary to maturity.” p. 382.

7 It is noteworthy that the predominant English language collection of PreSocratic texts, that of Kirk, Raven and Schofield (Cambridge, 1983, 2nd ed.), does not mention the fragments involving children at all in their section on Heraclitus (pp.181-212). Similarly remarkable is the fact that Albert’s article “Philosophie und Erziehung bei Heraklit von Epheseus” Paedagogica Historica 9 (1969), pp. 5-19 avoids mention of any of the fragments directly involving children.

88). They may seem to be the lowest rung in the dialectical ascent to divine reason (B.79), but it

is toward the guidance of children that adults in need must turn (B.117). The prevalence of

children establishes a matrix of associations between them and the patterns of cosmic and

cognitive development: foregrounding the problems of generational inheritance, the embodiment

of cultural knowledge, and the question of the emergence of thought as it is distributed beyond

the individual. Plato’s criticism of Heracliteans in the Theaetetus as believers in becoming and

flux to such an extent that the connotation of constant movement is the impossibility of any stable

truth could be seen, on one level, as a reaction to this threatening agency allowed to childish

activity.8 As the passage from the Republic asserts, the cultural rhythms imprinted on children

have the capacity to upset not just the structures of the state, but the conceptual apparatus of

knowledge.9 Children at play represent a shifting topology in Heraclitus’ thought where political,

cultural, epistemological, and ontological forces intersect in a dance that destabilises previous

modalities of thinking and in doing so proposes new configurations of bodies, brains and

environments.

This decentering movement creates/states a problem whose dimensions encompass the

genitality of thought, to use Artaud’s phrase, rather than marking a solution which responds to an

innate image of thought based around the notion of childhood as lack.10 Children in Heraclitus’s

philosophy embrace the indeterminacy and plasticity Democritus and Plato were to fear, asserting

that the logic of negation hides an affirmation at its heart of the positive, differentiating capacity

of childhood knowledge. This topology can be seen as a dynamical system embracing epistemic

invention and novelty, overpowering the given teleology of control and suggesting new forms of

26

8 Plato Theaet. 183A.

9 Irwin (1977) draws attention to the fact that Plato’s construction of the world of Forms is on one level an affirmation of the unsettling existence of this Heraclitean flux. On the question of whether this view is really that of Plato or the character Hippias see Mansfeld (1981).

10 Antonin Artaud, Collected Works, vol.1, transl. Victor Corti (London, 1968) p 19. qv. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London, 1994) p. 185.

cultural configuration. Consequently, the creative interaction of these forces, without a

supervening principle, will require us to acknowledge that Heraclitus’ children at play manifest an

alternate conception of time, one that possesses an efficacious quality and is not just a passive

marker of change. Moreover, the mapping of the alternative emergence of thought is never

separated in Heraclitus from the real bodies that children play with and upon. The

metaphorisation of children’s activities to cosmic or cognitive processes inevitably redounds back

upon the material of the real world, putting everything, so to speak, in play.11 As in fragment B.

52, aion, ‘life/time’,12 is a child playing, but a child at play with the pottery shard pieces of the

game of pessoi embodies the very swelling of cultural knowledge throughout time13:

Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη (B.52) Life/Time is a child playing, moving pessoi. Kingship is of the child.

Performative gameplay

The recent scholarship on this fragment exposes the permanence of that image of thought

which Heraclitus’ children seem to rebel against, namely the conception of children as a lack in

27

11 Johan Huizinga’s classic study Homo Ludens: a study of the play-element in culture (London, 1980 trans. Paul Kegan) saw play as civilising and furthermore claimed that, within the rules that bound the tensions of play, “culture proceeds in the shape and mood of play”. While later scholars of play, and in particular those that mention Heraclitus, seem to assume the verity of play as civilising and rule bound, they have not followed through with the full implications of his cultural parallel. Having said that, as we shall see, the play in Heraclitus can be characterized as disruptive rather than stabilising.

12 The translation of aion is an issue I will return to in detail in chapter 2, TimePlay. Coubiritsis “La notion d’aion chez Héraclite” in K. Bourdiris ed. Ionian Philosophy (Athens, 1999) pp. 104-113 argues that the meaning of the word pivots between time as vital force in Homer, close to a human generation, subordinate to chronos, and time as eternity, superior to it, as the meaning stabilises after Plato. Bollack-Wismann (1972) translate aion as ‘life’, Conche (1986) chooses ‘time’, while Kahn (1979) opts for ‘Lifetime’. My translation here as ‘life/time’ will have to act as a hedging of bets until we can analyze the problem in more detail.

13 Kurke p.274 observes the use of pottery shards for pessoi. Charles Kahn pp. 227-231 interprets the fragment as a metaphor heading only toward the exemplification of cosmic processes of alternating measures - picking up the pesseuon of B.52 with the metapesonta of B.88.

need of filling out and moulding into politically conforming adults. Leslie Kurke’s study Coins,

Bodies, Games and Gold on the interaction of competing symbolic systems in the transition from

archaic to classical Greece, marked against the development of the city state, polis, provides a

hermeneutic framework for understanding games that takes their role in the inscription of such

political normativity as a given. She writes with regard to pessoi that one version was known as

polis and as such its playing would model appropriate political behavior:

For (some) Greeks of the archaic and classical periods, playing pessoi taught the player how to be a citizen in the polis. For the game called polis, this was true in at least two senses. Narrowly understood, the rules and strategy of this battle-game impressed on its players the importance of maintaining their place in the hoplite battle line rather than becoming isolated (ἄζυξ)... More broadly construed, the player learned what it meant to submit himself to the rules and symbolic order of the city that constituted him as a citizen equal in status to all other citizens.14

It is in this way that playing is made subordinate to the categories of behavior which appear as

goals the game must orient its players towards. For Kurke, these categories represent fixed and

stable points to which the indeterminacy innate to the time of game playing, and the malleability

of childhood that it inscribes itself upon, must be limited.

Furthermore, Kurke assumes that the spatiality of the game predetermines, and limits, its

possible outcomes. Her analysis of the differing boards used for the two types of pessoi - polis

and pente grammai - argues that their distinctive spatial organization reflected democratic and

oligarchic connotations.15 The given topography of the playing board comes first and the players

must learn to adapt to its contours, like Democritus’ knife dodging paupers. Her reasoning takes

the form of the game as given and circumscribes play within the available positions, whereas we

should stress the indeterminate processes that led to the emergence of these positions, and which

28

14 Kurke p.270.

15 Kurke p.265 using the typography given by Aristotle Pol. 1330b17-21 explains that the board of polis had no distinctive features making all pieces structurally equal, while that of pente grammai differed in its possession of a central holy line representing hierarchized sacred space.

thereby makes them secondary. The modes and categories of culture and politics, that is their

spaces, should instead be seen as contingent upon the playful and differentiating time that enabled

their demarcation.

Brian Massumi has recently made a plea for this type of analytical reversal in his book

Parables for the Virtual. He insists that we must recognize the ‘ontogenesis’ of culture behind the

systemic structures which occlude this temporal process of their becoming. What is more, his

approach argues that the disguising of the creative movements and passages that allowed the

positions in a cultural configuration to seem fixed and inevitable is designed to curtail the

freedom of bodies within that system.16 Massumi’s analysis of this ‘gridlock’ claims that

oppressive spatialisation of possible arrangements makes all resistance determinately local and

thus ineffective, and furthermore, that such a compression of potential new becomings reflects an

erasure of bodies and affects by recourse to a predominantly textual model of interpretation. So

too, in this vein, Kurke’s analysis, derived from textual evidence and pictographic depictions of

pessoi and superimposed upon a spatialised structure of the city/board, erases the actual players

and the circulation of powerful affects and the development of new cognitive modes that their

games embody, which reach out far beyond whatever board is in front of them. Heraclitus’

playing children, however, emphasize that we should focus upon the indeterminate time, the aion,

that contains the forces of becoming within it.

Although Kurke situates games as subordinate to such pre-existent political forms, the

potential of play to provoke alternate configurations escapes from her analysis. Her discussion of

pessoi and other games is related to a passage of Herodotus which lists the inventions of the

Lydians (Histories 1.94). Ephesus, at the time of Heraclitus, was very much a polis shaped by the

Lydian king Croesus, in particular, and accounts of its foundation testify to a strong Lydian

influence. Indeed, Diogenes Laertius’ anecdote of the children playing astragaloi with Heraclitus

29

16 Massumi Parables for the Virtual p.3.

at the Temple of Artemis positions their game play at a site built through Croesus’ funding.17 Yet

it is notable, Kurke observes, that Herodotus’ account of Lydian discoveries does not include the

game of pessoi:

ἐξευρεθῆναι δὴ ὦν τότε καὶ τῶν κύβων καὶ τῶν ἀστραγάλων καὶ τῆς σφαίρης καὶ τῶν ἀλλέων πασέων παιγνιέων τὰ εἴδεα, πλὴν πεσσῶν τούτων γὰρ ὦν τὴν ἐξεύρεσιν οὐκ οἰκηιοῦνται Λυδοί. (Hist. I.94.3)

<They say that> then were invented the forms of dice and knucklebones and of the ball and all other games, with the exception of pessoi, for the Lydians do not claim the invention of these.

The catalyst for the invention of games is a severe famine (σιτοδείην ἰσχυρὴν) from which the

games are intended to provide distraction. Eating and playing on consecutive days the Lydians try

to play themselves out of death. Nonetheless, this is ineffective and the king is forced into

dividing his people and sending half off to emigrate: successfully so, as the refugees become

Etruscans under the leadership of the king’s son Tyrrhenios. This initial division appears to leave

half at home with nourishment for leisure, while the other half are left to sustain themselves

through the deadly play of an adventure into the unknown.

Kurke writes that under Herodotus’ aetiology the Lydians’ inability to invent pessoi was

due to their not possessing a city-state, a polis, which would have acted as a ‘mediating term’

between the tensions of elite and non-elite economic and symbolic systems. In her view this

would have provided the model for the creation of a game to further buttress the ideological

cohesion of the same polis. As a result, Kurke reads the continuation of Lydian suffering as

somehow a result of this lack, their unfortunate reliance upon random games of chance, such as

astragaloi and kuboi, only able to be remedied when, “the Lydian king essentially invents pessoi

30

17 Diogenes Laertius Vit. Phil. IX.3. Inscriptions on surviving column bases from the Artemisium testify to Croesus’ generous contribution to the building of the temple. See G.M.A.Hanfmann From Croesus to Constantine. The cities of Western Asia Minor and their Arits in Greek and Roman Times, p.11. The inscriptions can be found in F.N.Pryce Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, I.1: Prehellenic and Early Greek, figs. 31, 69.

through the bodies of his people.”18 The separation into two is like the democratic version of

pessoi called polis, Kurke explains, and only then does Herodotus’ narrative allow the emigrants

to found city states (ἐνιδρύσασθαι πόλιας 1.94.6).

Kurke’s argument, here, appears to have reversed upon itself toward the orientation

Massumi recommended. It is the temporal process of the embodied performance of a game

(albeit one whose name the Lydians do not yet know) which enables the ontogenesis of a new

political structure, rather than vice versa with the game as a reflection and subsequent support of

an existing, or at least conceptualized, political form. To return to fragment B.52, we can gloss the

Lydian episode by saying that the time of the famine and the consequent pressure of death

provoked the playing of a game, pessoi, whose process of differentiation bequeathed an

alternative political and cultural configuration (in a distant place), under the leadership, or

kingship, of the Lydian king’s own child (τὸν ἑωυτοῦ παῖδα 1.94.5) Tyrrenhios.

The reconfigurations that Heraclitus’ children offer, therefore, is not within an existing

framework, but the becoming of a whole new game. Edward Hussey takes the lack of mention of

an opponent in fragment B.52 to imply that the child is playing himself and thus by both winning

and losing represents the Heraclitean theme of the conflict of opposites and shows “that strife and

justice can coexist, independently, without becoming denatured”. Nevertheless, he still reverts to

a model of fixed and established rules.19 In a related way Richard Seaford positions the game-

playing within established codes for economic transaction.20 His depiction of new networks of

horizontal interaction facilitated by monetization relies on the contemporary Greek

conceptualization of money as an abstract and unified principle capable of controlling the

31

18 Kurke p.296.

19 Hussey in Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy p.107.

20 Seaford Money and the Early Greek Mind p.239: “In a board game absolute conflict between two parties making alternative moves (cf.B.88) with symbols is contained and defined by agreed absolute rules (independently of the will or identity of the players”.

circulation of things according to a defined logos; yet in allying this unitary notion of money with

Heraclitus’ ideas of fire and soul his analysis, like Kurke’s, binds the fluid movements of

Heraclitus’ forces, and playing children, to a grid where interaction is constrained.

The life/time of play, however, demands the destruction and invention of new forms of

activity and organization, just as Apollo’s destruction of the Achaean wall in the Iliad is compared

to a child building and destroying sandcastles:

ἔρειπε δὲ τεῖχος Ἀχαιῶν ῥεῖα µάλ᾽, ὡς ὅτε τις ψάµαθον πάϊς ἄγχι θαλάσσης, ὅς τ᾽ ἐπεὶ οὖν ποιήσῃ ἀθύρµατα νηπιέῃσιν ἂψ αὖτις συνέχευε ποσὶν καὶ χερσὶν ἀθύρων. (Iliad, XV 361-64) And with great ease he ripped down the Achaean wall, just like some child scatters the sand by the sea, when he makes it a plaything in childishness, and once more confounds it with his feet and hands in sport

Similarly, play in Heraclitus concerns the insertion of difference into the system that has

potentially destructive effects in place of a forced conformity. In Heraclitus’ world view, polemos

and eris are constitutive and mobilising forces, and destruction is thus always a form of creation.

Charles Kahn has noted that the only other occurrence of the form of basileus in Heraclitus in

addition to the second clause of fragment B52 (παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη) makes it synonomous with

war (polemos):

Πόλεµος πάντων µὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς µὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς µὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους. (B.53) War is the father of all, the king of all, and some he has shown as gods, others men, some he has made slaves, others free

The dynamic image of play in fragment B.52 should not, therefore, be considered dependent upon

anterior categorical structures, since its dynastic war-games cause the emergence of those very

categories. Through time and also as time play creates problems, ceaselessly inserting becoming

32

and indeterminacy into life. The child at play then is not so much lacking as overflowing, a

bearer of differential forces, through ritual, play, language and the rhythms of time, that cannot

but spill into the world, actualizing new games of knowledge as it knocks the old sandy ones

down.

On becoming childlike

This concept of play as not only an alternative form of politics, but as enacting the

becoming that causes new political positions is nicely brought out in the biographical tradition

about Heraclitus. Diogenes Laertius’ 3rd CE Lives of the Philosophers often creates anecdotes

about the behavior of its subjects through an osmosis with the surviving texts and summaries he

was able to access.21 By Diogenes’ time, much of Heraclitus’ thought had been filtered through a

variety of sources, in particular the Stoic tradition and that of Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil,

whose doxographical summaries of ancient philosophers lie behind almost all later accounts of

their work.22 But Diogenes’ interest peaks in the tales of the philosopher’s interaction with the

33

21 On this question see, in particular, Ava Chitwood Death by Philosophy (Ann Arbor, 2004) and Fairweather (1973).

22 See Hermann Diels’ Doxographi Graeci (1879). Theophrastus’ account, contained in Diogenes’ life of Heraclitus, focusses on the physical doctrines of change and fire from Heraclitus’ philosophy and tries awkwardly to balance the principles of war and strife (polemos and eris) with those of peace and agreement (homologia and eirene), in imitation of the philosopher Empedocles for whom the rhythmic creations of the world were structured by forces of strife (neikia) and love (eros). His account of periodic conflagration no doubt played its part in Heraclitus’ appeal to early Christian church thinkers like Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus of Rome who provide more accurate quotations than any other source. Cleanthes’ account does not survive, though the influence of Heraclitus’ style in clearly visible in what remains of Cleanthes’ hymn to Zeus (see SVF.Frag 537, esp 3-9). But, interestingly, the titles of his four volumes do and suggest an acknowledgement of the reaching concerns and consequences of Heraclitus’ philosophy. The summary of Heraclitus’ views by the 2nd century CE Stoic Sextus Empiricus reveal the way his thought had been modified and moulded by the preceding 5 centuries of Stoic influence to postulate logos in Heraclitus as anticipating Stoic views of a structure of world reason and the pervading pneuma breath that formed this connection to the divine logos is reflected in his account of the relationship between human perception and the surrounding unity. Roman Dilcher’s Studies in Heraclitus (Oxford, 1997) makes an excellent effort to remove this Stoic reading of logos from Heraclitus to reveal a more pragmatic and concrete emphasis than the abstract Stoic use.

world and he appears to relish recording the way that misfortunes seem to be promulgated by

one’s own doctrines. Such philosophical demises frequently inspire an epigram on the matter by

Diogenes himself. Indeed, his enraptured account of Heraclitus’ own death prompts an epigram

upon Heraclitus’ body flooded by darkness that mimics Sappho’s famous account of the

debilitating effects of desire.23 It is significant, therefore, that Diogenes invokes an episode with

children to illustrate Heraclitus’ radical politics. He begins by quoting a fragment that is

authenticated elsewhere by Strabo:

ἀξιον Ἐφεσίοις ἡβηδὸν ἀπάγξασθαι (πᾶσι καὶ τοῖς ἀνήβοις τὴν πόλιν καταλιπεῖν), οἵτινες Ἑρµόδωρον ἄνδρα ἑωυτῶν ὀνήιστον ἐξέβαλον φάντες· ἡµέων µηδὲ εἷς ὀνήιστος ἔστω, εἰ δὲ µή, ἄλλη τε καὶ µετ ́ ἄλλων. (B. 121) The Ephesians would do well to end their lives, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless boys, for that they have driven out Hermodorus, the worthiest man among them, saying, ‘We will have none who is worthiest among us ; or if there be any such, let him go elsewhere and consort with others.’

Heraclitus’ anger at the exile of Hermadorus, whom Pliny the Elder recounts was to move to

Rome and be involved in the drafting of Twelve Tables legal code,24 manifests itself in a wish for

the natural rhythms of generational inheritance and mortality to be accelerated to such a point that

children can assume the political running of the city. The ignorance of the Ephesian adults should

not be read as a Heraclitean disdain of democracy since there is not sufficient evidence to suggest

a preference for any form of government.25 And it is reasonable to infer from the philosophical

34

23 In Heraclitus’ case his fate is to wander alone in the mountains due to his misanthropy (Diogenes’ reading of fragments that disparage the foolishness of men), develop dropsy, based on Heraclitus’ belief that it was death for souls to become water (eg., B.36), be unable to find a cure due to his penchant for obsessive riddling (perhaps conjured from a reading of B.93 about the oracle at Delphi neither speaking or concealing, but giving a sign - add Greek), and die covered in dung with dogs barking at him (based on B.96 and B.97). Diogenes’ epigram on his demise (σῶµα γὰρ ἀρδεύσασα κακὴ νόσος ὕδατι φέγγος ἔσβεσεν ἐν βλεφάροις καὶ σκότον ἠγάγετο Vit Phil. IX.4- ‘For a fell disease flooded his body with water, quenched the light in his eyes and brought on darkness’) shows a clear dependence upon Sappho frag. 2.

24 Pliny H.N. xxxiv. 11.

25 Kessidis (1983) notes this problem, but cannot resist painting Heraclitus as an advocate of a moderate aristocracy. Rohatin (1972) reaches a similar conclusion.

notion of strife and becoming in a productive tension throughout the levels of Heraclitus’

philosophy, from the reversals of physical matter to the modulating routes of knowledge, that a

continuity of change between states is the only stable form.26 The stubborn dogmatism of the

Ephesians thus marks their own inability to think becoming, to intuit the revolvings essential to

the continuity of cultural structures, and to listen to Heraclitus’ exegesis upon the nature of

change without recourse to simplistic political analogies. Such a misreading could be situated

with regard to a fragment like the following:

εἶναι γὰρ ἓν τὸ σοφόν, ἐπίστασθαι γνώµην, ὁτέη ἐκυβέρνησε πάντα διὰ πάντων. (B.41) The wise is one, knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all.

The belief that children would do a better job at running the city intimates that they possess a

more subtle appreciation for the balanced flux between the one and the all that informs

Heraclitus’ philosophy. Yet in taking the ruling adults as its audience, B.121 alludes that the

children’s embodiment of the continuity of change is not the result of any interpretation; in

contrast, they naturally embody the shifting movement of forces, be they in the realm of nature

(physis) or man made law (nomos).

Diogenes next adds that Heraclitus deliberately avoided the adult ruling elite and shunned

the function of law-making himself, a somewhat generic expectation of the sage performed by

Solon and Pythagoras, for example. And instead, indicating his awareness of fragment B.52, he

claims that Heraclitus would prefer games with children than enacting laws with adults.

Diogenes’ insertion of this anecdote to explain Heraclitus’ political quarrels with the Ephesians

clearly makes the link between children at play and the need to reset the existing political

structure. Furthermore, Diogenes turns the cosmic board game of pessoi into the boardless game

of knuckle-bones, astragaloi:

35

26 On the possible historical corollaries to Heraclitus’ overtly political fragments see Pierre Bise (1925).

ἀξιούµενος δὲ καὶ νόµους θεῖναι πρὸς αὐτῶν ὑπερεῖδε διὰ τὸ ἤδη κεκρατῆσθαι τῇ πονηρᾷ πολιτείᾳ τὴν πόλιν. ἀναχωρήσας δ᾽ εἰς τὸ ἱερὸν τῆς Ἀρτέµιδος µετὰ τῶν παίδων ἠστραγάλιζε: περιστάντων δ᾽ αὐτὸν τῶν Ἐφεσίων, "τί, ὦ κάκιστοι, θαυµάζετε;" εἶπεν: "ἢ οὐ κρεῖττον τοῦτο ποιεῖν ἢ µεθ᾽ ὑµῶν πολιτεύεσθαι; (Vit. Phil. 9.1.2-3)

And when he was requested by them to make laws, he scorned the request because the state was already in the grip of a bad constitution. He would retire to the temple of Artemis and play at knuckle-bones with the boys ; and when the Ephesians stood round him and looked on, "Why, you rascals," he said, "are you astonished? Is it not better to do this than to take part in your civil life ?"

This shift, in conjunction with the fragment about Hermadorus, brings to the forefront the

association between child’s play and the forces of becoming that such play can embody. We hear

of the darkness provoked by the game of astragaloi in the Iliad when Patroclus recounts that an

argument after a game caused him to kill a man and thus go into exile.27 The very material of the

pieces, made from the bones of goats and sheep, seems to portend danger, as Artemidorus’ later

treatise on dreams testifies.28

The turn to play then, as Diogenes models it, is not an escape from politics, or the

assumed responsibility of law-making, it is rather a provocative alternative that gestures toward

the creative destruction which lies at the heart of political structures. The emergence of new

political forms is riddled with the alternative durations of nature and the forces of the religious

sphere.29 Diogenes highlights this religious aspect through placing his anecdote of play at the

Temple of Artemis, which is where he later records Heraclitus wished to put his book so that only

36

27 Iliad 23.83-92.

28 Artemidorus Oneiro 3.1 notes that while the game may be natural for children the (oneiric) involvement of adults can rarely end well: ‘Seeing a child play with dice (kuboi), knuckle-bones (astragaloi), or counters (psephois) is not bad, since it is customary for children to be always playing. But if a grown man or woman dreams that he or she is playing at kunckle-bones, it is bad luck, unless, of course, the dreamer hopes to receive an inheritance. For knuckle-bones are made out of dead bodies. And so they portend dangers to other men.’

29 Kurke notes how astragaloi were often found in shrines and temples, op.cit. 289.

the capable / empowered (dunamenoi) could access it.30 Diogenes’ account, therefore, sets up a

matrix of influence between the philosophical text, the failures of existing political structures and

the deadly play of children. Their embodied performance of wisdom thus enacts the throws of

becoming that shape and reshape the very coordinates of cultural and political organization.

The text of Diogenes also models Heraclitus’ turn toward child play as indicative of the

way his own epistemological journey has its centre in childhood. In describing Heraclitus’

education he notes that Heraclitus was remarkable as a child and in interpreting fragment B.101

submits that he was self taught:

Γέγονε δὲ θαυµάσιος ἐκ παίδων, ὅτε καὶ νέος ὢν ἔφασκε µηδὲν εἰδέναι, τέλειος µέντοι γενόµενος πάντ᾽ ἐγνωκέναι. ἤκουσέ τ᾽ οὐδενός, ἀλλ᾽ αὑτὸν ἔφη διζήσασθαι καὶ µαθεῖν πάντα παρ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ. (Vit. Phil. 9.1.5)

He was amazing from childhood, and when he was young he used to say that he knew nothing, however when he became fully grown he claimed that he knew everything. He listened to no one (as a pupil), but he said that he went in search of himself (B.101) and learnt everything from himself.

The alliance of this divine luminescence with a Socratic humility and self-awareness conveys the

impression that Diogenes is aware of the potency that Heraclitus attaches to children. Heraclitus’

movement to informed adulthood can only, in Diogenes’ logic, have been facilitated through a

journey into the apparent ignorance of his own childhood. Nevertheless, it is through listening to

the rhythms at play in this topology that Heraclitus is able to achieve wisdom and complete his

own movement into fullness (teleios). The preference for knucklebones with children as opposed

to lawmaking with adults is elucidated by this additional biographical interpretation. Absorption

into the time of childhood perpetually ungrounds the structures of thought, but it is this very

ungrounding and the liberating absence of claims to fixed knowledge that enables the political

and cognitive framework to be rethought.

37

30 Diogenes Laertius Vit. Phil. IX.1.6.

Diogenes’ intuition of this current in Heraclitus’ philosophy can also be glimpsed in his

relaying of Theophrastus’ observation on the fragmentary nature of Heraclitus’ works. His

characterization of this incompleteness recalls Heraclitus’ own epistemological transformation

after the turn to childhood through the rare word meaning ‘half done’, (hēmitelē) :

Θεόφραστος δέ φησιν ὑπὸ µελαγχολίας τὰ µὲν ἡµιτελῆ (Vit Phil.IX.1.6) Theophrastus says that his works are half-finished as a result of melancholy.

The form hēmitelē is seen earlier in the Catalogue of Ships section of the second book of the

Iliad. There it is used to describe the home of the warrior Protesilaos who died shortly after

arriving in Troy, leaving his young widow childless. His premature death thus leaves his home

half-complete (hēmitelē).31 Theophrastus’ characterization of the surviving works of Heraclitus,

therefore, stains them with the notion both of being incomplete with regard to the full knowledge

that Diogenes claims the adult (teleios) Heraclitus was able to obtain, that is, they appear stuck in

a childhood unable to complete their epistemological journey, but it also, through the analogy

with Protesilaos, figures Heraclitus’ philosophy as lacking offspring. This tension reflects the

challenging call that Heraclitus makes on his audience to try and think through the problem of

children and their position in the past of all that we were, but in the future time of how our

knowledge can be re-instantiated or re-moulded. That is to say, it highlights the ambiguity

between two forms of childhood, the one placed in generational continuity with the political,

cultural and cognitive structures of adult life, and the other a form that recursively, as the game of

time, refuses to grow up, always threatening to embody new types of knowledge that unground

those same structures.

38

31 Iliad 2.701. See LSJ 774.

Riddling Homer to death

Diogenes’ narrative architecture makes it clear that the emergence of thought is parallel to

the critique of the old. The play of children, with the intersection of religious, cultural and natural

forces, is figured as a provocation, an encounter that shocks established ways of thinking, that

portends danger as it exposes contingency. Such aspects come to light further, with a special

attention to the differential forces contained within language and the natural, in a fragment about

Homer. Elsewhere in Heraclitus’ philosophy there are multiple complaints against the

inadequacies of previous thinkers. Homer is criticized along with Hesiod, Xenophanes, Hecateus,

Pythagoras and Archilochus.32 The range of knowledge these invective targets are associated

with, from epic poetry, genealogy, geography to philosophy and iambic, has been read as

evidence of the broad scope of Heraclitus’ ambitions.33 But it is with Homer that Heraclitus’

children toy, overcoming the poet whose two epics frequently represented children as signs of

lack and imbecility.34 The children in Heraclitus, conversely, are natural savants, innately full of

understanding, playing with the flexibility of knowledge as they confuse a famous poet who is

unable to solve their riddle because of his inability to perceive both what lies in front of him and

what is hidden:

ἐξηπάτηνται, φησίν, οἱ ἄνθρωποι πρὸς τὴν γνῶσιν τῶν φανερῶν παραπλησίως Ὁµήρῳ, ὃς ἐγένετο τῶν Ἑλλήνων σοφώτερος πάντων. ἐκεῖνόν τε γὰρ παῖδες φθεῖρας

39

32 On the significance of these critiques for a theory of education see Albert op. cit. See also Kranz (1936), Babut (1976) for comment on how these attacks position Heraclitus with regard to his predecessors. The range of genres represented by his targets would seem to imply that Heraclitus’ own conception of the appeal of his philosophy is far beyond the sort of narrow philosophical dispute the tradition has inherited from Plato and Aristotle.

33 This is the overarching thesis of A. Long in Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1999) pp. 1-17.

34 See D. Levine, “Poetic Justice: Homer’s Death in the Ancient Biographical Tradition” CJ 98:141-160 and G.S.Kirk, 1950 “The Riddle of the Lice” CQ 44 vol.3: 149-167.

κατακτείνοντες ἐξηπάτησαν εἰπόντες· ὅσα εἴδοµεν καὶ ἐλάβοµεν, ταῦτα ἀπολείποµεν, ὅσα δὲ οὔτε εἴδοµεν οὔτʹ ἐλάβοµεν, ταῦτα φέροµεν. (B.56) Men are deceived in the recognition of what is apparent, just like Homer who was the wisest of all the Greeks. For children killing lice deceived him by saying: what we see and catch, we leave behind, what we neither see nor catch, we carry away.

The riddle of the lice is a tale that becomes popular in antiquity in association with

Homer’s death. His inability to solve the puzzle is said to have caused his demise in frustration at

his cognitive failure.35 Later versions also stress Homer’s blindness: a rationalization that would

account for his bafflement at the visual problem of the location of the insects. Closer inspection

of the fragment, though, prompts a less obvious explanation, for what Homer fails to perceive is

precisely not visible, since the lice are hidden in the garments and bodies of the children.

Although the children are aware of the deceptive arrangement of words and world, Homer is not.

His inability to ‘see’, therefore, is of a different perceptual level than vision. As another fragment

of Heraclitus indicates, the perceptual data collected by the senses is of no use unless it is

effectively coordinated by an epistemological faculty:36

κακοὶ µάρτυρες ἀνθρώποισιν ὀφθαλµοὶ καὶ ὦτα βαρβάρους ψυχὰς ἐχόντων. (B.107) Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls (psychai) do not understand the language. (trans. Kahn)

Homer’s eyes are not the problem so much as his failure to acknowledge the creative tensions that

Heraclitus perceives as structuring the world. Just as Hesiod is criticized elsewhere for not

realizing that night and day are one (B.57) since his genealogical account in the Theogony places

40

35 see Levine op.cit. n.2, 141.

36 The argument that the psyche plays an active role in the cognitive process, in development from a passive life force represented by breath in Homer, will be analyzed in detail in chapter 4, Beyond Boundaries. There, as we analyze this fragment and the others involving psyche, we will suggest that the material psyche functions as part of a distributed mind that incorporates the thinking performed by the body in its interface with the world, as well the knowledge contained in other bodies and the environment.

them in different generations instead of part of the same process, so too is Homer’s deception

marked as a misunderstanding of the role that opposing forces play in ensuring the continuity of

the world.

A dubious fragment preserved by Aristotle most likely represents his interpretation of the

Homer fragment (B.56) through recounting a likely Heraclitean revulsion at a line of the Iliad

during Achilles’ conflict with Agamemnon.37 Nevertheless, this gloss does direct us toward the

higher unity in the world of which Homer does not take account:

καὶ Ἡράκλειτος ἐπιτιµᾲ τῷ ποιἡσαντι “ὡς ἕρις ἔκ τε θεῶν καὶ ἀνθρώπων ἀπόλοιτο”. οὐ γὰρ ἂν εἶναι ἁρµονιάν µὴ ὂντος ὀξέος καὶ βαρέος, οὐδε τὰ ζῷα ἄνευ θήλεος καὶ ἄρρενος ἐναντίων ὄντων. (A.22) Homer was wrong when he said “Would that conflict might vanish from among gods and men!” (Iliad XVIII.107). For there would be no attunement (harmoniē) without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, since they are opposites.

In Heraclitus’ worldview, however, strife (eris) plays a key role in causing emergence, a creative

act that contributes to the attunement between opposites mentioned in A.22:

εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεµον ἐόντα ξυνόν, καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόµενα πάντα κατ ́ ἔριν καὶ χρεών.. (B.80) It is necessary to realize that war is shared and strife is justice, and that everything comes to pass in accordance with conflict.

What Homer does not see is the role of destruction and death in the continuity and

production of life. However, the pun on words in the riddle proposes that the children do. The

commentary of Bollack and Wismann notes the similarity between the word for lice (phtheiras)

and the verb for killing (phtheirō), such that the children are ‘killing the killers’. But it is also the

41

37 The second opposite Aristotle quotes, that of male and female animals, doesn’t fit with the pattern of opposites elsewhere in Heraclitus’ thought that imply transition and change, rather than the traditional static opposites like male and female, as the work of Roman Dilcher has noted (1997, p.108). It is likely that the second half of this fragment may not be authentic, and the first half thus appears like a rationalisation for criticism elsewhere leveled at Homer. But it is not, therefore without value.

case that the children are hiding the killers, that is to say literally embodying a deathly excess

within themselves.38 Just as with the astragaloi in Diogenes Laertius’ account, here too children’s

association with a natural rhythm of mortality, repurposed as a game, stuns and shocks the

established structures of thought. Similarly, the manipulation of language in the riddle also allies

the playing of children with the religious and prophetic spheres:

ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ µαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σηµαίνει. (B.93) The lord whose oracle is at Delphi, neither speaks or hides, but signifies.

Playing through the time of children, the forces of natural, religious, and linguistic knowledge

configure themselves in a constellation that arrests the thinking of the tradition, represented by

Homer. And their deceptive performance of this intersection of forces embeds them within the

epistemological core of Heraclitus’ philosophy:

ἁρµονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων. (B.54)

The hidden (aphanēs) attunement is stronger than the obvious (phanerēs) one.

The failure of men in B.56 to ‘recognize what is apparent’ (γνῶσιν τῶν φανερῶν - gnōsin

tōn phanerōn), to which Homer’s mortifying hermeneutical inadequacy is testament, is thus put

42

38 Bollack and Wismann Héraclite ou la séparation p.195: “Le mot de peux, en grec, signifiant destructeurs (phteir-, sur phteirein) les garçons tuent ce qui tue. Les deux termes sont juxtaposés.”.

in dialectic with a deeper structure.39 The riddle is a test of verbal unravelling, but it also intuits a

more profound connection between life and death. And as we have seen, the knowledge

performed by children at play grasps this finitude within nature, while the inability of men, and

Homer, to perform this secondary reflection, let alone grasp the first solution, leaves them

isolated, bereft from the time of becoming that the children’s games harness. But it is also the

case that while the semantic hints in the word for lice can prompt consideration of the concealed

harmony of the universe, this same observation could be apparent if man were to look at the

obvious lessons within the natural world. B.56 thereby quivers between two dynamics, the

linguistic and the ontological, suggesting that knowledge of the tensions within the universe can

be attained in different ways, both of which are impossible if one is possessed of an illiterate

psyche.

Heraclitus posits that the boundaries of children are permeable to the knowledge

concealed within the semantic and natural environments. As such they critique the demarcated

and disembodied wisdom that is unable to incorporate the games of becoming and insight that

flow across these borders. Their disruptive play seizes the potential within the aporiae of

language, but, importantly, it does so through an intuitive relationship with the material world,

with insects in nature. The riddle may be a linguistic puzzle, but it is also inscribed upon the

bodies of the children: the uncovering of the lice requires the interaction of the children upon

43

39 The motivations of the source for this fragment, Hippolyus, the 4th century CE bishop of Rome, have been interestingly analyzed by Catherine Osborne in her Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy (Duckworth, 1987). Her elucidation of Hippolytus’ deployment of fragments to show that the Noetian, or Modalist Monarchian/Patripassianist position, about god being both the father and son, is based ‘not on Christ but on Heraclitus’ provides a compelling narrative of the features of Hippolytus’ own reading of Heraclitus with regard to what he saw as Heraclitus’ “denial of distinctions of dignity and moral value in his epistemological statements concerning the visible and the invisible and in his use of opposites which undermine conventional value judgements” p.169. But her analysis of the use of the Homer riddle for Hippolytus’ argument seems to absorb his own prejudices and thus misses the more subtle interplay between the visible and invisible that are at work here, p.163: “What the riddle (B.56) demonstrates is that the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown, are actually all the same and equally worthless, and that is what Homer failed to see. The quotation illustrates Heraclitus’ treatment of the visible and invisible as equal in status and equivalent to one another.”

each other’s bodies, picking out the lice they can see on one another. While Homer is confounded

by his epistemological isolation from the coordinated production of knowledge, the children

perform a type of shared cognition where the activity of multiple viewpoints figures the mind as a

distributed process.

Heraclitus’ interest in how language can manifest the hidden harmonies that structure the

world is visible in a similar incidence of word-play, which, as with the lice, evidences a latent

death within life, although in this case it is not the insects of nature that preserve this insight, but

a man-made artifact:

τῷ οὖν τόξῳ ὄνοµα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος. (B.48) The name of the bow is life, its work is death.

Another word for ‘bow’ (τόξῳ) is bios (βιός), which is only distinguished from the Greek word

for life (βίος) by the positioning of the accent which would not have been written in the time of

Heraclitus. While the two forms of bios would still have been pronounced differently, the

similarity is clearly designed to unsettle the listener, encouraging them to listen again, where such

equivocation provides the occasion for a turning back to recognize the deeper harmony between

words and world.40 Erin O’Connell’s book on the resonance between Heraclitus and the modern

philosopher Jacques Derrida used such fragments to trace similarities between the thinkers in

their disavowal of logocentrism and the notion of an ideal form of meaning behind the play of

44

40 Kahn p. 201. Dilcher claims that Heraclitus was not suggesting an etymology, but deliberately using a homonymic play to provoke awareness of the wavering nature of the world, p.129: ‘language reflects in its ambiguity correctly the inherent ambivalence of the corresponding reality’. Dilcher’s analysis privileges deliberate misreading too much, and resorts ultimately to a model of language as representation, p.133: ‘if names are used too properly they will adequately reflect the structure of life in a luminous and tense logos.’ Language may indeed reflect, but it also has a creative (and destructive) function within the material world.

language.41 By exposing contingency and the drift of linguistic certitude, such an impulse

certainly does seem to unhook the signifier from the signified, limning a deferral of meaning as

words play through time and as time plays through them, overlaying meanings upon one another.

But in addition to this, the Heraclitean ‘deconstruction’ of language plays out through material

objects that themselves carry cultural or natural connotations of the dynamic tension between

opposites, and in particular the presence of death with life. Just as the bow is that which can both

protect and destroy communities, so too does the name of lice testify to their burrowing of

deathly meaning within the rhythms of the natural world. And it is the play of children that

embodies these forces, able to expose the corpse within the literary corpus as their inventive

performance makes us recognize that the categories of thought cannot be separated from the

material world with which they interact.

The central notion of harmony from B.54, harmoniē (ἁρµονίη), also returns us to the

material world and the practices of knowledge. Charles Kahn has noted that the word has three

meanings which overlap the literal and figurative registers. He writes that this triple range of

meaning encompasses: “physical fitting together of parts, as in carpentry; military or social

agreement between potential opponents as in a truce of civic order; and musical attunement of

strings and tones”.42 Harmoniē places us in the realm of cultural objects created by men, such as

ships, bows and lyres, as well as in a world of conflict temporarily halted through agreement.

Kahn’s analysis, though, in emphasizing the woodworking and military aspects of harmoniē treats

it in spatial terms rather than as a temporal process. He thereby misses the essentially dynamic

45

41 O’Connell Heraclitus and Derrida: presocratic deconstruction p.104 that: “the discourses of each show that meaning is fundamentally indeterminate because the contexts which fix meaning are never stable...both bring attention to the unacknowledged tensions that arise in the logocentric production of meaning and question concepts associated with a metaphysics of presence: the signification of identity, origins and ‘Truth’.

42 Kahn p.196. On the musical qualities implied as a sequence of intervals, or key, and the potentially ethical ramifications of one’s choice of harmonia see in particular the discussion of Plato Rep. 398e in Barker Greek Musical Writings vol. 1.

nature of Heraclitus’ hidden harmoniē. For as Aristotle’s gloss on the excoriation of Homer

implies, the constitutive harmoniē in Heraclitus’ philosophy does not represent the end of the

time of the interplay between opposites, but rather, like most truces, any temporary cessation is

balanced by an imminent eruption of more violence. Indeed, the productive tension that this

harmoniē encapsulates requires such polemical alteration. It is the third aspect of harmoniē as

musical attunement that most effectively captures the temporal element central to Heraclitus,

where the performance of different elements acting in coordination cannot occur in an instant, but

takes time.

Harmoniē in the Heraclitean view, then, contains strife within it, just as the fitting

together of the bow with the linguistic fashionings of man joins it to the interwoven tendencies of

living and dying. And it is the coordinated play of children that embodies this harmoniē as they

overlap with the knowledge concealed across the world. Harmoniē thus keeps the tensions of the

cosmic, cultural and cognitive worlds intact precisely through its recursive movement to this time

of becoming:

οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόµενον ἑωυτῷ ὁµολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρµονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης. (B.51)

They do not understand how a thing differing from itself agrees with itself; it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre.

This movement highlights the force of differentiation (diapheromenon) concealed within the

temporary structures of objects, just as within political or cognitive systems. The back turning

harmoniē in the objects specified by Heraclitus illustrates the deeper principle he is invoking in

B.54. B.51 poses that understanding of this hidden harmoniē can, as with the grasping of lice,

arise from physical activities, as archers and musicians stretch these man made materials into

46

shape.43 A subsequent insight into the relationship between the tense oscillations of becoming and

stability is evidenced through the ability of the bow to threaten cultural change in the violence it

can enact, defending and destroying households and communities. And so too does the semantic

aporia of the word for bow brought out in B.48 manifest the entanglement of contest and life, just

as it indicates the inability of language to stabilize meaning through iteration: it also differs from

itself while agreeing with itself. The lyre can also instantiate cultural knowledge, but as Plato

intimates, it can implant rhythms into children that subvert the sameness of tradition and the

structures of society. Music can soothe, but also deceive, as the connotations of the word for

enchantment, thelgein, imply.44

The ‘turning back’ (palintropos) that constitutes the harmoniē also extends beyond the

linguistic and manmade spheres. Another fragment describes the turnings (tropai) of the cosmic

fire that structure the material world:

πυρὸς τροπαὶ πρῶτον θάλασσα, θαλάσσης δὲ τὸ µὲν ἥµισυ γῆ, τὸ δὲ ἥµισυ πρηστήρ (B. 31A) The turnings of fire, first sea; but of sea half is earth, half lightning storm.

This tropological movement inaugurates the becomings of the world. Yet it does not represent a

macrocosmic principle in the kosmos that is unattainable to humans. For the power of its

harmoniē, and the transformations it can enact over time also resides within the insects of nature

and the material of culture, as well as in the language that humans use to categorize them.

Homer’s deception in the riddle leaves his form of cognition divorced from the hidden harmoniē

that binds the kosmos together, a principle manifested in the turnings of the elements as in the

playing of a lyre and the arrows of a bow. In considering the malleability of children not as a

47

43 See Lewis Campbell’s comment “As the arrow leaves the string, the hands are pulling opposite ways to each other, and to the opposite parts of the bow” qv. Burnet (1930) 163. Snyder (1984) illustrates this point with reference to depictions on Greek vases.

44 cf Odyssey 1.136; 5.47; 10.291; 12.40. See Goldhill The Poet’s Voice.

weakness, but as an openness to this productive harmoniē, Heraclitus resituates their lack of fixity

as a power of becoming.

Heraclitus’ children as material historians

In playing with the astragaloi and the dangerous lice, the children in Heraclitus mark

their critique of political and cultural traditions through literally taking hold of the material of the

world. Their wielding of the disruptive knowledge within these objects distinguishes them from

adults who have failed to intuit and embody the patterns of the natural world, as well as those

patterns they themselves have inscribed upon objects in the construction and naming of them. We

have also noted how children’s attunement to these forces models a form of distributed cognition,

one where the boundaries between individuals are blurred as the act of thinking co-opts the

faculties of the body as well as those of other bodies with which they play. Another fragment

figures the acquisition of such knowledge from the tense harmonies that flow through the

Heraclitean world as a material process:

συλλάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συµφερόµενον διαφερόµενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα. (B.10) Graspings: whole and not whole, converging differing, singing together and apart, from all things one and from one thing all.

The LSJ offers both a literal and a metaphorical meaning for the word syllapsies (συλλάψιες).

Through linkage to the verbal form syllambanein it can signify an act of understanding, but it

etymologically means a ‘taking together’ with connotations of an arrangement of things and

sounds, just as we saw with the noun harmoniē. The cognitive act is here modeled as a

coordinated bringing together of elements. In fact, it is the literal taking hold of objects in the

case of children that performs knowledge, rather than this grasping functioning metaphorically to

48

represent insight. Aristotle’s subsequent use of syllapsies to indicate ‘pregnancy’ could also be

read through Heraclitus’ lens to represent how the body is very much involved in the gestation

and birth of new knowledge.45 Yet before Aristotle the central meaning of syllapsies, as Charles

Kahn points out in his commentary, is the physically violent act of ‘seizing’ or ‘arresting’.46 In

his view this allows B.10 to ‘resonate’ with other fragments in Heraclitus that deploy the cognate

verb katalēpsetai (καταλήψεται) meaning ‘seize’ and ‘catch up’ as in the following example:

πάντα τὸ πῦρ ἐπελθὸν κρινεῖ καὶ καταλήψεται (B.66) Fire coming on will discern and catch up with all things.

For Kahn, retreating to the perception of a deliberate ambiguity on Heraclitus’ part (“who ever

supposed Heraclitus was an easy author?”), this range of syllapsies allows it to mean both the

physical act of taking together and the cognitive act of understanding.47 Whereas we might rather

specify, as we have seen with the embodied grasping of knowledge in the performance of

children’s games, that the physical is part of the process of cognition, indeed, an essential part.

The other example of the verb katalēpsetai yields to this interpretation, foregrounding the

link between ‘seizing’ and the material construction of knowledge, though in this case it has not

been built truthfully:

Δίκη καταλήψεται ψευδῶν τέκτονας καὶ µάρτυρας. (B. 28B) Justice will catch up with those crafstmen and perjurers of lies

Dikē (‘justice’) invokes the ‘just strife’ (dikēn erin) of B.80 that caused the emergence of all

things (ginomena panta kat’ erin). We can thus position the seizing (syllapsies) of knowledge as a

49

45 LSJ 1672.

46 See for example Herodotus Hist. 2.121; 6.26.

47 Kahn p.282.

material process produced through interaction with the becomings of the kosmos, and one that is

also a violent overthrowing of false forms of understanding. The cognitive matter that the

syllapsies acquire further references the way that knowledge is manifested in the movements and

cultural activities of the world: ‘coming together and differing’ (sumpheremon diapheremon)

speak to the harmoniē of B.51 that also exhibited a differing (diapheremon) behind its façade,

while ‘singing together and apart’ (sunaidon diaidon), as with the lyre of B.51, embodies this

constitutive tension through the performance of music.

The ability of the playing children in Heraclitus to seize and incorporate such knowledge

can be elucidated in comparison with the historical materialism advocated by the early twentieth

century thinker Walter Benjamin who also took a keen interest in the wisdom performed by

children, including that of his own childhood in Berlin where he recounts the sensation of

merging into the creatures and objects of his environment.48 In particular, he advocated a model

of historical materialism that enjoined its adherent to take hold of the discarded matter of history,

attuning oneself to the latent forces that the right attitude could set free, forces that might, as with

the games of Heraclitus‘ children, reconfigure the traditions in which they have been situated.

Before we draw some more parallels between two thinkers separated by millenia, though that

distance could hardly prevent a productive crystallization between Benjamin’s redemptive grasp

back across time and the futural reach of Heraclitus’ mantic significations (Σίβυλλα δὲ µαινοµένῳ

στόµατι καθ ́ Ἡράκλειτον ἀγέλαστα καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστα καὶ ἀµύριστα φθεγγοµένη χιλίων ἐτῶν

ἐξικνεῖται τῇ φωνῇ διὰ τὸν θεόν B.92- ‘The Sibyl with raving mouth utters things joyless,

unadorned and unperfumed, and her voice carries through a thousand years because of the god

who speaks through her’), it will be worth discerning some basic lines of Benjamin’s approach.

50

48 See his Berlin Childhood Around 1900, especially pp.38-39 where the young Benjamin wills himself into a butterfly; pp.98-99 where the the narratives of flurries of snowflakes draw the observing child into their world, whence he returns to reconfigure the dimensions of his own mind with tales of far distant lands; pp 99-100 and p.132 where Benjamin notes his mimetic ability to disguise himself of words, especially those for furniture, allowing himself to be ‘distorted by similarity in all that surrounded me’, even though this carried the risk of being petrified in this new state by the gaze of a disapproving adult!

Benjamin’s work frequently strove to destroy existing narratives of progress through

subjecting his period, or object, of study to an immanent critique. Whether in the case of the

emergence of bourgeois modernity in the Haussmanisation of Paris in the mid 19th century, or the

bleak world of the baroque as depicted by the German mourning play, the Trauerspiel,

Benjamin’s method was to focus on the fragments and ruins that unfolded from the texts or the

subterranean buildings themselves and to bring their meaning to light in a ‘constellation’ with the

present. He considered cultural artifacts to be the sites of bitterly contested meanings, and held

that historicism’s teleological approach, which told the story from the viewpoint of the victors,

elided and disguised these alternative narratives whose existence was considered dangerous. Far

from avoiding the past’s challenge, Benjamin demands this danger be embraced by the historical

materialist:

For the destructive momentum in materialist historiography is to be conceived as the reaction to a constellation of dangers, which threatens both the burden of tradition and those who receive it. It is this constellation of dangers which the materialist presentation of history comes to engage. In this constellation is comprised its actuality; against its threat it must prove its presence of mind.49

According to Graeme Gilloch, Benjamin’s focus on material that somehow survived beneath the

totalising narratives of progress reflected his belief that “the world is splintered into fragments, is

legible only in fragments, and is representable solely through fragments.”50 The historian, as a

‘polytechnical engineer’51, is thus charged with reconfiguring these fragments in relation to the

present. The attention that must be paid to these partial objects allows a double result. On the one

hand, the object’s resistance to a dominant historical narrative enables the de-mythologisation of

that same narrative through exposing its contingency; while on the other, once rescued from this

51

49 Walter Benjamin Arcades Project 475, N10a,2.

50 Graeme Gilloch Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations p.237.

51 Gilloch op.cit. 240.

false chain of causality, this discarded material can unleash the liberating potential contained

within it.52 Though, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, this attentiveness to the object’s

‘ruination’ must not presuppose that it can be restored to its ‘true’ appearance: its palimpsest of

discordant meanings is what draws the interest of the materialist historian.53 Benjamin writes with

regard to these layers within the object in his Theses on the Concept of History that “the past

carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection.”54 The import of history as

it fashions these constellations between past and present is therefore nothing less than

revolutionary:

Thinking involves not only the movements of thoughts, but also their zero hour. Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone when he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past.55

The monadological structure of the object of history, in Benjamin’s thought, is defined in The

Arcades Project as “the historical confrontation that makes up the interior (and as it were the

bowels) of the historical object, and into which all the forces and interests of history enter on a

reduced scale.”56 To excavate and rescue this monad stills time, and thence the object enters into a

dialectical relationship with the present, and, “in a moment of danger”, threatens the tradition.57

The historical materialist, in a metaphor frequently repeated through both The Arcades Project

52

52 See D. Mellamphy & N. Mellamphy 2009 “What’s the ‘Matter’ with Materialism?: Walter Benjamin and the New Janitocracy” Janus Head 11. 164.

53 Eagleton Walter Benjamin, Or towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London, 2009) 21.

54 Theses on the Concept of History II.

55 Theses XVII. On Benjamin’s employment of the rhetoric of religious practice as a response to the failures of liberal society, see Margarete Kohlenbach’s Walter Benjamin: Self Reference and Religiosity (New York, 2002).

56 Arcades Project 475, N10.3.

57 Theses VI.

and The Theses on the Concept of History, is thus charged with blasting and exploding the object

out of the historical continuum. And furthermore, Benjamin defines this detonation as that which

causes the very emergence of thought: “An object of history is that through which knowledge is

constituted as the object’s rescue.”58

The reader of Heraclitus, in confronting the dynamical play of forces hidden within the

play of children, encounters this same task. The dominant narrative of the child as lack is first

evident in Homer and finds its ultimate pejorative association in Hesiod’s Works and Days where

a hundred year childhood is the ultimate symbol of the degeneracy of the Silver Age.59 While we

do hear of the odd exceptional child in the narratives of Herodotus or the CyroPaedia of

Xenophon, this brilliance is marked as a prophetic oddity or a preternatural ability understood

from the teleology of the adult.60 By the time this weakness and malleability has been theorized

into an educational principle in the political treatises of Plato, we are in danger of missing this

alternate historical image: one exposing the contingency of existing political and cultural

narratives as well as categories of thought. The dangerous play of children in Heraclitus threatens

the tradition, as it embodies, in forming a ‘monad’, those violent becomings, from the natural to

the semantic, that lie concealed beneath the dominant narratives of history. Yet Heraclitus makes

it clear that while children can perform new categorical structures as time moves its pieces

through them (B.52), they are also vulnerable to the legacy that time, and man, can pass onto

them:

γενόµενοι ζώειν ἐθέλουσι µόρους τʹ ἔχειν, µᾶλλον δὲ ἀναπαύεσθαι, καὶ παῖδας καταλείπουσι µόρους γενέσθαι. (B.20) Having been born they wish to have their lots, or rather stay in them, and they leave behind children to meet with their dooms in turn.

53

58 Arcades Project, 476, N11.4.

59 Hesiod Op. 127-131.

60 Eg. Herodotus Hist. 5.29.

Heraclitus, therefore, offers his audience the chance to rescue their ludic constellation, and in

doing so to experience the hidden harmoniē that the revolutionary play of children threatens to

unleash.

But we could also say that there are different levels of Benjaminian materialist history at

play here. Since not only do the disavowed children of the traditional narrative make a plea for

our own tropological movement to blast them out of the continuum, but they themselves, in

grasping material objects which manifest the dynamical becomings of the world could be

characterized as historical materialists, offering a model of historical analysis for us to imitate.61

In their play with objects they cause new constellations of meanings that threaten the dominant

structures of adult thought: their excavation of the latent forces within the material world seizes

and condemns those who construct and swear by a false narrative (ψευδῶν τέκτονας καὶ

µάρτυρας B.28 - ‘those craftsmen and perjurers of lies’). The seizure of the lice, the goat’s bones

of the astragaloi, and the pessoi of the timeplay of aion, makes a constellation between children

and the object. And as Benjamin notes, such a grasping can redefine its orientation in time: “The

present determines where, in the object from the past, that object’s fore and after-history diverge

so as to circumscribe its nucleus.” 62

54

61 A recent call to arms by Melamphy and Melamphy (op.cit.) made this link between the play of children and the imperatives of a Benjaminian materialist historiography. They wrote that, “The materialist historian, like the infant, must open herself up to the historical possibilities of the object at hand.” (p.164) And this willingness to enter into the emancipatory powers of the discarded object is figured as a return to an “original unity between human and material world” (p.166) They continue to evoke their version of a Benjaminian notion of history with such colorings of a lost stability and unity behind the now fragmented state of affairs under the mystifying forces of bourgeois culture. By invoking Benjamin’s writings on Adamic language in his “On Language as Such” they suggest that history as child’s play, or ‘messy antics’ in their formulation, also posits “a unity of word and world” (p.167) with revolutionary possibilities. But the notion of a return to such an originary unity elides the way that Benjamin conceived of the world in a perpetual state of fragmentation and that the re-affirmation of forces discarded by history enacts a destructive momentum for the sake of the present.

62 Arcades Project 476. N11.5.

The status of children within Heraclitus’ text as historians, alert to the accretion of

historical forces within objects and our names for them, resonates with the revolutionary,

“messianic”, zeal that Walter Benjamin advocates.63 Fragment B.70, preserved in Iamblichus,

neatly encapsulates the way that the material they play with has epistemological consequences:

Ἡ. παίδων ἀθύρµατα νενόµικεν εἶναι τὰ ἀνθρώπινα δοξάσµατα. (B.70) Heraclitus believed that the toys of children are human opinions.

This fragment’s syntax deliberately makes it unclear whether the toys or the opinions are to be

seen as the primary object of comparison. As we noted in our argument against Kahn, Heraclitus’

use of such carefully balanced structures represents the interweaving of the levels of his world,

where he refuses to privilege any term as real and the other as metaphorical. And as with the

syllapsies of B.10 such interweaving gestures towards the materiality of thought. So here in B.70

the traditional interpretation that considers children’s toys as a pejorative metaphor for worthless

human opinions, based on the image of childhood as lack, reverses. Instead, through the

resonance with the other childhood fragments and those showing the plasticity of influence

between the epistemological and the material, Heraclitus proposes that the children’s literal

manipulation of objects, pregnant with differential forces, enacts the becomings of thought, that

is, the emergence of new opinions arising upon the old.

Benjamin also conceived of the natural inclination of children to play with things as

forming a synthesis between the structures of matter and thought. The knowledge manifested in

the toys they wield is thus of great value:

55

63 Theses II.

Every childhood achieves something great and irreplaceable for humanity. By the interest it takes in technological phenomena, by the curiosity it displays before any sort of invention or machinery, every childhood binds the accomplishments of technology to the old worlds of symbol. There is nothing in the realm of nature that from the outset would be exempt from such a bond.64

The child, in its fascinating montage of new technology with the mythological significations of

old, creates a constellation that benefits the future, just as it rescues the past. Such a binding is an

historical act, alert to the meanings concealed across nature waiting to be released by the

redemptive grasp of the present.

Yet there is a deeper level here that elucidates the merging of children themselves into the

realm of nature. The incorporation of the deadly lice in the riddling of Homer and the

manipulation of the astragaloi as a lethal threat to the Ephesian political classes suggested that

children acquire their potency in Heraclitus through their own permeability to the knowledge

within the matter of the world. The hermeneutic turning back (palintropos B.51) to the

harmonies of the world folded the bodies of children into its play of forces, creating a monad in

Benjamin’s terminology. In a way, this blurring of boundaries accounts for the way that the

unsettling knowledge embodied by children within Heraclitus’ fragments can be overlooked.

They too seem to disappear, literally performing the sort of hidden harmony that is stronger than

the obvious one (B.54).

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64 Arcades Project, 461. N2a,1.

Chapter Two: Timeplay

¿Qué trama es éstadel será, del es y del fue?....De una materia deleznable fui hecho, de misterioso tiempoAcaso el manantial está en mí.Acaso de mi sombrasurgen, fatales e ilusorios, los días. Jorge Luis Borges - Heráclito lines 14-16, 22-26.1

The previous chapter situated Heraclitus’ topology of children as a space for challenging

existing, and petrified, forms of adult knowledge, from Homer to the ruling political elite of

Ephesus. Their play functioned to expose the aporetic moments within language, harnessing the

deadly rhythms of the natural and manmade worlds in order to open up such static cultural

formations to provocative new encounters. It was in this way that the cooperative playing of

children worked to model, and enact, the emergence of thought as it wielded and was buffeted by

the flows of forces, be they linguistic, ludic or ritual, that played out through them. Yet the

valency of this collective embodiment of knowledge was made more potent by the liminality of

the children with regard to their movements and the structures against which they fought. Their

plasticity and indeterminacy functioned as a strength in the adoption of new epistemological

configurations, but also positioned them as vulnerable to the normative cultural positionings that

would seek to restrain these powers of differentiation. This liminality was visible in the way that

children were associated with death, both as an active power they invoked (B.56, B.121) as well

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1 On the question of Borges’ relation to time and Heraclitus see Howard Giskin’s article “Mystical Phenomenology of the Book in Borges” in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1990), pp 235-247. Giskin stresses Borges’ kinship with the metaphysical idealists, especially the Schopenhaurean vision of experiencing the will through transcending time and space. Borges’ poem about Heraclitus could similarly seen as gesturing toward the fictiveness of the dimensions of time within the world of representation when filtered through the perception of the human subject. Yet Borges’ intuitive materialist vision of time in/for Heraclitus cannot, I think, be merely related to a distrust of the senses, behind which is an idealist ontology provoking the possibility of a ‘mystical knowledge of the self’ (244). Instead he suggests that the flow of time, with the weave (‘trama’) of past, present and future, is very much to be identified with the human subject.

as passively at the mercy of doomed generational becomings (B.20). Death did not, though,

function to shut down their thinking: it was a shock capable of causing new patterns of thought to

emerge and intersecting forces to coalesce with the joins still visible.2 The association of children

with finitude, conversely, opened up fresh relational possibilities just as it destroyed previous

ones.3

The question of finitude must return us to the problematic of time in Heraclitus and to

question whether the sort of provocative harmonies and tropological collisions that mark

Heraclitus’ kosmos also work to make time an efficacious force, liable to create new passages, not

just to mark their movement as Aristotle will formulate it.4 The key fragment in this regard,

uniting the questions of play, children and time is B.52:

Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη (B.52) Life/Time (aion) is a child playing, moving pessoi. Kingship is of the child.

This chapter will analyse the word αἰών (aion) and consider the shifting connotations of this term

within the larger mythical and philosophical traditions. In particular, it will become important to

interrogate its relationship to another word for time, χρόνος (chronos), and to consider how

Heraclitus’ depiction of aion as a kingly child at play works to intertwine the finite and the

infinite as a creative force, compressing the dimensions of time into an arresting and pregnant

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2 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy, define philosophy as the art of joining concepts, a bricolage of ideas that is compared to the constructing of a dry stone wall.

3 My approach to the need to think finitude is much inspired by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Section 50, p.250 encapsulates the way that death is what enables man as existence (Dasein) to be in the world, just as it provides a limit beyond which he cannot pass: “Death is a possibility of Being that each Dasein must itself take over. With death Dasein stands before itself in its most proper potentiality for Being. What is involved in this possibility is nothing less than the being-in-the-world of Dasein as such.” For more analysis of Heidegger’s concept of finitude see Lawrence Hatab Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian contributions to moral philosophy; an interesting reading of Heidegger in relation to a variety of artistic media, from poetry to painting to film is offered by Kaja Silverman Flesh of my Flesh.

4 Aristotle’s definition will be discussed in more detail below. But the two main incidences occur in De Met. I.IX and Phys. IV. 10ff.

moment loaded with the potential to forge alternate political, cognitive and cosmological

registers.

The Context of B.52 in Lucian and Hippolytus

The accepted form of the child’s timeplay fragment comes from the 4th century CE

bishop Hippolytus of Rome, whose volume of quotations and evident access to a book of

Heraclitus’ philosophical sayings, though most likely from one of the compendiums such as the

vetusta placita, makes his version more reliable than the other preserved by the 2nd century CE

writer Lucian of Samosata.5 Lucian’s account, however, contains a valuable act of interpretation

that portrays aion as a principle of destruction and creation. In his satiric Philosophies for Sale

the buyer asks Heraclitus why, in comparison to the laughing Democritus, he is constantly crying.

Heraclitus’ response seems to be a loose paraphrase of the Theophrastan doxography, replete with

the notion of an imminent conflagration of the world for which men are to be pitied, as well as

evincing an existential ennui that nothing has any meaning since a wild storm of becoming has

confounded joy and joylessness, wisdom and ignorance.6 In a typically bathetic moment, the

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5 On the question of Hippolytus’ knowledge of Heraclitus see in particular the study of Catherine Osborne Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy. Geoffrey Kirk, Heraclitus: the cosmic fragments, provides a fine account of the likelihood of a compendium of Heraclitus’ fragments in the vetusta placita.

6 The question of whether Heraclitus believed in a periodic conflagration, an “ecpyrosis” has been much debated. Theophrastus’ comment that there were indeed ἐκπυρώσιας at certain intervals, recorded in Diogenes Laetius Vit.Phil.IX.8, appears to have influenced the subsequent tradition, especially the Stoics who highlighted the role of ecpyrosis. Note however Plutarch’s objection, Def. Or. 415ff. , that “l see the Stoic ecpyrosis spreading over the works of Hesiod, as of Heraclitus and Orpheus.” Among early modern scholars most (eg.., Zeller, Diels) accepted the ascription of an epyrosis to Heraclitus, even though there are no direct references to it in the surviving fragments. However, Karl Reinhardt’s Parmenides argued strongly against this interpretation and with the exception of Kahn p.134ff., all recent commentators (Kirk, Gigon, Marcovich, Bollack-Wismann) reject the theory. On the Stoic valuation of elements in Heraclitus they found alliance with, for example that of the pervading material role of fire, a need to live ‘according to nature’ (ὁµολογουµένως ζῆν), an analogy between the micro and macrocosmic spheres see in particular A.Long ‘Heraclitus and Stoicism’ in his Stoic Studies. Long notes, however, that the Stoic perception of these similarities did not necessarily mean they existed in the first place in Heraclitus’ philosophy, rather their interpretation moulded the fragments to suit their own priorities.

beautiful cosmic chasm of pourings of Heraclitus fragment B.124 (σάρµα εἰκῇ κεχυµένων ὁ

καλλιστος, ὡς φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, ὁ κόσµος) is transformed by Lucian into a bowl of porridge (ἐς

κυκεῶνα), where everything is said to change under the game of aion.7 When the potential buyer

inquires as to the nature of this aion, Heraclitus replies, “Παῖς παίζων, πεσσεύων, διαφερόµενος,

συµφερόµενος” - ‘A child playing, playing at pessoi, taking apart, and bringing together’. Lucian

is presumably interpolating part of fragment B.10 from the pseudo Aristotelian De Mundo

(συµφερόµενον διαφερόµενον) which was used as an illustration of the flexibility of the cognitive

‘graspings’ (συλλάψιες), to lay hold of the antagonistic, if mutually determining, tendencies of the

Heraclitean cosmos. It also gestures toward fragment B.51 in describing the back turning

harmony as that which people ‘fail to understand’ (οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν) how in ‘differing from itself

agrees with itself’ (διαφερόµενον ἑωυτῷ ὁµολογέει). For Lucian, therefore, the child aion not

only embodies the imbrication of destruction and construction within the Heracitean lebenswelt, it

indicates that such activity is synonymous with its philosophical method.8 Furthermore, the

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7 Kahn, p.85, follows Marcovich, p.548, in translating B.124 as a ‘heap of sweepings’, p.85. Although Kahn expresses doubts about its authenticity. The manuscript contains σὰρξ (‘flesh’) which was restored to σάρµα (‘heap’ or ‘chasm’) by Diels. Marcovich dismisses McDiarmid’s reading, ‘Note on Heraclitus fr. 124’ American Journal of Philology 62 (1941) 492-4, which translated this original version as ‘the fairest man (not cosmos) is flesh composed of parts scattered at random’ - a notion that speaks loudly to Empedocles’ subsequent account of zoogony in which at one stage limbs float around separately before coalescing into individuals (Empedocles B.57). Without weighing into this philological argument too heavily, and deciding whether to position the fragment with regard to the microcosmic constitution of man, or the macrocosmic pattern of the world, it seems worthwhile emphasizing the original meaning of the verb χέω, ‘to pour’, from which κεχυµένων is a participle. Given the importance of rivers, and their constitutive motion and overlapping flows as a model for the constancy of change in Heraclitus’s philosophy (eg., B.12, B.91) which was acknowledged in antiquity (eg. Cratylus, as a Heraclitean, is recorded by Aristotle to have supposed, in riffing off B.91, that one cannot step into the same river once, Met.III, 5, 1010a14) it is expedient to keep this liquid aspect to B.124, gesturing as it does to a fluid overlapping that occurs over time, rather than a refuse dump of confused items spread over space. This ‘generous’ reading of B.124, fitting into a central image and theme of Heraclitus’ philosophy, is in opposition to Dilcher, p.120, who believes the element of ‘randomness’ disallows the Heraclitean idea of a cohesive structuring tension (as in B.51). As a result he considers this fragment to express the non-Heraclitean view, or a misinterpretation of the authentic vision of the world. There may be some merit to this argument, but accepting it would make it even more likely that the fluid pourings of (κεχυµένων) should be emphasized since they reflect other themes. The chasm or heap (σάρµα) might therefore represent the confused thinking that conceives of Heraclitus’ idea of differentiation and flux over time rather in spatial terms as a confused mess.

8 In doing so Lucian foregrounds the disruptive qualities that are attached to play (and philosophy), in distinction to Kahn, p.227 who interprets B.52 as referring to changes according to fixed rules.

metaphor of child’s play infects the abstraction of time, situating both within the material world

as its dynamic principles.

The authenticity of the version preserved by Hippolytus in book nine of his Refutation of

the Heresies is assured by the numerousness of the fragments, sixteen in total, that are not attested

elsewhere, and additionally by the more nuanced syntax and verbal choices these fragments

contain which are representative of Heraclitus’ dense, yet carefully constructed style.9 The reason

for his numerous citations of Heraclitus is to disprove the validity of a theological position, the

so-called Patripassianist or Modalist Monarchian view, held by a rival of Hippolytus, Noetus, the

bishop of Smyrna, and his disciples. This was the view that the trinity encompassed three aspects

of God, who therefore had the ability to appear as the father, the son and the holy spirit. Christ

and God were thus seen as the same, consequently God was held to have died on the cross as

Jesus and to have been resurrected. This position signified, for Hippolytus, a denial of radical

distinctions between immortality and human finitude and the ethical differences contained

therein.

Intriguingly, Hippolytus accuses Noetus of being a disciple not of Christ, but of

Heraclitus, whose fragments are seen to herald Noetus’s subsequent “rejection of all convenient

distinctions in theology, ethics and social value systems”.10 The nineteen quotations of Heraclitus

that Hippolytus deploys to indicate the pagan origin of Noetus’ theological fallacy are, thus,

frequently those concerned with apparent opposites that reveal themselves to be one and the

same. Hippolytus considers Noetus’ intellectual filiation with this tradition as the cause behind his

own belief that God’s multiple manifestations and ability to undergo death can be reconciled with

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9 On this principle of deducing authenticity through the balanced constructions and terse formulations of Heraclitus’ fragments see in particular Roman Dilcher, Studies in Heraclitus.

10 Osborne p.181 describes how Hippolytus’ reading of Heraclitus’ opposites translates Aristotle’s depiction of Heraclitus’ epistemological inconsistency in his Metaphysics as a denial of the principle of non-contradiction (Met.3.1005b23ff.) into the realm of ethics.

the singularity of his immortality. One example will suffice to illustrate the abhorrent theological

confusion that Hippolytus views in Heraclitus:

ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες. (B. 63)

Immortals mortals, mortals immortal, living the other’s death, dead in the other’s life.

It is within this context that Hippolytus cites the accepted version of aion as a playful

child. Catherine Osborne interprets Hippolyus’ reasoning as follows:

Two contrasts are undermined here: that between child’s play and kingly rule, and that between eternity and childhood. Both are relevant to the parallel with Noetus, who attributed the temporal childhood of Christ to the eternal god the Father and hence maintained that the ‘king of all things’ was for a time nothing else than a child playing.11

Hippolytus’ method is to assign ethical or moral value to what he views as opposites, and in his

commentary on this passage makes it clear that aion, as eternity, represents a positive ceaseless

quality of being, whereas the child belongs to the mortal world of finitude and ephemeral worth.

Osborne’s reading, valorising Hippolytus’ logic with her own inattention toward the semantic

flexibility of the fragments, posits that the central element that Heraclitus’ fragments lack is an

understanding of difference as the basis of culture.12 Nevertheless, Hippolytus’ attempt to force

the pairs of opposites and tendencies into static ethical polarities unravels. Their resistance

highlights, instead, that the overlapping potentials within categories, objects, language and the

natural world can only be actualized by the temporal process of differentiation: a process which

the embodied performance of children models. Difference is precisely at the heart of Heraclitus’

theory of culture, as long as one recognizes it as an ongoing and originary condition, not as a

subordinate category of identity.

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11 Osborne p.157.

12 Osborne p.182.

Hippolytus stresses his conception of aion as eternity by repeatedly employing it, as in

the phrase δι᾽αἰῶνιος αἰωνίος (di’ aiōnios aiōnios - ‘eternal through eternity’), to foreground the

notion of time throughout time, a never ending condition that is not subject to alteration or

change.13 His disapproval of the association of this immortal concept with the short term and

insignificant temporality of the child is evident in the assignation of αἰωνίος to characterize the

kingship (ἡ βασιληίη) of the second half of the fragment, which in his reading must refer, in its

superior qualities, to God, not man, let alone child. In spite of his attempts to circumscribe the

semantic range, and moral status, of Heraclitus’ terms, their associations proliferate away from

him. In subsequently citing fragment B.53 where war is the father and king of all (Πόλεµος

πάντων µὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς) with powers of liberation and enslavement, the

manmade creation of war, in Hippolytus’ reading, attaches itself to his description of aion,

bringing the eternal immortal realm back into the warring becomings of the mortal world.

Hippolytus’ exposure of Noetus’ and Heraclitus’ confusion over the created and the uncreated,

between mortal and immortal, cannot maintain its distance from the text it seeks to undermine. In

a similar way to Lucian’s paraphrase, aion forges an affiliation with the dynamic structurings of

Heraclitus’ cosmos, wherein it not only acts as the creator of difference, but as that which carries

difference within its playful movements, operating immanently.

Hippolytus’ initial gloss (Ref. IX.9.1) of the opposites of Heraclitus, along with the

expected ‘mortal-immortal’ (θνητὸν ἀθάνατον ) and ‘father-son’ (πατέρα υἱόν), contains the

unusual pairing logos-aion (λόγον αἰῶνα), further serving to confound the distinctions Hipploytus

is trying to make. Even though Osborne is right to dismiss Ramnoux’ claim of gnostic precedent

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13 Hippolytus Ref. IX.9.4. αἰωνίος is first used in Plato’s Timaeus where the text tries to establish the eternity of the everliving model. See below for further discussion of Plato’s attempt to distinguish this eternal aspect of aion as opposed to the generational finitude of beings in the material world.

here14 in claiming that both logos and aion are creations of the father, she overlooks the question

of what sort of falsely collapsed opposition this pair was originally supposed to indicate. Based

on the preceding three pairs in the example we would expect aion to represent the immortal

element (as stressed elsewhere in the citation of B.52) and logos the mortal and divisible. The

following two groupings, however, upset that order:

Ἡ. µὲν οὖν φησιν εἶναι τὸ πᾶν διαιρετὸν ἀδιαίρετον, γενητὸν ἀγένητον, θνητὸν ἀθάνατον, λόγον αἰῶνα, πατέρα υἱόν, θεὸν δίκαιον (Ref. IX.9.1)

Heraclitus says that the all is divisible and indivisible, generated and ungenerated,

mortal and immortal, word and eternity, father and son, divine and just

The child as son would now be associated with the uncreated, the immortal and aion; the father

with the perishable, the contingent and logos. The first two pairings, whose words have no

parallels in any of the surviving fragments of Heraclitus appear to reference Plato’s Timaeus

where the description of the time, chronos (χρονός), of the sensible world is characterized as

created and divisible in distinction to the intelligible and uncreated eternity, aion, within the realm

of ideas.15 Yet this more obvious opposition between chronos and aion is not employed by

Hippolytus, despite its evident currency in the NeoPlatonic writers he is familiar with, such as

Plotinus.16 The alternate term for time, chronos, is not found in Heraclitus’ fragments, but neither

are the forms γενητὸν ἀγένητον (‘generated ungenerated’). Hippolytus’ uneasy handling of aion

evidences its problematic status. He tries both through repetition to make it mean eternity in

distinction to the realm of child’s play, as if to wrest it from the ludic to the theological, the finite

to the infinite, all while situating it against a concept, logos, that would also connote both the

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14 Osborne p.149; Clarence Ramnoux “Commentaire a la refutation des heresies” - Revue Philosophique 1961-2. Kirk p.66, similarly subscribes to a Gnostic explantation, suggesting that aion is seen as anterior to logos which stands as one of its creations.

15 Plato Timaeus 52a. For discussion of this passage see below.

16 See Plotinus Enn. III.7 where aion as eternity is described as a manifestation of intelligence.

immortal and mortal realms for a thinker in Hippolytus’ context. The pair logos aion (λόγον

αἰῶνα) thus forms an uneasy caesura in the sequence, disturbing the logical order and unsettling

the binary distinctions Hippolytus is trying to separate out. The authentic fragment that this

indirect reporting of Heraclitus’ list of opposites introduces displays the sort of tension that

Hippolytus is unwilling to countenance:

οὐκ ἐµοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁµολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι (B.50)Listening not to me, but the logos it is wise to agree that all things are one.

Here, as in fragment B.1, logos is seen to operate on different levels, both being the pragmatic

performed discourse of Heraclitus, and representing a cohesive world pattern that can be

perceived, intuitively, outside the realm of language. Geoffrey Kirk’s commentary situates the

logos on the level of the universe, as a form of disembodied reason or divine account, very much

in line with the Stoic re-appropriation of Heraclitus.17 Yet while the logos does move between

these levels of micro and macrocosm, it is this fluidity by itself which makes it unstable within

Hippolytus’ pair. Hippolytus’ hermeneutic decision comes back to haunt him, since by depicting

the Heraclitean opposites as static and opposing conditions wrongfully coalesced into one, his

own attempt to reinsert meaningful distinctions becomes necessarily exclusionary, forcing

separation between terms that constantly invoke each other and move across such boundaries.

Hippolytus’s reading, like Lucian, illustrates that the time of aion cannot be divorced from the

becomings and passages of Heraclitus’ epistemological and ontological worlds. The metaphor of

child’s play, with all the associations that this invokes across the rest of the fragments, draws aion

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17 Kirk p.70 viewed the logos as the formula of things. Guthrie History of Greek Philosophy 470-471 similarly highlights the Stoic elements of logos, postulating it as a transcendental arche that directs the world, even as it manifests itself within it. Alternate views that highlight the role of logos with regard to human levels of interpretation are to be found in Dilcher, Kahn, Nussbaum. For detailed discussion of the logos and its movement between the macro and microcosmic spheres see chapter 4, Beyond Boundaries.

into the finite realm of death and difference, just as it makes child’s play a principle of cosmic

being.

Aion in the Poetic Tradition - Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Euripides

The multivalency of Heraclitus’ term aion perseveres throughout centuries, and resists

being reduced to a single meaning of eternity, its afterlife, to adopt Walter Benjamin’s phrase,

adding spectral dimensions to Hippolytus’ reading. An analysis of the mutations this term

undertakes in the tradition outside of Heraclitus will suggest whether his usage is especially

unusual, or whether the tensions present in Heraclitus’ deployment of the term are consistent with

its range. A third possibility is that, as we saw clearly with Hippolytus of Rome, it is Heraclitus’

emphasis upon the shifting dimensionality of aion which unsettles later attempts to control its

meaning.

In Homer the term refers to the lifetime of an individual and not eternity, and is thus very

much at risk from the forces circulating within the sensible world. The description of Hera’s

entreaty to Zeus not to allow Sarpedon to cheat death indicates its vulnerability and finitude:

αὐτὰρ ἐπὴν δὴ τόν γε λίπῃ ψυχή τε καὶ αἰών, πέµπειν µιν θάνατόν τε φέρειν καὶ νήδυµον ὕπνον

εἰς ὅ κε δὴ Λυκίης εὐρείης δῆµον ἵκωνται, ἔνθά ἑ ταρχύσουσι κασίγνητοί τε ἔται τε τύµβῳ τε στήλῃ τε: τὸ γὰρ γέρας ἐστὶ θανόντων. (Iliad XVI. 453-7)

But when soul and aion have left him, then send death and sweet sleep to bear him away until they come to the land of wide Lycia, there shall his companions and relations bury him with a mound and pillar: for this is the honour due to the dead.

Martha Nussbaum has noted how the occurence of the term psyche (ψυχή) in Homer only occurs

passively at the time of death in part of an argument that makes claims for Heraclitus’ radical

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reinvention of the term as a life controlling cognitive faculty.18 We can similarly conceptualize

aion here as something only mentioned in proximity to its erasure, devoid of any active power

and merely a retrojective marker of a life already completed. Heraclitus will transform these

passive aspects of aion and psyche from Homer into vital principles that range beyond the

individual as they catalyze fresh cultural and epistemological positions. Other examples of the

occurrence of aion in Homer, though, for example at the death of Patroclus (Iliad XIX. 27) and

earlier in a foreboding of Sarpedon’s demise (Iliad V. 685), cement its use at this time as an

inactive boundary of existence. A revealing section of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus is stranded

on Calypso’s island, further implies that the desiring structure of nostalgia is even able to shorten

one’s aion:

οὐδέ ποτ᾽ ὄσσε δακρυόφιν τέρσοντο, κατείβετο δὲ γλυκὺς αἰὼν νόστον ὀδυροµένῳ, ἐπεὶ οὐκέτι ἥνδανε νύµφη. (Odyssey V. 151-3)

His eyes were never dry of tears, and sweet aion was flowing away in grieving for his homecoming, since the nymph no longer pleased him.

Aion has no power of its own in Homer, representing that which a mortal possesses:

vulnerable both to the disturbances of the battlefield as well as the psychotopography of the

individual, able to dissolve into one’s tears. Thus it connotes both life and the time of life, but

also a life force, though only in the sense of one that can erode at different rates. Coubaritsis’

analysis of the evolution of aion attaches this notion of a vital force to the Homeric usage,

particularly with reference to the association with psyche in the Sarpedon passage above.19 His

argument, as we shall see below, ingeniously re-inscribes the Platonic notion of childhood as lack

and limitation onto Heraclitus’ playful aion in order to subjugate it to a prior notion of a founding

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18 See Martha Nussbaum, ‘Ψυχή in Heraclitus, I’ pp.1-6. Her reading of psyche is discussed fully in chapter 4, Beyond Boundaries.

19 L. Coubaritisis ‘La notion d’aion chez Hércalite’ in K.J.Boudoris ed. Ionian Philosophy, Athens 1989, pp.104-113.

time, supplying a demiourgic chronos as this principle. As a consequence he denies the

immanence of Heraclitus’ kosmos and the back-stretching harmony (παλίντροπος ἁρµονίη B.51)

of its creative timeplay in favor of a transcendental origin and creator, an arche (ἀρχή -

‘beginning, originary principle’) in the Aristotelian sense. For Coubaritsis there is a strong

continuity in meaning between Homer and Heraclitus, and indeed through to Aristotle, with aion

as a marker of the life appropriate for each being. However, Coubaritsis’ desire to plot a coherent

evolution of the term from the life force of Homer through to its reversal into a principle of

unchanging eternity in Plato and in the NeoPlatonic writers such as Plotinus, yoking these

disparate uses together through their common dependence on the notion of aion as a fitting

lifetime, underplays Heraclitus’ important role in its transformation. He does not recognize the

unsteady valence of the term as layers of meaning accrete, just as they can shear off to reveal

jagged edges, making Plato and his followers susceptible to the associations Heraclitus invokes.

Heraclitus’ employment of aion as a vitalist and positive force directly engages with the

concomitant Homeric sense of dissolution and powerlessness. His recasting of the term into a

productive, playful and creative capacity, linked to the unstable potentialities of children and, as

we shall see, the constant transformations of fire and swellings of knowledge, modifies the

Homeric usage in turning aion from passive into active, while nonetheless maintaining its deathly

tenor. As noted in the previous chapter, Heraclitus’ criticism of Homer arises in part due to the

latter’s wish that strife, eris (ἐρις), would disappear from the world (A.22): to do so would deny

the constitutive role of eris in the interplay between the tense and mutually determining

tendencies of the world. Heraclitus’ revaluation of the role of strife and war turns the destruction

that can truncate aion into a principle of creation:

εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεµον ἐόντα ξυνόν, καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόµενα πάντα κατ ́ ἔριν καὶ χρεών. (B. 80)

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It is necessary to realize that war is common and strife is justice and that everything comes to pass in accordance with strife.

War, polemos (πόλεµος), is as an active principle in itself, and is capable of marking out

ontological and cultural distinctions:

Πόλεµος πάντων µὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς µὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς µὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους. (B.53)

War is father of all, and king of all, and some he has revealed as gods, others as men, some he has made slaves, others free.

Yet to return to fragment B.52 we are reminded that not only is aion a child at play, but also that

kingly power (ἡ βασιληίη) belongs to the child, thus forging a link between aion, war, and strife.

But the power of this matrix comes, in part, from transforming the notion of the vulnerability of

aion to the machinations of war in Homer’s world view into an originary dehiscence behind all

creation in Heraclitus’.20 The Heraclitean harmony (ἁρµονίη - harmoniē (B.51), does then turn

back (παλίντροπος) to this vulnerability as the condition of creation, and not as a scissure that

demands an ontologically prior, and hence holistic, foundation. In its play the child aion is able to

mark out the boundaries of new lives and relations across the shifting coordinates of the

Heraclitean kosmos, but only, perhaps, because its own diminishing life force requires the

creation of new bonds in order to survive.

In Homer, therefore, aion seems to inhabit the individual, to be susceptible to diminution,

in fact even to contain this capacity as its ontological precondition, and ultimately to leave the

human, powerless to alter the course of events, in death. As the time, or weakening force, of life it

is defined by its inevitable cessation. And whilst it is necessary for life, it adds nothing positive to

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20 This valuation of a foundational darkness is interestingly picked up in the psychoanalytic writings of Jacques Lacan, in particular his discussion of Antigone in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p.299 in regard to what he takes as Heraclitus’ prioritizing of difference over Platonic identity as a route to think the discord at the heart of the death drive. Lacan also employs fragment B. 15 which states that Hades and Dionysus are on and the same in order to to gloss his conception of the death drive. On this relation see in particular Alain Badiou’s essay ‘Lacan and the PreSocratics’.

it, unless we read back into it the seed of the Heraclitean reversal and its transvaluation of

vulnerability into a necessary foundation behind the creatively destructive transformations of his

world.21 Elsewhere the term becomes separated from possession by the individual and is

employed to mark a period of life. Hesiod’s Theogony employs the term when describing the

typology of wives that can befall men, after Zeus has created woman in punishment for

Prometheus’ theft of fire and bestowal of it among humans. The fashioning of woman, an evil

(κακόν) in exchange for fire (πυρὸς) (Theogony 570) strikingly anticipates Heraclitus fragment B.

90 where the cosmological principle of fire and its transformations is likened to economic

activity:22

πυρός τε ἀνταµοιβὴ τὰ πάντα καὶ πῦρ ἁπάντων ὅκωσπερ χρυσοῦ χρήµατα καὶ χρηµάτων χρυσός. (B.90)

All things are requitals for fire, and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods.

The noun ἀνταµοιβὴ functions both to indicate exchange, but also punishment, both meanings of

which are contained in prior usages of the term by Archilochus, a poet whom Heraclitus knew

well enough to disparage in his own style (B.42).23 With Heraclitus, though, in distinction to

Hesiod, fire itself has become an enforcer of the just punishment that structures the turnings of

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21 It is in this unstable foundation of death under the world of becoming that we find the solution to Coubaritisis’ dilemma, p.105: “Héraclite rend possible l’apparition de deux problématiques importantes pour la suite de l’histoire du fondement: soit ce fondement, quel que soit le nom qu’on lui assigne, s’affirme comme une assise stable, soit il implique l’absence même d’un fond comme un fond sans fond.”

22 On this equation of the monetary associations of fire and commerce see further Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind, where he writes, p.232, that this fragment “has two points of comparison: fire resembles precious metal money as universal equivalent, but also as effecting universal transformation according to the logos.” The notion of a logos, as a formula, within the transformations and transactions of fire is central to Seaford’s desire to posit an abstract conception of the unifying role of fire, and elsewhere mind (p.242) controlling the concrete world of goods.

23 See Archilochus 74.7 for the exchanges of nomos, and 65 for the notion of punishment (ἀνταµείβεσθαἰ τινα κακοῖς - ‘to pay something back in punishment to the ill’). On Heraclitus’ Archilochean flourish at the end of B.42 and his imitation of the former’s particular invective mode see Bollack and Wismann p.158.

the kosmos through its materialized graspings and arresting divisions of all things (B.66). The

relationship between Zeus and fire is a question we will return to, in particular with regard to its

reception in the early Stoic Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus, but it is clear that this Hesiodic equation is

something that Heraclitus is aware of. Zeus’ creation of woman thus puts man in a bind, forced to

cater to this beautiful evil’s obsession with luxury in order to receive assistance in old age. The

man who acquires a sensible wife, well fashioned to her wits (ἀρηρυῖαν πραπίδεσσι, 608), is,

however, able to balance good and evil throughout his entire aion (ἀπ᾽αἰωνος....ἐµµενές,

609-610).

This aspect of aion as a generational lifetime features in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi where

the chorus meet at the tomb of Orestes to bring libations, wailing that throughout aion their heart

has been nourished with lamentations (δι᾽αἰῶνος δ᾽ἰυγµοῖσι βόσκεται κἐαρ, 26).24 As a marker of

time aion is again a passive principle, but one that always invokes duration beyond the moment.

However, in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens we see how the time of aion can reach beyond the

human generation: the chorus depict Zeus as ‘lord through unceasing time’ (δι᾽αἰῶνος κρέων

ἀπαύστου, 574) who was able to bring the torments of their distant ancestor Io at the hands of

Hera to an end (παύεται - pauetai) through the touch of his hand. This enrapturing embrace

causes the birth of a ‘blameless child‘ (παῖδ᾽ἀµεµφῆ, 581) that itself is said to be blessed

throughout long aion (δι᾽αἰῶνος µακροῦ πάνολβον, 582). Aion is once more qualified in these

examples as extended. In the case of Zeus the qualification ἀπαύστου (apaustou - ‘endless’)

makes aion evoke eternity, while for the child born from Zeus’ touch (named Epaphos from the

verb ‘to touch’ ephaptomai - ἐφάπτοµαι), the adjective µακροῦ (makrou - ‘great’) attached to aion

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24 For a broad overview of this topic see Jacqueline de Romilly Time in Greek Tragedy.

conveys a sense of fame enduring beyond the life of the individual.25 Just as we have sketched in

Heraclitus B.52, so here a child, linked to an aion that breaches the limits of the mortal through

its association with the kingly power of Zeus, is endowed with the potential to reconfigure the

future.

This potency, though, as in Heraclitus, is enmeshed with a defining vulnerability and the

concomitant pressure of finitude to forge new relational ties. These examples occur in the

stasimon of the chorus of the suppliant maidens themselves as they explain their genealogy to the

Argive king Pelasgos as part of their supplication. The need for them, as refugees from Egypt, to

entwine their ancestral narrative with the place of mainland Europe, Argos in the play, though its

boundaries include much of the Peloponnese, is enacted through an implied linkage not only

between the movements of Io across the Hellespont and their flight back to Greece, but also

through a shared relationship to this extended notion of aion manifested by both the supreme god

of mainland Greece, Zeus, and their divine ancestor Epaphos. Furthermore, this projection of a

mutual timespace, crossing geographical and chronological boundaries, occurs under the

exigency of a current trauma as the suppliant maidens flee their ravenous kinsfolk, the Aegyptioi.

The threat to commit suicide on the altars of Argos is both a politically effective strategy to

convince Pelasgos to take up their cause for fear of the miasma such death would unleash, as well

as serving as the premise for this collapsing of genealogical time. The physical contract that the

suppliant demands in the present is given a powerful precedent by recounting the genesis of their

whole lineage as a result of Zeus’ own all powerful laying on of hands, and the subsequent

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25 H. Friis Johannsen Aeschylus: The Suppliants vol.2 argues, p.459, that “In the 5th century it (aion) never simply means ‘time’, nor does it ever mean ‘eternity’...and δι᾽αἰῶνος invariably means ‘throughout one’s lifetime’. Johannsen’s dogmatism however can only then solve the collocation of ἀπαύστου with aion by describing it as a paradox. Surely, it is more profitable to allow all these meanings to be potentially in play, even if the choice of adjective is necessary to emphasize certain valences.

etymological manifestation of this contract in the child Epaphos (‘touch’) with his own boundary

crossing aion.26

At the beginning of the play, aion appears to assume a certain level of agency in the

fulfillment of this embrace across time:

νῦν δ᾽ ἐπικεκλοµένα Δῖον πόρτιν ὑπερ- πόντιον τιµάορ᾽, ἶνίν τ᾽ ἀνθονοµούσας προγόνου βοὸς ἐξ ἐπιπνοίας Ζηνὸς ἔφαψιν: ἐπωνυµίᾳ δ᾽ ἐπεκραίνετο µόρσιµος αἰὼν εὐλόγως, Ἔπαφόν τ᾽ ἐγέννασεν (Suppl. 40-48)

Now let me call upon the calf of Zeus, the avenger from across the sea, the child of our ancestress the flower brushing cow, conceived by a breath, the touch of Zeus: and the destined aion fulfilled that correct naming, and she gave birth to Epaphos (Touch).

This ‘blameless’ child (581), born in the past, stretches into the trauma of the present, acting as a

prior validation of their current suppliancy. The use of aion quivers between the gestation and

lifetime of the child, the genealogical currency of the Suppliants’ ancestry, the eternal register of

divine approbriation, and the exigencies of the present situation.27 In employing this term the

chorus exploits these associations, assuaging the crisis of their finitude with a narrative that grafts

a longer, even infinitely extended, time frame from the past (and through Zeus onto the future)

into their present. The mutual relation created between the unceasing aion of Zeus’ rule and the

large aion of Epaphos’ good fortune makes aion itself that which is capable of, as it empowers the

child’s name through time, influencing the present. In weaving themselves into this timespace the

suppliant maidens trust that the extension inherent to aion can envelop them in the same

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26 On rituals of supplication and the importance of physical embrace see the classic study of John Gould ‘Hiketeia’ Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol.93, (1973), pp. 74-103. With particular reference to this scene in Aeschylus’ Suppliants see Mary R.Bachvarova ‘Suppliant Danaids and Argive Nymphs in Aeschylus’ The Classical Journal, vol.104, no.4 (Apr-May 2009), pp.289-310.

27 Johannsen, p.45, restricts aion here to the first meaning, that of embryonic gestation, also adding that aion ‘implies the existence of the person to whom it belongs’.

reassuring release from torment, and in doing so create a new cultural formation in juncture with

the Argive populace.28

By the time of Aeschylus aion has acquired a certain agency, marking a period of time

that reaches beyond the mortal, as well as being a force that is capable of enabling the physical

touch of Zeus’ breath to materialise in a child whose signifying potency can extend across time.

This concept of aion as an efficacious principle linked to a child is further illustrated in a passage

from Euripides’ Heracleidae when the chorus of elders from Marathon rejoice after the defeat of

Eurystheus and the Argives in a battle that has saved the lives of Heracles’ children:

πολλὰ γὰρ τίκτει Μοῖρα τελεσσιδώ- τειρ᾽Ἀιών τε Χρόνου παῖς. (Heracl. 899-900)

Fate that brings completion and Aion, the child of Chronos, brings many things to pass.

The verbal form τελεσσιδώτειρ’ ( telessidōteir - ‘bringing completion’) syntactically and logically

attaches itself to fate, moira, leaving τίκτει (tiktei ‘bring to pass, bring forth, birth’) as the verb

attached to the personified aion (as well as moira) according to Wilhamowitz.29 Both

telessidōteir and tiktei contain a sense of teleology and fulfillment, and the dense syntax of the

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28 Kahn has observed the stylistic similarities between Aeschylus and Heraclitus, p7, 90ff. I would suggest a more conscious engagement on Aeschylus’ part with the ideas of Heraclitus. This is a larger project for a future date, although it is worth sketching a brief example here. Aeschylus’ etymological interest in the name of Zeus in a choral ode of his Agamemnon (Ζεύς, ὅστις ποτ᾽ ἐστίν, εἰ τόδ᾽ αὐ-τῷ φίλον κεκληµένῳ,τοῦτό νιν προσεννέπω (160-2) “Zeus whoever he is, if it pleases him to be called that, so I shall address him”) clearly is aware of Heraclitus B.32 (ἓν τὸ σοφὸν µοῦνον λέγεσθαι οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνοµα “The wise alone both does and does not want to be called by the name of Zeus.”) Aeschylus frequently invokes the more archaic form of Zeus, Ζηνὸς, and several manuscripts read this as the verbal form ζην - to live. eg., in Laurentius xxxii 9 for Suppliants 671. His interesting deployment of aion displays a similar awareness of the particular emphases Heracltitus placed and how these differed from the previous tradition. No substantial work has been written on this relationship. Although note Meagan Jeanelle Arp’s recent dissertation, PreSocratic thought in Sophoclean tradedy’ (U.Penn. 2006) which contains a useful discussion of the relationship between Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Heraclitus with particular reference to the of the bow.

29 Ulrich von Wilamovitz-Moellendorff Heracleidae p.176. Wilkins, A Commentary on the Heracleidae of Euripides, p.172, argues that the association of telessidotera and moira in particular refers to the tele of marriage and death, situating it within the broader context of the play.

sentence allows telessidōteir to run into Aion. The designation of Aion as the child of time

(Chronos) also references the notion of creation inherent in the verbal form tiktei.30 Coubaritsis

considers this mythological genealogy to be authentically archaic and suggests that it is against

this conception of the priority of Chronos that Plato reacts in his Timaeus in making chronos

derivative of aion, instituting the “renversement historique” that will rattle through the

centuries.31 Yet it is evident that Euripides’ view offers a perspective on the aion of Heraclitus

that cannot be ignored. Euripides’ awareness of Heraclitus is testified to in the doxographical

tradition where it is reported that he passed Heraclitus’ book to Socrates.32 In a similar way to its

treatment in the Suppliants, aion is linked to the generational process, given a directive power,

and specifically situated with regard to a child, pais.

We have noted the absence of the term chronos in Heraclitus, and if we agree with

Coubaritsis that Euripides’ genealogy is archaic enough to have predated Heraclitus we can

consider his omission of its founding and fatherly connotations to be a deliberate choice in

asserting the immanent flux of the world as the disruptive child’s play of aion. The notion of

chronos as a generative principle itself does indeed have a philosophical model prior to Heraclitus

in the early to mid 6th century BCE work of Pherecydes of Syros:33

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30 Wilamovitz pp.179-180 overlooks this relationship between the two in defining aion as time relative to the human and chronos as abstract time.

31 Coubaritisis p.109.

32 Diogenes Laertius Vit Phil.II.22 : φασὶ δ᾽ Εὐριπίδην αὐτῷ δόντα τὸ Ἡρακλείτου σύγγραµµα ἐρέσθαι, "τί δοκεῖ;" τὸν δὲ φάναι, "ἃ µὲν συνῆκα, γενναῖα: οἶµαι δὲ καὶ ἃ µὴ συνῆκα: πλὴν Δηλίου γέ τινος δεῖται κολυµβητοῦ." “They say that Euripides gave him (Socrates) the treatise of Heraclitus and asked his opinion of it, and that he said ‘The part I understand is excellent: so too I think is the part I don’t understand: but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.’”

33 Some ancient accounts (Souda, Diogenes Laertius) situate Pherecydes in the early 6th century, at the same time as the Lydian king Alyattes and the Seven Sages; others a little later in the mid 6th century (other passages from Diogenes, ever consistent!, as well as Cicero Tusc. 1,16,38, and Pliny N.H. VII, 205. None, however, posit his flourishing contemporary with Heraclitus it seems reasonable to suppose that he is at least two generations prior. The biographical tradition also tells the story of Pythagoras burying his supposed teacher Pherecydes, which while indicating the usual desire to discern direct relationships between philosophical successors, would make sense temporally if Pherecydes died in the mid 6th century.

Φερεκύδης δὲ ὁ Σύριου Ζάντα µὲν εἶναι ἀεὶ καὶ Χρόνον καὶ Χθονίαν τὰς τρεῖς πρώτας ἀρχας...τὸν δὲ Χρόνον ποιῆσαι ἐκ τοῦ γόνου ἑαυτοῦ πῦρ και πνεῦµα καὶ ὕδωρ

(Damascius de principiis 124)

Pherecydes of Syros said that Zas and Chronos and Chthonie always existed, as the first three principles...and that Chronos made out of his own seed fire, and wind (breath) and water.

Kirk, Raven and Schofield argue that Chronos as Time, not Kronos as the father of Zeus, is the

correct reading based on the similar etymological play with Zas as Zeus (from the verb ζάω ‘to

live’ ) and Chthonie linked to chthōn (χθών - ‘earth’) representing primitive cosmogonical

beings.34 This seems right, and Aristotle’s gloss that Pherecydes ‘did not say everything in

mythical form’ (τῷ µὴ µυθικῶς ἅπαντα λέγειν Met. 1091b8) confirms that his arguments need not

always be demarcated through traditional mythological figures. Chronos is always existing (εἶναι

ἀεὶ - einai aei), where we can read the adverbial form aei as a link to the noun, aion, it is cognate

with as Aristotle subsequently defines it (De Caelo 297a22-28). But it is significant that,

compared to the purely mythological version relayed in Euripides, there is no overt mention of

aion as a product of Chronos, let alone as a creative force itself. As a theogonical entity Chronos’

seed appears to create the elements, an account which Kirk, Raven and Schofield consider ‘to

smack of fifth century four-element theory’, taking earth as already present in the form of

Chthonie.35 However, we can also discern a Heraclitean interpretation of Pherecydes’ model.

Heraclitus’ picture of an always existing kosmos regulated by the turnings of fire (B.30), where

all material bodies descend into and emerge from water (B.31) whose overlapping waves also

signify the perpetual flux that can give rise to new forms of intelligence (B.12) that are made

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34 Wilhamowitz believed it should have been emended to the more traditional mythological figure of Kronos. Kirk, Raven and Schofield The PreSocratic Philosophers, p.57, concede that the notion of a cosmogonical conception of time is difficult to trace at this time, but rightly, I think, decide this is not strong enough evidence to discount the mss. reading of chronos. With regard to the question of the elements produced from Chronos, Kirk Raven and Schofield, p.58, argue that the account of Pherecydes has been altered under the influence of Stoic and Aristotelian physiology.

35 Kirk, Raven, Schofield, p.58.

material in the exhalations of psychai (B.12; B.36) engages with the fire, water and air begat from

Pherecydes’ Chronos. In Heraclitus’ kosmos, though, instead of an originary Chronos creating

these material elements, we find a concomitant aion that playfully catalyzes their movements as

they intersect one another in fresh arrangements.

-------

For evidence of Heraclitus’ transformation of aion in this sense it is expedient to look at

two cosmogonies closer to his period, those of Empedocles of Acragas and that of Plato’s

Timaeus. Both reveal that the structuring role of aion as it moves from the finite to the infinite,

compressing dimensions in the moment, offers the intuitive subject the chance to incorporate its

dynamic potential. And while Empedocles and Plato clearly attempt to resituate Heraclitus’ world

of becoming as the subordinate partner within a higher metaphysical duality, the creative

indeterminacy loaded into Heraclitus’ aion works to unsettle their efforts.

Empedocles and Heraclitus36

Empedocles’ cosmological picture of the alternating creation and destruction of the world

under the competing catalysts of Love (Φιλότης) and Strife (Νείκια) was acknowledged in

antiquity by Theophrastus as a deep and zealous engagement with the radical ontology proposed

by Parmenides of Elea.37 Parmenides’ new conception of being even denied the existence of

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36 Empedocles’ dating makes likely some overlap with Heraclitus. Kirk Raven and Schofield, p281, suggest the dates of 495-435 BCE.

37 Theophrastus, reported by Simplicius in Phys. 25.19, writes that he was an ‘emulator’ and ‘associate’ of Parmenides (Παρµενίδου δὲ ζηλωτὴς καὶ πλησιαστὴς).

time, implying that since the world was one and complete, a sphere impermeable to alteration, it

was situated in a perpetual present:38

οὐδέ ποτ ́ ἦν οὐδ ́ ἔσται, ἐπεὶ νῦν ἔστιν ὁµοῦ πᾶν, ἕν, συνεχές· τίνα γὰρ γένναν διζήσεαι αὐτοῦ; (Parmenides B.8 5-6)

It never was nor will be, since it is now altogether one, continuous. For what origin / birth will you seek for it?39

It is important to position Empedocles’ response to Parmenides in light of his forerunner’s

philosophy of time. For even though he maintains certain Parmenidean premises concerning the

overall stability of the sphere of the kosmos, Empedocles qualifies this with a rapturous

description of the evolutionary process of Boschean becomings, hybrid forms and floating limbs

within the kosmos.40 In charting these eruptions he evokes Heraclitus’ doctrine of a differentiating

and creative strife. Consequently, this tension between the Parmenidean and Heraclitean views of

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38 As G.E.L.Owen puts it in ‘Plato and Parmenides on the Timeless Present’: “ Parmenides de-tenses the verb ‘to be’.”

39 This futility of searching for an origin (γένναν διζήσεαι) appears to invoke Heraclitus frag B.101 ἐδιζησάµην ἐµεωυτόν - ‘I sought for myself’. On the relationship between Heraclitus and Parmenides there are many interpretations, the majority suggest that Parmenides is responding to Heraclitus, based not merely on the admittedly shaky dating of Diogenes Laertius, but on the existence of verbal parallels such as these in the work of Parmenides. On this question see the bibliography in Alexander Nehamas ‘Parminidean Being/Heraclitean Fire’ in Victor Carson and Daniel Graham eds.PreSocratic Philosophy: Essays in honor of Alexander Mourelatos.

40 For example Fr.57 describes the first stage of evolution where individual limbs look for companions to mix with: ᾗ πολλαὶ µὲν κόρσαι ἀναύχενες ἐβλάστησαν / γυµνοὶ δ᾽ἐπλάζοντο βραχίονες εὔνιδες ὤµων / ὄµµατά τ᾽οἶ ἐπλανᾶτο πενητεύοντα µετώπων. - “Here arose many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes wandered alone in need of foreheads.” Fr. 62 notes the mutant forms that these intersecting limbs and forms can give rise to: πολλὰ µὲν ἀµφιπρόσωπα καὶ ἀµφίστερνα φύεσθαι / βουγενῆ ἀνδρόπρῳρα, τὰ δ᾽ἔµπαλιν ἐξανατέλλειν / ἀνδροφυῆ βούκρανα, µεµειγµένα τῇ µὲν ἀπ᾽ἀνδρῶν / τῇ δὲ γυναικοφυῆ σκιεροῖς ἠσκηµένα γυίοις - “Many animals were born with faces and breasts on both sides, man-faced ox-offsping, while others again rose up as ox-faced man-offspring, creatures compounded from male and female elements, and fitted with shadowy parts.”

time, stability and becoming, manifests itself in Empedocles’ uncertain handling of the term

aion.41

In describing his cycle of change, Empedocles relies on an elemental model that is

adapted, like Pherecydes’ account, from mythology.42 His elements, termed roots (ῥιζώµατα

rhizōmata), are identified as Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis which were taken as representing,

though not without disagreement, fire, air, earth and water.43 The alternation of these roots under

the ‘dynamic principles’ (ἀρχικὰς δυνάµεις - in Aetius’ summary) of Love and Strife into

‘one’ (ἕν) and ‘many’ (πλέον) causes a ‘double birth’ (δοιὴ γένεσις) and a ‘double

dissolution’ (δοιὴ ἀπολειψις) for ‘mortals’ (θνητῶν).44 The fragment continues:

τὴν µὲν γὰρ πάντων σύνοδος τίκτει τ᾽ὀλέκει τε, ἡ δὲ πάλιν διαφθοµἐνων θρεφθεῖσα διέπτει. καὶ ταῦτ᾽ἀλλάσοντα διαµπερὲς οὐδαµὰ λήγει, ἄλλοτε µὲν Φιλότητι συνερχόµεν᾽εἰς ἕν ἅπαντα, ἄλλοτε δ᾽αὖ δίχ᾽ἕκαστα φορεύµενα Νείκεος ἔχθει...

ἠδὲ πάλιν διαφύντος ἑνος πλέον᾽ἐκτελέθουσι, τῇ γίγνονταί τε καὶ οὔ σφισιν ἔµπεδος αἰών. ἡ δὲ διαλλάσσοντα διαµπερὲς οὐδαµὰ λήγει, ταύτῃ δ᾽αἰὲν ἔασιν ἀκίνητοι κατὰ κύκλον. (B17. 4-8, 10-13) For the meeting of all things brings one to birth and destroys it, and the other is

nurtured and flies apart as they grow apart again. And these things never cease from their continual exchange, now all coming together into one through the influence of Love, and now being each carried apart through the hatred of Strife...and again as the many grow as

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41 Jonathan Barnes, PreSocratic Philosophers, vol.2, p.13. has termed this contrast as one between “global stability” and “local change”. In Heraclitus’ case, though, it would be wrong to posit that the local flux causes macrocosmic stability. As we have emphasized already, the Heraclitean valuation of differentiation before identity would suggest that any perception of global stability is the result of adopting an inadequate perspective on the duration of change.

42 Aristotle Met. A4 985a31-3 claimed that Empedocles was the first thinker to introduce the theory of the four elements, in particular with regard to the monistic physikoi as he saw the earlier Milesians who each discerned a single element as the underlying and directive matter, with Thales representing water, Anaximenes air and allied to this conception in Aristotle’s eyes, Heraclitus linked to fire.

43 See Kirk Raven and Schofield, p.286. For the disagreement on which elements the divinities represent see Diels and Kranz 31 A.33. For example Hippolytus of Rome makes Hera earth and Aidoneus air, while Aetius, dependent on Theophrastus, makes Hera air and Aidoneus earth.

44 On the question of whether this double is taken to imply that mortals are born twice, both on the movement toward unity and the fracturing away see discussion in Bollack Empédocle.

the one grows apart, in this way do they become and they have no stable aion. But to the extent that they never cease from their continual interchange, in this way they exist always unmoved in the cycle.

The verb for ‘give birth’ (tiktei - τίκτει) resonates with Euripides’s passage in the Children of

Heracles, as does the subsequent ektelethousi (ἐκτελέθουσι - ‘grow to fulfillment’); while its

joining to a verb for ‘destruction’ (ὀλέκει) under the ‘coming together’ (σύνοδος) of all also

embodies the unsteady harmony of tendencies within Heraclitus in ways that Euripides does not.

Further, we could read this section as an interpretation of Heraclitus’ B.60 (ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω µία

καὶ ὡυτή. ‘The way up and down is one and the same’) where Empedocles literalises the

Heraclitean paradox into a double journey. The virtual potentialities contained in Heraclitus’ view

of time as a moment pregnant with alternative routes as yet unmapped are actualized into a

cyclical process by Empedocles. He imposes a regularity of ceaseless motion, a storm of

becoming where verbs of birth and destruction are matched by those of spatial movement (διέπτει

- ‘flying apart’; συνερχόµεν - ‘coming together’; δίχ...φορεύµενα - ‘carried apart’), even though

from the Parminedean perspective of stability these elements appear to be

‘stationary’ (ἀκίνητοι).45

An alternative solution to this paradox, however, is visible in Empedocles treatment of

time. The aion of the elemental roots is said to be unsteady (οὔ σφισιν ἔµπεδος) with regard to its

becomings (τῇ γίγνονταί) where the word for ‘steady’ (ἔµπεδος - empedos) has spatial

connotations of a ground or foundation.46 In the midst of the interchange aion is unable to act as a

bulwark. If we consider aion as referring here to the ‘lifetime’ of the elements, following Diels’

index, we are close to the Homeric usage, where aion is impassive and vulnerable to forces

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45 See Kirk Raven Schofield on this issue, especially p.288. In reverting to a conception of the unmoving, Empedocles gestures back towards the metaphysical proposition of Parmenides, just as his denial elsewhere of any actual birth or destruction (Empedocles B.8) in averring the continuance of intermingling could be seen to tally with Parmenides’ vision of being that knows no coming to be or dissolution (οὔτε γενέσθαι οὔτε ὄλλθσυαι - Parmenides B.8. 13-14).

46 Eg. in Homer Iliad 12.12; Odyssey 23.203

beyond its control.47 However, the connotations of the verb of fulfillment (ektelethousi) from the

line before suggest that aion is actively involved in catalyzing this flux, and should not to be

thought in static opposition to the alternatively prevailing forces of Love and Strife. The verbs of

motion from earlier in the passage (συνερχόµεν; δίχ...φορεύµενα) refer to the spatial

rearrangements of the elements, but can also function ontologically, as tendencies for expression

and emergence within the Empedoclean cycle that are facilitated through the action of aion. Aion

may shake as the dynamics of Empedocles’ world yo-yo everything into the whirl and back out,

but it nevertheless survives, quivering in a blur of becoming (τῇ γίγνονταί). Furthermore, the

verbs for motion are very close to the Lucian paraphrase of the Heraclitean fragment involving

aion (διαφερόµενος, συµφερόµενος) which we saw was an amalgamation of other Heraclitean

phraseology.48 Empedocles’ use of aion thus echoes this Heraclitean aspect of aion where it is an

unstable, yet creative force, inserting indeterminacy into the time of life.

The following line sees the repetition of the phrase ‘never ceasing’ (οὐδαµὰ λήγει) from

the ‘interchange’ to describe this blur, and aien, the adverbial form of aion is used to describe the

motionlessness of the elements as everlasting (αἰὲν ἔασιν ἀκίνητοι - ‘they are always unmoved’).

We posited above that this paradox between ceaseless change and endless motionlessness could

be solved through the adoption of two different spatial perspectives: one from within the

fluctuations of the cycle; the other from outside where the stability of the whole kosmos remained

intact and appeared changeless, as well as timeless. The Heraclitean concept of aion, though,

offers a temporal solution: implying the coexistence of both a vulnerable lifetime and an eternal

principle, both passive and active, defined by this fluctuation, just as the child aion of B.52 is

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47 Diels-Kranz, Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker vol.3, p 28.

48 Perhaps Empedocles’ associations provide an origin for the ancient interpretation of αἰών within the broader epistemological and cosmological tendencies, and harmonious differentiations, that structure Heraclitus’ world. The transmission to Lucian is likely to be through Theophrastus and Aristotle, so we may figure Empedocles’ reading as one which may have influenced Aristotle.

rendered powerful and powerless. It is not so much, then, that ‘life’ is unstable given the

interactions of the forces of Love and Strife, but that ‘time’ itself is unstable, endlessly so.

The 3rd person plural form of the verb ‘to be’ (ἔασιν - easin) also denotes existence, such

that the stability in change represents an ontological condition, not merely an effect or response.

Yet just as in fragment B.1 of Heraclitus, this condition is perpetually refounded. In that excerpt,

to which we shall return, the ignorance of men is always coming into existence (as the verb

γίνονται implies), yet this epistemological failure is linked through the bivalent syntax of aei (ἀεὶ)

to a perennial logos (λόγου τοῦδʹ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίγνονται ἄνθρωποι - ‘Of the logos that

always is, men always become ignorant’).49 Fragment 16 of Empedocles, quoted by Hipploytus of

Rome in confusion at the existence of the two principles of creation of Love and Strife, infers that

aion, here qualified as infinite (ἄσπετος - aspetos), is continually full of the past and the futures

of these interacting forces:

ἧι γὰρ καὶ πάρος ἔσκε, καὶ ἔσσεται, οὐδέ ποτ᾽, οἴω,τούτων ἄµφοτέτων κενεώσεται ἄσπετος αἰών. (B.16) As they were formerly, so also will they be, and never, I think, shall infinite aion be

voided of these two.50

ἄσπετος αἰών occupies the same position in Empedocles’ hexameter as ἔµπεδος αἰών from B.17.

Here though, the never-ending interplay of the antagonistic forces of Love and Strife is qualified

with regard to the aspects of time, past (πάρος ἔσκε) and future (ἔσσεται), not in terms of spatial

extension or movement. Aion contains these dimensions within itself, as becoming and change

form its constituent features.

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49 Aristotle noted the capability of this aei to apply to both men and the logos as symptomatic of Heraclitus’ dense and ambiguous style (Rhet. III.5, 1407b11ff.)

50 See Brad Inwood, The Poem of Empedocles, 27ff, for more discussion of the way that Empedocles deals with the question of the void with regard to his reworking of Parmenides’ denial of non-being.

In this respect, we can ask whether aion in Empedocles’s usage has come closer to being

affiliated with eternity (as it will be in Plato’s Timaeus), as the supervening and metaphysical

container within which all finite changes occur. But the tension in aion to which Empedocles is

attuned always brings us back from the bulging dimensions of eternity to the vulnerable

becomings of human lives. In fragment B.129 the plural form, aionessin, is used to describe ‘ten

or twenty aions of men’ (δέκ᾽ἀνθρωπών καί τ᾽εἴκοσιν αἰώνεσσιν), translated as ‘generations’ by

Kirk, Raven and Schofield.51 This statement could indicate that the stability of the endless aion

(ἄσπετος αἰών) is purchased only with the repeated expenditure of individual lives with an

unstable aion (οὔ σφισιν ἔµπεδος αἰών) as the forces of Love and Strife buffet them.52 However,

these two alternative perspectives, from within unceasing becoming and destruction, and from

without where all time exists together, are not exclusive: as with Heraclitus, the epistemological

aim of Empedocles’ discourse is to provoke awareness of how these different temporal scales are

mutually determinative. The acquisition of this knowledge arises from being able to install

oneself in this interstitial viewpoint that is not so much an empty gap as it is a dimensional

passageway. Consequently, the wise subject opens himself up to communication across temporal

planes, reaching out to other durations among the organisms and productions of both nature and

culture. Fragment B.129 describes this exact process as a man superlative in wisdom stretches

his mind across time:

ἦν δέ τις ἐν κείνοισιν ἄνὴρ περιώσια εἰδώς ὅς δὴ µήκιστον πραπίδων ἐκτήσαντο πλοῦτον παντοίων τε µἀλιστα σοφῶν <τ᾽> ἐπιήρανος ἔργων. ὁππότε γὰρ πάσηισιν ὀρέξαιτο πραπιδεσσιν,

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51 Kirk, Raven, Schofield, p.218.

52 The ascription of aion, in B.154, to the notion of a markedly separate era when the sun did not mark out the seasons with a ‘fixed route’ (βέβαιον δρόµον) and this lack of regularity was held as a reason for the defiling practice of meat eating. However, the occurrence of aion in this account is more likely to come from Plutarch’s summary so can not be wholly cited as an Empedoclean use, despite the fascinating associations of an age where everything was even more enmeshed and intermingled than during the present principles of exchange.

ῥεῖ᾽ὅ γε τῶν ὄντων πάντων λεύσσεσκεν ἕκαστον καί τε δέκ᾽ἀνθρωπών καί τ᾽εἴκοσιν αἰώνεσσιν. (B.129) There was among them a man of exceptional knowledge, who had obtained the greatest wealth of understanding, the greatest aid for all types of wisdom. For whenever he reached out with all his understanding, he easily discerned each one of the existing things, in ten and even twenty ‘generations’ (aionessin) of mankind.

The movement of the mind to the panoptic embrace of infinite aion enables the grasping of an

individual element (ἕκαστον - hekaston) within the world of beings (τῶν ὄντων πάντων), an

element that is perceived through the senses, indicated by the iterative verb of sight (λεύσσεσκεν

- leussesken). In this way the epistemological journey across time functions as an ontological

motif for Empedocles’ cosmology where the forces of Love and Strife perpetually play out

through the coexistence of temporal dimensions in an infinite aion, but in doing so cause the

emergence of individual (and unstable) finite forms.53

It is important to note that this fragment does not specify a direction across which the

wise man stretches with his understanding (ὀρέξαιτο πραπιδεσσιν) and so we should assume that

this epistemological vantage point ranges into the past as well as the future. Nevertheless, the

evidence elsewhere in the Purifications section of the poem for the reincarnation of the soul

might posit that this mental elasticity occurs as a result of physical longevity, or recursive

existence via a reincarnated soul. Two fragments cited by Hippolytus describe the transformations

of an authorial ‘I’ who has been reborn as a “boy, girl, plant, bird and dumb sea fish” (B.117) as a

result of bloodshed and being cast out of heaven for 30000 years (B.115). The ability to behold

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53 Thus we should use this coalescence as a further point of suture between the supposedly different poems of Empedocles’ oeuvre, the cosmological and natural theories (peri phuseos), and the ‘Purifications’ (katharmoi) concerned with theology, ritual and issues such as reincarnation. One of the traditional objections to the unity thesis lies in this problematic between the repeated interminglings as Love and Strife endlessly integrate and disintegrate the elements of the world, and the apparent stress in the Katharmoi on the survival of the individual soul. Yet in this reading we have seen how already in the cosmological fragments there is a tension in the use of aion between the finite form within the flux of change, and the perpetuity of the overall structural cohesion of the kosmos. The ability of the understanding of one man to stretch across time can be seen as consistent with an established thematic. On the recent papyrological find which has strengthened the claims for the unity of the fragments into one poem see Inwood, especially pp. 75-79.

elements across ‘generations’ could function retrospectively as a form of long term memory.

However, the use of the word prapides (πραπιδεσσιν) to designate the intellect invokes another

fragment where the same term is used in association with growth throughout aion. As such it

confirms that this intuitive discerning is itself an act of creation oriented toward the future:

εἰ γὰρ καί σφ᾽ἁδινῇσιν ὑπὸ πραπίδεσσιν ἐρείσας εὐµενέως καθαρῇσιν ἐποπτεύσεις µελέτῃσιν, ταῦτά τέ σοι µάλα πάντα δι᾽αἰῶνος παρέσονται τε πόλλ᾽ἀπο τῶνδε κτήσεαι. αὐτὰ γὰρ αὔξει ταῦτ᾽εἰς ἦθος ἕκαστον, ὅπῃ φύσις ἐστὶν ἑκάστῳ (B.110 - 1-5)

If you secure them in your unwhirled intelligence and observe them with good will in pure exercises, these will assuredly be with you throughout all aion, and you will obtain many other things from them; for by themselves they will cause each thing (ἕκαστον) to grow in its own way, according to the nature of each.

The verb for securing (ἐρείσας) has similar semantic connotations of ‘ground’ and ‘foundation’ as

the earlier adjective (ἔµπεδος) used to describe aion, although ‘intelligence’ (πραπίδεσσιν) is here

able to escape the instability rooted in the exchanges of the world. Furthermore, the adjective

adinēsin (ἁδινῇσιν - ‘unwhirled’) intimates that this intelligence can transcend the alternately

centrifugal and centripetal whirl (δίνης - dinēs Fr. 35. 5) that creates, destroys and blurs forms

under the influence of Love and Strife. The intellect is once again associated with sight

(ἐποπτεύσεις - ‘you will observe’). Empedocles allies this sense with fire as part of his theory of

the perception of like by like involving effluences, whereby the membrane of the eye is structured

as to allow passage to the fine fires of colour from the outside world.54 While Empedocles

subordinates fire to the ontogenetic principles of Love and Strife, it nonetheless plays a key role

through this association with intellection and the literal captation of effluvial wisdom in his

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54 Theophrastus interprets Empedocles B.84 which describes Aphrodite’s invention of the eye as a ‘primeval fire confined within membranes and delicate garments’ (ἐν µήνιγξιν ἐελµένον ὠγύγιον πῦρ λεπτῇσίν τ᾽ὀθόνῃσι) in terms of its ability to receive the shades of colour according to the width of their spectrum. Compare this theory with that in Plato’s Timaeus 45d, discussed below, where fire is said to be emitted from the eye.

epistemology. Empedocles’ association of perception and fire as they exploit the indeterminacy

within aion resonates strongly with themes from Heraclitus. Heraclitus positioned the intuitive

graspings embodied by the games of children with respect to the arresting movement of fire (B.

10, B.66 discussed in the last chapter). And in a similar way to Heraclitus’ linkage of human

epistemology to the cosmological structurings of his world, this fragment endows the intellect

with a force that plays beyond the individual. For in spite of the many benefits one can accrue

from the careful maintenance of these powers, it is also the case that the knowledge preserved

securely in the intellect has an agency of its own, capable of ‘augmenting’ (αὔξει - auxei) the

qualities of individual elements (εἰς ἦθος ἕκαστον) so that they reach their full expression of

nature (φύσις - physis). The verb for augment (auxei) also resonates with a comparatively themed

fragment of Heraclitus where the logos of the psyche is said to increase (αὔξων - auxōn) itself

(Heraclitus B.115). The intellect, for Empedocles, is not simply an extended form of memory

across aion toward the past, but has an efficacy of its own, able to stretch into the future of aion

as it brings finite forms to life. Through his theory of effluences and the material connection

between cognition and the shaping of the world, Empedocles’ mobile intellect performs with a

dynamical aion to reconcieve and recreate the kosmos in a way that shows the influence of

Heraclitus.

This capacity of the prapides to range from the infinite to the finite, and to self-

reflexively witness their imbrication, also mimics the programmatic fragment B.1 of Heraclitus.

There, as mentioned above, the eternal is invoked with regard to both the underlying logos and

the becomings-ignorant of men. And Heraclitus is the man who will, in vain, distinguish the

nature (physis) of ‘each thing’ ( ἕκαστον as used by Empedocles in B.129): ὁκοίων ἐγὼ

διηγεῦµαι διαιρέων ἕκαστον κατὰ φύσιν καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει - ‘Of these things I will set out

and distinguish each thing according to its nature and telling how it is’ - Heraclitus B.1 excerpt.

As with Empedocles’ mind-stretched sage, so Heraclitus attempts to ‘cut out’ (διαιρέων) from the

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eternal flux of all a definition of the individual thing. Yet unlike the implied success of the

Empedoclean genius (and his actualizing intellect), Heraclitus’ heightened awareness of

language’s own flux makes his categorization an inevitable failure, since, as he notes elsewhere,

“Nature (physis) loves to hide”- “φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλει” B.123. The frustration that the

unheeding hordes elicit in Heraclitus leads him to prefer the company of children: children who

intuitively perform the timeplay of creative forces concealed within the world. Their literal

grasping of this hidden knowledge enacts the potency of an aion that folds the infinite into the

finite. It is this potential which we can glimpse in Empedocles’ sage, as the epistemological range

affects not just the dimensions of knowledge, but those of nature as well.

Empedocles’ reaction to Heraclitus’ aion further manifests itself in his handling of the

boundaries of mortality and immortality (cf. Heraclitus B.62 ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι -

‘Immortals mortals, mortals immortals’). The proud boast of the authorial persona in Empedocles

fragment B.112 (traditionally the first of the Purifications fragments) begins with the author’s

greeting to the people of Acragas and continues: “ἐγω δ᾽ὑµῖν θεὸς ἄµβροτος, οὐκέτι θνήτος /

πωλεῦµαι µετὰ πᾶσι τετιµένος” - “I go among you as an immortal god, no longer mortal,

honoured among you all”. This claim of immortality might align the author with the inter-

temporal intellect of the wise man of B. 129. Yet as we have seen with aion, the notion of eternity

is always anchored to that of finitude, giving meaning to the changes and temporary relations that

objects and things enter into with each other. Indeed, in fragment B.35 Empedocles describes the

effects of the antagonism of Love and Strife as what was impervious and immortal becomes

finite. This downward change in ontological status is, conversely, a principle of marvelous

emergence:

αἶψα δὲ θνήτ᾽ἐφύοντο τὰ πρὶν µάθον ἀθάνατ᾽εἶναι, ζωρά τε τὰ πρὶν ἄκρητα διαλλάξαντα κελεύθους. τῶν δέ τε µισγοµένων χεῖτ᾽ἔθνεα µυρία θνητῶν παντοίαις ἰδέῃσιν ἀρηρότα, θαῦµα ἰδέσθαι. (B. 35. 14-17)

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Then straightaway those things grew to be mortal which before had learned to be immortal, and those that were unmixed became mixed as they exchanged their paths. And as they mingled myriad tribes of mortal things poured forth, fitted with forms of all sorts, a wonder to behold.

Recalling the coming together (σύνοδος) of fragment B.17, the notion of space is once more

invoked through the divine and mortal elements exchanging ‘paths’ (κελεύθους). This double

movement seems to reference Parmenides’ criticism of those who illogically believe in being and

non-being for following a ‘back-turning path’ (‘παλίντροπός ἐστι κέλευθος᾽ Parmenides B.6).

This complaint has also been read as a deliberate criticism of the Heraclitean ‘back-turning

harmony’ of B.51 (παλίντροπος ἁρµονίη), an association that the ‘turning back toward a

way’ (παλίνορσος...ἐς πόρον) in the third line of Empedocles’ fragment B.35 additionally directs

us. In the last chapter we argued that Heraclitus’ harmony represents the process of differentiation

that leads to creation, as strife demolishes old structures of thought and culture and allows the

emergence of the new. We can now suggest that this emphasis on the power of difference relates

to the question of time, of aion, in whose oscillating dimensions mortal and immortal co-exist

before they are actualized in the world. The mistake of Parmenides and Empedocles is to view the

constitutive tension of Heraclitus’ harmony as spatial and real, rather than as temporal and

potential.

Nevertheless, Empedocles vision’ of the spatial interchange of mortal and immortal

things (of which the human is just another thing) does gesture toward Heraclitus’ valorization of

the potency of coordinated thinking. Empedocles, too, highlights the importance of cognition as

the immortal and mortal things are said previously to have ‘learnt’ (µάθον) about their change in

ontological status: an act of thinking that appears to recalibrate itself to the timescales of

cosmological change.55 However, in the collisions and minglings which cause the evolutionary

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55 Empedocles’ theory of perception, acknowledging the cognitive work performed by non-human ‘things’, will be analyzed in more detail in chapter 4, Beyond Boundaries.

explosion of new forms we come close to an embodied performance of knowledge which, like the

creative aion which plays through Heraclitus’ children, is marked by its indeterminacy and

blurring of boundaries.

-------

It is evident that Empedocles wields the concept of aion in different ways, noting its

integral place within the local becomings of the kosmos, as well as outside in the global stability

of its Parmenidean being. Empedocles resolves the challenging relation of aion to emergence

within Heraclitus by assigning dynamic principles of Love and Strife that provoke the exchanges

within the kosmos, while they themselves remain unchanged. Aion lacks agency in Empedocles,

yet is a topology through which the forces that fill time can be actualised, just as acts of

perception can stretch across its dimensions to augment the physis of things. Empedocles’

attunement to Heraclitus’ aion, however, is ultimately recast in terms of a spatialised and

geometric vision of the world’s movements, ones that appear motionless when seen from the

timeless eternity of Parmenides’ panoptic perspective.56 Empedocles’ oscillation between aion as

an unstable finite lifetime (ἔµπεδος αἰών) and aion as an infinite container (ἄσπετος αἰών) is not,

though, just an opposition between Parmenidean and Heraclitean theories of time, but as we have

indicated, reacts to the overlapping presence of infinity and finitude within the vulnerable and

dynamic timeplay of Heraclitus’ child aion. It is also the case that Empedocles initial uncoupling

of these aspects of time, uneasy as it may be, sets the stage for Plato’s eventual segregation of

aion into the noumenal and eternal world of Forms, and chronos into the phenomenal world of

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56 In Empedocles Fragment B.27 he notes how the sphere is held fast in the close obscurity of harmonia. This might signify that Empedocles does not want to name the substance that binds, in repetitive differentiation, the kosmos together, a substance which may well be aion. harmonia clearly does not fill the function of a clearly defined ratio involved in the cosmogony of the universe as we see in Plato’s adaptation of Pythagorean number theory in the Timaeus. It still refers back to its material conception of ‘fastening’ and through the designation of close (or clever) obscurity (πυκινῷ κρυφῳ) to Heraclitus as well.

becoming and changes.57 Let us now turn to Plato’s Timaeus to see whether the back-stretching

tensions in Heraclitus’ aion have been tamed, or whether their disruptive play erupts once more.

Plato’s Timaeus and Heraclitus

At the beginning of his description of his cosmogony Plato’s character Timaeus introduces an

important distinction between being and becoming in language that refers back to Parmenides’

interrogation of ontology. Similarly, he assigns different epistemological frameworks to each

side, devaluing the role of irrational sensation associated with the knowledge of becoming

compared to the logical reasoning that maps the enlightened path to being:

Ἔστιν οὖν δὴ κατ΄ ἐµὴν δόξαν πρῶτον διαιρετέον τάδε· τί τὸ ὂν ἀεί͵ γένεσιν δὲ οὐκ ἔχον͵ καὶ τί τὸ γιγνόµενον µὲν ἀεί͵ ὂν δὲ οὐδέποτε; τὸ µὲν δὴ νοήσει µετὰ λόγου περιληπτόν͵ ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ὄν͵ τὸ δ΄ αὖ δόξῃ µετ΄ αἰσθήσεως ἀλόγου δοξαστόν͵ γιγνόµενον καὶ ἀπολλύµενον͵ ὄντως δὲ οὐδέποτε ὄν. (Timaeus. 28a) Therefore in my opinion we must firstly make the following distinction. What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming, yet never is? The former is apprehensible through logical thought, since it always is, while the other is an object of opinion accessed through unreasoning sensation, since it becomes and perishes, and never in any way is.

However, as we shall see, this initial distinction collapses under the mediating role of time, so that

Plato’s cosmogony, with its demarcation of the spheres of being and becoming, is drawn back

into a Heraclitean conception of the coexistence of infinity within finitude. Plato’s attempt to

separate aion from chronos unravels.58

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57 57 Jackson Hershbell provides a clear overview of the relationship between their respective cosmogonies in his article ‘Empedoclean influences on the Timaeus’ Phoenix, Vol. 28, No.2 (Summer 1974), pp. 145-166. Hershbell, however, makes no mention of the Heraclitean conception of aion.

58 In a certain sense my reading seeks to further qualify Callahan’s argument in chapter 1, pp.3-37, of his Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy with the commentary upon the Timaeus of A.J.Taylor by noting an unacknowledged source, i.e, Heraclitus, behind the Platonic conception of time and eternity.

Allying himself to a Parmenidean conception of an infinite, timeless and uncreated being

(τὸ ὂν), Plato stresses that the world of becoming (τὸ γιγνόµενον), in contrast, must have a cause

behind its coming into existence (28a). He personifies this cause in the figure of a divine

architect, the demiurge (ὁ δηµιουργός) who crafts the world (οὐρανὸς ἢ κόσµος ‘heaven or

kosmos’) through the observation of being which is ‘always existing’ (τὸ ἀίδιον)and functions as

a model or paradigm (παραδείγµα) for imitation. An artistic poiesis that employs the world of

becoming and destruction as its model, however, is unable to be beautiful (οὐ καλον): initiating

the association of becoming with aesthetic and moral degradation while being is defined by its

unchanging perfection, a qualification that connotes different relationships to time. Nevertheless,

the created οὐρανὸς (ouranos) itself is kalos, ‘the most beautiful of all that has

become’ (κάλλιστος τῶν γεγονότων), since during its fashioning the demiurge kept his gaze fixed

on the eternal. In case one might confuse its beautiful artifice for the real model in whose image it

is made, Plato asserts that we can be sure it is a created object due to its being perceptible by the

senses (ὁρατὸς γὰρ ἁπτός τέ ἐστι καὶ σῶµα ἔχων - ‘For it is visible and tangible and has a body’

28b).

As Timaeus attempts to demarcate clear boundaries between the eternal (τὸ ἀίδιον) and

what becomes (τὸ γιγνόµενον) he acknowledges the problem of clearly articulating the nature of

the demiurge responsible for crafting the ouranos:

τὸν µὲν οὖν ποιητὴν καὶ πατέρα τοῦδε τοῦ παντὸς εὑρεῖν τε ἔργον καὶ εὑρόντα εἰς πάντας ἀδύνατον λέγειν (Timaeus 28c) For to discover the maker and father of this universe is certainly a task, and in discovering him to declare to all men an impossibility.

The reason for this communicative aporia rests upon the unsteady relationship of the created

kosmos to truth, a quality which is seen to belong to eternal being, since the sensibility of the

world, in addition to being the proof of its existence, is also the guarantor of its essential

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unknowability (ὅτιπερ πρὸς γένεσιν οὐσία͵ τοῦτο πρὸς πίστιν ἀλήθεια - ‘For as being is to

becoming, so is truth to belief’ 29c.). The necessarily approximate description of the kosmos as a

materialised copy (εἰκόνα - eikona) is tied to an epistemological indeterminacy innate to the

kosmos itself. In a similar sense the apperception of the demiurge, who hinges the sensible and

intelligible realms together is mutated through his co-presence in both worlds: tied to noumenal

being in its contemplation of its lineaments, while as a creative principle it is an example of the

becoming that does not belong to the eternal. Such a liminality is visible in the claim that ‘he

wished especially that all becoming should be just like himself’ (ὅτι µάλιστα ἐβουλήθη γενέσθαι

παραπλήσια ἑαυτῷ 29E).59 Just as the demiurge resists classification so too will time, in the

aspects of aion and chronos, acquire an indeterminacy with regard to its situatedness within

discourses of truth and belief. And this indeterminacy will draw both sides of time into its orbit,

confounding the Platonic segregation and illustrating once more the potency of Heraclitus’ theory

of the efficacious time of aion.

Our first indication of the problematic of this hinge, both epistemological and

ontological, occurs in a description of the flux behind the regularity and beauty (kalos) of the

created world. In an argument that will anticipate the later introduction of a third element to that

of being and becoming, that of the place, or receptacle, or χῶρα (chora),60 Plato argues that the

visible world, hence that of becoming and the sensible, was initially in a state of ‘discordant and

disorderly motion’ (κινούµενον πληµµελῶς καὶ ἀτάκτως 30a) and that the demiurge had to ‘lead it

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59 Normally, following Cornford Plato’s Cosmology p.26, the question is posed as to whether the demiurge is identical with or a substitute for the intelligible forms. While that is certainly one of the possibilities, the other side of the equation is rarely examined. As with Heraclitus’ treatment of time, the very efficacy of the demiurge comes from precisely this ambivalent status with regard to infinity and finite becomings, a status that is itself a power of creation.

60 Plato employs many terms to describe this third element (50cff.), Stoics interpreted it as the raw matter, hyle, of the universe. On this problem see John Sallis Chorology: On beginning in Plato’s Timaeus (Indiana 1999).

to order from this confusion’ (εἰς τάξιν αὐτὸ ἤγαγεν ἐκ τῆς ἀταξίας).61 This change in its

organization is said to be ‘better’ (ἄµεινον), inserting another value judgment into the stages of

the cosmogony. A difficulty arises, though, when we try to combine the moral and aesthetic

excellence (kallistos) of the ouranos crafted through the demiurge’s focus upon eternal being with

this degraded chaos that pre-exists that same creative act. This tension devolves not only on

whether we consider this earlier chaotic movement as logically distinct from the ouranos as a

beautiful copy (eikona), or temporally distinct as an anterior chaos;62 it also depends on how we

situate the concept of order, or arrangement (τάξις - taxis) with regard to the observation of the

eternal being (τὸ ἀίδιον). Taxis has connotations of spatial organization, the drawing up military

ranks and placing everything in its ordered location, as well as of the juridical allotment of

punishment, and the notion of a temporal arrangement to regulate changes.63 Plato here invokes

an important predecessor of Heraclitus, Anaximander of Miletus, whose one surviving fragment,

using moral language in similar fashion to Plato, indicates that time, chronos, is fundamentally

involved in the ordering of the world:

(ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γἐνεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οὖσι, καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι) κατὰ τὸ χρεών. διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοις τῆς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν. (Anaximander A.9; B.1) And the source of coming to be for existing things is that into which destruction happens too ‘according to necessity; for they pay penalty and retribution to one another for their injustice according to the assessment of chronos.’ (trans. Kirk, Raven, Schofield)

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61 Vlastos in Allen ed. Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics (New York, 1965) discusses this question of motion before creation.

62 So argues Callahan as he questions Taylor’s Aristotelian critique of Plato that there is an illogicality in the existence of time before its creation. Callahan, p.34, criticizes Taylor’s conception of time for falsely importing the Aristotelian definition of time as the measure of motion (see above) into an entirely different Platonic conception of time.

63 See for example κατὰ τάξιν in Herodotus Histories 8.86 to mean ‘in battle formation’; in its temporal usage see Plato Leges 809d “ἡµερῶν τάξις εἰς µηνῶν περιόδους” - ‘An arrangement for the circuits of our moon.’. Aristotle in his Politics (1261a. 34) uses it as a term of time (κατ᾽ἐνιαυτὸν ἢ κατά τινα ἄλλην τάξιν ἢ χρόνον - ‘According to a year or some other measure or time.’)

Anaximander’s conception, in legalistic metaphors, of the injustice of the changes within the

world will form a key text in Heraclitus’ reversal to a cosmodicy64, whereby he asserts the very

justice of the becomings caused by strife itself (δίκην ἔριν B.80). In doing so Heraclitus

supplants his vision of a playfully disruptive aion effecting change onto Anaximander’s

conception of time as chronos: an aion which causes, through ludic uncertainty, the emergence of

new orders as opposed to a chronos which corrects prior misdemeanors and brings everything

back to a pre-conceived order. In this light, Kirk, Raven and Schofield interpret the action of

Anaximander’s time (chronos) with regard to inevitable changes, such as the passing of the

seasons, which restore the balance between the elements.65 Thus chronos functions as a

regulating principle to prior antagonistic forces. From this perspective we can submit that its

verdicts are only temporally successful as it reboots the inevitable continuation of an underlying

disorder. Anaximander’s Chronos is not a creative force, unlike in Pherecydes’ treatment, and it is

perhaps in reaction to its repressive nature that Heraclitus omits chronos from his world view,

preferring to concentrate on the time of aion that embraces, provokes, or even is, the war and

strife and becomings that Anaximander’s chronos attempts, in vain, to control.

In addition, according to Simplicius’ summary of Anaximander, which rests on

Theophrastus, the ‘ordering’ or ‘assessment’ (taxis) of time (chronos) operates as a principle of

regulation in heavens and worlds (οὐρανοὺς καὶ...κὀσµους - in Phys. 24,13) that are themselves

the product of his originative substance, the apeiron - the ‘unbounded’. Chronos and its taxis are

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64 Nietzsche’s employs this term ‘cosmodicy’ in his lecture on Heraclitus in his PrePlatonic Philosophers, p.72, when drawing a contrast with Anaximander.

65 See Kirk, Raven, Schofield p.121. They also make reference to Solon’s invocation of the court of time, χρόνος (Fr. 24) whereby time is merely a passive “lapse” during which changes have occurred, which in the case of Solon consist of the freeing of earth (Γῆ) from the slavery of property markers. However, there is more going on in the case of the poem of Solon, not just in its possible referencing of the generative principles of Pherecydes’ cosmology mentioned above, with Χθονίη invoking earth as a creative force along with χρόνος, but also in this interweaving of earth and time with regard to the instantiation of a new political configuration for the Athenians.

dependent upon this prior force, whose nature is defined spatially by Aristotle.66 Theophrastus’

doxography, via Simplicius, claims that the apeiron is an element (στοιχεῖον) and a

‘principle’ (ἀρχή) of things that is itself material, as the underlying substance from which all

others are derived.67 However, it is notable that in Hippolytus of Rome’s account (Ref. 1.6) of

Anaximander’s cosmogony, unlike Simplicius’ version, explicit mention is also made of the

apeiron’s temporal quality: ταύτην δ᾽ἀίδιον εἶναι καὶ ἀγήρω, ἧν καὶ πάντας περιέχειν τοὺς

κόσµους - ‘This nature is eternal and unaging and also surrounds the whole world.’68

We can discern traces of the indeterminate spatial and temporal location of this apeiron in

Plato’s adoption of similar language to describe his ‘everliving’ (ἀίδιον) ‘model’ (παραδείγµα),

although he does insert a principle of creation, the demiurgic artist, as the active link between his

worlds, assigning no agency to the everliving itself. The demiurgic act of poeisis, in leading this

chaos (ataxia) into order (eis taxin) appears to designate the existence of such a constitutive

disorder within everliving being itself, given that it is the model for creation. Plato’s being is, in

fact, described in terms of order, in the Parminidean sense of self-similitude (τὸ κατὰ ταὐτὰ καὶ

ὡσαύτως ἔχον - ‘The thing which is self identical and uniform’ 29A).69 Yet the intertext with

Anaximander, where the order (taxis) of chronos attempts to restrain disorderly forces, sits

uncomfortably with Plato’s conception of an unchanging intelligible being marked, as we will

see, by an eternal aion while chronos is relegated to the sensible world. The indeterminacy and

differentiating potential of Heraclitus’ aion appears to infect Plato’s intelligible model and the

pre-existent chaotic motion.

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66 Aristotle Physics 203a16.

67 Simplicius in Phys. 24, 13 = DK 12A9.

68 The account preserved in the Pseudo-Plutarchan Stromateis also mentions a different form of time to that of χρόνος, commenting that the cyclical destruction and creation in the world have been occurring throughout infinite time (ἐξ ἀπείρου αἰῶνος).

69 This strongly recalls Parmenides’ description of being as a perfect identical sphere B.8, 43-49.

Plato’s invocation of the Anaximandrean taxis, whereby it becomes the principle of

cosmogony through the action of the demiurge thus poses questions about time’s role in the

creation of the world. The ambiguous status of the demiurge, drawing finite becoming and infinite

being together, creates an aporia in Plato’s text in which we can glimpse, anamorphically, the

presence of certain Heraclitean elements, not just with regard to the changes of Plato’s sensible

world, but also affiliating themselves to the intentionally anti-Heraclitean (thus Parmenidean)

aspects of Plato’s ontology of the everliving (ἀίδιον) model. Plato’s subsequent account of the

creation of chronos along with that of the kosmos betrays further indebtedness to Heraclitus’ idea

of time. Moreover, the associations that Plato makes between chronos and aion, the movement of

the planets, the role of fire in vision and the notion of the universe as an everliving creature

almost function as a commentary on the text of Heraclitus. They form an interesting manipulation

of Heraclitus’ ideas from which we can turn back to the fragments themselves and the different

ways that time manifests itself in organizing Heraclitus’ world.

------

Timaeus recounts how the demiurge, after replacing disorderly motion with the taxis

which creates the sensible world, wants to ensure its perfection through the presence of

rationality. As a result the kosmos is to be a living organism, replete with soul and intelligence

(τὸν κόσµον ζῶον ἔµψυχον ἔννουν - 30c), which, by necessity, imitates the model as an eternally

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living creature itself (ζῶον ἀΐδιον ὄν - 37d).70 Another aspect of this imitation is the temporal

register in which the creatures operate and here Plato attempts to make a strong distinction

between the two aspects of time represented by aion and chronos:

ἡ µὲν οὖν τοῦ ζῴου φύσις ἐτύγχανεν οὖσα αἰώνιος71͵ καὶ τοῦτο µὲν δὴ τῷ γεννητῷ παντελῶς προσάπτειν οὐκ ἦν δυνατόν· εἰκὼ δ΄ ἐπενόει κινητόν τινα αἰῶνος ποιῆσαι͵ καὶ διακοσµῶν ἅµα οὐρανὸν ποιεῖ µένοντος αἰῶνος ἐν ἑνὶ κατ΄ ἀριθµὸν ἰοῦσαν αἰώνιον εἰκόνα͵ τοῦτον ὃν δὴ χρόνον ὠνοµάκαµεν (Timaeus 37d-e) But to the extent that the nature of the living creature was eternal, it was impossible to attach this (eternity) completely to the created (world). Therefore he planned to make a moving image of aion, and as he ordered the heaven, he made an eternal image, which moves according to number, while eternity rests in unity; and this image we have called chronos.

Plato asserts a radical separation between chronos and aion, proposing that one basis for this lies

in their different relation to motion. The time of chronos in the created world of becoming is not

a pre-existing frame and comes into being along with the ouranos, where its regular motion is

opposed to the abiding aion of the eternal creature.72 This poses a question as to the nature of this

motion itself and its relation to space and time. We hear later that the world of ‘becoming’ (τὀ

γιγνόµενον) and ‘destruction’ (τὸ ἀπολλύµενον), being sensible, needs to exist in a space, a topos

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70 Sallis, p.58, discusses this tension between the order of production, as an act of poiesis by the demiurge and that of birth as would befit a normal living being. He makes reference to Nietzsche’s rebarbative reading in Die fröliche Wissenschaft, V/2 of Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. G.Colli and M.Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1973) 1245-146. “Let us be on guard against thinking that the world is a living being. Where should it expand? On what should it feed? How could it grow and multiply? We know more or less what the organic is; and we should not reinterpret the exceedingly derivative, late, rare, accidental, which we perceive only on the crust of the earth, and make of it something essential, universal, eternal, which is what those do who call the universe and organism”. The notion of this crust being alive is precisely the thought that Vernadsky will invoke in describing his vision of the biosphere, where it represents a zone rife with energy, nourished by cosmic radiation and transformed by creatures on the surface that are very much its products.

71 Sallis, p.79, notes that this is the first use of the adjective αἰώνιος and argues that its sense is “not sufficiently clear as such to necessitate translating it as ‘eternal’.”

72 Cornford,p.103, provides a neat encapsulation of this difficulty of the frame of time. On the question of the eternity of the image and number see Sallis, p.81; Remi Brague Le temps chez Platon et Aristote pp.27-41.

(52a), unlike the self-similar, ‘unborn’ (ἀγέννητον), ‘indestructible’ (ἀνώλεθρον) and

‘imperceptible’ (ἀναίσθητον) model. This additional spatial quality is considered by Callahan to

be a consequence of becoming’s weak relationship to being, as if it needs anchoring to something

to stabilize its ontological deficiency.73 Yet the movement of the created ouranos is not one

through a space with which it is mutually determined, as things change, become and are

destroyed. Instead, the dimensions of time themselves are seen as motions:

ταῦτα δὲ πάντα µέρη χρόνου͵ καὶ τό τ΄ ἦν τό τ΄ ἔσται χρόνου γεγονότα εἴδη͵ ἃ δὴ φέροντες λανθάνοµεν ἐπὶ τὴν ἀίδιον οὐσίαν οὐκ ὀρθῶς. λέγοµεν γὰρ δὴ ὡς ἦν ἔστιν τε καὶ ἔσται͵ τῇ δὲ τὸ ἔστιν µόνον κατὰ τὸν ἀληθῆ λόγον προσήκει͵ τὸ δὲ ἦν τό τ΄ ἔσται περὶ τὴν ἐν χρόνῳ γένεσιν ἰοῦσαν πρέπει λέγεσθαι - κινήσεις γάρ ἐστον͵ τὸ δὲ ἀεὶ κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχον ἀκινήτως οὔτε πρεσβύτερον οὔτε νεώτερον προσήκει γίγνεσθαι διὰ χρόνου οὐδὲ γενέσθαι ποτὲ οὐδὲ γεγονέναι νῦν οὐδ΄ εἰς αὖθις ἔσεσθαι͵ τὸ παράπαν τε οὐδὲν ὅσα γένεσις τοῖς ἐν αἰσθήσει φεροµένοις προσῆψεν͵ ἀλλὰ χρόνου ταῦτα αἰῶνα µιµουµένου καὶ κατ΄ ἀριθµὸν κυκλουµένου γέγονεν εἴδη. (Tim. 38a) And these are the portions of chronos; even as ‘was’ and ‘will be” are generated forms of chronos, although we apply them incorrectly, without noticing to everliving being. For we say indeed that it ‘was’ or ‘is’ or ‘will be’, but in fact according to the true account, only ‘is’ is applicable; ‘was’ and ‘will be’, however, are terms in which it is fitting for the becoming which happens in chronos to be spoken, for they are motions (kineseis); but they do not belong to that which is always unmoved with regard to its uniformity to become older or younger through chronos, nor ever to have become so, not to be so now nor to be about to be so in the future, nor overall to be subject to anything which becoming has attached to the things borne in the world of sensation, but these are generated forms of chronos which imitates aion and circles round according to number.

The temporal dimensions of past and future belong to and are created along with the time

(chronos) of the world of becoming, while the perpetual present, the existential form of the verb

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73 Callahan claims, p.34: “Timaeus states that since all coming to be is only an image of real being, it is fitting that, as the image of something other than itself, that which comes to be should exist in something other than itself, that is, in space. In this way it clings (my emphasis) to existence as best it can and escapes utter non-being. A spatial order thus somehow exists through the exigencies of coming to be.....occupation of space is, in some way, a consequence of occupation of time.” Nevertheless, as tempting as this reading is, it does not adequately address the relationship of topos to the chora (χώρα - ‘place’) described in 52b. There the chora functions as an indestructible receptacle in which the world comes to be. However, 52e, describes how this chora, along with being and becoming, preceded the creation of the ouranos and hence chronos. On this quandry see Gretchen Reydams Schills Demiurge and Providence, especially pp. 29-32, and Brisson Le meme et l’autre p.263.

to be (τὸ ἔστιν), only belongs to being and hence to aion.74 In opposition to Empedocles’ aion

which was perpetually full of past and future through the actions of Love and Strife, Plato

attempts to empty his aion of these temporal dimensions. In doing so, however, he submits that it

too is a creation, as an evacuation, a boundary drawn by the demiurge outside of which the

warring dimensions of past and future are removed and let loose. As such, the previous

entanglement of these disorderly dimensions with the stable form of aion might represent the

chaotic movement of 30a. The ‘imitation’ (µιµουµένου) of aion by chronos, as its moving image

(εἰκὼ...κινητόν) does not so much reflect the unchanging ontology of the model as it exists

through all aion (38c), as it distorts its claim to immobility, drawing it into the originary and

overlapping timespace upon which both are contingent.75 Here the Heraclitean aion emerges in its

association between eternal ontological principle and the finitude of childhood. Callahan’s

metaphor of chronos as “an aspect of change that bridges the gap, as it were, between change and

the immutability of the eternal nature” must, therefore, be fully extrapolated to mean that aion

can, and does, cross back into chronos. The chasm over which they are linked is a compressed

topology in which all temporal dimensions jostle in undifferentiated potentiality. And just as in

Heraclitus, the play of time is thought biologically, since Plato characterizes his world of

becoming of chronos as the child of the eternal model of aion, which is its generative father.76

Though by placing Plato’s metaphor back in time we see how these distinctions elide. The child

becomes the father, while the father is always tied to the child it previously was.

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74 This passage is discussed in detail by Erika Maula (1970) On the Semantics of Time in Plato’s Timaeus Åbo : Åbo Akademi, using the semantical theories of Plato’s Sophist especially its emphasis on different forms of the verb ‘to be’, see Sophist 262c-d.

75 It is in this way that I modify Callahan’s critique of Taylor, where for Callahan chronos describes a temporal regularity that provides a link to aion as a form of resemblance by arguing, p.37, that the point of similitude is rather one of their mutual relation to the confusion and irregularity beneath their respective creation through a dividing up of the temporal dimensions.

76 Plato Timaeus 50d: καὶ δὴ καὶ προσεικάσαι πρέπει τὸ µὲν δεχόµενον µητρί͵ τὸ δ΄ ὅθεν πατρί͵ τὴν δὲ µεταξὺ τούτων φύσιν ἐκγόνῳ. ‘And we may liken the receiving matter to a mother, the source to a father, and the middle nature to a child.’

Plato’s text approaches this notion of an underlying and undifferentiated flow of time by

arguing that the divisions of days, nights, months and years did not exist till the becoming of the

heaven, ouranos, and its attendant time, chronos (38a). This regularity, cut out from the flow,

maintains its intervals ‘by number’ (κατ΄ ἀριθµὸν), which is itself preserved by the demiurgic

creation of planets (εἰς διορισµὸν καὶ φυλακὴν ἀριθµῶν χρόνου γέγονεν - ‘for the boundary

marking and guardianship of the numbers of time’ 38c). Despite its relation to number, the

conception of chronos that the planets oversee is hardly abstract, since it is very much concretized

through the movement of the planets which construct it (ὅσα ἔδει συναπεργάζεσθαι χρόνον -

‘which were necessary for the cooperative fashioning of chronos’ 38e). While we may deduce an

idea of time from such regular motion, Plato stresses that time, as chronos, is itself materialized

through these planets. The planets, in coordinated motion, are time.77 Consequently, chronos

exists, materially, outside the human who may or may not be able to perceive it:

οὔτε πρὸς ἄλληλα συµµετροῦνται σκοποῦντες ἀριθµοῖς͵ ὥστε ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν οὐκ ἴσασιν χρόνον ὄντα τὰς τούτων πλάνας (Tim. 39d) Nor do they (men) measure and compare them (the planets) against each other using numbers, with the result that they are unaware that their wanderings constitute chronos.

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77 Callahan, p.26, suggests that the function of chronos is not only to provide a measurement of time, but to ‘be an image of and thereby make the universe a more perfect imitation of the perfect nature that abides in eternity.‘ In this sense he draws a contrast with the theories of Aristotle, discussed below, where time is the measurement of motion, not motion itself. The importance of such planetary motion in the ordered fashioning of the universe also evokes the Pythagorean conception of the music of the spheres performed by the movement of the heavenly bodies. See Aristotle de caelo 290b12 for a summary. Interestingly, as with the case of the unobservant men in Plato’s world of becoming, the deafness of men to the concordant music of the planets is explained by their having been accustomed to its background rhythm from birth, compared in a simile to the deafness of coppersmiths acquired through the percussive noise of the smithy. Just like Heraclitus’ invocation to attune oneself to the hidden harmony through the kosmos, so must Pythagoreans listen beyond the obvious and accustomed.

The planets move spatially, yet also embody the dimensions of time (past and future) as the

movements belonging to chronos: movements that demarcate, even actualize, change, regardless

of the intellectual capacity of perceiving subjects.78

This tension between spatial and temporal movement is thrown into further focus by the

use of the term τρόπος (tropos - ‘way/turn’) (39e) to describe their rotations. Plato previously

characterized their confusing orbits, due to the conflict between the two circles of the Same and

the Other, as ‘moving at the same time in two opposite directions’ (τὸ διχῇ κατὰ τὰ ἐναντία ἅµα

προϊέναι 39b). By materializing such a twisting arrangement of chronos across the world of

becoming the planets connote the ‘back-turning harmony‘ (παλίντροπος ἁρµονίη B.51) of

Heraclitus’ world. We have argued that this is a tense harmony which gestures beyond the spatial

association of fastening to the differentiating interplay of forces concealed in material objects, in

linguistic formulae and the physis of natural organisms. In addition, we have seen how the

coordinated play of children, allying the back-turning harmony to the time of aion, embodied

these potentials and tendencies..

The cosmological patternings of aion in Heraclitus worked in harmony with the

emergence of new structures of thoughts and culture. So in the Timaeus does the dynamic

movement of the planets of time, here chronos, provide the occasion for the exercise of new

cognitive orbits. And as with Heraclitus a key aspect of the performance of this knowledge is an

understanding of the relationship between difference and sameness.79 The planets in the Timaeus,

and the chronos which they embody, manifest one side of this hinge as they are positioned in the

circle of the Other, or Different, which is subordinate to that of the circuit of the Same:

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78 Aristotle will subsequently define the need for an observer, a psyche, to make the calculation of time, Physics 223a21. He suggests that time as a numerator of movement cannot exist without someone to count.

79 οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόµενον ἑωυτῷ ὁµολογέει - ‘they do not know how in differing from itself it agrees with itself’, where we can note the semantic root of ξυνιᾶσιν to mean ‘coming together’, discussed in chapter 4, Beyond Boundaries.

κατὰ δὴ τὴν θατέρου φορὰν πλαγίαν οὖσαν͵ διὰ τῆς ταὐτοῦ φορᾶς ἰούσης τε καὶ κρατουµένης. (Tim. 39a) They keep revolving around the circuit of the Other which is transverse and passes through the circuit of the Same by which it is dominated.

Not only is the circuit of the Same that which exercises sovereignty over the circuit of the Other,

but unlike the latter, which has been broken into more circles so as to accommodate the

movement of the planets, it is attuned to the qualities of the ever-uniform (πρὸς τὰ κατὰ ταὐτὰ

ἔχοντα ἀεί 37b) and is correspondingly itself ‘undivided’ (ἄσχιστον 36d). The motion of the

planets in the circle of the Other provides more than just an epistemological window for man to

perceive the nature of chronos: it also functions as the path toward understanding the revolution

of the Same which offers a higher knowledge of number (38c). A rational path which in turn

points one toward the unchanging and undivided aion. Difference here is thought only with

respect to a supervening Sameness, whereas we posited the priority of the creative and

unpredictable process of differentiation in Heraclitus’ philosophy. Nevertheless, as we have seen,

Plato’s attempts to segregate aion from movement, chaos and difference efface a constitutive

disorder behind its ‘eternity’.

Indeed, the claims for the circuit of the Same, as the passageway to aion, to be

impervious to difference, and chronos, appear highly contingent. Plato’s account of the cognitive

confusion of children implies that their unfettered playfulness can upset the uniformity of the

Same. These circuits are described as interwoven bands constructed from the world soul which

the demiurge created in order to endow the living kosmos with rationality (τὸν κόσµον ζῶον

ἔµψυχον ἔννουν - 30c) as that which would most beautifully imitate the eternal being. Yet when

this soul is implanted into humans, together with the addition of appetitive and spirited parts, the

circuits become disordered, leading to cognitive errors:

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τότε ταὐτόν τῳ καὶ θάτερόν του τἀναντία τῶν ἀληθῶν προσαγορεύουσαι ψευδεῖς καὶ ἀνόητοι γεγόνασι, οὐδεµία τε ἐν αὐταῖς τότε περίοδος ἄρχουσα οὐδ΄ ἡγεµών ἐστιν. (Tim. 44a) Then they speak of the same or the other in the manner which is opposite from the truth and they become false and foolish, and there is no circuit in them which has a guiding or directing power.

The rule of the circuit of the Same is thereby upset, until education and appropriate nutrition have

harmonised the circuits back into their appropriate order. In this way, as we have seen in the

previous chapter, Plato emphasizes the role of education in correcting the wayward innovations

and perceptions of the young. Yet it is noteworthy, bearing Heraclitus in mind, that it is the

cognitive play of children who, through the nature of their souls, are able to confound this

hierarchy as they drag the sameness of aion into the world of becoming and division and

difference (chronos).

The seizing of this disorderly knowledge, as in Heraclitus, is considered a material

process. Plato’s notion of the tangible role of fire in vision, as streams of fire from within the eyes

collide with fire from the outside world to form a substance which distributes the resulting motion

through the body to cause sensation and seeing (45c-d) owes much to Empedocles.80 Observation

of the movements of the planets, through the physical coalescence of the fires of the micro and

macrocosm, and the perception of time thereby inaugurates the very activity of philosophy:

νῦν δ΄ ἡµέρα τε καὶ νὺξ ὀφθεῖσαι µῆνές τε καὶ ἐνιαυτῶν περίοδοι µεµηχάνηνται µὲν ἀριθµόν͵ χρόνου δὲ ἔννοιαν περί τε τῆς τοῦ παντὸς φύσεως ζήτησιν ἔδοσαν· ἐξ ὧν ἐπορισάµεθα φιλοσοφίας γένος͵ οὗ µεῖζον ἀγαθὸν οὔτ΄ ἦλθεν οὔτε ἥξει ποτὲ τῷ θνητῷ γένει δωρηθὲν ἐκ θεῶν. (Tim. 47a) But now vision of day and night, and of months and the circuits of years have contrived number and not only given us an awareness of chronos, but also the method of inquiry for the whole of nature (physis); from which we have procured philosophy in all its range, than which no greater gift has come or will come to the mortal race from the gods.

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80 See above for discussion of Empedocles.

Plato here foregrounds the role of the senses, and the material intersections between the

individual and the kosmos in the cognitive process that afford the highest knowledge. The mobile

arrangement of the planets in the circuit of the Different, spiraled and canted by the circuit of the

Same, creates patterns of fire that embody the dimensions of chronos through the movements

(κινήσεις) of the past and the future. The cognitive process and the acquisition of philosophical

wisdom functions as a distributed activity involving agents in the heavens as upon the earth. And

as with Heraclitus‘ children, the literal grasping of this knowledge through the body (and its

burning eyes) exploits a potency within time.

This relationship between fire, perception, time and philosophical attunement to the

motions of the kosmos can now return us to Heraclitus. Fire is the central element for Heraclitus,

whose dynamic activities are classified with regard to the aspects of time:

κόσµον (τόνδε), τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν, οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλʹ ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀειζωον, ἁπτόµενον µέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύµενον µέτρα. (B.30) This kosmos, the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it always was, and is, and will be everliving fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.

Unlike Parmenides’ denial of the dimensions of past and future in his description of being as

perpetually present, which we can see is behind Plato’s attempt to similarly demarcate his aion,

Heraclitus’ vision of an immanent kosmos contains all temporal registers within it. The anaphora

of the adverb ἀεὶ (aei - ‘always’) in the word ἀειζωον (aeizōon - ‘everliving’) directs us naturally

to Heraclitus’ playful aion, but as an everliving organism also speaks to Plato’s use of the term to

describe his own model (ζῶον ἀΐδιον ὄν - 37d), while Plato’s created kosmos is also vital, even if

it ‘only’ exists throughout all chronos (38e). Heraclitus’ fire, in its manifestation of past, present

and future is a creative and destructive force that operates immanently without the need for the

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poiesis of a demiurge, be it god or man to create it.81 The denial of a transcendental origin is also

an affirmation of the coexistence of all the levels of time, incinerating each other in turn as they

take hold of the world in measured turns that put us in mind of the rituals of game playing. And as

we saw with regard to the materialized cognitive graspings of the children of Heraclitus, fire acts

as a model of such captation:

πάντα γάρ τὸ πῦρ ἐπελθὸν κρινεῖ καὶ καταλήψεται (B.66) Fire, coming on, will distinguish and catch up with all things.

The relentless advance of fire is also the insertion and division (κρινεῖ) of forms of time that can

actively reconfigure the kosmos. Fire sweeps finite objects (καταλήψεται) back into the temporal

flux of change and becoming, away from any temporary stability they assumed in adopting

demarcated forms. While fire plays a central role in the Timaeus as the medium for the

understanding of the divisions of chronos, and furthermore as a route to the changeless aion of

the everliving model, so in Heraclitus’ world do the movements of fire literally embody the

dimensions of a time that only ‘swells’ (ἐπελθὸν) through its own relationship to extinction. In the

same way the play of children, as it threatens established cultural and epistemological structures,

is always both the creation and the destruction of structures of time, a forgetting necessary for

innovation.82

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81 So Kahn, p.134: “Insofar as the kosmos is made, it is self-made; insofar as it is organized, it is self-organized; insofar as it is generated it is identical with its own eternal source, everliving fire.” In responding to the radical novelty of Heraclitus’ denial of a cosmogony or origin the early Stoics (Zeno and Cleanthes) tried to resolve this through the ascription of two forms of fire, a pur technikon and a pur atechnikon one of which was the creative arche while the other was the form of fire known as one of the elements. On this question see, in particular, A. Long “Heraclitus and Stoicism” where he believes that Heraclitus would have supported this distinction between forms of fire, p.43.

82 This notion of the relation between forgetting and creation will be discussed in the next chapter, Latent Evolution, with regard to Nietzsche’s valorization of their connection in his second Untimely Meditation:On the uses and abuses of history for life.

Plato’s association of fire and time is given a further Heraclitean element in the use of the

verb κατασβέννυται (46d) (cf ἀποσβεννύµενον of Heraclitus B.30) to describe man’s separation

from the external fire, and hence knowledge of the world, during sleep.83 Heraclitus’ own

incandescence at the epistemological fumblings of his audience, as they fail to listen to the logos

and the phusis of each thing, also represents, through the centrality of fire as the cosmological and

cognitive principle of the world, an inability to think in time. And as we have seen, this is an

ignorance that the Timaeus would classify, therefore, as one that disables the instantiation of

philosophy.

Aristotle and Heraclitus

Let us finally turn to Aristotle’s definition of aion in his treatise On the Heavens.

Although Aristotle does not directly acknowledge Heraclitus anywhere in his writing on time, we

will observe how Heraclitus’ aion provokes and unsettles Aristotle’s account, just as it did with

Plato. Furthermore, Aristotle’s theorizing upon time and, in particular, the paradox of the ‘now’

that introduces divisions between the dimensions of the past and future, will similarly elucidate

Heraclitus’ notion of the differentiating potential within aion.

καὶ γὰρ τοῦτο τοὔνοµα θείως ἔφθεγκται παρὰ τῶν ἀρχαίων. τὸ γὰρ τέλος τὸ περιέχον τὸν τῆς ἑκάστου ζωῆς χρόνον, οὕ µηθὲν ἔξω κατὰ φύσιν, αἰών ἑκάστου κέκληται. κατὰ τὸν αὐτον δὲ λόγον καὶ τὸ τοῦ παντὸς οὐρανοῦ τέλος αἰών ἐστιν, ἀπὸ τοῦ ἀεὶ εἶναι εἰληφὼς τὴν ἐπωνθµίαν, ἀθάνατος καὶ θεῖος. (De Caelo 297 a22-28)

And, the ancients were inspired when they devised this word. For the fulfillment (telos) which surrounds the time (chronos) of each living creature, and which by nature (physis)

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83 This reading of Heraclitus’ cognitive structuring of his macro and microcosms is also picked up in Sextus Empiricus, adding the Stoic notion of a pervading breath (pneuma) as that element which sleep threatens to separate us from. He illustrates this severed connection, and its relationship to enveloping rationality with a remarkable double image of our own breath being like a root desiring to emerge out of our own windows to coalesce with the cosmic breath which is itself compared to the fire that kindles human intelligence that shelters together at nighttime like coals. (Adversus Mathematicos VII 129-130 = DK. 22 A.16).

cannot be exceeded, has been called the aion of each. By the same reasoning the fulfillment of the entire heaven is also called aion, taking the name from ‘to exist continuously’ (aei einai), since it is immortal and holy.

Aristotle’s definition makes explicit the link between aion and the adverbial form aei (ἀεὶ) with

the infinitive of the verb to be, einai (εἶναι). aion is designated as a marker of the appropriate

length of time for each living being, ranging from an individual to the lifetime of the heavens,

which extends to infinity. By its nature (physis), he explains, this boundary cannot be overcome

and in aligning his own key concept of teleology to this description reminds us of the telessidōteir

form used in Euripides’ Heracleidae. Similarly, in linking aion to the living thing (zōēs), and

referencing its nature (physin) which Aristotle terms elsewhere (Politics 1252 b.33) as the

completed form of a thing revealed through growth, it also refers to the other verb of generation

in Euripides’ mythological passage, tiktei, just as it does the eternal creature of Plato’s Timaeus

and the ever-living fire of Heraclitus.84 While the physis of a being defines the extent of its

growth, it is aion which marks, or even enables, the fulfillment (telos) of this potentiality. In the

second example, describing the completion of the entire universe it is notable that the term

chronos is omitted and aion is that which delineates the infinite dimensions of the heavens.

Associated with mortal life and generation as well as an infinite and immortal cosmic extension,

aion does more than just passively qualify time, chronos, as the fitting lifetime, or appropriate

temporality, of each being.85 Through its role in the maintenance of infinity, as well as in the

dynamics of growth (and decay) of finite beings, Aristotle evokes a certain power within aion that

takes its valence from this ability to range across temporal registers, between the eternal

movements of the macrocosm and the finite interchanges of the microcosm. This Heraclitean

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84 Politics 1252b33 οἷον ἕκαστον ἐστι τῆς γενέσεως τελεσθεῖσης, ταύτην φαµὲν τὴν φύσιν εἶναι ἑκάστου - ‘Such as each thing is when its growth has been completed, this quality we term to be the nature of each’

85 This notion of the passivity of aion is a presupposition of Coubaritsis’ reading.

trace of mobility and agency appears to escape from Aristotle’s attempt to restrict the function of

aion to that of a static boundary marker.

Aion is explicitly distinguished from chronos just before this passage. Chronos is limited,

in Aristotle’s sense, to that which measures ‘change’ (µεταβολή). It is the ‘number’ (ἀριθµός) of

‘motion’ (κινήσις) and is therefore dependent upon the existence of ‘matter’ (σῶµα) which can

move and be measured (279a15-17). As a consequence of there being no matter beyond heaven,

there can be no chronos there either, nor any ‘void’ (κενόν) or ‘place’ (τόπος) since they allow the

possibility of motion, and without matter there can be no motion.86 Chronos is contingent upon

space, and the sort of motion it can numerate is necessarily spatial: it cannot gesture beyond the

pre-existing material framework it is used to measure.87 That is to say, it possesses no mobility of

its own. Nevertheless, the unmoved and unchanging things situated outside heaven are able to

partake in aion:

ἀλλ᾽ἀναλλοίοτα καὶ ἀπαθῆ τὴν ἀρίστην ἔχοντα ζωὴν καὶ τὴν αὐταρκεστάτην διατελεῖ τὸν ἅπαντα αἰῶνα.

(De Caelo 279. a21-23)

But unchanged and impassive they have the best life and complete in self sufficiency their whole aion.

Although aion is classified as a correctly named fulfillment and boundary of chronos, it

also has an existence or reckoning beyond itself, in an immaterial sense. In the discussion of time

in book IV of his Physics, where the term chronos is used exclusively, Aristotle claims that

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86 In the Physics Aristotle also stresses that chronos is not to be seen as identical to motion (219 b17), but is contingent upon it, relating it to its numerical function in recording movement, thus marking an important modification from the Platonic conception of the movement of time, as chronos, in the Timaeus.

87 Again we might see here a qualification of the Timaeus (52c) where time, chronos, is said to exist in something other than itself, i.e., space. John Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy, p.34, however, criticizes A.J. Taylor’s commentary on the Timaeus for supposing that “because the gignomenon (world of becoming) is ‘in time’ it is also ‘in space’; occupation of space is, in some way, a consequence of occupation in time.” Callahan goes on to recommend instead that we should not necessarily assess the creation of time and space in the Timaeus in a strictly literal, or chronological sense (that being itself paradoxical), but in a logical way.

eternal things (αἐι ὄντα) are not in chronos (οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν χρόνῳ) since they are not embraced

(περιέχεται) by chronos, nor able to be measured (µετρεῖται) by it (Physics IV 221b4-6). Time

(chronos), however, is able to embrace certain things which are currently non-existent (µὴ

οντῶν), as long as they have the capacity for ‘destruction’ (φθαρτὰ), or ‘birth’ (γενητὰ), and are

therefore liable to change and, thus, be subject to measurement. Aristotle gives some examples of

these non-existents and the conditions for the potentiality of their existing in time:

τῶν δὲ µὴ ὄντων ὅσα µὲν περιέχει ὁ χρόνος, τὰ µὲν ἦν (οἷον ῟Οµηρος ποτε ἦν) τὰ δὲ ἔσται (οἷον τῶν µελλόντων τι) ἐφ᾽ὁπότερα περιέχει, καὶ εἰ ἐπ᾽ἄµφω, ἀµφότερα καὶ ἦν καὶ ἔσται. ὅσα δὲ µὴ περιέχει µηδαµῇ, οὔτ᾽ἦν οὔτ᾽ἔστιν οὔτ᾽ἔσται. ἔστι δὲ τὰ τοιαῦτα τῶν µὴ ὄντων, ὅσων τἀντικείµενα ἀει ἔστιν

(Physics IV.222a1-4)

Among the non-existents, on the other hand, those which time embraces either once were (such as Homer once was), or will be (such as some event in the future), according as it embraces them on either side <of the present>, or if it embraces them on both sides, then they can be either past or future. However, it never embraces at all those things which neither were or are or will be. Examples of the non-existents of such a kind are those opposites which eternally exist.

Chronos is capable of reaching across the dimensions of time, able to hold long dead

poets or nondescript future becomings in its grasp, but only in the sense that they must pass, or

have passed, into its own spatial location. For Aristotle there can only be one time ‘at a time’, and

time cannot be identical in successive moments (Physics IV.220b6). Earlier in the treatise

Aristotle has commented on the flux of time in its correlation to the flux of things which it

measures. The anchor, and boundary (περας) to this potential extension is the present instant, the

‘now’ (τὸ νῦν) which ‘divides’ (διόριζειν) ‘the past’ (τὸ παρελθὸν) and ‘the future’ (τὸ µέλλον).

This ‘now’, though, cannot itself be said to be a ‘part’ (µέρος) of time (Physics IV.218a7-9) since

the part must refer to the whole, but the instant cannot refer to anything beyond itself. The

language used illustrates once more Aristotle’s conception of time already in spatial terms since

the instant acts as a ‘boundary stone’ (ὅρος): a stabilizing landmark against the shifting

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topography of the movements of bodies to which chronos was and will be tied. This leads

Aristotle to the paradox that time does not exist, since the past and future are the actual

dimensions of time, but do not actually exist since the changes they measure have already

occurred or are yet to, while the ‘now’ must be perpetually different from itself since ‘no two

parts can exist at the same time’ (µηδὲν δ᾽ἐστὶ τῶν ἐν τῷ χρόνῳ ἄλλο καὶ ἄλλο µέρος ἅµα -

Physics IV. 218a12).88 While time, chronos, as the numeration of motion, requires a before (τὸ

πρότερον) and after (ὕστερον) in order to make a measurement, the ‘now’ as an instant cannot

have a before and after and so is not embraced by time, even though it is necessary for the

previous now to perish before a new one can exist.

However, in the paradox of the instant, the ‘now’ that enables time even though it is

outside its reach, we find a possible solution to the impasse that Aristotle has led us into. While it

may be possible to speak of time (chronos) as that which can destroy things through the aging

process (Physics IV. 219b14) , or as a principle of epistemological decay since all things can be

forgotten it it (Physics IV. 222b25), Aristotle emphasizes that chronos has no efficacy itself. Our

habit of believing so is a trick of language and logical imprecision. Simply put, in Aristotle’s

view, chronos is not a ‘principle of causation’ (αἴτιος) and is unable to do anything:

οὐ µὴν ἄλλ᾽οὐδὲ ταύτην ὁ χρόνος ποιεῖ, ἀλλὰ συµβαίνει ἐν χρόνῳ γίνεσθαι καὶ ταύτην τὴν µεταβολήν. (Physics IV.222b26-27)

But moreover, it is not really time which does this (destroys things), but the change which happens concurrently with time.

(trans. after Wicksteed/Cornford)

The change (µεταβολή) which destroys things is not only ‘in’ time, but also ‘goes along with

it’ (συµβαίνει), ‘joins with it’, even in the metaphorical sense ‘agrees’ with it. The spatialized

concept of chronos wavers under the temporal pressure of potential and previous becomings.

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88 For more on the question of the paradoxes of Aristotle see Sorabji Time, Creation and Continuum: theories in antiquity and the middle ages (Oxford, 1983).

where the dimensions of time are held within, rather than created through changes in the external

world. There is a connection here back to the paradox of the instant, the ‘now’, which plays a

fundamental role in bringing time to being, but yet does not belong to it. In addition to

demarcating the dimensions of time, it is also that which unites them. This function is also

defined in terms of potentiality:

οὕτω καὶ τὸ νῦν τὸ µὲν τοῦ χρόνου διαίρεσις κατὰ δύναµιν, τὸ δὲ πέρας ἄµφοῖν καὶ ἑνότης. (Physics IV. 222a19-20)

In this way ‘the now’ is both the divider of chronos in potentiality, but a continuing

unifier as the coincident end-term and beginning term of past and future time. (trans. after Wicksteed/Cornford)

The ‘now’ displays agency, holding both directions of time (ἄµφοῖν) along its boundaries.

This potential, extending simultaneously to the past and the future, cannot be measured by

chronos, but its incisions, as marking points, can. However, in being both past and future at the

same time, and that which exists between them, it seems to be something of a contradiction.89 We

should return to the passage quoted above (Physics IV.222a1-4) concerning the ‘non-

existents’ (µὴ οντῶν) and the examples that time, as chronos, can surround (περιέχει) and those

that it can not. An example of the latter was ‘opposites which always exist’ (τἀντικείµενα ἀει

ἔστιν). We can include in this category of non-existent opposites the ‘now’ which chronos cannot

hold or even measure: it is paradoxically both past and future, and yet neither. Aristotle’s criticism

of Heraclitus in his Metaphysics for violating the principle of non-contradiction, on the grounds

that things cannot both exist and not-exist (εἴναι καὶ µὴ εἴναι - Met. III.1005b23) provides a

useful intertext here. His reading spatializes Heraclitus’ opposites through the assumption that

two cannot exist simultaneously as they would occupy the same place. Aristotle ignores the

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89 Callahan. p.71. argues that the functions of dividing and uniting ‘are the same thing...but they differ in essence’. Yet in understanding the now with regard to a spatialized line of time he overlooks the idea that such functions are mutually determined and form the same essence once considered through the idea of time.

constitutive tension, the backstretched harmony, between the existence of opposites as potential

tendencies within one thing. This force of internal divergence should be conceptualized in terms

of the dimensions of time, not space.90 In fact, Aristotle’s ‘now’ is held taut by a similar

potentiality, combining the past and future changes it stitches into the cloth of time. In the

coexistence of these opposing dimensions it itself ceases to ‘exist’ in the sense of being measured,

since it is always both before (τὸ πρότερον) and after (ὕστερον), but it is also that which causes

time, chronos, to pass.

As an active agency and that which enables chronos to mark the limits of matter, even as

it is not subject to chronos, Aristotle’s ‘now’ adds some qualification to his definition of aion. For

while aion is associated with the growth (and erasure) of the living organism within its pre-given

limits, but also swells to mark the infinite duration of the heavens and of the incorporeals beyond,

so too does the ‘now’ move across durations as that which defines the present, yet also extends,

potentially, toward both directions of time. It is in this sense that Aristotle’s paradox of the ‘now’

speaks to the aion of Heraclitus B.52 where a similar tension can be perceived. The aion marks

the necessary finitude of the child, as its nature (physis) achieves its destined limit (telos), but

which also as a cosmological principle, tied to its originary function of differentiation (B.51),

embodies the warlike play of infinite changes that harmonize the kosmos. Furthermore, the

incisions of the ‘nows’ which pin Aristotle’s chronos onto a spatialised world of mobile

materiality also entrap the infinity of opposites (τἀντικείµενα ἀει ἔστιν) within each moment. The

potency of Heraclitus’ children is balanced in a similar way, as the ‘now’ of their play makes

them both vulnerable to the inevitable numeration of time as the generations give way (B.20), but

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90 Dilcher. p108 notes that Heraclitus’ opposites are not the traditional static ones employed by Pythagoras, for example between male and female, odd and even, termed enantia (ἐνατία) in Greek. Instead his opposites ‘all imply transition and change’, that is their present state contains future states within it, that only become visible when one plots its mutability over time. For more on Aristotle’s wilful misreading of Heraclitus see in particular Harold Cherniss Aristotle’s Criticism of PreSocratic Philosophy.

also powerful as their performance threatens to unleash the potential within opposites onto the

world, reshaping space under the exigency of time.

---------

To return to the poem of Borges quoted at the beginning of this chapter, we can discern how his

reading of Heraclitus’ theory of time elucidates our account of the development of the term aion

and the ramifications of Heraclitus’ valorisation of its efficacy. For it is Heraclitus’ weave

(‘trama’) of past, present and future operating immanently across his world, playing out the

emergence of thought as it rearranges the very dimensions of existence that unsettles the

subsequent tradition. The coalesced potentiality of the infinite and the finite in the timeplay of

aion inaugurates new patterns of knowledge, culture and the physical kosmos. Heraclitus’ aion

does not, therefore, act as a ‘médiateur’, as Coubaritsis views it, in the smooth teleology of the

term as a step on the way to the connotation of an unchanging eternity, always marked with the

sense of with the appropriate lifetime of a living element; but it is an arresting provocation as it

transvalues its pejorative deployment in Homer into a principle of differentiating creation.91 The

distinctions that Empedocles, Plato and Aristotle attempt to make unavoidably collapse under this

disruption. And as with Borges’ poem the recognition of the artificial carving up of time must turn

us toward our own shadow, prompting a self-reflexive intuition of our place within the flow of

time, and acknowledging its ‘contemptible’ (deleznable) nature as that which shocks us out of our

sense of finitude and the illusion of separation, compelling us to turn toward the flowing

connections beyond boundaries. As this communication across durations embeds us in the world,

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91 Coubaritsis p.105.

reaching forward and back through time, aion desires nothing more than to break out from any

sense of appropriate or limited lifetime. And in this sense does it desire to proliferate and change

eternally. To play.

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Chapter Three: Latent Evolution

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

In the last chapter we observed how Aristotle’s definition of the time of chronos treated it

as the number (ἀριθµός) which measured the motion (κινήσις) of a physical body (σῶµα). Despite

this conception of chronos in terms of spatial coordinates and materiality, we discerned that

Aristotle’s idea of ‘the now’ (τὸ νῦν) as the boundary which divided the past and future, even as it

remained distinct from them, spoke to the differentiating power concealed within the aion of

Heraclitus’ playing children. ‘The now’ offered a model of temporality that both manufactured the

subsequent interpretation of time as chronos as well as appearing to disappear under its

numerating radar. Considered as a pregnant moment that coalesced the dimensions of time to

insert their potential in new configurations, ‘the now’, like Heraclitus’ children, gained its

efficacy from its invisibility.

Does such an association, though, not run the risk of devaluing the real processes and

becomings of childhood as it merges into adulthood and onwards to death by removing them

from the passage of time? Does the aion of children’s timeplay require the thinking of a new form

of temporality, one that can acknowledge the relationship with finitude not as a distant horizon to

be encountered in the future, but as an internal condition for existence that invades the present? In

this chapter we will explore such questions with regard to two key thinkers of finitude and time,

Martin Heidegger and Frederic Nietzsche, in their respective encounters with Heraclitus. In

particular, we will use them to illustrate the idea of the creative time of the aporia in Heraclitus’

philosophy, where we can glimpse the interplay of tendencies (of forgetting and remembering, of

living and dying, of appearance and concealment) that structure one’s experience of the kosmos.

This incitement to think beyond the spatial boundaries of opposites and install oneself in this in-

between time will allow purchase upon the efficacy of aion as it blurs the demarcation of

individuals from one another and the world. The grasping of this aporetic form of temporality,

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linked to the becomings and potentials of childhood play in Heraclitus, also offers an

interpretation of Nietzsche’s theory of the Eternal Return of the Same as delineated in his Thus

Spoke Zarathustra, a doctrine described by Heidegger as his most fundamental, without which

“Nietzsche’s philosophy is like a tree without roots”.1 Heraclitus’ playing children will indicate

that it does not posit a perpetually recurring sameness linked to an immanent view of time

contained in a succession of moments, but rather an assertion of difference forged from the flow

of becoming.2 It is the presence of Heraclitus’ children behind Nietzsche’s thinking of time that

will function as the sprouting creativity to which the brave individual can turn in affirming what

Nietzsche termed his ‘greatest burden’.3

Aristotle and Nietzsche’s Hidden Tempo

Before we move onto Nietzsche’s initial encounters with Heraclitus and time in his works

from the 1870s, The PrePlatonic Philosophers and his Second Untimely Meditation in particular,

it is worth returning to Aristotle. Aristotle limns a latent force sussurating beneath chronos, and

although he will ultimately dismiss it as being inaccessible to observation (ἀλλὰ λανθάνειν τοῦτο

τὴν ἡµετέραν αἴσθησιν - ‘but it escapes our senses’) and defies what is apparent (λίαν ἐτὶ τοῖς

φανεροῖς ἀµφισβητεῖν - ‘to be excessively skeptical to obvious facts’ Phys. VIII.253b30), he

nevertheless provides an account of Heraclitean becoming and flux that resonates with

Nietzsche’s subsequent evaluation. Indeed, as we shall see in this chapter, the concepts of what

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1 Martin Heidegger Nietzsche Vol.2, p.6.

2 As such my interpretation will side more with the recent work of Robin Small, Nietzsche Time Becoming, as opposed to the interpretation offered by Eugen Fink, a collaborator with Heidegger, in his Nietzsche’s Philosophy. The emphasis on the Eternal Return as a differentiating force that fissures any conception of sameness is also a key tenet of Gilles Deleuze’s interpretation in his Difference and Repetition, esp. pp.110-114.

3 This phrase comes from the first instance of the doctrine of the Eternal Return in The Gay Science §341.

‘escapes’, or ‘lies concealed’ (λανθάνειν from lanthanō) as well as the need to think beyond the

obvious (τοῖς φανεροῖς - phanerēs) are central to Heraclitus’s philosophical provocation to orient

oneself rather toward the indeterminate time of the aporia, away from the spatial categorisations

of knowledge that work to insert distinctions between things, individuals, states and minds that

can more productively be seen as overlapping and to have emerged from such mergings.

Shortly after his introduction of the concept of ‘the now’ that quivers in and out of time in

book IV of his Physics, Aristotle poses the dilemma of whether chronos can tick if there is no one

to perform its arithmetic:

Πότερον δὲ µη οὐσης ψυχῆς εἴη ἂν ὁ χρόνος ἢ οὔ, ἀπορήσειν ἄν τις. ἀδυνάτου γὰρ ὄντος εἶναι τοῦ ἀριθµήσοντος ἀδύνατον καὶ ἀριθµητόν τι εἶναι, ὥστε δῆλον ὅτι οὐδ᾽ἀριθµός. (Phys. IV. 223a22-24) The question, then, is whether or not chronos would exist if there were no psyche. For if it were impossible for there to be the factor that does the counting, it would be impossible that something should be counted, so that evidently there could be no number.

The ψυχή (psyche) is usually translated as ‘soul’, though it is clear that here Aristotle intends to

emphasize its epistemological function associated with the activity of counting.4 Cornford offers

‘consciousness’ as a translation,5 and it certainly seems clear that chronos in Aristotle’s view can

not exist without the presence of an observing individual. There is no doubt, then, that time as

chronos is figured as an ‘interpretation’, a secondary act upon the world. We have already

indicated that the role of ‘the now’, which is not a ‘part’ (µέρος - meros) of chronos, but

nevertheless holds its dimensions within its potential (τὸ δὲ πέρας ἄµφοῖν καὶ ἑνότης - Phys.IV.

222a.19-20 - ‘a continuing unifier as the coincident end-term and beginning term of past and

future time’) might function as this originary force that enables chronos to ‘be’. And furthermore,

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4 The usage of psyche in Heraclitus will be analyzed in the next chapter, Beyond Boundaries. Suffice it to say here, that Aristotle’s usage of the term lacks the embodied and distributed nature of its cognitive functions that I will discern in Heraclitus’ vision.

5 Aristotle Physics trans. Cornford p.418.

we have discerned a trace of Heraclitus’ aion in this ‘now’, playing across time as it weaves the

eternal into the finite. Could it be that chronos is a numeration of this incisive ‘moment’, where a

psyche actualizes its differentiating force into the movement of a body that can be counted? If one

were to take away the psyche, its numbers, and consequently chronos, would we be left with a

‘now’, vainly looking for a chronos to divide (διαίρεσις - diaresis)? The continuation of the

passage implies a somewhat different answer:

εἰ δὲ µηδὲν ἄλλο πέφυκεν ἀριθµεῖν ἢ ψυχὴ καὶ ψυχῆς νοῦς, ἀδύνατον εἶναι χρόνον ψυχῆς µὴ οὔσης, ἀλλ᾽ἢ τοῦτο ὅ ποτε ὄν ἐστιν ὁ χρόνος, οἷον εἰ ἐνδέχεται κίνησιν εἶναι ἄνευ ψυχῆς. τὸ δὲ πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον ἐν κινήσει ἐστίν. χρόνος δὲ ταῦτ᾽ἐστὶν ᾗ ἀριθµητά ἐστιν. (Phys. IV. 223a26-29) And if nothing can count except psyche and the intellect (noos) of the psyche, it is impossible that chronos should exist if psyche did not; unless as the ‘objective thing’ which is subjectively chronos to us, if we may suppose that movement could thus objectively exist without there being any psyche. For ‘before’ and ‘after’ are objectively involved in motion, and these, being capable of numeration, constitute chronos.

Aristotle further insists upon the activity of a psyche that makes use of the rational logic of the

noos in contrast to the senses. Without this disembodied calculation to measure the changes of the

world, chronos ceases to be. But here Aristotle qualifies his argument, hypothesizing that without

the observing psyche there would still be movement (κινήσις - kinēsis) that is capable of being

counted (ἀριθµητά ἐστιν). How might this movement, unbeknownst to a calculating

‘consciousness’, be grasped? Its ability to maintain a ‘before and after’ (πρότερον καὶ ὕστερον)

distinguishes it from ‘the now’ which was perpetually tied to a present, loaded with potential, but

always evanescing before the next ‘now’ came along. Underneath chronos and its facilitating

psyche there lies instead the time of a hidden dynamism.

While this passage conducts a thought experiment for a world without a psyche, later in

the Physics Aristotle considers, and dismisses, the possibility of continuous movement that could

somehow evade the perceptions of an existing psyche:

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καί φασί τινες κινεῖσθαι τῶν ὄντων οὐ τὰ µὲν τὰ δ᾽οὔ, ἀλλὰ πάντα καὶ ἀεί, ἀλλὰ λανθάνειν τοῦτο τὴν ἡµετέραν αἴσθησιν. (Phys. VIII.253b10-12) And in fact some thinkers maintain not that some things are in motion and some not, but that all things are in motion always, though this escapes (lanthanei) our senses.

Although Aristotle does not identify the proponents of this theory of constant motion, Simplicius’

commentary on the passage supposes that ‘Heracliteans’ are the target of his criticism, possibly

taking a lead from Plato’s Theatetus 189E.6 Aristotle notes that these thinkers do not specify

which type of motion they mean, nevertheless, he chooses to debunk their argument by taking it

to refer to ‘alteration’ (ἀλλοίωσις) over time. In Aristotle’s view change occurs in states and

phases rather than continuously. He gives the example of the sudden freezing of water into ice, or

the set amount of men needed to haul a ship where a lesser number could not shift it at all, or the

distinct alteration from sickness to health. Neither ‘growth’ (αὐξάνεσθαι) nor ‘decay’ (φθίνειν)

can go on continuously (συνεχῶς). Aristotle illustrates the folly of the adherents of perpetual flux

with two examples from nature:

ἔστι δ᾽ὅµοιος ὁ λόγος τῷ περὶ τοῦ τὸν σταλαγµὸν κατατρίβειν καὶ τὰ ἐκφυόµενα τοὺς λίθους διαιρεῖν. οὐ γὰρ εἰ τοσόνδε ἐξέωσεν ἢ ἀφεῖλεν ὁ σταλαγµός, καὶ τὸ ἥµισυ ἐν ἡµίσει χρόνῳ πρότερον. (Phys.VIII.253b15-18)

The argument is similar to that about dripping water wearing away stones and roots splitting stones as they grow out through them. For if so much material was pushed out or carried away by the drip, it does not follow that half that material was previously carried out in half the time.

The ‘Heraclitean’ belief that there is a constant process of change, wearing away the shape of a

rock from without or fissuring it in sprouting growth from within, belies the senses and the fact

that while matter can be divided infinitely (µεριστὸν εἰς ἄπειρον τὸ ἀλλιούµενον), alteration itself

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6 Simplicius Phys. 1196.8. Daniel Graham’s commentary on book VIII of the Physics assumes that Aristotle probably did have Heraclitus in mind for his critique. Other scholars agree, though differ in their assessment of whether Aristotle’s perception of a doctrine of radical flux is germane with Heraclitus’ thought. Vlastos, Guthrie, Barnes believe he did; Graham, Kirk, Marcovich are against the idea.

(ἡ ἀλλοίωσις) may not be. The notion that there might be a latent flow of becoming always in

motion, modifying and creating new forms, is to deny the evidence of the senses and to cavil

about what it apparent:

ὥστε τὸ φάναι συνεχῶς ἀλλοιοῦσθαι λίαν ἐστὶ τοῖς φανεροῖς ἀµφισβητεῖν. εἰς τοὐναντίον γὰρ ἡ ἀλλοίωσις. (Phys.VIII.253b30-31) Therefore to suppose change occurs continuously is to be excessively skeptical of obvious facts, since all alteration heads toward the opposite state.

Aristotle shows his hand here. As with the arithmetic of chronos, chopping the world into

measurable chunks dependent upon the presence of a counting psyche, so is there held to be no

alteration that is not visible to an observer. Furthermore, it is the pre-existent definition of

demarcated opposites (εἰς τοὐναντίον) that determine the boundaries and actuality of change.

Aristotle thereby denies the kinēsis that was hypothesized to exist before chronos in book IV, a

time of becoming that moves beyond an observing framework; but in doing so he indicates an

awareness of a Heraclitean theory of motion and, hence, time, as just such a latent force effecting

change. While Aristotle disproves this position by recourse to fixed perceptual categories, we will

see how Heraclitus’ philosophy precisely enjoins one to think beyond these spatialized and

distinct opposites, and to install oneself in the aporetic in-between where tendencies constantly

interact. This liminal time, however, is not a moment rife with potential, a ‘now’ waiting to insert

its own clear division , but like the steady wearing away (κατατρίβειν) performed by the drips of

water it consists of a fluid process, a kinēsis that perpetually shapes the world. Heraclitus’

injunction to attune oneself to the ‘hidden harmony that is stronger than the obvious’ (ἁρµονίη

ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων. B.54) is to attempt to grasp a dynamic and creative time underneath,

and constitutive of, the usual segmentation of reality represented by chronos. Heraclitus requires

his audience to do exactly what Aristotle disparages, namely ‘to quarrel with what is

apparent’ (τοῖς φανεροῖς ἀµφισβητεῖν). And while this becoming may indeed ‘escape our senses’

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as in Aristotle’s critique (λανθάνειν τοῦτο τὴν ἡµετέραν αἴσθησιν), Heraclitus asserts that it

nevertheless exists and its constant pressure can not be evaded (τὸ µὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις

λάθοι. B.16 - ‘How can one conceal oneself from that which never sets’).

It is this theory of perpetual becoming and change behind the subsequent interpretation of

time that Nietzsche emphasizes in his lecture on Heraclitus as part of a series on what he termed

the PrePlatonic Philosophers.7 Seeming to pick up on Aristotle’s reading, Nietzsche speculates

that even though the natural sciences of Heraclitus’ day were suspicious of a theory of ‘eternal

motion and the negation of all persistence in the world... there exist certain truths toward which

the mind feels compelled, raising notions just as terrifying as the others.’8 And the truth to which

he feels Heraclitus is driven is that time is a subjective phenomenon, as Aristotle emphasized for

chronos, but that the task of philosophy is to think beyond our own viewpoint in order to grasp

the forces that flow beneath the individual.

Just as Aristotle attempted to disprove the theory of constant movement by reference to

the apparent phase changes in the natural world, so does Nietzsche employ the thought

experiment of the German natural scientist Karl von Bär to assert the validity of such a

conception in Heraclitus’ philosophy. This experiment postulated that the perception of change,

and one’s rate of movement, were proportional to one’s pulse rate. The fact that a rabbit’s heart

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7 The bibliography on the relation between Nietzsche and Heraclitus is large. For recent analyses of the relationship between Nietzsche and Heraclitus see for example A. Pryzbeleski (2002) ‘Nietzsche Contra Heraclitus’ which critiques Nietzsche’s interpretation suggesting that it relies too much on the modern terminology of ontology. See also D. Lambrellis (1989) ‘‘The World as Play: Nietzsche and Heraclitus’ pp.218-228 in K.J. Boudoris ed. Ionian Philosophy; Sarah Kofman (1987) ‘Nietzsche and the Obscurity of Heraclitus’ Diacritics Fall 1987 pp. 39-55. Eugen Fink (2002) Nietzsche’s Philosophy betrays throughout his affiliation to Heidegger as well as situating Nietzsche’s work within a theory of the time of play that owes much to Heraclitus.

8 Nietzsche PrePlatonic Philosophers p.60. Indeed Graham, in agreeing with Kirk’s critique that Heraclitus believed in the evidence of the senses and showed no interest in microscopic change, notes, p.67, that “It is only after Parmenides that pores, effluences and corpuscles become crucial elements of physical structure.” However, a lack of fragments concerning the persistence of flux at minute levels does not deny that Heraclitus’ theory of radical becoming could not apply at these dimensions. Heraclitus is determined, as we shall see, rather to make a different point about how the current of this creative dynamism of becoming should model a form of human engagement with the world and with each other.

beats at four times that of cows signifies that they would experience and enact four times as much

in the same period. Nietzsche summarizes von Bär’s position as follows: “The inner life of

various animal species (including humans) proceeds through the same astronomical space time at

different specific rates, and it is according to these that they variously judge the fundamental

standard of time” (p.60). If we could alter our own rate of perception the established forms of

things would drastically change. Increase the rhythm of our pulse and sensation by one thousand

and decrease the length of our life by the same amount and a bullet could easily be followed in

flight. Continue further till life lasted forty minutes and “then we would consider the grass and

flowers to be something as absolute as we now consider the mountains...we would be totally

unable to observe the voluntary movements of animals, for they would be far too slow; at best we

could conceive of them as we (in out time frame) think of the heavenly bodies” (p.61). Heading

in the opposite direction, lengthening the period of life and reducing the frequency of perceptions

would have the following consequence:

We would experience as much in one year as we now do in eight to nine hours; then every four hours we would watch winter melt away, the earth thaw out, grass and flowers spring up, trees come into full bloom, and then all vegetation wilt once more. Many developments would not be observed by us because of their speed; for example a mushroom would shoot up like a fountain. Day and night would alternate like light and shadows in but a moment, and the sun would race along the arch of heavens in the greatest hurry. (PrePlatonic Philosophers p.61)

Once we can imagine the ability to range into a perspective beyond the human, and the

boundaries and stable forms of objects that it has subjectively delineated, we can grasp the ‘wild

storm of becoming’, where anything that seems to perdure is a ‘complete illusion, the result of

our human intellect.’ Becoming exists at all levels, from the infinitely small to the cosmic. In

advocating what Aristotle denied, namely the existence of motion and change beyond the senses,

Nietzsche posits that ‘forms only exist at certain levels of perception’ (p.62). Time too can be

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reduced to a moment, a time ‘atom’ that contains nothing within it and appears to vanish.9 Yet as

we have seen reflected in Aristotle’s critique, beyond the gaze of a calculating psyche, be it

human or leporine, as it executes its form of time upon what is apparent, there lies a hidden

movement, a kinetic force that creates and alters the world. For Nietzsche, the brilliance of

Heraclitus’ philosophy lies in its attempt to think this becoming as the continuous force concealed

beneath all things (including time), as that which enables them to be, just as it devours them at

will. In Nietzsche’s view, though, this is a difficult challenge, in fact the most difficult challenge,

as it threatens to immerse the observer into its flux. This tension between the affirmation of

becoming and its concomitant destruction of form, together with the need to carve the world into

livable rhythms is also brought out in Nietzsche’s Second Untimely Meditation: On the Use and

Abuse of History for Life in the relationship it sketches between the creative flow of the

unhistorical and the arresting interpretations of the historical.10 It is toward that text’s staging of

an encounter with Heraclitus that we will now turn.

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9 In a notebook from the same period Nietzsche develops a theory of time as atoms, a view which like Aristotle’s conception of chronos requires an observer to create the illusion of continuity. On this theory see in particular Small Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought pp 55-77.; Keith Ansell Pearson ‘Nietzsche’s Brave New World of Force: On Nietzsche’s 1873 Time Atom Theory fragment and the matter of Boscovich’s Influence on Nietzsche’ Journal of N Studies no.20 (2000) 12-14.

10 A much later note, from 1885, on this same question of the requirement of rhythm suggests that its sculpting of the forms of time is not just an aesthetic effect, but is essential for the physiological wellbeing of the organism: “Man is a form and rhythm shaping creature...Without the transformation of the world into forms and rhythms there would be noting ‘the same’ for us, and so nothing recurring, and so no possibility of experience and assimilation, of nutrition.” KSA 11, 38(10), 608. Nietzsche’s interest in different forms and theories of rhythm, going back to his lectures on Aristoxenus of Tarentum have been well noted for the subsequent development of his thought In particular, see James Porter Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (especially pp.160-162) as well as Robin Small, pp. 48-53. Small notes how Nietzsche regrets the disappearance of certain Greek theories of rhythm that exhibited a more accurate reflection of the continuity of becoming through its focus on time-proportions in contrast to the stress and emphasis model of rhythm that replaced it.

Embracing the Return of Heraclitus

Toward the end of his life Nietzsche wrote of his affiliation with Heraclitus in his Ecce

Homo where, in a typically physiological reading of the vitality of philosophers, he spoke of the

‘warmth’ of his embrace with the Ephesian, and even went so far as to say that his own key

doctrine of the Eternal Return might have been taught by Heraclitus himself, a question we shall

return to.11 Such a relationship is not a passive marker of influence, but in Nietzsche’s model of

historical undertaking, marks a transformative bond, the meeting of great minds braced atop

mountains, unafraid of the abyss of the sky and the clutter of the ignorant herd, as they

communicate with each other about how to think as part of the more crucial question of how to

live.12 This mode of historical engagement is termed ‘monumental’ in Nietzsche’s 1874 essay On

the Utility and Liability of History and exists for the reassurance of the powerful individual in the

present who is looking for exemplars of the courage necessary for effecting change as they strive

after forms of greatness and overcoming. What is more, such an exemplar is still seen to be alive

and vital, in fact this is the mark of the success of its ‘authentic being’: “Whatever was once

capable of extending the concept of the “human being” and of giving it a more beautiful

substance must be eternally present in order for it perpetually to have this effect” (On the Utility

and Liability of History p.132).

Various commentators have noted how Nietzsche’s concept of the human moves between

an anthropocentric notion of talented individuals (and unquestioning multitudes) to understand a

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11 Nietzsche (2007) Ecce Homo p.47-8.

12 Kofman p.45 interprets Nietzsche’s valorization of the PreSocratics as an uncloaking of their original potency from the ‘coats of grey concepts which the metaphysicians have clothed and obfuscated them.’ She continues: ‘And yet, those early philosophers are true masters, not because they possess truth, but because they are models for living and thus worthy of recurring eternally.” On the question of Nietzsche’s association of an engaged reading with a style for living with regard to the Ecce Homo see the recent study by Daniel O’Hara (2009) The Art of Reading as a Way of Life: On Nietzsche’s Truth.

more powerful current flowing beneath, and through the human as a medium.13 Nietzsche here

suggests that it is the mark of this powerful force, as it transcends the human, to reach across time

to be enveloped by (or itself to envelop) those who are also experimenting with the boundaries of

the individual since, in striving after immortality and fame, they ‘do not hold existence in high

regard’ (p,132). The action of the bold monumental historian compresses time in the embrace of

the past only to unfold its dimensions beyond the limit of mortality, extending a contribution far

into the future as a new peak of wisdom to perpetually be ascended.14 Nietzsche can view his own

grasping of the ‘form shaping forces’ once manipulated by Heraclitus as the revivifying of his

philosophy of becoming and its attendant critique of cultural and religious value systems that

falsify the contingency of their existence through denying their historical emergence.15 In

claiming that Heraclitus might have taught the doctrine of Eternal Return, Nietzsche’s self

proclaimed greatest insight, he also highlights the way, as we have seen with Empedocles, Plato

and Aristotle’s responses to Heraclitus’ aion, that Heraclitus’ interrogation of time is a central

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13 See Fink p.27; Keith Ansell Pearson Viroid Life p.7. Nietzsche writes in his Will to Power, section 682:“Man hitherto - as it were, an embryo of the man of the future; - all the form shaping forces directed toward the latter are present in the former; and because they are tremendous, the more a present-day individual determines the future. This is the profoundest conception of suffering: the form shaping forces are in painful collision. - The isolation of the individual ought not to deceive us: something flows on underneath individuals.”

14 Robin Small (2010) Nietzsche Time Becoming p.76 notes that Nietzsche’s critique of an enervated historical preservation of the past is that it cannot affect the present. In contrast the monumental historian drags the potency of historical exemplars into his own time: “The idea is that the great cultural models of past ages are capable of acting at a temporal distance on the present day.” This image of the construction of mountains of wisdom is movingly transformed in the later work Dawn, p.575, into that of birds flying into the distance that must eventually rest. He continues: “But who could venture to infer from tht, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have come to a stop...;it will be the same with you and me! But what does that matter to you and me! Other birds will fly farther!”

15 Fink, p.8, claims that it is Nietzsche’s tendency to see all ontological questions with regard to value (op.cit. 8), and to view cultural structures as just the latest in a line of subjugations, and life denying values, on behalf of the ‘will to power’. In this sense it is not surprising that he found kinship in a philosopher who similarly seems to hold the dominant contemporary values of his time, such as his critique of religious ritual, purification and prayer (B.5; B.15), up to scrutiny and to find wanting. Not to mention Heraclitus’ overall philosophical project that states from the outset the errant epistemological standards of his audience, as it will go on to chasten their political priorities.

concern of his philosophy, and as such the two philosophers find common (or rather, ‘high’)

ground in their respective thinking toward new concepts of temporality.16 The ability of

Heraclitus as an historical exemplar to speak across time resonates with the Eternal Return’s

valuation that all acts stretch beyond the individual lifetime, recursively engineering the future as

well as the future’s future; while Nietzsche’s embrace back into the past reflects his belief that

such willing can free and resituate Heraclitus toward the open vistas of the future. As Eugen Fink

puts it in regard to the Eternal Return’s conception of the world as a temporal whole: “time loses

its unambiguous direction.”17

Yet Nietzsche is aware of the pitfalls of this historical mode of enquiry, a tunnel vision

that can elide the context of previous events, turning causes into pure “effects in themselves” and

smoothing the difficulty and differences of the past into a labile generality with “its sharp edges

and its lines broken in favor of this conformity” (p.133). In a prolepsis of the debate his doctrine

of the Eternal Return will provoke, Nietzsche posits that the impossibility of the past recurring in

all its ‘peculiarity and uniqueness’ makes the concept of absolute veracity in retrospection a

useless one.18 Nonetheless, the illusion of such a perfect repetition is precisely what leads to

distortion under the aegis of imitation, as the monumental historian can fictionalize the past and

damage its richness such that “entire large parts of it are forgotten, scorned and washed away” (p.

134). The seductive analogies of this type of thinking can prompt ‘rashness’ and ‘fanaticism’, an

overly simple correspondence, a positing of clarity, that is itself an obscuring of a more complex

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16 Small Nietzsche Time Becoming p.2 writes that for Nietzsche: “the mission of overcoming the prejudices of morality that he assigns to himself depends on the possibility of uncovering new forms of temporality.”

17 Fink, p.78.

18 See for example the famous critique of George Simmel Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that it is not possible for two states to be identical if one involves an acknowledgment of repetition, p.136: ‘Recognition adds something new by attaching a particular meaning to the content that has reappeared.’ Whereas Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment, p.188 notes the need for a forgetting of recurrence in order to create whereby supermen are capable of transcending nihilism through creative action, and so imitating a new historical period.

relationship. And what is more, the limiting of the historical field in such a way allows for a

subsequent mastering and re-appropriation of these privileged remains as a closed canon to be

used as a barrier against genuine creation and difference in the present.19 In this case monumental

history can develop into “the most devastating weed” as the forces of ressentiment engulf and

suppress the vitality of these exemplary figures (135). In the right ‘soil’ though, for the man intent

on creating something great of his own, the powerful ‘style’ of living of the exemplar is not to be

slavishly imitated, but should function as a courageous model of iconoclastic difference to inspire

new forms of knowledge and, importantly, action in the present.

On Forgetting Heraclitus

The central thesis of On the Utility and Liability of History is that “the unhistorical and

the historical are equally necessary for the health of an individual, a people and a culture”(p.128).

Just as the three modes of historical enquiry that Nietzsche specifies, the ‘antiquarian’ (reverently

preserving the past) and the ‘critical’ (condemning the past) in addition to the ‘monumental’,

must be employed for their appropriate function, so is it the case that the ability to forget the past

is essential for life.20 Employing more ecological analogies, Nietzsche claims that the unhistorical

“is like an enveloping atmosphere in which alone life is engendered, and it (sc. life) disappears

again with the disappearance of this atmosphere.” The emergence of the human being from this

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19 In this way me might see Hegel’s comment that ‘there is not a single one of Heraclitus’ propositions that I could not take up into my logic’ (Lectures on the Philosophy of History vol.1) into the dialectical framework of speculative reason as one such example of what Nietzsche would term a simplifying and devitalizing form of monumental history. As Sarah Kofman observes, pp.43-50, Nietzsche’s conception of history is not one of synthesis aimed at truth, but rather a typological conception that marks ‘the types of forces eternally in conflict’ and pays attention to the ‘styles’ of art and life that these earlier thinkers manifested in whatever remains.

20 Harald Weinrich notes in his Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, p.128, that Nietzsche’s conception of these historical modes owes something to Montesquieu, as well as Goethe in his deliberate invocation of Faust’s own model of forgetting.

atmosphere as “a bright, flashing, iridescent light” is a result of rational reflection and the

fittingly circumscribed utilization of the past for life, that is, the deployment of the historical

sense. In reflection upon his own critique of contemporary German society (and philologists),

Nietzsche believes that an excess of history can, however, cause the human to vanish.21

Consequently, it is the unhistorical element which is essential for the wellbeing and the courage

of the human to act in the first place.

The essay begins with a memorable description of man’s despair at the sight of the

happiness of a herd of cows that is ‘tethered by the short leash of its pleasures and displeasures to

the stake of the moment’ in the bliss of recurrent forgetfulness, ‘living unhistorically’ entirely

within the present (p.126). Man, however, is overburdened by the past which he longs to disown,

yet becoming an animal is not possible, despite the temptation to interrogate them.22 The figure

that also provokes envy is the child at play who is compared to the multitude that is the herd. Just

as Heraclitus figures aion as a single child at play, but evokes the distributed and shared

performance of knowledge their ‘playtime’ incorporates, so does Nietzsche figure the child in

relation to a collective. In addition to this association with the forgetful natural rhythms of

animals, the child is likewise characterized by its exclusion from the dimensions of time as it

‘plays in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and the future’ (p.126). In living

unhistorically, with its concurrent forgetfulness, the child represents ‘the vision of a lost paradise’

to man who feels a discontinuity between himself and the innocence of his past, as if his

childhood was as inaccessible as joining in the thoughtless ruminations of the herd. Man cannot

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21 On the question of the relationship of Nietzsche’s theory of history to contemporary German academia see in particular, James Porter’s Nietzsche and the philology of the future (2000); Harald Weinrich pp.126-131. The relationship of Nietzsche’s philosophy of history to his conception of animals and the natural world is cogently analyzed by Vanessa Lemm (2009) Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: culture, politics and the animality of the human being.

22 Lemm, pp. 7-9 makes a similar point with regard to the ephemeral knowledge that the animals, in their blissful present, fail to remember under questioning.

turn back, but in envy, to this play that is beyond time; yet Nietzsche makes it clear that time

itself can drag the child into its debilitating clasp:

And yet the child’s play must be disturbed; all too soon it will be summoned out of its obliviousness. Then it will come to understand the phrase “it was”, that watchword that brings the human being strife, suffering, and boredom so that he is reminded what his existence basically is - a never to be perfected imperfect. (p.126)

The ‘it was’ of time represents the imposition of a form of morality that seeks justification from

the past to suppress the potential of the present through the imposition of guilt, of ‘imperfection’,

upon the moment. It is significant, here, that the encroachment of the fence of the past takes all

attention away from the fence of the future, just as the excess of history threatens to dissolve the

human and deny the vital audacity that can affirm and create the unknown ahead. While the play

of the child represents a lost (bovine) innocence, its unhistorical liberation is not a model the

adult can repeat, aware as they are that such play was always an ignorance veiling a vulnerability

once it is ‘summoned out of its obliviousness’ and into time. The child at play unknowingly

embodies a ‘style’ of life that is inaccessible to the adult aware of the interpellation of the past

and its weight of history. The call of the ‘it was’ has indeed created the adult, just as it threatens to

leave him stuck in an infinite regression.23

Even though the atmosphere of the unhistorical creates the conditions for the adult to

develop, the historical must be faced and controlled according to the ‘shaping power’ (die

plastische Kraft) that an individual or culture possesses to limit the vehemence of this ‘it was’.

The brave adult knowingly attempts to adopt a position not of blindness between fences, but of

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23 Indeed, it is only when Nietzsche comes to formulate his doctrine of Eternal Return in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra composed a decade later that the capability of the child to will itself is figured as a central image for man to assert his place in time, to realize that the oppressive pressure of the “‘It was’ is a fragment, a riddle, a dreadful chance - until the creative will says to it: ‘But I willed it thus’.” Thus Spake Zarathustra p.163. The active agency of the child is explicitly drawn as the third of the ‘Three Metamorphoses’ (pp.54-56) where the first is a camel that bears the burden, the second a lion that refuses to suffer its weight anymore, and the child as that which embodies the necessary freedom and innocence to will by itself and thereby to ascend to a higher creativity within time through accepting finitude and responsibility for one’s acts of willing that affirm the past as well as the future.

active forgetting ‘on the threshold of the moment’ and ‘without dizziness of fear’ (p.127). The

individual or culture must forget in order to act. Nevertheless, in the drawing of a limit around

what to forget, one implicitly adopts an appropriate historical mode, kindling an iridescent

beacon, and decides what to remember.24 This is the balance that Nietzsche advocates for the

health and happiness of a culture and the individuals within as they strive to answer the threat of

the past with the selective, and bold, hermeneutic of the ‘architect of the future’ (p.131).25

Surprisingly, though, given his admiration for Heraclitus, Nietzsche argues that the

follower of Heraclitus is one such model of an individual unable to forget and therefore incapable

of action. Indeed, Nietzsche here draws a parallel between becoming and the historical, positing

that the inability to look beyond the ephemerality of all things is debilitating:

Imagine the most extreme example, a human being who does not possess the power to forget, who is damned to see becoming everywhere; such a human being would no longer believe in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly dare raise a finger. (p.127)

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24 Weinrich p.129 suggests that Nietzsche’s ‘art of forgetting...consists in depriving of their motivational basis memory contents that have previously been faithfully preserved, in this case those of historical education, and constructing a new, competing motivation from action, life, and the future, on the basis of which memory is to be reorganized.’

25 Nietzsche’s conception that the past speaks as an oracle which requires the a future architect to interpret its call might also be put in dialogue with Heraclitus’ own emphasis on oracular knowledge and its ability to riddle across time. Fragment 93 ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ µαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σηµαίνει - ‘The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign’ emphasizes the act of interpretation that a proper attunement to the world must perform. A thinking we shall emphasize in regard to Heidegger’s reading of Heraclitus, discussed below, that must think both what is visible and concealed as a means to acknowledging the force that hinges them together. As we suggested in the last chapter, Heraclitus’ prompts his audience to think toward the temporal, and its potential manifestations, as a means to recognizing the differentiating harmony that structures the world, rather than their static spatial opposition. This element of thinking in time is explicitly linked to the mantic in another fragment B.92 Σίβυλλα δὲ µαινοµένῳ στόµατι καθ ́ Ἡράκλειτον ἀγέλαστα καὶ ἀκαλλώπιστα καὶ ἀµύριστα φθεγγοµένη χιλίων ἐτῶν ἐξικνεῖται τῇ φωνῇ διὰ τὸν θεόν - ‘And the Sibyl with raving lips uttering things mirthless and unadorned and unperfumed, reaches over a thousand years with her voice, thanks to the god within.’ The allusive signification of the oracular in Heraclitus connotes the need to assess its message with regard to time as a means to cut through the layers of meaning.

Besides the figuring of forgetting as essential to happiness and, ultimately, to future oriented acts

of creation in the service of life, this passage claims that an excess of historical attunement causes

doubt as to all existence. In perpetual coming to be and destruction, it is not that the ‘it was‘

deceptively posits metaphysical values to restrain life, but that the ‘it was‘ implies the ultimate

impermanence of everything. The excess of history thus leads to one’s disappearance into history,

toppled from the vantage point of the threshold of the moment into the endless flow of things that

have ceased to be. Nietzsche subsequently anthropomorphizes this flow of becoming as a ‘dark,

driving insatiable power’ proclaiming the lines from Goethe’s Faust that “Everything which

comes into being is worthy of perishing. Thus it would be better if nothing came into

being” (135).26 Absolute becoming enacts a judgment, as does the critical mode of history

through which this dark force can act, but here the Heraclitean student is unable to affirm this

inevitable destruction without losing the sense of a coherent self. The critical mode should judge

in the service of life, condemning an unjust structure of privilege for example, and by doing so

maintain its ability to create the future out of this destroyed past; in contrast, the experience of

absolute becoming is disabling for the student fragmented by a lack of forgetfulness and

subsequently unable to act.

Does Nietzsche turn away from his affiliation with Heraclitus, implying that the outcome

of his predecessor’s philosophy is a nihilistic disappearance into the incendiary tropes of the

eternal movements of his fire-justice? Moreover, does this characterization infer that it is

impossible to think and live true becoming? History, for Nietzsche, does not preserve, but

destroys. He infers that one cannot act without the illusion of finite forms, stable objects and

individuated selves that belie the constant becomings and blurrings of life’s force. The demands

for action shape the mechanisms of perception such that a forgetting of the ultimate

impermanence of everything allows the falsifying movement of memory to mark out the lines of

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26This is a quote from Goethe Faust 1I, ll. 1339-41.

such objects and selves as if they will endure and are capable of interaction.27 As what Nietzsche

will later qualify as the Will to Power obsessively categorising, requisitioning, evaluating and

transforming the matter of life, from the biological to the technological and cultural, so must man

‘distort reality’ in order to perform his desire upon it.28

Nietzsche repeatedly returns to Heraclitus’ image of the playful child as a model of the

aesthetic justification of the world, a game played without a definite teleology or recourse to a

moralistic finalism, that he will identify with his Dionysian mode in his Birth of Tragedy. Such an

affiliation affirms the dissolution of subjectivity into the unified flux, where a powerful will plays

through the child, as through the tragic artist, although they do not will themselves.29 It is

significant that Nietzsche distinguishes the child at play from the student of Heraclitus: one

unhistorical and able to forget in a perpetual present, out of time as it were; the other overly

historical, trapped in the past and the soon to be consumed future, condemned to see becoming

everywhere where the only things able to be forgotten are the necessary illusions of one’s sense of

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27 And conversely, as Paul Ricoeur has elegantly observed in his Memory, History, Forgetting, the construction of a historical narrative is an act of remembrance that is only made possible through a dialectic with forgetting, especially under the heightened pressure of trauma.

28 Fink p.148, he continues : “What we believe to be things conceals our view of the infinite, indeterminate and unlimited whole. The things obscure the world to us. However we cannot live in the flooding universal sea of pure becoming.”

29 Nietzsche PrePlatonic Philosophers p.70: “The eternally living fire, aion, plays, builds and knocks down: strife, this opposition of different characteristics, directed by justice, may only be grasped as an aesthetic phenomenon. We find here a purely aesthetic view of the world. We must exclude even more any moralistic tendencies to think teleologically here, for the cosmic child (Weltkind) behaves with no regard to purposes but rather only according to an immanent justice: it can act only lawfully and willfully, but it does not will these ways.”; for very similar sentiment and some exact repetition of phraseology see the Birth of Tragedy p.32: “But where the subject is an artist, it is already released and redeemed from the individual will and has become, as it were, a medium, the channel through which the one truly existing subject celebrates its release and redemption in semblance....we are already images and artistic projections for the true creator of art, and that our highest dignity lies in our significance as works of art - for only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.” It is significant, as we will note later, that Heraclitus interprets aion as the eternal fire, treating the child as a cipher and metaphor, not acknowledging that the power it yields and models in Heraclitus’ world devolves from its actual existence and vulnerability. We will suggest that it is this real and active Heraclitean child, performing an infinity of potentials in the finitude of its existence that re-emerges a decade later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra where it can will on its own, affirming creativity and accepting its place in time.

self and the permanence of objects in the world that would permit action. Both are vulnerable to

the flow of time that threatens to confine creative acts of futurity in the prison of the past,

revealing existence as an “uninterrupted having-been” (126). In drawing this opposition between

the child and the true student, despite their shared exposure to a defining finitude, Nietzsche

overlooks the narrative we have discerned whereby the children of Heraclitus model a form of

distributed behavior, affecting cognitive and cultural emergence, that itself embodies the creative

time of becoming. Their affirmation of its differentiating potential is marked, even enabled, by

their vulnerability to its flow; but their installation in its alternative and aporetic form of

temporality is what makes them Heraclitus’ ideal students, his eternal playmates.

Nevertheless, the adult audience invoked by Heraclitus’ fragments stand far removed

from Nietzsche’s picture of the true student debilitated by the flow of ceaseless becoming. They

are notable instead for an inattentiveness to either Heraclitus’ doctrine, or the broader meaning,

and flux, inhering in the world itself (cf B.50 οὐκ ἐµοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁµολογεῖν

σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι: ‘It is wise, listening not to me, but to the logos to agree that all is

one’). His audience is not marked, therefore, by its inability to forget, as indicative of a

heightened and repressive historical obeisance, but by an abundance of forgetting. The first

fragment as ordered by the editor Hermann Diels, whose stylistic tropes indicate the beginning of

a treatise, replete with the programmatic laying out of a methodology consonant with the

openings of Herodotus or Hecateus30, emphasizes the association between forgetting and

epistemic failings.

(τοῦ δὲ) λόγου τοῦδʹ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίγνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον·γινοµένων γὰρ (πάντων) κατὰ τὸν λόγον

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30 Kahn notes, p.97, that contemporary works of prose by Hecateus of Miletus, Alcmaeon of Croton and Ion of Chios also begin with reference to logos. Of course Heraclitus’ employment of logos at the beginning of his work immediately points to his own complex interrogation of the term beyond the meaning of ‘discourse’ or ‘work’. As elsewhere an initial obvious reading is given added depth when put in dialogue with other uses of the same vocabulary and concepts in different fragments. For a full discussion of Heraclitus’ manipulation of logos see the following chapter, Beyond Boundaries.

τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώµενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦµαι διαιρέων ἕκαστον κατὰ φύσιν καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει. τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἔγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται. (B.1)

Although this logos always is, men are always becoming uncomprehending, both before hearing it and once they have heard it. Although all things occur according to this logos they are like the inexperienced when they make an attempt at such words and deeds as I guide, separating out each thing according to its physis and telling how it is. But other men are oblivious of what they do while awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep.

The anaphora of the active and middle forms of λανθάνω (lanthanō), together with the balanced

opposition of wakefulness and sleeping, imply that concealment and forgetfulness are mutually

intertwined with the daily fluctuations of consciousness. Furthermore, it is significant that the

epistemological inadequacy indicated by this prevalence of forgetting is, as with Nietzsche,

related to action (ποιοῦσιν) both as conscious deeds and psychic enactments. The students seem

more akin to the ever forgetful herd, ruminating in joyful ignorance of the pressings of time and

the dimensions of the past and the future. But unlike the cows, however, these men are alienated

from the patterns and rhythms of nature, unable to embody its movements as their attempts to

grasp these meanings result in failure.

This ignorance of the discourses of both Heraclitus and the world is marked not in terms

of a passive acquisition of knowledge, but as an encounter that they themselves cannot perform

(ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώµενοι).31 The epic formula ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων (epeōn kai ergōn - ‘words

and deeds’) similarly gestures towards a pragmatics of philosophy where knowledge must be put

into action. A fragment preserved by Stobaeus makes explicit this need to enact the philosophical

wisdom signified by an understanding of the appropriate physis (φύσις) of things:

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31 Daniel Graham (2008) ‘Heraclitus: Flux, Order and Knowledge in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy argues that this notion of a physical encounter with the world is, p.178 ‘necessary for knowledge but not sufficient.’ In Graham’s argument he valorizes a form of inductive thinking toward an understanding of the world in Heraclitus that is provoked by logoi as verbal representations. His emphasis on the logos as language, however, serves to undercut the role of the body in the process of thought and the embeddedness of the individual within a series of physical encountners and cognitive overlappings with the world.

σωφρονεῖν ἀρετὴ µεγίστη καὶ σοφίη, ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας. (B.112)

Thinking well is the greatest excellence and wisdom, to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their physis.

Central to this performance of wisdom is the concept of physis and how the listener is to attune

themselves to it. In the last chapter we employed Aristotle’s definition of physis as that which

marked the completion of growth (τῆς γενέσεως τελεσθεῖσης - Pol.1252b33), thus taking it in its

passive sense, as ‘nature’ or even ‘constitution’. In this reading, man’s failure is based on an

inattentive experience toward the definite and fixed shape and meaning of things, where we have

taken each thing (ἕκαστον - hekaston) to refer not just to material objects like bows and lice, but

also to the political and cultural structures of society. Heraclitus’ logos determines the boundaries

of material objects within the fluid changes of the world, and knowledge of these limits should

allow the careful listener to perform the recounting of these boundaries to others, and

consequently bequeath them the practical knowledge for how to understand and control their

interactions, that is, how to shape the world.

This reading of physis as ‘completed growth’, however, implies a static approach to

nature when it has reached an Aristotelian final state as if the observer could absent themselves

from the very processes that caused the stages of this growth. The problem with conceiving of

physis as the completion of an object’s, or cultural structure’s, teleology is that it downplays not

just the question of its emergence, but also the temporal process during which it developed.32

Furthermore, in allying the essence of an object (or political structure) to its completed form and

defining its utility around this endpoint, one is liable to miss the constitutive conflicts and

unexpected interactions of forces that resulted in this form, compressing this time of incessant

change into a simple correspondence between cause and effect as Nietzsche suggests in his On

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32 Martin Heidegger writes in his essay on fragment B.16 Aletheia p.112: “physis is not just the essence of things (Das Wesen) but rather thinks the essential presencing (verbal Wesen) of physis.”

The Genealogy of Morals.33 Consequently, the question arises as to how one is to define the

completed state of anything, since such a snapshot not only eradicates time with regard to the

indeterminate processes in the thing’s past that led to this moment but also to the inevitable

alteration of this form under the exigency of the future. Physis is more cogently characterized

with reference to its active evolution, as a continual process, not its final attainment of form,

where such evolution includes growth and decay.34 The ignorance of Heraclitus’ audience would

therefore be based on their not thinking becoming properly, and subsequently, their failure to

place themselves within the creative time of becoming, the transitions between states where

change really occurs.

Such knowledge can be attained from an attentiveness to both Heraclitus’ performed

discourse as well as the teachings inhering in the world. Fragment B.17 claims that it is an

inability to discern the meanings inhering in one’s constant exposure to the patterns of the world

that marks their ignorance and, importantly, their turning away from the materialized address of

the logos in the world into the alienated space of their own illusorily discrete self:

οὐ γὰρ φρονέουσι τοιαῦτα (οἱ) πολλοί, ὁκοίοις ἐγκυρεῦσιν, οὐδὲ µαθόντες γινώσκουσιν, ἑωυτοῖσι δὲ δοκέουσι. (B.17)

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33See Nietzsche On the Genealogy of Morals 2.12 where the emphasis on the Will to Power and its incessant overcomings and distortions of reality, means that the analysis of any form, be it biological, political or technological, must recognize this dynamic mutability that divorces any utilitarian perspective upon a form from its original conception: “there is no more important proposition for all kinds of historical research than that which we arrive at only with great effort...namely that the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and its incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it....everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn, overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former meaning and purpose must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.” Pearson, p.99, comments that for Nietzsche “evolution must be approached in terms of a ‘succession’ (Aufeinanderfolge) of more or less profound and independent processes of overpowering in which powerful transformation and resistance play the role of an immanent open-ended dynamics.”

34 Pierre Hadot The Veil of Isis pp. 7-12 provides a concise summary of these passive and active aspects of physis. Nietzsche continues his analysis (On the Genealogy of Morals 2.12) of the incessant mutations caused by the Will to Power as it flows under all forms by extending it to the individual organism vulnerable to decay, while positioning this degeneration as itself a form of their evolution.

Most men do not think things in the way they encounter them, nor do they recognize what they experience, but they believe their own opinions. (trans. Kahn)

The verbal form ἐγκυρεῦσιν (enkureūsin) has the meaning ‘hit upon’ or ‘meet with’ and in Homer

is used with regard to one’s physical confrontation of an army (Iliad 13.145), just as in Hesiod it

can be used figuratively with regard to falling upon misfortunes (ἀάτῃσιν Op. 216), and as such it

can convey something of a chance encounter. In daily life man would be exposed to many such

encounters, yet the verb used for cognition (γιγνώσκω - gignōskō) implies that he is unable to

perceive the importance of the continuity of these experiences (the participle µαθόντες from the

verb µανθάνω - manthanō).35 Gignōskō has the sense not just of perception, but of ‘recognizing’

and ‘coming/getting to know’ - processes that involve an awareness of the significance of

repetition and repeated occurrence in time. The reflection upon one’s encounters should not lead

to a view of the static, stable and teleological form of things, but instead to an acknowledgement

of change over time, including one’s own.36 Moreover, the verb δόκειν (dokein), used to denote

the alternative form of cognition employed by men, has connotations of ‘seeming’ and

‘imagining’: the sort of disembodied reasoning that disavows the import of the physical

confrontations with the logos of the world that have been inscribed upon their body. Man here is

unable to think his encounter with the world, even though the continuity of these experiences is

what places and constitutes him within the material becomings of time: buffeted, created and

changed constantly.

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35 Kahn’s translation of µαθόντες as ‘experience’ reflects the analysis of Bruno Snell on its use in the PreSocratics where he defined it in terms of a knowledge or skill one acquires through being brought up in a certain way. See Snell ‘Die Ausdriicke fiur den Begriff des Wissens in der vorplatonischen Philosophie ("Philol. Untersuchungen," Vol. XXIX) (Berlin, 1924), pp. 72ff for more examples. This emphasis upon the process of learning suggested by manthanō, rather than a singular piece of information acquired, is consonant with the idea that Heraclitus’ audience are marked by their failure to think their existence in time appropriately.

36 Homer’s deception at the hands of the playing children (B.56) was also modeled as a failed act of recognition (the noun form γνῶσις) of what was apparent and visible (τῶν φανερῶν), even if what was clear was concealed in a riddle.

Heraclitus emphasizes his empiricism in another fragment, employing the noun form of

the verb for experience used above in B.17 (manthanō):

ὅσων ὄψις ἀκοὴ µάθησις, ταῦτα ἐγὼ προτιµέω (B. 55)

I prefer whatever comes from sight, hearing, and experience

Heraclitus’ audience are figured as too forgetful, unable to synthesize their experiences into an

awareness of the process of time and the recurrence of change. In this way their failure is one of

selective memory: they remember stability and forget change over time, but do not assimilate

their own experience of becoming into a recognition of the constancy of alteration. One of

Heraclitus’ famed river fragments delineates this perceptual task:

ποταµῷ γὰρ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐµϐῆναι δὶς τῷ αὐτῷ καθ΄ Ἡράκλειτον. οὐδὲ θνητῆς οὐσίας δὶς ἅψασθαι κατὰ ἕξιν. ἀλλ΄ ὀξύτητι καὶ τάχει µεταϐολῆς σκίδνησι καὶ πάλιν συνάγει καὶ πρόσεισι καὶ ἄπεισι. (B. 91)

One cannot step twice into the same river, according to Heraclitus. Nor can one grasp any mortal substance twice in a stable condition. But through the sharpness and swiftness of change it scatters and again comes together, and it approaches and departs.

As we have noted before the literal captation of an object of knowledge represented by the verb

ἅψασθαι (hapasthai) references the catalyzing seizings of the immanent fire, here given extra

valence with regard to the physical movement of water. The epistemic difficulty in grasping an

object is rather, we might say, a result of its immersion in the ineluctable ebb and flow of time.

Defined by its tendency to change under the current of becoming, a mortal substance (θνητῆς

οὐσίας) does not remain still: whether in accretion as it meets other substances, or its decay in

time as death beckons from the future, the intellection of the object can only infer this variability,

not a continuity of form. Just as the immanent fire encompassing all temporal dimensions kindles

in measures (ἁπτόµενον µέτρα), so must this be balanced by its extinguishing in turn

(άποσβεννύµενον µέτρα B.30). The attempt ‘to grasp twice’ (δὶς ἅψασθαι, dis hapasthai), without

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extinguishing (or forgetting) once, thereby betrays a misunderstanding of this natural pattern

recurring through time. It is in this way that cognition fails when it is not attuned to the body’s

constant encounters with change and becoming in nature, while the turn to one’s own opinions

(ἑωυτοῖσι δὲ δοκέουσι) can be posited as a remembering of stable forms that is also a forgetting

of emergence.

Such a forgetting of the fundamental instability of all forms also redounds upon the

observing subject themselves. Another river fragment, possibly the only one with the authentic

style of Heraclitus,37 illustrates through its allusive syntax that both the rivers and the observers

are entwined in a constant process of alteration:

ποταµοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐµϐαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ· (B. 12)

As the (same) people step into the (same) rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them.

For Daniel Graham, the ambiguity that enables the dative ‘the same’ (αὐτοῖσιν) to apply to both

the subject and object of the verb implies that both the individual and the river display a stable

structure giving them a unified coherence that not only belies the constancy of change, but is

actually a result of it.38 Charles Kahn’s commentary similarly claims that, like the flickering

movements of the fire, so do rivers and humans exhibit a constant form bounding the flux of its

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37 So the editions of Kahn; Graham; Marcovich. This version, cited by the Stoic Cleanthes as he compares Heraclitus’ conception of the psyche with that of the Stoic founder Zeno (some 150 years after Heraclitus). The other versions of the river fragment, including a paraphrase of the famously attributed saying that ‘one cannot step into the same river twice’ only occur in reported speech by Plutarch (B.91) and Plotinus (B.84). The other secondary accounts of Heraclitus’ words do, though, indicate that he probably used multiple formulations to emphasize the importance of the river for his thinking on flux, and the interweavings between individuals and their world.

38 Graham p.180: “It is the opportunity to react to the changing current of life that allows the individual to become a unified person, that constitutes the individual as a person. We see that experience is constitutive for Heraclitus”.

contents.39 Yet this is to presume that one can adopt an external perspective as a constitutive

subjectivity and step out of the flow of becoming, as if one were not a mortal substance oneself. It

is just such a mistake that the ill-attuned adult audience continues to make, perceiving the world

as an external series of stable states, or polarised opposites, and not paying attention to one’s

necessary immersion into the unceasing movements and tendencies that flow beneath the

individual. This percussive rhythm of becoming represents the efficacy of time, a syncopation

which the audience cannot hear in their ignorance of its tempo. And as a result of this failed

reflection upon their place and being within the world, man does not even belong in it:

ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες κωφοῖσιν ἐοίκασι· φάτις αὐτοῖσιν µαρτυρεῖ παρεόντας ἀπεῖναι. (B.34)

Not comprehending they hear like the deaf. The saying testifies that they are absent while present.

ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες mimics the cognitive model of fragment B.1, but extends the consequences

of the epistemological forgetfulness of his audience into an ontological condition. Being attuned

to the dynamic patterns of the world is what it means to be in the world. As the waves wash over

Heraclitus’ audience, as blissfully ignorant as the ruminating herd of Nietzsche’s cows, so too are

they left in the unfulfilled promise of the atmosphere of the unhistorical, unable to spark the

emergence of a historical sense that would allow their development. They fail to draw an

appropriate line between remembering and forgetting that would ‘segregate what is discernible

and bright from what is unilluminable and obscure’.40 But instead, to play knowingly in the

waves, recognizing oneself as one such wave among illimitable others, is to actively acknowledge

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39 Kahn, p. 167 making reference to Plato Symposium 207D as a parallel, where Plato writes, through the character of Erysimachus that “(Man) is called the same despite the fact that he does not have the same hair ad flesh and bones and blood and all the body, but he loses them and is always becoming new.”

40 Nietzsche On the Use and Liability of History p.127.

one’s own place within becoming, that is, in Nietzschean terms, to adopt a perspective and affirm

an historical awareness of one’s own susceptibility to history and time’s “it was”.41

On Concealing, Death and Martin Heidegger

The failure of Heraclitus’ audience properly to think, and selectively forget, their

relationship to the force of becoming within the world signifies an inattention to the question of

concealment, both with regard to the potential for change latent within all things, activated by the

pressure of time, as well as the way that all flourishing the world, including that of man, is

constitutively hinged to a hiding whence it emerged and whither it will disappear. The question

of concealment, therefore, is central to any investigation of physis. And while Heraclitus’

audience in B.1 appear to be oblivious (lanthanei) and forgetful (epilanthonomai) of both his

philosophical delineation and their own material encounters of the world, Heraclitus makes it

clear that such behavior should be impossible:

τὸ µὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι; (B.16)

How can one conceal oneself from that which never sets?

The indefinite τις (tis) reminds us of the use of tis in fragment B.30 to specify that no god or man

was responsible for creating the everliving fire (πῦρ ἀείζωον), and so here does it posit that the

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41 Plato’s passage from the Symposium might be revisited here in a different light. His claim (207D) that “Mortal nature seeks to be forever and to be immortal. But it can only do so by leaving something else new behind in place of the old” need not indicate the construction of personal identity through continual physical recreation and the fashioning of beliefs, that is, through the activities of the individual. Rather this perpetual renovation could be placed in light of one’s immersion into the kinetic becomings of other individuals. As the character Bernard puts in in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves - “We melt into each other with phrases. We make an insubstantial territory.”

immanent world process is ineluctable and unforgettable for mortals and immortals alike.42 Thus

we seem closer to Nietzsche’s vision of the true student of Heraclitus, unable to forget in a

constant whirl of becoming. Similarly, as fragment B.34 implied, an appropriate epistemological

intersection with its creative movements is a sign of ontological belonging, though this can also

be associated with the risk Nietzsche’s description highlights of being unable to adopt a position

on the ‘threshold of the moment’ outside this stream, and thereby dissolving into it.

However, we should not occlude the difference between the active and middle forms of

lanthanō and imply that we are dealing with a solely intellectual attitude toward the world. For

while lathoi certainly carries an association with its middle voice meaning to forget, it also

contains a physical connotation of hiding and concealing oneself. As becoming, the

differentiations of war (polemos) and strife (eris B.80) leave their trace upon all objects, just so is

the body inscribed, the delineations of wear and tear riddled across it. The desire to conceal

oneself (lathoi) from that which never sets (τὸ µὴ δῦνόν - to mē dunon) is not just a rational

endeavor to forget the inevitability of change, to ascribe a false stability to the world; it is also a

physical attempt to escape the materializations of becoming that scar the body and the other

objects of the world as they encounter each other. The unaware audience forget even to look at

their own bodies as an interface with the changes of the kosmos. Their hiding bespeaks a

forgetting and denying of their selves as material and permeable, mediated through their

connections to the moving world around them. And so then does it overlook the way that both the

cognitive and the cultural frameworks operate through this communication across borders,

beyond the boundaries of demarcated bodies and minds.

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42 Kahn, p. 274, goes too far in associating τὸ µὴ δῦνόν with the judgement of Zeus, as alluded to in fragment B.64’s invocation of the thunderbolt. It is not the case that the τις suggests a subordination of the human to divine insight, but that the immanent movement of the kosmos is itself the enactment of justice, creating and changing the delineations between god and mortal as in B.53. Marcovich, p.433 concurs with the argument of Diels, Kirk (p.365) and Guthrie (p.474) that the ‘never setting’ refers to his key element of fire.

The analogy that the ill-attuned audience are like the forgetful only tells half the story.

Heraclitus’ repetition of the form lathoi suggests that while such a concealment and escape from

the world may be possible as a form of cognitive short-sightedness and solipsism, it is

ontologically, with regard to one’s embedded place in the kosmos, impossible. The desire to

retreat to one’s own somnolent phantasms, away from the communal experience of the logos,

nevertheless testifies to an impulse that does in fact bind the hoi polloi of Heraclitus’ coruscating

invective together. Remaining concealed from what never sets (to mē dunon) may not be

achievable, but the attempt to do so, to mark out lines for action based on stability over constant

flux, may be necessary in order to live. This perspective speaks to Nietzsche’s requirement for the

balanced conjunction between remembering and forgetting, attempting to avoid the dehiscence

into the flux of becoming through the belief in a livable amount of permanence. So in Heraclitus’

philosophy do concealment and presence appear to be mutually determining, both on the level of

the individual human, and as fragment B.54 and B.123 testify, with regard to the overall

organization of the world:

ἁρµονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων. (B.54)

The hidden harmony is stronger than the obvious one.

φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ. (B.123) Physis loves to conceal itself

As we have seen with the children riddling Homer about the hidden lice, an awareness of the

dynamic relationship of what is present to what is absent enables a higher understanding of the

world. We may be deaf to the recognition of the hidden harmony, but it nonetheless envelops us.

Just so, in its litotes, does to mē dunon name the ‘setting’ and ‘concealment’ to which it, as what

is perpetually present and never setting, is related.

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Martin Heidegger’s essay Aletheia has meditated elegantly on this hinge, finding an

equivalence between dunon and lathoi such that: “λανθάνω, I remain concealed, does not just

signify a form of human behavior among others, but identifies the basic trait of every response to

what is present or absent - if not, indeed, the basic trait of presence and absence themselves.”43

For Heidegger, this tendency is a constitutive feature of Being (Sein), as the event which brings

beings, and actuality, to presence. Yet as a result of its association with concealment and trace, as

the sheltering reservoir from which it emerges, it is always a difficult, though essential, process

for humans to grasp.44 Heidegger defines the human as existence (Dasein) with regard to the

propensity to pose this question of Being, namely what it was that caused their emergence and

that of the other beings with whom they interact, trying to glimpse it anamorphically beyond its

‘luminous self concealing’.45 Just like Nietzsche, Heidegger invokes the Heraclitean thunderbolt

of B.64 (τὰ δὲ πάντα οἰακίξει Κεραυνός: ‘The thunderbolt steers all’) to illustrate this ephemeral

flashing of insight, its jagged tear burnt into our retina long after its disappearance.46 The

inability, therefore, of Heraclitus’ audience, (and to an extent Heraclitus himself in Heidegger’s

reading despite his dwelling within the address of Being)47, to think fully this relationship

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43 Heidegger Aletheia p.109. For an analysis of the influence of Heidegger’s analysis on early Greek philosophy for Classicists see in particular David C. Jacobs (ed.) (1999) The PreSocratics after Heidegger; Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (eds.) (1989) Heidegger on Heraclitus; Jean Beaufret (2006) Dialogue with Heidegger.

44 As Heidegger’s essay on Anaximander indicates, this concealment is not to be conceived of as a result of human ignorance, but is there all along: “The forgetting of Being belongs in the essence of Being, which that forgottenness itself conceals.”

45 Heidegger Aletheia p.107

46 Heidegger also inscribed this fragment above his hut in the Black Forest with its allusive beckoning to think the lighting behind the concealment of the lightning. On this see Adam Sharr (2006) Heidegger’s Hut.

47 See the essay Logos p.78 where it is Being itself that is given the active role in the posing of questions of its concealment, bringing a certain determination to language, logos, as a ‘letting-lie before’ and ‘gathering’ that precede subsequent definitions of logos as language and reason. Heraclitus is thus treated as somewhat of a cipher through whom Being emerges only to disappear unrecognized. Furthermore, it is in this way that the call of Being supervenes above any individual relationships between the thinkers and so is Heidegger’s analysis uninterested, unlike Nietzsche, in the lives, historical situations or intellectual affiliations of the PreSocratic philosophers themselves.

between such epistemological behavior and a fundamental dynamic of the ontological question is

characterized as their having “forgotten the essence of forgetting”.48 Heraclitus’ famed obscurity

is thereby considered one result of this trying to think into the lighting.49

Putting the ‘Being’ of Heidegger into a productive dialogue with the ‘Becoming’ of

Nietzsche centered around the question of forgetting and concealment in Heraclitus requires some

explanation. Nietzsche’s adherence to the innocence of Becoming situated itself in opposition to

the static life-denying imposition of transcendental values that he envisioned in Being, even going

so far in one of his notebooks to claim that Being was an “invention of those suffering from

Becoming.”50 As Eugen Fink has noted, Being for Nietzsche was “something fixed, immovable,

rigid and lifeless.”51 And compared to the warm embrace he enjoys across time with Heraclitus,

the encounter with Parmenides (as one of Being’s early instigators) is figured as bone-chilling,

sickly and anemic.52

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48 Heidegger Aletheia p.107.

49 Kofman p.50: “Heraclitus is already obscure for his contemporaries and for himself because his speech is aimed at questioning clarity: but what is clearest is also the most obscure, what is closest, farthest, what is unconcealed, concealed, and unveiled, veiled. Heraclitus is obscure because he is illumination and says what enlightens, clarity, while trying to invite light to enter into the language of thought.” Such obscurity, much commented on in the doxographical tradition finds an interesting analogy in Diogenes Laertius’ account (IX.6) of Heraclitus’ depositing of his ‘deliberately obtuse’ book in the Temple of Artemis which was itself subsequently effaced by arson roughly a century after his death - cf Val Max VIII.14. The notion of the title of obscurity being attained by the misunderstanding hordes is another factor that endears Heraclitus to Nietzsche, speculating that this density is a mark of their fame (“We incomprehensible ones” The Gay Science §374). On the connection between obscurity, fire and self effacement see the interesting work by David Schur The Way of Oblivion which traces a link between Heraclitus and Kafka mediated by the figure of Heidegger.

50 Nietzsche Kritische Studienausgabe Vol. 12, 2 (110) 115.

51 Eugen Fink Nietzsche’s Philosophy p.32. Fink was a colleague of Heidegger with whom he conducted a seminar on Heraclitus in the early 1960s. His critical introduction to Nietzsche considers his treatment of ontology in terms of value and aesthetics as a symptom of his inability to see the depth of the ontological problem. His obvious affiliations with Heidegger’s reading leads him to agree, despite his appreciation of the allusiveness of Nietzsche’s poetic insights, that Nietzsche cannot escape the prison of metaphysics.

52 Nietzsche Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks p.69.

Yet as Heidegger ‘de-structures’ the history of the question of Being, arguing that it has

been misunderstood from the time of Plato onwards, its ‘well-springs’ concealed by tradition, so

is it clear that his notion of Being is far different from the dichotomised and static other world so

abhorrent to Nietzsche.53 In its catalysing movements as it brings the world and the beings in it to

presence, emerging and concealing as it does so, Heidegger stresses that it must be thought from

the historicity and the finitude of the subject, subjected as they are to the world in which they

have fallen. And furthermore, he insists that Being is itself finite and not a supervening

unbounded horizon against which man cannot take a stance. Rather he proposes that human

existence, Dasein, must affirm its potential through acknowledging the very limit of mortality and

its consequent relationality to other beings.54 It is in this way that Heidegger’s notion of Being as

the concealed presence that enables emergence within the world speaks to Nietzsche’s idea of the

unhistorical as the germinating atmosphere from which life can develop and come to assert itself,

taking its place in time. And just as Heidegger’s Dasein must draw a boundary from the limit of

death in order to think its presence and ontic potentialities within time, so is it when Nietzsche’s

human strikes its own gleaming light in the enveloping, concealing, mist that it can assert an

appropriate horizon for preserving the past in the service of life. Both thinkers, in their different

ways, turn to Heraclitus to interrogate and illustrate what is the right sort of forgetting: a self-

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53 This destructing of tradition and the effacements it has enacted on the original concepts that still require thinking is clearly laid out in the introduction to Being and Time. For example p.66 “The tradition that gains dominance makes what it ‘transmits’ so little accessible that at first and for the most part it covers it over instead. What has been handed down it hands over to obviousness; it bars access to those original “wellsprings” out of which the traditional categories and concepts were in part genuinely drawn. The tradition even makes us forget such a provenance altogether. Indeed it makes us wholly incapable of even understanding that such a return is necessary”.

54 Heidegger writes in Being and Time, Section 50, p.250: “Death is a possibility that each Dasein must itself take over. With death Dasein stands before itself in its most proper potentiality for Being. What is involved in this possibility is nothing less than the being-in-the-world of Dasein as such. Its death is the possibility of being no lnger able to be ‘there’. When Dasein stands before itself as this possibility it is fully directed toward its very own potentiality for Being.” Section 50, p250. On some of the paradoxes involved in thinking time from finitude see Lilian Alweiss ‘Heidegger and ‘the concept of time’ History of the Human Science Vol.15, No.3, pp.117-132.

aware attunement to a constitutive concealment that, paradoxically, grants the human existence.

The never setting of the to mē dunon from both their perspectives discloses a force from which

man has evolved and to which he must turn, remembering what it means to forget in order to

continue to do so.

This force, however, has a variety of dimensions through the affiliations that to mē dunon

forges across Heraclitus’ fragments. We must beware of too quickly discerning a unifying

principle, as both Heidegger and Nietzsche are prone to do.55 They tend naturally to situate the

never setting with regard to the movements and transformative tropes performed by the everliving

fire:

κόσµον (τόνδε), τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν, οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλʹ ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόµενον µέτρα καὶ ἀποσϐεννύµενον µέτρα. (Β.30) This kosmos, the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it always was and is and will be everliving fire, kindling in measures and in measures going out.

The eternally playful fire, destroying and creating without purpose fits Nietzsche’s conception of

the world as an aesthetic phenomenon, of innocent becoming without any preconceived plan. As

he notes in his lectures on what he terms the Pre-Platonic philosophers, the central belief of

Heraclitus is the ‘oneness and eternal lawfulness of nature’s processes’ and the association that to

mē dunon invokes of notions of punishment and surveillance should not refer to the arresting

judgment of mortals from a divine external perspective, 56 but to the the continual working out of

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55 Heidegger collapses many of Heraclitus’ key terms into related responses to the call of Being, as multiple attempts to think its meaning, Aletheia p.112. He sketches this effort in a series of interpenetrated terms such as fire (τὸ πῦρ), the everliving (τὸ ἀείζωον), the laying together in presence behind the subsequent meanings of λόγος as language and reason, harmony (ἁρµονίη), war (πόλεµος), strife (ἔρις), friendship viewed as mutual bestowing (φιλία), and the one (ἕν). It is significant that in his lecture on Heraclitus in his PrePlatonic Philosophers p.70, Nietzsche aligns the concept of aion not with a child, which for him stands as a metaphor for the aesthetic justification of the world, but rather with an ever playful fire.

56 Just so is it subsequently seen by the commentaries of Kahn, p.274 and Marcovich p.433. Both situate it with respect to fragment B.66 πάντα γάρ, φησί, τὸ πῦρ ἐπελθὸν κρινεῖ καὶ καταλήψεται - in Marcovich’s translation ‘Fire, having come suddenly upon them, will judge and convict all (living beings).’ p.435.

justice with fire as its ‘own judge...exonerating itself of its injustice’.57 Whereas for Heidegger,

the fire embodies the meaning of the logos, as the ‘gathering which lays everything before us in

presencing’, as a lighting that is also a sheltering of Being.58 In both cases, the forgetting of the

movements of nature, as it requilts the pattern of existence, is to turn away from the structuring

force that has enabled humans to be while it concurrently threatens to submerge them once more.

In attempting to position oneself outside nature and the temporal delineations of the world, man is

unable to intuit his place within it, to respond affirmatively to the limits it imposes upon him. No

one can escape its presence just as no one, god or man, has fashioned it into existence.

Yet we can push the association of to mē dunon with the πῦρ ἀείζωον (pur aeizōon)

further, invoking its temporal elements as the incendiary flow of becoming reconfiguring matter

and beings across the world, just as it regulates the economies of exchange:

πυρός τε ἀνταµοιϐὴ τὰ πάντα καὶ πῦρ ἁπάντων ὅκωσπερ χρυσοῦ χρήµατα καὶ χρηµάτων χρυσός. (B.90)

All things are exchange for fire and fire for all things, just as goods are for gold and gold for goods.

Nietzsche’s conception of the immanent justice of the world process is relevant here, with no

meaning found outside or prior to the movements of the kosmos. In forgetting one’s place within

the transactions of becoming, man also attempts to escape the passage of time: failing to think the

concealment that its movement inevitably carries. The word ἀνταµοιϐὴ (antamoibē) can refer to

questions of punishment and reward, but does so without an external standard to which it can

refer.59 And in this way it might reference the violent and assertive seizings of Nietzsche’s Will to

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57 This is how Nietzsche characterizes the immanence of of fire as a juridical enforcer in his PrePlatonic Philosophers p.68.

58 Aletheia p.116. Friis Johansen A History of Ancient Philosophy p.REF similarly sees the fire as the manifestation of the logos, ascribing to a belief that one is material and the other abstract +

59 See Kahn p.146.

Power, the ontological essence, in Fink’s reading, that reconfigures our experience of the world,

creating new categories and forms.60 Our inability to recognize the contingency and emergence of

these forms is to fail to assert the latent flow of becoming beneath their finite appearance, and to

note how such creation is always matched by the ‘dark insatiable force’ of the Second Untimely

Meditation that destroys all. It is through adopting a broader temporal perspective, which includes

the conflicting forces of past, present and future, that one can situate their dynamic exchange as

that which enables time, and which cannot be avoided. To place oneself in their interplay is to

join into the creative possibilities of becoming, but a condition of membership, as with

Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, is the acceptance of one’s finitude, and one’s susceptibility to the

recurring exchange that destroys the forms drawn by the Will to Power, including the boundary of

the self.61

Perhaps, then, it is the inescapable arrival of death that to mē dunon appeals to, as a

potentiality that never happens to ‘us’, but in whose anticipation we must dwell.62 This is the “it

was” of Nietzsche that makes life an “imperfect tense”, catching the carefree child unawares and

swirling the overly attuned student of becoming into its dehiscence. On Nietzsche’s model, the

historian intent upon creating the future must adopt a perspective above this storm of becoming in

order to permit a momentary forgetting of the impermanence of all things. This is in distinction to

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60 Fink, p.115.

61 Fink p.151 writes: “In the final analysis man is a fiction to himself, no absolute individual Life itself creates fictions. The will to power is at work in these fictions and creates the finite living form of the human being.” The assertion of the eternal return, and the acceptance of one’s existence as semblance need not, however, include a denial of the self, but the creative possibility of new selves, new configurations that arise from minglings and overlappings in the flow of becoming. Paul Klossoswski has written elegantly of this aspect of the Eternal Return and how its potential is, as with the Second Untimely Meditation linked to the ability to forget: The Vicious Circle, p.58: At the moment the eternal return is revealed to me, I cease to be myself hic et nunc and am susceptible to becoming innumerable others, knowing that I shall forget this revelation once I am outside the memory of myself; this forgetting forms the object of my present willing; for such a forgetting would amount to a memory outside my own limits; and my present consciousness will be established only in the forgetting of my other possible identities.”

62 Jacques Derrida (1993) Aporias p.76 posits with regard to Heidegger’s approach to thinking death that the only death we ever experience is that of the other within us.

Heidegger for whom it is the acceptance of the erasure that death promises that liberates the now,

where he conceives of death as an internal characteristic of that present.63 Heraclitus also avers

that death is something man confronts daily:

θάνατός ἐστιν ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ὁρέοµεν, ὁκόσα δὲ εὕδοντες ὕπνος. (B. 21) Death is all we see when awake, all we see asleep is sleep.

The analogy of B.1 comparing the inability to think the logos with an ‘obliviousness in the

face of what one does awake’ (λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἔγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν) offers further commentary

on the failure of Heraclitus adult audience to reflect upon their ‘conscious’ (ἐγερθέντες) encounter

with the material world. In spite of death’s never setting presence, the audience have absented

themselves (B.34) from the very force that contains erasure within: a concealment which it

promises, inevitably, to impart on all the beings of the world. Here, clearly, man has forgotten to

think into the oblivion. In drawing no deeper meaning from the sensory experience imparted by

their embeddedness in the material world so is Heraclitus’ audience unable to assess the meaning

of death, to consider its necessary relationship to life, their ‘interplay’ as Roman Dilcher has put

it, which ‘is seen to constitute the living organism of both man and cosmos’.64 The turning away

from death and the retreat into the imaginings of B.17 (δοκέουσιν) is also to ignore a force that

binds the whole world together. In association with the encompassing temporal dimensions of the

catalyzing fire (ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον - ‘It always was and is and will be

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63 Alweiss is correct, I think, in arguing that Heidegger does not submit that we can experience our own death, since that would be paradoxical, conceiving that it does not exist in a distant future, but is an internal catalyst for the present. She writes, p.124: “Death thereby is not something that will happen some time in the future, but it is ‘now’, it is the future orientation as horizon of possibility. It grounds the possibility of all possibilities without ever becoming actual.”

64 Dilcher Studies in Heraclitus p.99 Dilcher acknowledges his debt to Heidegger in his introduction, and though he doesn’t directly engage with his writings, his influence is clearly felt in passages such as this: “All external and manifest things (both in micro and macrocosm) turned out to be but the dying of life force of which they still bear trace. Therefore true insight must not be directed at these lower forms, but at the source from which they spring.” p.100

everliving fire’ B.30), death is what lies behind and ahead, while eternally present. Its arrival both

‘kindles and extinguishes’ (ἁπτόµενον µέτρα καὶ ἀποσϐεννύµενον µέτρα), bringing to life as it

conceals others in death, while its potency to do so never sets (to mē dunon). While man sees

death, he does not acknowledge its internal relationship to himself, just as he fails to recognize

the commonality of the ‘measures’ (µέτρα) with which it draws boundaries around others.

A cognitive misalignment with the kosmos occurs when the dynamical exchange of

becoming are reduced into discrete states. In the case of death, the inability to connect the process

of dying to the perpetual emergence of life is to ignore the cohesive tension that structures the

world.65 Such an entangled relationship, as we have seen, also extends from the human into the

semantic, as the deadly bow conceals the name of life within (B.48). As with the lice that deceive

Homer (B.56 - φθεῖρ linked to the verb for kill φθεἶρω) an attunement to the hints contained in

language is an alternate way to appreciate the way man’s words have concretized this riddling

interplay, as the attempt to fix meaning is destabilized by the aporetic fissures they conceal.

Man’s failure to situate the state of death as part of the creative bond between living and dying is

indicative of his deafness to the logos ((τοῦ δὲ) λόγου τοῦδʹ ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίγνονται

ἄνθρωποι) of B.1, where such deafness is not solely configured around an exposure to language,

though it is partly that in the case of the audience’s inability to hear Heraclitus, but through man’s

cognitive isolation from his physical contiguity with the world. Just as the to mē dunon referred to

the unavoidable becomings of fire across the dimensions of time, so can it point toward the

constant dynamism of the logos.

The second half of fragment B.21, frustrating the expectation of the balanced term ‘life’

to the ‘death’ observed in consciousness, also refers us to fragment B.1 and the forgetting of one’s

unconscious behavior in sleep (ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται). Kahn has noted that

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65 Dilcher makes a similar point, claiming p.91 that “Living and dying are thus interwoven, the are absolute contraries fighting against each other, and yet essentially connected and dependent on each other.”

Heraclitus does not share the opinion of a thinker like Pindar who saw sleep as an occasion for

inspiration.66 Another fragment,, though, also preserved by Clement of Alexandria like B.21,

offers a more complex picture:

ἄνθρωπος ἐν εὐφρόνῃ φάος ἅπτεται ἑαυτῷ [ἀποθανὼν], ἀποσϐεσθείς ὄψεις, ζῶν δὲ ἅπτεται τεθνεῶτος εὕδων, [ ἀποσϐεσθείς ὄψεις], ἐγρηγορὼς ἅπτεται εὕδοντος. (B.26)

Man strikes a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched. Living he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper

The terms ἅπτεται (haptetai - ‘he kindles for himself/is kindled/fastens upon’) and ἀποσϐεσθείς

(aposbestheis - ‘having been extinguished’) refer us back to the use of the same verbs to describe

the movements of the everliving fire in B.30, and it is clear that some sort of parallel is being

offered between the macro and microcosmic spheres. On a literal level it implies that as darkness

falls so must man create his own light in order to see, a derivative version of the sun. Heraclitus

observes that limits of the sun are well set and that transgression would summon the justice of the

Furies, dragging its illegitimately prolonged unconcealment and boundary crossing back to the

chthonic darkness of death:

Ἥλιος γὰρ οὐχ ὑπερϐήσεται µέτρα· εἰ δὲ µή, Ἐρινύες µιν Δίκης ἐπίκουροι ἐξευρήσουσιν. (B.94)

The sun does not overstep its measures. If he does, the Furies, ministers of justice, will find him out.

The Furies, with their association with night and the dead personify the kosmos-structuring forces

of eris and polemos (B.80), offering further insight into the fundamental role of death in the

organization and balance of Heraclitus’ world. The anaphora of the form haptetai could imply

that it is this controlling force that man is put in touch with, rather than being cut off in

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66 Kahn p. 215. Pindar fr. 116 Bowra.

epistemological solitude from the waking world.67 On one reading, it is man’s inability to

interpret his sensory interaction with the world while awake that leads to his failure to think the

continuity between himself and other beings as the flow of becoming ties them all together. It is

only in sleep that man can finally, without the isolating mediation of his cognitive faculties,

connect with the never-setting presence of death.

Night is, after all, not something to be devalued in Heraclitus’ world, since the fire is

ever-living and its quenchings are as catalyzing as its kindlings. While the dunon of to mē dunon

doubtless references the setting of the sun from the verb duō (δύω), we do not require Heidegger

to recognize that the concealment of dusk is what enables the emergence of dawn. Heraclitus’

critique of Hesiod’s Theogony for making day and night two separate entities who meet in the

underworld (Theogony 748-57) clearly enjoins his audience to reject the teaching that

anthropomorphizes a continuity of process into distinct opposites:

διδάσκαλος δὲ πλείστων Ἡσίοδος· τοῦτον ἐπίστανται πλεῖστα εἰδέναι, ὅστις ἡµέρην καὶ εὐφρόνην οὐκ ἐγίνωσκεν· ἔστι γὰρ ἕν. (B. 57) The teacher of most is Hesiod. It is him they know as knowing most, who did not recognize day and night: it is one.

The same cognitive verb, gignōskō, is used as in B.17. B.57 provides a vivid example of the

criticism that B.17 made of Heraclitus’ audience: the intellectual separation of a balanced, if

hidden, harmony into discrete states is a result of the inability to reflect upon and recognize the

meaning of one’s physical encounters with the world across time.

Just as the borders of night and day elide so does the man of B.16 illuminate himself in

the dark, looking at the role that death and concealment play in the dawning of life. This is not a

lamp lighting that, inadequately, makes up for the absence of the sun, but an intuitive shining that

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67 This position opposes Kahn p.215 “At nightfall we have lost contact with the daylight, the fire that is shared. So each one is obliged to strike a light for himself. The experience of nightfall is one of isolation, where the individual in his own person reflects the quenching of the diurnal fire.”

leads man to grasp the role of the negative, the different, and the deadly in the essential

becomings of Heraclitus’ kosmos. Heidegger argues that Dasein, in just such a turning back

toward the force which causes presence, is empowered not just to think into Being, but to play its

part in its disclosure:

The lighting not only illuminates what is present, but gathers it together and secures it in advance in presencing. But of what sort is the presencing of gods and men? They are not only illuminated in the lighting, but are also enlightened from it and toward it. Thus they can in their way, accomplish the lighting (bring it to the fullness of its essence) and thereby protect it.68

Being needs Dasein in order to come to light, requires Dasein’s limits and inescapable finitude to

provide the occasion for its manifestation to be glimpsed.69 And with regard to Nietzsche’s

conception of the emergence of man, so can this ‘light’ (φάος) stand for the spark of self-

awareness that the human must carefully nourish in order to grow into himself. The metaphor of

lamp lighting as an epistemological lucidity reverses, in back-stretched harmony, to ground the

individual back in the ontology of the world. Bearing a light toward the darkness is the sort of

performance of wisdom that would acknowledge the concealment of physis (φύσις κρύπτεσθαι

φιλεῖ - B.123) that Heraclitus exhorted in B.112 (σωφρονεῖν ἀρετὴ µεγίστη καὶ σοφίη, ἀληθέα

λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας - “Thinking well is the greatest excellence and wisdom, to

act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their physis”). Through embodying the

constitutive tension of physis as it brings illumination out of concealment, the student of

Heraclitus reclaims their own presence in the kosmos.

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68 Heidegger Aletheia p.115.

69 See Heidegger What is Metaphysics? pp. 103-106.

This association of wisdom and light is explicitly made in another fragment:

αὐγὴ ξηρὴ ψυχὴ σοφωτάτη καὶ ἀρίστη (B. 118)

A beam of light is the dry psyche, wisest and best

Yet who or what is responsible for this enlightenment? Reading haptetai as the middle form of

haptō (ἅπτω) with the meaning ‘to kindle’ (thus ‘kindling for oneself’) and assigning agency to

the subject ‘man’ (anthrōpos) is unattested before Heraclitus.70 A more natural translation is that

‘man is kindled as a light’, picking up the passive participle of aposbestheis (‘having been

extinguished’) which grammatically refers to the anthrōpos, not to the adjacent ‘eyes’ (opseis).71

In spite of his material connection to this dynamic force, as man is kindled by, fastened upon and

grasps (haptetai x3) the never-setting process of dying that enables life to dawn, the experience is

forgotten by the waking subject who is left to ‘clutch the sleeper’ (ἐγρηγορὼς ἅπτεται εὕδοντος).

The oscillating mood of haptetai manifests the alignment the self-aware subject should make to

the macrocosmic movements of the ever-living fire as its latent potential brushes against them in

sleep. So too does it indicate that the creativity of this deadly becoming offers both ontological

and epistemological illumination. To think death is the mark of the attuned individual; indeed, to

return to Heidegger, man is not existence, as Dasein, without this tendency to re-conceive the

boundaries of the mortal.72

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70 For a brief lexicographical survey see Kahn n.288 p.327.

71 Such connotations of passivity led an early commentator to assume the literal death of the man and to insert the participle [ἀποθανὼν] ‘having died’ in B.26. In doing so it rendered the logic of the rest of the fragment suspect, seeming to undermine the cyclical transitions from consciousness to sleep and then back again. Wilhamovitz’ excision of this literal death is correct, but its floating participle does testify, in its bracketed trace, to the death that never quite arrives, even though we live in its presence (D.21).

72 Derrida has commented astutely on this in his Aporias, writing that “Dasein or the mortal is not man, the human subject, but it is that in terms of which the humanity of man must be rethought....Heidegger never stopped modulating this affirmation according to which the mortal is whoever experiences death as such, as death”. p.35

Sextus Empiricus and Heraclitus’ Nocturnal Mind

Through the association that haptetai and aposbestheis forge between the individual and

the catalyzing fire, Heraclitus emphasizes that the descent into the oneiric realm of death and the

subsequent rebirth into wakefulness manifests an essential macrocosmic process. Such an analogy

was also noted in Geoffrey Kirk’s interpretation of this fragment, positing a physiological reading

for the transitions undergone by the psyche in parallel to the physical turnings (tropai) of the fire

(B31.A).

ψυχῇσιν θάνατος ὕδωρ γενέσθαι, ὕδατι δὲ θάνατος γῆν γενέσθαι, ἐκ γῆς δὲ ὕδωρ γίνεται, ἐξ ὕδατος δὲ ψυχή. (B.36)

For psychai it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth. Out of earth is born water and out of water psyche.

Kirk views the anthrōpos of B.26 as just such a ‘soul’ (ψυχή - psyche), and the movement to

sleep as one toward a watery death.73 Yet, as Marcovich has noted, Kirk does not acknowledge

the second half of the fragment and the subsequent emergence into life from this contact, just as

the psyche arises out of earth and water.74 Marcovich qualified Kirk’s physiological perspective

that insisted on the permanence of the state of death, with the consequence that the dissolution of

the individual psyche into the physical elements led to the birth of a different individual psyche,

by claiming that ‘water’ (ὕδωρ) and ‘earth’ (γῆν) refer to the blood, humors and the physical

matter of bones, sinews and flesh:75 death is thereby a constant presence within the human

psyche, just as it is within the macrocosmic physical processes to which it is analogous.

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73 G.Kirk AJP 70 (1949) p. 390. See also his account in his Cosmic Fragments p.148 - “His soul fire is burning low, is almost extinguished, and in most respect he resembles a dead man. Sleep, then, is a medial state between waking life and death.”

74 Marcovich p.245.

75 Marcovich p.362 citing Gigon Untersuchungen zu Heraklit (Leipzig, Dieterich, 1935) p.105.

Accordingly, Marcovich reads this mixture of states within man as an example of Heraclitus’

interest in the meeting of opposites, the principle of coincidentia oppositorum. Yet this perception

of stable opposites, even as they clash, overlooks the more fundamental continuity of transition

between the mutually determining processes of living and dying, merged together through the

flow of becoming. His snapshot of flux misses their shifting interactions across time. Marcovich

and Kahn also fail to consider the epistemological significance of these permeable boundaries.

The psyche in Heraclitus fulfills a wider function than that of a physiological life force. It also

plays an essential role in the cognitive activity of the individual, not as a disembodied ‘mind’, but

very much as a material power that extends beyond the individual into the fluid transactions of

the kosmos whose dynamic interactions occasion the psyche’s own development.

The insight, illumination and captation afforded by the light (phaos B.26) which the

anthrōpos (and his psyche) bears into the watery death of nighttime is unsurprisingly downplayed

by Kirk, Marcovich and Kahn.76 As Kahn sees it, the mark of this impoverished kindling is one of

isolation, a turning away from the communal experience of fire and the logos. In minimizing the

epistemological and ontological importance of one’s immersion into the constitutive processes of

concealment and forgetting that Nietzsche and Heidegger have highlighted, Kahn’s reading

appears to owe much to the doxographic report of Sextus Empiricus, a late 2nd century CE

skeptic philosopher. His commentary upon Heraclitus’ doctrine is clearly biased by Stoic

intermediaries since it posits central roles for such Stoic concepts as ‘the surrounding element’ (τὸ

περιέχον) and ‘breath’ (πνεῦµα), terms that do not appear in any of Heraclitus’ fragments. Sextus

discerns the theory in Heraclitus’s philosophy, endorsed by Kahn and Kirk, that one’s intellectual

qualities are dependent upon a conscious, and individual, connection to a pervading force of

rationality in the macrocosm, treated as fire and logos. Similarly, he appears to disparage sleep as

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76 Kahn reads the phaos as insignificant, viewing it, p.215 as a ‘weaker counterpart for the lucid fire of the day’.

a severing of this link, leaving one in a state of forgetfulness and waylessness. Nevertheless,

Sextus’ depiction of this nighttime contains an alternate vision of a communal and creative form

of cognitive behavior that harnesses a latent power. And through employing the metaphor of a

root (ῥιζή - rhizē) sprouting at night to describe this distributed mind, Sextus’ account resonates

with the example used in Aristotle’s critique of the Heraclitean theory of perpetual becoming in

Physics VIII that the shoots of a plant could fissure a rock (τὰ ἐκφυόµενα τοὺς λίθους διαιρεῖν)

through a growth that is concealed (lanthanein) and belies the obvious (phanerēs).77 In doing so,

Sextus indicates that this form of knowledge emerges from the permeability of the psyche to the

interplay of forces hidden in the time of becoming:

τοῦτον οὖν τὸν θεῖον λόγον καθ᾽Ἡράκλειτον δι᾽ἀναπνοῆς σπάσαντες νοεροὶ γινόµεθα, καὶ ἐν µὲν ὕπνοις ληθαῖοι, κατὰ δὲ ἔγερσιν πάλιν ἔµφρονες. ἐν γὰρ τοῖς ὕπνοις µυσάντων τῶν αἰσθητικῶν πόρων χωρίζεται τῆς πρὸς τὸ περιέχον συµφυϊας ὁ ἐν ἡµιν νοῦς, µόνης τῆς κατὰ ἀναπνοὴν προσφύσεως σωιζοµένης οἱονεί τινος ῥιζης, χωρισθείς τε ἀποβάλλει ἥν πρότερον εἶχε µνηµονικὴν δύναµιν. ἐν δὲ ἐγρηγόρσει πάλιν διὰ τῶν αἰσθητικῶν πόρων ὥσπερ διά τινων θυρίδων προκύψας καὶ τῶι περιέχοντι συµβαλὼν λογικὴν ἐνδύεται δύναµιν. ὅνπερ οὖν τρόπον οἱ ἄνθρακες πλησιάσαντες τῶι πυρὶ κατ᾽ἀλλοίωσιν διάπυροι γίνονται, χωρισθέντες δὲ σβέννυνται, οὕτω καὶ ἡ ἐπιξενωθεῖσα τοῖς ἡµετέροις σῶµασιν ἀπὸ τοῦ περιέχοντος µοῖρα κατὰ µὲν τὸν χωρισµὸν σχεδὸν ἄλογος γίνεται, κατὰ δὲ τὴν διὰ τῶν πλείστων πόρων σύµφασιν ὁµοιοειδὴς τῶι ὅλωι καθίσταται. (Adversos Mathematicos VII 129-130)

According to Heraclitus it is by drawing in this divine reason (logos) in respiration that we become intelligent, and <it is by the same principle that> in sleep we become forgetful, but in waking we retain our senses. For in sleep the passages of perception are shut, and hence the understanding (noos) in us is separated from its natural unity with the surrounding medium: the only thing preserved is the connection through breathing, which is like a root. So when separated, our understanding loses its former power of memory. But when we awake it goes out again through the passages of perception as through so many windows, and by contact with the surrounding medium it regains its rational power. Just as coals that are brought near the fire undergo a change and are made incandescent, but die out when they are separated from it, just so does the surrounding portion of the surrounding medium which resides as a stranger in our bodies become nearly irrational

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77 The fact that Sextus’ account diverges from the Theophrastan doxography devolving from Aristotle in most significant details implies that the image of the root which they both employ may accurately reflect its occurence in Heraclitus.

(alogos) as a result of this separation, but by the natural union through the multitude of passages <when they are reopened> it attains a condition which is like in kind to the Whole.

Sextus’ commentary displays a materialistic conception of the logos, a divine rational

element that literally becomes part of the body of the individual through breath, and is maintained

during consciousness through an open passageway (poros) between the macrocosm and the

macrocosm. This inhaled wisdom, though, appears to fade in the individual, and requires a

constant stream of interaction with the divine logos from where it is drawn. In claiming that this

connection is preserved through a ‘drawing off via respiration’ (δι᾽ἀναπνοῆς σπάσαντες), Sextus

gestures toward the concept of ‘exhalation’ (anathymiasis) that is ascribed to Heraclitus by

Theophrastus to explain the transformations of the physical elements of fire, earth and water78:

γίνεσθαι δ᾽ ἀναθυµιάσεις ἀπό τε γῆς καὶ θαλάττης, ἃς µὲν λαµπρὰς καὶ καθαράς, ἃς δὲ σκοτεινάς. αὔξεσθαι δὲ τὸ µὲν πῦρ ὑπὸ τῶν λαµπρῶν, τὸ δὲ ὑγρὸν ὑπὸ τῶν ἑτέρων (Theophastus qv. Diogenes Laertius Vit. Phil. IX.9)

Now exhalations arise from both the earth and the sea, some are bright and pure, others murky. Fire is augmented by the bright exhalations, moisture by the others.

By setting the inspiration of intelligence (noos) within this purported cosmic cycle of Heraclitus,

Sextus adopts the equivalence between fire and psyche indicated in fragments B.36 and B.118.

And just as Theophrastus goes on to note that the ‘bright and pure’ (λαµπρὰς καὶ καθαράς)

exhalations when kindled produce day, and the moist ones night, so does Sextus privilege daytime

as the occasion for higher attunement to the divine element, with sleep that of forgetful separation

(ἐν µὲν ὕπνοις ληθαῖοι), where ληθαῖοι (lēthaoi) is an adjectival form of lanthanō, such that

forgetfulness and concealment invoke each other.

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78 On the question of anathymiasis and its possible place in the authentic doctrines of Heraclitus see Kahn pp. 256-60, and in particular for a good summary of the debate with a conclusion in favor of its presence, albeit in a non-Stoic sense, in the fragments see Dilcher pp.172-183.

The other interpreter of Heraclitus upon whom Sextus draws is Cleanthes, whose four

book exegesis upon Heraclitus manifests his importance to the development of the early Stoics.79

A.Long has indicated that this turn to Heraclitus, a natural one given the shared interest in

doctrines of a directive fire and a pervading logos harmonizing the macro and microcosmic

spheres, was employed by Cleanthes to buttress the teachings of the founder of Stoicism, his

predecessor Zeno. The forging of this affiliation inevitably involved interpretations of Heraclitus’

philosophy that projected him as a valuable forerunner of Stoic philosophy, even if direct lines of

influence upon Zeno may not have been so strong.80 A clear example of Cleanthes’ method is

visible in the assignation of the doctrine of the psyche as a perceptive exhalation (anathymiasis)

to both Zeno and Heraclitus, before his quotation of the river fragment B.12 we considered

above:

Ζήνων τὴν ψυχὴν λέγει αἰσθητικὴν ἀναθυµίασιν, καθάπερ Ἡράκλειτος.· βουλόνεµος γὰρ ἐµφανίσαι, ὅτι αἱ ψυχαὶ ἀναθυµιώµεναι νοεραὶ ἀεὶ γίνονται, εἴκασεν αὐτὰς τοῖς ποταµοῖς λέγων οὕτως· (B.12) (Arius Didymus fr. 39.2) Zeno says that the psyche is a perceptive exhalation, just like Heraclitus. For Heraclitus, wanting to show that psychai as they are exhaled are continually becoming intelligent, likened them to rivers in saying the following: (B.12)

The same phrasing for ‘becoming intelligent’ (νοεραὶ ἀεὶ γίνονται) is found in Sextus’

commentary (νοεροὶ γινόµεθα), the adverbial aei emphasizing the constant need for the psychai

to be re-nourished. But it is noteworthy that the psychai themselves are being

‘exhaled’ (ἀναθυµιώµεναι) in Cleanthes’ version, a movement that is synonymous with the birth

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79 There are not many studies on this relationship. See for example A. Long ‘Heraclitus and Stoicism’ in Stoic Studies; Roman Dilcher has a useful appendix on Cleanthes and Heraclitus pp.177-200.

80 Long p.46 has suggested that “Neither the early Stoics’ basic assumptions about the universe, nor their choice of fire as the active principle are likely to have been derived from Heraclitus”. Kahn, however, draws a more direct notion of intellectual inheritance, claiming that the “Stoics were the true Heracliteans of antiquity”, p.5. This view is in direct contrast to Nietzsche who disparaged the Stoic reception, their ‘dragging down’, of Heraclitus from what Nietzsche viewed as Heraclitus aesthetic conception of existence. See Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks p.+REF

of perceptiveness as understanding (noeroi).81 Such a reading can bring us back to the transitions

and changes of the psyche in B.36. The ‘death’ (thanatos) of the psyche in its turn into water can

imply the drowning of understanding, while the exhalation back from water to the dry gleam

(αὐγὴ ξηρὴ) of B.118 can represent the brilliance of wisdom (σοφωτάτη καὶ ἀρίστη) reborn. The

psyche, for Cleanthes, embodies ‘perceptiveness’ (αἰσθητικὴν) through its direct participation in

the physical processes of Heraclitus’ kosmos, whereas for Sextus the route to perceptiveness is

externalised from the soul, as a literal passageway (poros) that must be kept open for intelligence

to be nourished.

In adducing, and modifying, the readings of Theophrastus and Cleanthes, Sextus seems to

devalue the role of sleep, marking it as a form of isolation from the materialised rationality that

can be inhaled during daytime.82 His account lies behind both Kahn’s conception of the

segregated pejorative light of the anthrōpos of B.26, as well as the immersion into a deadly

moisture envisioned by Kirk. Yet something is left over, a root (ῥιζης - rhizēs) that refuses to be

severed when the passageways (poroi) are shut off. What is this root? A plant of wisdom

engrafted onto the individual able to endure the forgetfulness of sleep, ready to flourish, tumbling

out the windows of perception (even smashing them open) when the dawn comes? In the

nighttime the rhizome conceals its energy, preparing to create a new pathway (poros) as it ‘peeps

out’ (προκύψας) from a place now defined by a stranger, the accommodated guest of the cosmic

reason, who has ‘become other’ (ἡ ἐπιξενωθεῖσα) and ‘almost illogical’ (σχεδὸν ἄλογος). Night is

a time of latent growth, an alternate materialism where the individual sprouts afresh from the

earth in which they are been planted, drawing strength through a residual breath that takes

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81 As we shall observe in the following chapter a mark of ‘mind’ (νοῦς) noos is its intuitive ability to grasp a situation, where the movement of understanding unsettles the claim of the individual to be a bounded thinking entity.

82 Kirk p.341, reads these comments on sleep as authentic while Marcovich, p583, roundly disparages them as “a sheer forgery by Aenesidemus, without any evidential value for Heraclitus”. Kahn, p.295, disagrees in considering the doxography of Sextus as an independent interpretation which nevertheless provides a ‘coherent physical exegesis of Heraclitus’ doctrine of sleep’.

inspiration from the subterranean. Just like Aristotle’s plant that he refuses to believe can

constantly fissure the rock, so does the root manifest the force of becoming.

This metaphor of the root is also qualified by the absence of the ‘former power of

memory’ (πρότερον...µνηµονικὴν δύναµιν), which, ‘in separation’ (χωρισθείς) from the divine

reason, does not just wither away, but is actively cast off (ἀποβάλλει). Viewed through

Nietzsche’s lens we glimpse the atmosphere of the unhistorical attained through the active power

of forgetting. Casting off memory and the past, man has no need to fear the loosened leaves from

the scroll of time that flutter into his lap, plaguing him with the “I remember” of duty.83 Awake,

the root must dress up in the apparel of reason (λογικὴν ἐνδύεται δύναµιν), bear the burden once

more of memory, but only till night time offers another chance for unmediated interaction,

wanderings off the established track, with the creative becoming of the earth. Sextus does not

mention death in his depiction of the separation of sleep, rather the root represents that which

‘alone’ (µόνης) is kept alive, ‘saved’ (σωιζοµένης) in the ground of dying only to reemerge in the

morning. It subversively brings the never-setting (to mē dunon) to light, as its nocturnal

germination affords insight into the thinking of forgetting that Heidegger advocated,

acknowledging the ‘sheltering in which the essential possibility of rising is preserved’.84

The interaction while awake between the noos and the divine logos of the world takes

place on perceptual pathways (aisthētikoi poroi) through the movement of breath, with

understanding inhaled across the kosmos along vectors that are hinged at one end to a root within

the human. This transmission of knowledge appears to flow in one direction, from the kosmos to

man, as evidenced by the presence of intelligence inside the human with regard to ‘a stranger in

our body who is a part of the surrounding rational element’ (ἡ ἐπιξενωθεῖσα τοῖς ἡµετέροις

σῶµασιν ἀπὸ τοῦ περιέχοντος µοῖρα). Figured as a bellows keeping the fiery pathways of

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83 Nietzsche On the Use and Liability of History p.126.

84 Heidegger Aletheia p.114.

understanding ablaze, the individual is defined by its passivity, merely adapting to the set

contours of knowledge that exceed its control. The survival of the root, however, has illustrated

an active agency to alter the perceptual network, casting off established trajectories at night and

marking out new lines of affiliation come the morning. In doing so the root sketches a co-

determinism of mind between the psyche and the environment that occurs beneath the visible, a

concealed dynamism that enables the manifestation of intelligence. Such a plasticity of influence,

as it grasps the articulating power of difference in the nightime of becoming, offers the possibility

not just of reconnecting with, but of subverting, the stretched out poroi of day. Perceived from the

perspective of the divine logos the root represents a tenuous epistemological thread verging on

the illogical, its cosmic stranger taken hostage. But envisioned from the trackless (hence aporetic)

and disconnected space of the root, this ontological dwelling in the time of night represents a

creative merging with the earth, such that new avenues of noos can be materialised.

The analogy of the separated noos being like ‘glowing coals’ (ἄνθρακες) provides a

further gloss upon the creative exposure to becoming that understanding finds itself in at night

whence it emerges changed come dawn. In the logic of Sextus the dying heat of the embers

signifies an impoverished condition, a half-life that can only be ‘born into ardent

intelligence’ (διάπυροι γίνονται) as the cosmic fire kindles them in the day, once the poroi can be

traversed once more. The verb sbennutai (‘quenched’) references the measures of Heraclitus’s

everliving fire (aposbennumenon) as well as the quenched man (aposbestheis) of B.26 bringing

light into the embrace of dying. But it is the plural nature of the coals that unravels the

straightforward reading, as the isolation from the kindling cosmic fire, the divine logos, is

represented by a communal sheltering at night. And moreover, it is the physical contiguity of the

coals pressed against one another as their remaining heat, and understanding, is distributed across

their multiplicity, that enables their collective preservation. Just as the subterranean root

concealed itself in half madness only to sprout and reconfigure the cognitive environment to

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which it is a part, so do the multiple coals imply that intelligence is materially spread across many

individuals. Far from being marked by the fading temperature of insight, the sheltering,

germination and communal interaction of nightime models the very processes of thought.

The image of the coals as a shared manifold of intelligence, preserving and provoking

knowledge through their permeability to one another, leads Sextus back to Cleanthes, from whom

we noted the influence of the theory of exhalation (anathymiasis) upon Sextus’ analysis of

becoming intelligent. After positing a doctrinal similarity between Zeno and Heraclitus on the

constitution of psychai, Cleanthes illustrates the continual renewal of their cognitive faculties by

claiming that Heraclitus ‘compared them to rivers’ (εἴκασεν αὐτὰς τοῖς ποταµοῖς). And it is in this

context that fragment B.12, mentioned earlier, is quoted (ποταµοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐµϐαίνουσιν

ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ· “As the (same) people step into the (same) rivers, other and still

other waters flow upon them.”). A.Long writes with regard to Cleanthes’ intention that “the

continuity of the river by the flow of different waters would be like the soul which owes its

continuing (or renewed) existence to the flow of vaporising moisture”.85 But might we not

suggest, incorporating the hint of Sextus’ coal image, that it is the incessant flow of other psychai

upon psychai that causes the emergence of their cognitive powers, since the first line of the

fragment implies that the psyche is a percipient exhalation (τὴν ψυχὴν λέγει αἰσθητικὴν

ἀναθυµίασιν), not merely the result of one? The psyche gains its insight and creativity from its

immersion with other psychai, all of them glowing, sprouting and thinking together in their

shared exposure to the aporetic time of becoming.

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85 A.Long Heraclitus and Stoicism p.55.

Thinking the aporia

Sextus’ account of the relationship between the microcosmic intelligence and the

pervasive rational element of the kosmos attempted to circumscribe the space of night as a

forgetting, isolated from the pathways to the divine logos that are closed. The vision of the root

and coals that he employed, however, worked subversively to limn an alternative evaluation of

this separation from the established poroi, gesturing toward a theory of mind defined by latent

intersections with the materiality of the environment across a shared manifold with others.

Adducing the readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger, we have highlighted Heraclitus’ concern with

the problematic of forgetting and concealment, arguing that in spite of man’s fallible perception

of his place in the becomings of the world, the never setting force (to mē dunon) cannot be

escaped, and even in sleep man touches (haptetai) a death that should be re-thought into a

heightened awareness of the relationship of dying to the emergent forces of an elusive physis.

Elsewhere Heraclitus’ philosophy explicitly enjoins his audience to install themselves in this

indeterminate region:

ἐὰν µὴ ἔλπηται, ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει, ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον. (B. 18) He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is unexplored and aporetic.

The requirement for expectation implies an appropriate hermeneutical attunement, a posing of the

right question in one’s interaction with the world as one attempts to think the unexpected.

Forgetful of his nocturnal grasp of becoming, and its articulation of difference, it is little surprise

that Heraclitus indicates that man has not adopted the right attitude toward death:

ἀνθρώπους µένει ἀποθανόντας ἅσσα οὐκ ἔλπονται οὐδὲ δοκέουσιν. (B.27) What awaits for men at death they do not expect or even imagine.

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The misrecognition of one’s exposure to the logos, described in B.17 (οὐδὲ µαθόντες

γινώσκουσιν), was also characterized by a retreat to an imagination (ἑωυτοῖσι δὲ δοκέουσι) that

disavowed the material rhythms and changes manifested in the world. So here the surprise of

death results from failing to consider the process of dying, in its interplay with the emergence of

life, as something one encounters long before the end. It is also an inability to think one’s own

relationship to death, to believe that it can be ignored, or considered a separate sphere from the

erotic enjoyment of life, an attitude which Heraclitus derided:

ὡυτὸς δὲ Ἀίδης καὶ Διόνυσος, ὅτεῳ µαίνονται καὶ ληναΐζουσιν. (B.15 excerpt) But Hades and Dionysus are the same, him for whom they go mad and celebrate the Lenaia.86

But above all, the unexpected arrival and consequences of death result from the perception that it

is a fixed state, a momentary border of which one is either on one side or the other. To place

oneself in the time of dying is to reconsider this border as a dynamic, indeterminate, and

permeable becoming where forces interact and whence thought and culture emerge. From this

perspective one can rethink one’s own relationship to the tradition of the “it was” while keeping

another eye on the “it will be” of Nietzsche’s fence of the future. And, moreover, it is to affirm, as

with the Eternal Return, that the conflict of these fences, or paths in the image of Thus Spoke

Zarathustra, is what creates the pregnant moment of the present, a gateway where past and future

perpetually meet.87 To linger in this gateway, as in the aporetic becoming of night, is not to step

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86 Such a sentiment made an impression on the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Alain Badiou ‘Lacan and the PreSocratics’ writes with regard to Lacan’s assertion of Heraclitus as a predecessor for his own theory of the death drive, ¶2: “Among these aphorisms, the most useful is the one which states the correlation of the Phallus and death....The authority of difference allows Heraclitus to perceive, in the identity of the god of the dead with the god of vital ecstasy, the double investment of the Phallus.”

87 Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra pp.178-179. My interpretation of the infinite paths of the past and future that meet at the Gateway thus sides more with Small, p.140 who asserted contra Fink, that the affirmation of the Eternal Return does not sublate the difference between past and future in a static moment, but that its affirmation of becoming makes it a doctrine about the past, the present and the future.

out of time, but to assert one’s place within it, vulnerable to the dimensions upon which one must

travel, yet endowed with the creativity to shape their repetition.

We have indicated that the differentiating potential of children associated with aion arises

from the force of becoming: an unseen pressure that fissures rocks before the time of chronos can

categorize its actions. Yet, as Heraclitus emphasizes, the wrapping of the eternal into the finite

does not remove these children from time, but situates them in the dangers of its flow. One result

of the adult inability to acknowledge the entanglement of the future of dying with the

determinations of the past as it creates the present is the belief that the event of death can itself be

passed down as an inheritance to one’s children:

γενόµενοι ζώειν ἐθέλουσι µόρους τʹ ἔχειν,[ µᾶλλον δὲ ἀναπαύεσθαι], καὶ παῖδας καταλείπουσι µόρους γενέσθαι. (B.20) Once born they want to live and have their portions; and they leave behind children to become their dooms. (trans. Kahn)

Heraclitus exploits the multivalency of the term moros (µόρος) meaning death, fate and portion to

express this condition which Kahn’s translation neatly brings out, where the adult attitude toward

its positive aspects, ‘being born to life’ (γενόµενοι ζώειν), ‘to enjoy it’ in Marcovich’s rendering,

is placed in chiastic opposition to ‘being born to death’ (µόρους γενέσθαι) for children.88 Reading

this fragment with another, also preserved by Clement, suggests that this attitude results from not

thinking one’s relationship to finitude, and like Nietzsche’s herd in the Second Untimely

Meditation, blissfully ruminating in the present, unaware of what is to come:

αἱρεῦνται γὰρ ἓν ἀντία πάντων οἱ ἄριστοι, κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν, οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ κεκὸρηνται ὅκωσπερ κτήνεα. (Β.29) Τhe best choose one thing in exchange for all, everflowing fame in exchange for mortals; but most men have sated themselves like cattle.

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88 Marcovich p.522.

Bollack-Wismann have pointed out the ambiguous syntax of the phrase kleos aenaon thnētōn

(κλέος ἀέναον θνητῶν) where the unusual use of the genitive ‘of mortals’ (thnētōn) creates a

parallel with the first clause in which one thing (hen) is chosen ‘in place’ (antia) of ‘all’ (pantōn).

This balanced use of the genitive in the two clauses upsets the reading that translates kleos

aenaon thnētōn, ignoring the notion of opposition in the first clause (‘one instead of all’), as

‘everflowing fame among mortals’.89 The traditional perspective sidesteps this semantic

problem. It makes the fragment testify to Heraclitus’ valorization of an ‘aristocratic war-ethics’

that mimics the choice of Achilles for immortal (aphthiton) kleos over an undistinguished long

life (aion) in the Iliad (IX.410-416), while analogizing this noble embrace of death with the

polemos that structures Heraclitus’ world in opposition to the mundane pleasures and inescapable

mortality of the many.90 In taking the hoi polloi (οἱ δὲ πολλοὶ) to embody the same attitude to life

as the plural subject of B.20 Marcovich argues that such people, separated from the flow of fame

that can transcend mortal borders, ‘do not beget children but only ‘living deaths’.

The ambiguous syntax, however, implies that both the best and the many derive their

experience of life from a sense of their imperviousness to time.91 The choice of hoi aristoi (οἱ

ἄριστοι) for one thing over many does not posit a simple correspondence with the patterning of

Heraclitus’ world, since the very function of polemos and eris (strife) is to break asunder and to

return to concealment in order to manifest new configurations. The task of knowledge, in seizing

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89 Bollack-Wismann pp.128-129; The translation is Kahn’s, p.233.

90 Marcovich p.523. See also Reinhardt; Kahn pp.233-235. As we will explore in the next chapter, the notion that polemos as war is something that occasions the attainment of excellence for the few must be balanced by the recognition of its percussive effect on the many, shaping their cultural and cognitive environments.

91 As often with Heraclitus’ fragments multiple readings are afforded by the puns, syntactical uncertainties and lexical polyvalencies that riddle through his work as mantic messages whose solving requires the merging into this semiotic interplay that both reveals and conceals (cf ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ µαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σηµαίνει - The lord whose oracle is at Delphi, neither speaks nor hides, but gives a sign. B.90), with the consequence that insight is gleaned when one’s expected interpretation meets an unexpected hermeneutical aporia.

these constant changes, is to recognize that the ‘one and the many’ are not demarcated states, but

are always in a process of transition as they intersect one another in the time of becoming:

συλλάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συµφερόµενον διαφερόµενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα. (B.10)

Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent differing, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.

The aristoi, therefore, ignore the potential contained in the co-existence of the one and many as

they invoke one another within time, preferring to absent themselves from the multiple and finite

mortal changes (taking thnētōn as neuter) that recombine to make the world, in preference for a

disembodied immortality, a lust for a kleos that can conquer time.92

The unaware ‘herd’ (κτήνεα) of the polloi also sate themselves without regard to their

place in time, believing such rumination to continue indefinitely, just as they believe they can

cheat death through postponing it to their children. A separate fragment indicates the need, as

with the one and many, to consider ‘satiety’ (κόρος) in terms of its interdependence with

‘hunger’ (λιµός):

ὁ θεὸς ἡµέρη εὐφρόνη, χειµὼν θέρος, πόλεµος εἰρήνη, κόρος λιµός , ἀλλοιοῦται δὲ ὅκωσπερ (πῦρ), ὁπόταν συµµιγῇ θυώµασιν, ὀνοµάζεται καθ΄ ἡδονὴν ἑκάστου. (B.67) The god: day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger. It alters as when mingled with perfumes, it gets named according to the pleasure of each one.

Both the aristoi and the polloi brace themselves on the bank of these fluid interchanges, believing

their position secure against the transitions of time, naming their immortality, as it were,

‘according to their pleasure’ (καθ΄ ἡδονὴν ἑκάστου). Such an attitude positions death outside

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92 Kahn, p.223 avers that Heraclitus had no belief in the afterlife, or the survival of the individual soul, as opposed to the view of Pythagoras. Guthrie History of Greek Philosophy Vol.1 posited that Heraclitus’ subscribed to an Orphic view of immortality.

time, instead of absorbing it as the process of dying into their lives. They fail to dwell in the

indeterminate period where the paths of time interact, where the never-setting flow of becoming

can not be escaped even if it can be forgotten, and where the latent roots of distributed thought

erupt into presence as old configurations shatter.

Just as man does not reflect upon his physical embeddedness in the world and

constitutive permeability to other psychai, mediated through the concealed becoming that plays

through them, so then does he not acknowledge the warring time of transition that such forces

enact within his own body:

ταὐτό τ΄ ἔνι ζῶν καὶ τεθνηκὸς καὶ [τὸ] ἐγρηγορὸς καὶ καθεῦδον, καὶ νέον καὶ γηραιόν· τάδε γὰρ µεταπεσόντα ἐκεῖνά ἐστι κἀκεῖνα πάλιν µεταπεσόντα ταῦτα. (B.88) The same exists in us, living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping and young and old: for these things transposed are those and those transposed again are these.

To focus upon these conditions as separate states is to ignore the continuity that binds them

together, the time of becoming and movement that supervenes above any momentary snapshot of

existence. The inability of Heraclitus’ audience to seize the interwoven braid of these tendencies

always pulling on one another, and thereby keeping the vital tension intact, overlooks their own

existence in time, growing old, waking and sleeping. But it is also a failure to grasp the presence

of what is absent temporally, such as ancestors and the knowledge they held, connected through a

continuum where multiple timescales interact. It is, rather, the transition between states where this

power is glimpsed when something is neither one thing or another, but both: a coalescence of

potentialites and tendencies. The ‘transpositions’ (metapesonta B.88) of this time of continual

change within the body bring us back to the child aion whose gameplay (pessueōn B.52)

embodies the creative becoming that the manipulation of the never-setting forces located there

can yield.

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---------

Heraclitus’ creative child solves the impasse posed by Nietzsche’s opposition in On the

Utility and Liability of History between the joyful play of the child out of time, stranded between

the fences of the past and future, and the ideal Heraclitean student dissolved in the present amid

the stream of change. It is the child’s entanglement in becoming that attunes them to the latent

powers flowing beneath the individual. Yet the children, unlike the student of Heraclitus

described by Nietzsche, do not evanesce into this time of conflict, unable to act, oppressed by the

burden of ephemerality. The imperfection summoned by the arrival of the ‘it was’, the inheritance

of the moros as figured in B.20, is able to be resisted, and absorbed into the game. It is in this

sense that Heraclitus’ children represent the ideal students themselves. And as B.112 required of

the wise (ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας - ‘to speak and act the truth, perceiving

in accordance with physis’), the children’s grasping of the constitutive forces of concealment that

occasion the emergence of thought and the formations of the world is one with their performance

of the dynamic interplay central to physis. The horizon which Nietzsche insisted must be

carefully drawn to circumscribe the weight of history and to enable the human to forget in order

to develop in the future is, for Heraclitus, no horizon or limit at all. It is a permeable and aporetic

border where past and future, dying and emergence coalesce, a becoming that can not be escaped.

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Chapter Four: The shared logos

This chapter will posit that the notions of cognitive coordination and communal

embodiment are central to Heraclitus’ employment of logos (λογός) in his theory of the

emergence of mind and culture. I will argue that his re-evaluation of these concepts questions the

notion of a unified self and the boundedness of the individual, as well as the construction of a

cultural context that evolves to contain this flexibility.1 The thinking into the unexpected aporia

we discerned in the last chapter does not just enjoin an epistemological attitude toward

uncertainty and flux, one that can result in a rejuvenated sense of life borne from an encounter

with the inevitability of dying, but indicates moreover how individuals and cultures take their

very generation and foundation from this permeable border, penetrated by the durational

alterations of nature, just as by the graspings of other minds.

In this vein, we will contest that the inclination among scholars to valorize one side of the

micro-macrocosm analogy long observed in Heraclitus, either focusing upon human intelligence

and the human condition, or upon the physical laws and regulative pattern of the cosmic order, is

to overlook the dynamical intersections between the natural and cognitive environments where

neither is stable in relation to the other, but subject to and enacting a ceaseless series of

transformations.2 Situated between these two positions, other scholars have followed Diodotus’

comment that Heraclitus’ main interest was a philosophy of politics with nature used as a

paradeigma (Diogenes Laertius Vit.Phil.9.5). They suggest that the political sphere should

function as a pliant structure in imitation of the cosmic order, capable of harmonizing the warring

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1 In doing so I position myself in diametrical opposition to the argument of Martha Nussbaum, ‘Ψυχή in Heraclitus, I’, who argued that one result of Heraclitus’s novel manipulation of the Homeric semantics of logos and psyche is precisely the drawing of a connected self with its integrity concretised by the controlling faculty of the psyche able to manipulate the connected language of logos.

2 For the former see Dilcher p.31; Kahn p.23. For the latter Kirk; W.K. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy I, pp.470-471.

interests of different factions.3 Such a reading of the cultural plane, however, tends to situate its

mimetic genesis with respect to the macrocosm, viewing it as a scale model of the divine cosmic

law that regulates change and is itself destined to survive. In doing so they overlook the way that

the contours of the political sphere are moulded in response to the volatility of minds and

individuals interacting with one another: that is to say, we should view culture as a flexible

container under constant construction, and deconstruction, from its component parts. One result

of the disinclination to consider the vulnerability of the cultural itself to the differentiating

tendencies that it attempts to control is to suppose that it can somehow stand outside time.4

It is by adopting a co-evolutionary perspective upon the becomings of nature, culture and

cognition that we can move beyond the temptation to view the micro-macrocosm analogy in a

unidirectional frame, subordinating one side to the other. Such an idea, taken from biology,

emphasizes the importance of feedback loops between the organism and its environment, making

neither ultimately determinative of the other, and allowing that the organism does not only adapt

to its environment, but also mediates and creates it.5 We can thereby abandon the metaphors of

altitude, and implications of precedence, that situate the human below the cultural, itself

underneath the cosmic. We will observe how the logos is neither an abstract principle to which

one must conform, nor a purely human form of rationality that can, at its best, reflect the

constitution and pattern of the world; rather, it is its collective performance that can shape and

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3 Naddaf, The Greek Concept of Nature, pp.125-134; McKirihan, Philosophy Before Socrates, p.118.

4 Naddaf p.2 ascribes the same motive to all Pre-Socratic philosophers, whereby they adapt the processes of cosmogony, anthropogony and politogony to provide a “guarantee that these orders will remain as they are.”

5 On this questions see in particular Gilles Simondon in Crary, Winter eds. Incorporations; George Kampis Self- modifying systems in biology and cognitive science ; Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots and his Nature’s Due in which he advocates a “hermeneutics of biology” to investigate how organisms “make meaning of their genetic texts by expressing them in a form (morphology and behavior) appropriate to their habitat and history” p.34 (check ref.); Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s The Tree of Knowledge provides a compelling analysis of the way that an organism’s specific knowledge of its environment allows it to constitute its dimensions. Maturana and Varela also emphasize how such knowledge is often implicit and embodied, rather than held in a separate deliberative brain.

alter the environment to which one is bound. By positing a materialistic conception of logos and

psyche whereby they function through being distributed across other individuals and the cultural

context, but without any teleological or external directing principle - a true affirmation of

Heraclitean flux - we can situate Heraclitus’ conception of the kosmos as an open system, a

tentative biosphere, that enjoins creativity in terms of the plasticity of cultural and cognitive

structures.6 A key aspect of this plasticity will also be a recognition of the change that occurs

through time, not where time is an external measurement of alteration, but a central element

effecting the transformation of any system, mental or social. Such a consideration will build on

our earlier analysis of the potency of aion (αἰών), as well as also employing insights from

research in the biological and neuroscientific fields that emphasize how the fluid interactions

between brains, bodies and the environment can be modeled as a dynamical system that results in

new configurations when one factors in the role of time.

Logos, Phronesis and Polemos

The centrality of logos to an understanding of Heraclitus is evident not just from its

presence in the opening statement of B.1, which we have recognized functions, or at least mimics,

the programmatic opening of a book, but also from its recurrence as logos or the connected verbs

legein and homolegein in twelve other places in the surviving fragments: more than the key

concept of fire treated by Theophrastus as Heraclitus’ central arche in the style of the Milesian

material monists. The only other comparable terms with respect to the frequency of their

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6 The theory of the biosphere arises from the work of Vladimir Vernadsky’s The Biosphere. His original theory situated the biosphere as the boundary region of the earth, whose complex regulating mechanism was a result of the interplay between the cosmic radiation of the sun and the living matter of the earth. Such coordinated interaction rendered the biosphere a creative region of energy, p.7. The term has now migrated from its original planetary connotation to cover the idea of self-regulating systems, typically natural ones (but also including those of distributed computer networks), where there is a dynamic harmonisation between the interacting parts. For a good analysis of how the term is now employed, in both its technological and natural senses, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control.

occurrence are psyche which appears in 9 fragments, and is defined by Aristotle as a joint arche

with fire (De An. 405a25), and pais and its related terms for the young and youthful. As I have

argued, it is the unacknowledged persistence of children in the fragments that can reconfigure and

enrich the readings of this matrix of common terms, bringing the concept of the quivering

temporal registers and efficacies of aion into play, foregrounding the interplay between living and

dying. Yet the prevalence of logos has not led to any scholarly consensus upon its meaning, or

even upon the limits of its semantic range. Some prefer to read it as an objective formula, or

cosmic principle responsible for the arrangement of the universe that supervenes upon any notion

of human language and words.7 Others acknowledge its materiality as something that can be

encountered with the senses, but claim that the logos of human language functions as a

manifestation of a higher logos representing the ‘eternal structure of the world’, even as the

surrounding and directing arche itself in Guthrie’s reading.8 This perspective toward the micro-

macrocosm analogy thus sees human language, and thought, as a passive imitation of a superior

force writ large upon the cosmic canvas, interpretation seen as the deciphering of a pre-existent

plan that can not be altered, merely acceded to.9

Scholars who view Heraclitus’ philosophical project as situated primarily toward an

interrogation of human knowledge and the human condition, such as Roman Dilcher and Martha

Nussbaum, tend, in contrast, to emphasize the importance of logos as language and thought in the

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7 Kirk and Raven p.187 define logos as ‘the unifying formula or proportionate method of arrangement of things’; Marcovich p.8 suggests that logos in B.1 means the statement of Heraclitus, but that prior to that, before hearing, lies the meaning of an ‘objective truth (law, rule).’

8 Kahn p.94. Guthrie’s perspective, p.471, appears to follow the summary of Sextus Empiricus we observed in the last chapter, in considering that the logos as a divine principle, both transcendental and immanent and able to be inhaled as a rational connection to its given its function as the surrounding matter, to periechon.

9 For example see Daniel Graham ‘Heraclitus: Flux, Order, Knowledge’ in Patricia Kurd and Daniel Graham eds. The Oxford Handbook of PreSocratic Philosophy in which he argues, p.183 that “The logos, the Message, is imprinted on the kosmos, the world order. When we are awakened by philosophy, we can read the message in the events and objects of the world. We must read the book of the world by learning to parse its most humble statements.” Kirk and Raven p.187 view the logos as the ‘structural plan both individually and in sum’ for all things.

construction of the individual. Though even here there are differences. Nussbaum prefers to focus

upon the objective nature of logos as ‘connected speech’ whose correct apprehension leads to the

notion of the unified self in coordination with the controlling cognitive function of the psyche,

while Dilcher traces a balance between this objective aspect, as the result of logos, and the

subjective performance of logos that is tied as a ‘principle of deliberation and reflection’ to a

specific occasion.10 Such a subjective viewpoint is incompatible for Dilcher with the discovery of

an abstract truth in nature, but as a mobile and dialectical process of understanding tied to a

particular context it can ‘reflect’ the endless transformations of the world to which the rational

and interpretative individual is aligned. Logos from this side of the analogy is less concerned with

an external law of the cosmos, and more viewed instrumentally as the path toward the

individual’s development of a higher understanding, one that is able to discern the relationship

between the ambiguities of language and the warring tendencies of nature.11 Nevertheless, this

emphasis on logos as human reasoning, and its being specifically language based, works to

disavow the importance of the body in perceptual and cognitive development. Instead, we will

see how the body functions as a mediating link between both sides of the micro-macrocosm

analogy as the permeable membrane connecting the logos within, in its physical performance of

intellection, with that from outside, in its empirical confrontation with the materialized logos of

the cosmos as we indicated with reference to B.17 (οὐ γὰρ φρονέουσι τοιαῦτα (οἱ) πολλοί,

ὁκοίοις ἐγκυρεῦσιν - ‘they do not think things in the way they encounter them’).12

In viewing the body not just as the site for the passive reception of information upon

which the faculties of reasoning enact an interpretation, but instead as actively embedded in the

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10 Nussbaum p.5; Dilcher p.46.

11 Dilcher’s frequent use of the terms ‘reflection’, ‘relating’ and ‘representation’ to describe the logos betray his conception of the inability of language, and reasoning, to alter their environment.

12 B.72, whether it is an authentic fragment or a subsequent interpretation of Marcus Aurelius, makes a similar point.

construction and performance of knowledge we can reassess Heraclitus’ condemnation of the

ignorance (ἀξύνετοι) of men in fragment B.1 and B.2. Indeed, their failure to heed the ever

existing logos is said to occur both after hearing it, as well as before (καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ

ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον B.1). Whilst language certainly can be a vehicle for the logos it is not the

only way it can manifest itself.13 Here it is the body’s very situatedness in the world that makes it

participate in the constant movements of the logos, and the inability to hear the logos is to be deaf

both to the philosophical explanation of Heraclitus, and to one’s own material presence in the

cosmos. So too in this vein can we revisit fragment B.50 to suggest that the listening beyond

Heraclitus’s discourse does not necessarily refer to an underlying formula external to the

individual that is present in nature, but might gesture toward the logos inherent in one’s body.

Subsequently, it would be the foregrounded body that acts as the unifying one where all the

tendencies coalesce:

οὐκ ἐµοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁµολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι (B.50) It is wise listening not to me, but to the logos to agree that all things are one.

The listening enjoined upon his audience here goes beyond language toward a self awareness, a

form of intuitive attention to the music of one’s own body and its dynamic relation to the world.14

We can cast fragment B.101 in such a light, as a turning to the materiality of the body and the

cartography of time’s imprint that it bears (ἐδιζησάµην ἐµεωυτόν. ‘I went in search of myself’).

Though it would not just be the case that the body is a site where the logos is inscribed by the

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13 This is the view of Edward Hussey in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy p.106: “The logos , whatever it is, is something that is expressible only in language and intelligible only because it is so expressible.”

14 Here then we can discern the influence of Heidegger once more, where logos has powers not of isolated rationality and language but forms a ‘gathering’ and ‘letting lie before in unconcealment’ that can unite all Dasein together. In his lecture course Logic: The Teaching of Heraclitus on Logos with reference to this fragment B.50 Heidegger writes, p.286, that logos: “is the one that joins all, the being of all, the being of beings as a while.”

external world, whose formula is to be deciphered by the well attuned mind, but that its growth

and change as it ages and changes, the oscillations of its phusis as it were, indicate that we must

situate the logos itself with regard to the related question of its passage through time. Perhaps

from this perspective we can find a resonance between the aiei of B.1 that attaches itself to the

logos and its cognate form aion in B.52 that made the pais a powerful force manipulating the

warring opposites in the infinite game of time, while also leaving it vulnerable to erasure, as a

generational duration, under those same rules. As the differentiating force of becoming plays

through it, the logos, like the children in the world, changes.

Just as the body, though, cannot exist in isolation from the processes of the interpreting

subject, but acts as a vehicle and active interface for the logos, so can it not survive apart from

other bodies. We have previously noted how the word for ignorance in B.1 (ἀξύνετοι - axynetoi)

is repeated in B.34 testifying how deafness to the logos results in a lack of belonging to the world

(παρεόντας ἀπεῖναι). Yet how might we parse this absent presence? Firstly, with respect to one’s

perceptual failure to realize one’s embeddedness within the transactions of the cosmos. We argued

in the last chapter that a consequence of this failure to recognize one’s place in the flux of time

and tendencies was to attempt to adopt a position as a constitutive subjectivity capable of

perceiving these changes without being immersed in them. Furthermore, this led to the belief in a

stable self, an ‘I’ that could resist the eristic bufferings that all other things in the universe seemed

to endure. In posturing an absence from these intersections, in maintaining a belief in stability

over the aporetic transitions within and between all things, the ignorant man was not truly present

in the world, and overlooked his generation from, and interplay with, this flux. Secondly, such an

absence existed with regard to other beings, those who were defined by a shared exposure to the

never setting (to mē dunon) forces of becoming, and in particular that of dying. And thirdly, this

dislocation could be figured in terms of a particular understanding of cognition which believes it

can grasp the logos without the body, unable to recognize its formative position in the task of

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thinking. The absence to which being in a state of axynetoi testifies, therefore, is from one’s

involvement in the communal embodiment of the logos as a materialized process of thinking that

occurs in relationship with the world, effecting, and subject to, change through time.15

Fragment B.2, following on from B.1 in the account of Sextus Empiricus, classifies this

‘ignorance’ (axynetoi) as a privation from the ‘communal’ (xynos) logos:

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν. (B.2) Although the logos is common, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession.

In anaphora with the opening of B.1 (τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ᾽ ἐόντος αἰεὶ) this fragment specifies the

importance of the logos being ‘shared’, or ‘common’ (ξυνοῦ - xynos). And just as the persistence

of the logos is nevertheless met by the somnolent ignorance of the audience, so too is the

phronesis (φρόνησις) of the many here similarly viewed in terms of an epistemological failure.

For Marcovich the unreal clause introduced by ὡς implies that while the common logos speaks to

a higher, more divine form of wisdom, men “live as if they had another, private, religious wisdom

of their own which actually does not exist.”16 Similarly, for Kahn, the common logos represents a

“public possession available to all men” that connotes “rational discussion”17. In Kahn’s view, as

he adopts an ambiguous reading once more, logos is both an objective structure governing all

things as well as a principle of rationality that can be employed by men to discern that same

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15 Even if we maintain a linguistic understanding of logos as Nussbaum does, taking the φάτις of B.34 to refer to the impoverished speech of the ἀξύνετοι that manifests their inability to perceive the connective qualities of logos as opposed to what she views as a Homeric atomistic understanding of language as epos, we must still acknowledge that language exists in a community and as Heraclitus’ attention to the ambivalence of language makes clear he is well aware of its mutability. Language, like the individual, cannot be bounded nor taken out of time.

16 Marcovich p.96. Marcovich supposes that B.2 is not only related to B.114, as suggested by Bywater and followed by Gomperz, Gigon and Kirk, but that they are one and the same fragment. While I will emphasize their connection, specifically through the repetition of the term for ‘shared’ (ξυνός) I find Marcovich’s argument for their literal conjunction unconvincing.

17 Kahn pp.101-2.

structure. In addition it can also be used as a method of communication to ensure consensus and

the smooth functioning of a community. The importance of the shared performance of this logos

and its essential relation to the maintenance of the cultural and political order will become

apparent later in fragment B.114, and Kahn is right, I think, to emphasize that a key feature of the

logos is its embeddedness in a shared social context. Yet his equivocation about the location of

logos does not acknowledge that the coordinated performance of logos might be the very thing

that allows its subsequent perception as a structure in the world. Both Kahn and Marcovich place

a very human phronesis in contrast to the ruling power of the logos, where the privateness of

phronesis is a symptom of man’s alienation from what should bind them together.

The ὡς, though, could also indicate that the mistake of the many is the very attitude that

phronesis is a solitary activity, bounded by the limits of the individual. Thus, it is not that an

appropriate phronesis should function as an excision from the communal storehouse of the

rational logos, imitating and enacting its harmonious structure, but that phronesis itself, like the

logos, only exists through being distributed across many individuals. It is in the performance of

knowledge across multiple bodies that the logos is truly shared (xynos) and that man thereby

escapes his sense of isolation (axynetoi). Logos, as the activity of thinking, just like the phronesis

which characterizes it, is more than just a principle, or structure, of rationality available to all men

as a potentiality to be realized on an individual basis. Indeed, given that it takes its vitality from

being coordinated across the boundaries demarcating individuals, it is, in fact, impossible for it to

be separated off into such a private location and survive. This last aspect represents the delusion

of the polloi. And, furthermore, as we have observed, an important aspect of this process is the

foregrounding of the body which encounters this logos. The misalignment of the many thus

represents the belief that knowledge can be divorced from the logos as well as from the body, and

by implication from those of others.

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Heraclitus, therefore, appears to be criticizing the polloi for adopting the sort of mind/

body dualism that considered the rational functions of cognition to be separate from one’s

material presence in the world and connections to others. The position of Parmenides, denying the

validity of the senses, is emblematic of this nascent division that was to structure millenia of

subsequent thought. His critique of mortal enquiry as based upon physical experience depicts the

route of such a line of thought as being buffeted in all directions, unable to ascend to the

contemplation of motionless being, and thereby characterized by the sort of back turning harmony

of Heraclitus (palintropos harmoniē B.51) that jumbles all opposites together:

Πρώτης γάρ σ΄ ἀφ΄ ὁδοῦ ταύτης διζήσιος <εἴργω>, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ΄ ἀπὸ τῆς ἣν δὴ βροτοὶ εἰδότες οὐδέν πλάττονται, δίκρανοι· ἀµηχανίη γὰρ ἐν αὐτῶν στήθεσιν ἰθύνει πλακτὸν νόον; οἱ δὲ φοροῦντα κωφοὶ ὁµῶς τυφλοί τε, τεθηπότες, ἄκριτα φῦλα, οἷς τὸ πέλειν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶναι ταὐτὸν νενόµισται κοὐ ταὐτόν, πάντων δὲ παλίντροπός ἐστι κέλευθος (B.6, lines 3-9) I hold you back from this first way of enquiry, and from this also, upon which mortals, knowing nothing, wander with two heads. For they are carried along, blind and deaf at the same time, stupefied, unheeding hordes, who think that to be and not to be are the same and not the same, and the path taken by all of them is backward turning (palintropos).

It is with this critique in mind that Kirk and Raven view Parmenides’ theory of sensation,

aisthesis, as indicative of the falsity of human opinion that draws its conceptual categories from

its unexamined experience of the world.18 Seen in this light, Parmenides’ conception of sensation

might represent his aping of the Heraclitean empiricism that he wishes to belittle, but in doing so

it would confirm that a Heraclitean theory of the essential interweaving of mind, body and world

is entirely plausible. The relevant fragment is preserved by Theophrastus in an account of

different theories of perception (aisthesis), in which he groups the thinkers surveyed into two

schools of thought. One group, containing Parmenides, Plato and Empedocles is said to determine

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18 Kirk and Raven p.262.

sensation on the principle of like by like, while another, that of the followers of Anaxagoras and

Heraclitus uses the conception of the perception of opposite by opposite.19 Parmenides’ view,

which Theophrastus admits lacks a certain definitional boundary, is that perception depends on

the relationship between the two elements of hot and cold, and that knowledge (gnōsis) depends

on which holds the majority. The elements are material in the body and it is therefore its limbs,

present in the world, that enable the genesis of mind (νόος - noos):

Ὡς γὰρ ἕκαστοτ᾽ ἔχει κρᾶσιν µελέων πολυπλάγκτων, τὼς νόος ἀνθρώποισι παρίσταται· τὸ γὰρ αὐτό ἔστιν ὅπερ φρονέει µελέων φύσις ἀνθρώποισιν καὶ πᾶσιν καὶ παντί· τὸ γὰρ πλέον ἐστὶ νόηµα (B.16) For as is at any moment the mixture of wandering limbs, so mind (νόος) is present to men. For that which thinks (φρονέει) is the same thing, namely the nature (φύσις) of their limbs, in each and all men. For what preponderates is thought (νόηµα).

The plangent collisions of the splayed limbs stand in opposition to the contained, motionless

perfection of the being (τὸ ἐον - to eon) Parmenides enjoins man to contemplate, just as their

divergent motion seems to represent the twisting futility of double-headed Heracliteans indicated

in B.6. Yet whatever the target, if there be such, for Parmenides’ account of sensation, and

Theophrastus himself takes him at face value without any implied critique, it is revealing that the

arrangement of limbs, and their configuration of the elements of hot and cold, not only occasions

the emergence of mind (noos), but also that the limbs themselves appear to think (phroneei). Here

the verbal form of phronesis implies that both perception and the activity of thought are

performed by the body.20 The body has agency, in this view, in the process of cognition, an

agency delineated by its embeddedness in the world. A result of this agency is the notion that

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19 It is interesting that in Theophrastus’ division (de sensu 1) the doxa of Anaxagoras and Heraclitus is said to be enacted by their followers, whereas Parmenides, Empedocles and Plato are said to assert the doctrine themselves.

20 von Fritz, ‘Noos, Noein, and their derivatives in Pre-Socratic Philosophy’ p.230 notes how phren and phronein, unlike noos, ‘is always connected with the potential or beginning of an action.’. Phronein is very much constructed according to the lines of interaction between the world and the individual.

thought (noēma) and mind (noos) must be seen to be constantly evolving and changing as the

wandering limbs assume different positions. In Parmenides’ perspective, such mobility would

indicate the contingency of human opinion upon time in opposition to the truth that inheres in the

motionless sphere of being. It is perhaps noteworthy, also, that the capacity of the body to think is

defined as its physis, an aspect we have discerned in Heraclitus as referring not to the static

predetermined essence of an object, but to the parameters of its growth and concealment as

becoming flows through it.

The concatenation of thought, the body and its change over time is further highlighted by

Theophrastus’ commentary in his De Sensu. After stating that the quoted fragment of Parmenides

makes perception (to aisthanesthai) and thought (to phronein) the same, he continues that

memory (mnēmē) and forgetfulness (lēthē) arise from the same causes, that is to say according to

the mixture of elements in the limbs (de sensu 3). In Parmenides’ account, the body thinks,

remembers and forgets dependent upon the patterning of the elements of hot and cold within it.

Knowledge is material. The trace of the past is inscribed upon the body and can presumably be

accessed and revivified if the limbs repeat the same pattern, just as their failure to do so results in

forgetfulness. The body in this account is embedded in the world, actively engaged in the

generation of thought in the present, but also functioning as a materialized memory, carrying its

past with it. There is no separate sphere of cognition, disembedded in an immaterial mind, that

enacts a verdict upon the information of the senses. Theophrastus goes on to detail the surprising,

though logical, conclusion of Parmenides’ doctrine of perception of like by like in recounting that

‘the corpse’ (τὸν νεκρὸν) is unable to perceive warmth, light or sound owing to its deficiency of

fire, but is able to perceive their opposites (cold, silence etc.). Perhaps here we see a reductio ad

absurdum that functions to ridicule the paradoxical viewpoint of Heracliteans able to believe in

being and not being at the same time (see above in B.6): dead or alive, Heraclitean man cannot

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gain the higher understanding of immortal being (to eon), regardless of where he points his two

heads.

Parmenides’ account of perception resonates with Heraclitus’ own valuation of phronesis.

It makes phronesis a capacity of the body, whose material interaction with the world through the

senses is at one with the process of thought. Furthermore, this ability is common to the totality of

individuals, just as it is to the sum of their limbs. Whether Parmenides is making a direct critique

of Heraclitus is relatively unimportant here, and scholarly opinion is much divided on the

matter.21 What is clear, though, is that at the beginning of the 5th century BCE it is quite

acceptable to posit the important role that the body plays in thought, specifically phronesis. Given

this background it becomes more compelling to conceive of the ignorance of the polloi in

Heraclitus’ fragment B.2 to consist of their inability to perceive this relationship. The

epistemological failure delineated in B.17 consists in a paradoxical denial of the thinking that

their being embedded in the world naturally provokes. Unable to listen to the phronesis that their

bodies perform in the world, man turns to his private illusions and the perceived isolation of the

mind (ἑωυτοῖσι δὲ δοκέουσι ‘they believe their own opinions’). If Parmenides is actually

parodying what he understands to be the Heraclitean theory of knowledge he shows himself an

astute interpreter, much more so than the internal audience of Heraclitus’ fragments. Unlike them,

Parmenides recognizes that the body plays a central role in the production of knowledge.

Theophrastus’ summary of Parmenides’ account also speaks to the notion that phronesis

in B.2, as it is tied to the communal performance of logos, is also distributed beyond the boundary

of the individual and functions precisely through being so. For immediately after his description

of the perceptive corpse Theophrastus ascribes to Parmenides the idea that everything which

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21 See in particular Alexander Nehamas ‘Parminidean Being/Heraclitean Fire’ in Victor Carson and Daniel Graham eds.PreSocratic Philosophy: Essays in honor of Alexander Mourelatos for bibliography on this question. A key intervention in this argument reversing the usual ordering of Parmenides before Heraclitus was presented in Karl Reinhardt’s Parmenides.

exists (pan to on) has some knowledge (gnōsis). It is not simply the case that being in the world

implies a capability for knowledge, but that being situated in the world directly leads to

knowledge. The flailing limbs of man could not but help perform phronesis and acquire noos for

man, just as all other bodies, animate or inanimate, are naturally endowed with a part of

knowledge. And as the configuration of body parts also acted as a storehouse for memories, so

can we consider everything existing as instantiating aspects of collective knowledge, acting as the

scaffolding for the continuity of cultural wisdom in the same way that the craftsmanship of a lyre

manifests the inheritance of tradition. The constellation that these various bodies enter into with

one another enables the preservation of old patterns of knowledge, while also offering the

possibility for new configurations.

While Parmenides’ notion of the ubiquity of gnōsis does seem to be tied to beings, in

Empedocles, whose awareness and interpretation of Heraclitus we have already noted with regard

to the question of aion, such a distribution of thought is extended to ideas themselves. In a

passage we have quoted previously (fragment B.110), Empedocles encourages his student to plant

his teachings in their understanding, which will subsequently acquire the capacity to grow (auxei)

‘in their own manner according to the physis of each’ (ταῦτ᾽εἰς ἦθος ἕκαστον, ὅπῃ φύσις ἐστὶν

ἑκαστῳ). The ideas have an agency of their own, maturing at different rates, but are able to

accompany the wise student throughout her whole life. The end of this fragment, which we did

not consider earlier, postulates the results of not looking after these seedlings: they actively take

themselves off elsewhere (ἦ σ᾽ἄφαρ ἐκλείπουσι περιπλοµένοιο χρόνοιο σφῶν αὐτῶν ποθέοντα

φίλην ἐπὶ γένναν ἱκέσθαι. - ‘then at once they will abandon you as time comes round in longing to

find their own dear kind’). Empedocles concludes by warning that ‘all things have phronesis and

a share of intelligence’ (πάντα γὰρ ἴσθι φρόνησιν ἔχειν καὶ νώµατος αἶσαν). The conjunction of

phronesis and nōma/noēma shows the influence of Parmenides B.16, although Empedocles’

assertion of Heraclitean flux also testifies to the synthesis he is attempting to enact between the

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two thinkers. For Empedocles phronesis is not solely a possession of the individual as the masses

have deluded themselves in Heraclitus B.2. The capability of ideas to flit away from the ignorant

allows the activity of thinking to move across boundaries: knowledge can leave the ill-attuned

behind, creating new configurations with other bodies similarly endowed with phronesis and able

to reach out beyond their own limits.

Neither Parmenides nor Empedocles, however, make the link between the multiple nodes

of phronesis that are embedded in the world, capable of forging new connections, with the idea of

a materially distributed logos that exists in Heraclitus. Parmenides rarely uses logos and where he

does it exists in opposition to the faculty of the senses, as a standard of reason that can be applied

to go beyond their deceptive information to a higher more abstract truth (κρῖναι δὲ λόγῳ - ‘Judge

with logos. B.7.5). Empedocles similarly assigns logos no structuring role in his kosmos, nor

envisions its coordinated performance cutting across the boundaries of minds, bodies and their

environment. The few occurrences of the term refer to ‘argument’ or ‘explanation’ (σὺ δ᾽ἄκουε

λόγου στόλον οὐκ ἀπατηλόν - You listen to the undeceitful path of my logos. B17.26).22 Logos

for both thinkers stands outside the intersections of the world, as an argument or principle of

interpretation that is voluntarily employed, in opposition to the unavoidable phronesis that is

common to all limbs, bodies and ideas moving upon the earth. Empedocles and Parmenides thus

resist the notion that the ever-present manifestations of thinking in all beings (and ideas) intuit a

cohesive, powerful and material logos that is common to all. Their reading of phronesis does,

however, help to gloss the delusion under which the axynetoi of Heraclitus live in B.2, whereby

they believe their thinking is able to exist apart from their material experience of, and

interpenetration with, other agents of thought, be they other individuals, ideas, or the

environmental context to which they are bound.

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22 Other similar occurrences in Empedocles are B.32.2 and B.131.4 where ‘argument’ or ‘explanation’ are the most viable translations

The association between logos and phronesis in Heraclitus’ philosophy becomes even

clearer in another fragment, where the repetition of the adjective xynos (ξυνός) testifies to the

important feature of the prevalence and communality that they both possess:

ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν (B.113)

Thinking is shared by all.

As with B.2 we can extend the reading that phronesis, like the logos, is a structure or principle of

deliberation that is available to all, to the more interesting insight that the activity of thinking

operates across a shared manifold, involving the interactions of multiple agents. The belief that

phronesis is a ‘private object’ (ἰδίαν B.17) represented a failure of Heraclitus’ audience to

properly think the emergence of knowledge from communal embodiment. And since phronesis

functions with respect to the vital process of logos which effects genesis across the world

(γινοµένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον - ‘all things come to be according to logos’ B.1), thinking

does not just appear upon an already existing and stable context as a secondary act of reflection

upon the world, but is a process of change capable of reconfiguring and creating that arena. On

the other hand, because phronesis is promulgated via one’s material embeddedness in the world it

is natural that its parameters are shaped by the environment in which it finds itself (taking

‘environment’ as both the existence of other individuals, cultural structures, linguistic forms etc,

as well as the physical world with which they interact). Kahn’s reading, utilizing the Empedocles

fragment we quoted above, that the absence of a direct referent for the ‘all’ (πᾶσι) might imply

more than just that all men, but that all living things have a share in thought, as a tentative

‘panpsychism’, could thus be broadened to acknowledge the key role played by the rhythms of

nature and cultural traditions in the shaping of thought and knowledge.23 So too can the

concessions of scholars from both sides of the macro-micocosm analogy that logos exists in

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23 Kahn p.119

things, albeit in the diminished form of either the celestial fire or as a principle of reasoning, be

reformulated as an active quality that contributes to the persistence and development of

knowledge.24

The notion that phronesis operates through communication across borders as a communal

activity, enlisting the cognitive work of individuals as well as that of objects and contingent

cultural and natural structures, must also pose questions about the integrity of the self in

Heraclitus. A mark of the functioning of this distributed phronesis would be the permeability of

the individual to the thinking performed by other bodies, where the discreteness of their

boundaries conceals the aporetic interplay of tendencies that cross them. The oscillations of the

self hiding physis of B.123 trace a communal self, or rather, a reservoir of fractured selves, below

the surface of the individual. Furthermore, as we observed in the last chapter, fragment B.112,

which directly precedes B.113 as preserved by Stobaeus, explicitly links the enlightened form of

phronesis - sophronein (σωφρονεῖν) - with the ability to act and speak the truth through aligning

one’s perception with physis (ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας B.112). To perform

the logos (taking λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν as a hendiadys) of the self-concealing physis means to bring

into unconcealment - to follow Heidegger’s and Kahn’s readings of alētheia25 - the shared nature

of thought and hence the question of the border of the individual. The Delphic and Sage wisdom

associations of sophronein thereby redound beyond self awareness toward the recognition of the

constitutive overlaps between individuals and the objects and cultural structures of their

environment, all participating in the production of knowledge.

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24 Dilcher, p.44, admits the possibility of the logos being material, but refuses to grant it any agency of its own, arguing that it is not itself a ‘thing’ nor is it ‘engaged in structuring things.’ Kirk and Raven p.188 align the logos with the ‘primary cosmic constituent, fire’ and suggest that it is in this sense that it may be seen as an ‘actual component of things’. For a modern version of this thesis of ‘active externalism’ whereby the environment does not just provide information for the interpreting subject, but actually forms part of the processes of cognition see the influential article “The Extended Mind” by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers (Analysis 58:10-23, 1998).

25 Kahn p.122; Heidegger, Logos p.70.

Another fragment preserved by Stobaeus which mentions sōphronein can now be

adduced as further evidence of the collaborative activity of thought:

ἀνθρώποισι πᾶσι µέτεστι γινώσκειν ἑωυτοὺς καὶ σωφρονεῖν. (B.116)

All men have a share in knowing themselves and thinking well26

Self knowledge, even of the type that avers one’s self being interwoven with others, is a capacity

of all men (ἀνθρώποισι πᾶσι), an instantiation of the wise form of phronein (sōphronein) that is,

conversely, not available to all the participants of a common phronein in B.113. Although it could

equally be the case that the epistemological alienation of man from his dynamic relationship to

the world is the result of a misrecognition that Heraclitus is precisely trying to correct; other

‘thinkers’ in the coordinated patterning of thought labor under no such illusions of a privileged

and bounded subjectivity.

The third concept, or material practice, that is qualified by the key adjective xynos is that

of war (polemos):

εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεµον ἐόντα ξυνόν, καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόµενα πάντα κατ΄ ἔριν καὶ χρεών (B.80) One must know that war is shared and strife is justice, and that all things happen according to strife and necessity.

ἐόντα ξυνόν (eonta xynon) imitates the ἐόντος ξυνου (eontos xynou) that applied to the logos in

B.2, while the formula that all things occur according to strife uses the same language as the

generative function of the logos in B.1. This clear repetition allows polemos to provide some

gloss upon the nature of logos, and by implication upon the aspect of logos represented by the

similarly communally experienced and performed phronesis.

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26 Kahn, p.41 translates as “It belongs to all men to know themselves and to think well.”

For those scholars positioned toward the macrocosmic reading of logos in Heraclitus,

polemos represents the cosmic interchange of opposites, the endless strife of the physical

elements, of which man’s own alterations are derivative.27 This polemical force is thus taken to

manifest a unifying balance and stability, one that illustrates the objective structure and guiding

plan of the logos. Kirk and Raven claim, consequently, that human thought fails to grasp the

harmony of these alterations operating at a macrocosmic scale, unable from their perspective to

think a different timescale of change.28 This allying of polemos with a macrocosmic logos of an

ordered and balanced exchange of opposites positions the human as a passive misinterpreter of

this structuring force, and, in doing so, it disavows the communal embodiment and active

performance that war enjoins on those under its penumbra. In other words, such a reading

privileges the metaphorical aspect of polemos, abstracting it from the material intersections it

would have made with Ephesian bodies, living through the fall of the Lydian kingdom and

capitulating to the suzerainty of the Persians.29 Polemos is rather a vivid instantiation of the way

that the logos too is a material encounter, one that exists through the intersections of multiple

agents.

Furthermore, a more literal reading of polemos must acknowledge that it both destroys

and creates communities, functioning as a force of disassociation and cohesion, and as such

testifies to the performative potency of the logos. The polemos does of course refer to the

physical exchanges and tense harmonies of the cosmic sphere, but it cannot do so to denote a

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27 See for example Kahn p.206; Kirk and Raven p.194; Guthrie p.447.

28 Kirk and Raven, p.194. Kahn similarly claims that on the human level the more typical viewpoint of Hesiod and Solon is to be followed, namely justice and straight judgements being used to correct and control strife. Such a demarcation between the cosmic and the mortal perspective seems, unnecessarily, to complicate the immanent pattern that Heraclitus postulates for all.

29 While Kahn is right to note that Heraclitus’ intention in invoking the communality of polemos is to illustrate its pervasiveness to all aspects of life, beyond the strict battlefield ramifications of a similarly common (xynos) Ares in Iliad XVIII. 309, this must also include the literal manifestation of polemos in actual warfare.

separate sphere of physical and elemental alteration to which humans are passive. Instead it

demands we recognize that such a boundary is permeable and dynamic, whereby the action of

human warfare is able to change their environmental context, just as the strife of the natural world

reconfigures the conditions for human interaction. We can substitute the interpretation that strains

to make polemos stand as a metaphor of a balanced structure of exchange for the more instinctive

view that polemos represents a fundamental instability and volatility, whose communal

embodiment offers radically creative, if unpredictable, outcomes.

The plasticity that polemos represents, moulding political borders as it shapes the

material context in which they are drawn, also redounds upon the microcosmic view of the logos,

namely its connotation of human reasoning and cognition. For Roman Dilcher the tense

harmonies of polemos act as a model for the mobility of thought, as he delineates the structure of

the logos as a ‘moving dialectical process of understanding’.30 This process, though, is seen as

never-ending, a succession of ‘grasping and abandoning’ that never settles on any ‘fixed

knowledge’ or reaches any sort of ‘reconciliation’31. Consequently, its kinetic interrogations

‘reflect’ and ‘relate to’ the basic structures of the world and of life, mirroring the endless series of

transitions that never resolve into any peaceful equilibrium.32 Dilcher’s nuanced reading of the

flexibility of the logos, however, overlooks two key points. Firstly, it emphasizes the

subordination of logos to the physical world as a form of passive interpretation upon a pre-

existing, albeit dynamic, context; whereas our notion of the materiality of the logos situates it

actively in the world, such that its performative embodiment offers the possibility not just of

understanding the underlying fluidity, but also of actively partaking in and facilitating its

exchanges. And secondly, Dilcher’s conception of this dialectical movement, the cognitive back

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30 Dilcher p.115.

31 Dilcher p.118. His model of the dialectic, therefore, appears indebted more to the Negative Dialectics of Theodor Adorno than the synthesised union of opposites proposed by Hegel.

32 Dilcher p.129; p.145.

and forth of never-ending trench warfare, confines the activity of thinking within the boundaries

of the individual. The model of polemos as a process of knowledge must naturally, though,

demand the communal participation of multiple agents in its production (and destruction).

Beyond the efforts of any one individual, the contours of cultural wisdom take shape through

discourse among the present members of a community, as well as through the assaults and retreats

they make in the face of inherited knowledge. And it is in this sense that polemos speaks to the

shared performance of phronesis, where new configurations of thought are able to be elicited only

through coordinated engagement with the material world.

The performance of culture

This nexus of associations that Heraclitus establishes between logos, phronesis and

polemos through the ascription of the key term of xynos (ξυνός) can be brought to bear upon a

concept of how culture operates in fragment B.114:

ξὺν νόῳ λέγοντας ἰσχυρίζσεθαι χρὴ τῷ ξυνῷ πάντων, ὃκωσπερ νόµῳ πόλις, καὶ πολὺ ἰσχυροτέρως. τρέφονται γὰρ πάντες οἱ ἀνθρώπειοι νόµοι ὑπὸ ἑνὸς τοῦ θείου· κρατεῖ γὰρ τοσοῦτον ὁκόσον ἐθέλει καὶ ἐξαρκεῖ πᾶσι καὶ περιγίνεται. (B.114) Speaking with noos they must strengthen themselves through what is shared by all, just as a city holds to its law, but even more strongly. For all human laws are nourished by a divine law. For it extends its power as far as it will and it suffices or all and is more than enough.

The need to adhere to what is common (τῷ ξυνῷ - toi xynoi) is here presented in analogy with the

strength of the polis that is reliant upon its human law (nomos). Moreover, the necessity for

people to ally themselves in a shared performance of what is xynos supervenes above the stability

a polis acquires from its law, since it intuits ‘the divine one’ (ἑνὸς τοῦ θείου) that rules above it.

While Kahn is right to point out that Heraclitus does not name the divine one as a divine law, a

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development that the Stoics will subsequently extrapolate into the idea of natural law, he

nevertheless stresses that there is a cosmic hierarchy at play here, and that the mortal turn toward

the communal can manifest this higher divine principle.33 The standard interpretation of this

fragment that highlights its value for the lineaments of a theory of culture may be typified by the

comment of McKirihan that Heraclitus grounds ‘his views on law and politics in his cosmic

theory’.34 On this reading, the task for mortals, and especially lawmakers, is to imitate the

patterns and order in nature, an act of adaptive harmonization that relies upon the adoption of an

external viewpoint upon the text of the natural world.35

My co-evolutionary perspective upon Heraclitus’ vision of man’s immersion into and

emergence from the movements of the kosmos has, however, stressed their active and dynamical

role in the perpetuation of its rhythms, such that there is an openness and permeability between

the micro and macrocosmic spheres: the environment is as much a creation of human behavior

and selection, as they are of it. And so does the boundary between culture and nature dissolve.36

The logic that situates the mortal turn to what is shared (xynos) as a stronger glue for cohesion

(polu ischyroterōs) than that offered by human law also indicates that the nourishment

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33 Kahn pp.17-8.

34 McKirahan (1994) 148. Naddaf, p.133, agrees with McKirahan and in adopting the view of logos as a divine objective structure states that “the single most important thing to realize is that there is an impersonal, supreme cosmic principle (logos) or law (nomos) that regulates all physical phenomena (or conversely, all physical phenomena are manifestations of the one; see b10) and which should be the basis or blueprint for all human laws, political and moral.” Marcovich, p. 95, also stresses that a limited corporeality to what he reads as a divine law is indicated by the verb τρέφονται which expresses the idea of nourishment , as well as the subsequent verbs κρατεῖ indicating ‘territorial expansion’, ἐξαρκεῖ meaning ‘sufficient’, and the idea of a surplus conveyed by περιγίνεται. The notion of this ambivalent materiality leads Kirk and Raven, p.212 to speculate that the divine one is identical with the logos as ‘the formulaic constituent of the cosmos’ and that human laws can manifest this principle through the material connection of human lawmakers possessed of the element of fire (cf B.118) that grants them a tenuous connection with the fiery logos.

35 Daniel Graham writes with regard to Heraclitus’ method, p.183, that ‘When we are awakened by philosophy, we can read the message in the events and objects of the world’.

36 This is one of the central tenets of co-evolutionary theory. See for example Brian Goodwin Nature’s Due p.43.

(trephontai) that the laws of the polis receive comes as much from the distributed and warring

configurations of its individual members as from the kosmos. The coordinated performance by

mortals of the philosophical wisdom of the logos, phronesis and polemos moulds and sustains the

dimensions of the political realm.

The only other incidence of the term polis occurs in B.121 (discussed previously in

chapter 1), where the foolish behavior of the Ephesians in exiling Hermadorus leads Heraclitus to

call for their demise and the ‘bequeathal of the polis to the youth of the city’ (τοῖς ἀνήϐοις τὴν

πόλιν καταλιπεῖν). Reading these two fragments together we can suggest that Heraclitus’

invective calling for their necessary abdication of power lies not just in their treatment of

Hermadorus, but that, as elsewhere, it is their failure to heed, and perform, the communal logos

that makes them unworthy, and unable, to provide the necessary strength for the health of the

polis. Their inability to value Hermadorus is thus a symptom of their deeper alienation from their

role in the catalyzing performance of the logos: an alienation that we can now classify as one

from their own material embeddedness in the world, arising from a retreat to a bounded and

solitary realm of stability over the transversal communications that bind all individuals (and other

components in the distributed activity of phronesis) together. And as we have already noted, it is

the shared nature of childhood play that offered an alternative model for the functioning and

emergence of culture. The link that fragment B.52 made between the timeplay of children and

kingly power associated them with power of polemos as king to create and shift the

categorizations within the fluid hierarchy of slaves, men and gods in Β.53. The connection we

have now limned between the shared (xynos) nature of polemos and the mediation of the polis by

the performance of what is common (toi xynoi) further highlights that the becomings embodied

by children’s games manifest Heraclitus’ conception of what causes the emergence and the

continuity of a necessarily dynamic culture.

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And it is this sense of an active and communal participation in the construction and

development of one’s polis that B.114 demands. The strength that is acquired through what is

common should not be viewed as a stable structure to which one must ‘hold fast’ as Kahn

translates ischyrizesthai (ἰσχυρίζσεθαι). Just as the logos is neither a macrocosmic law to which

one must passively accede or a microcosmic principle of deliberation that functions mimetically

with regard to the world, but instead takes its vitality from being performed by the thinking

bodies of coordinated individuals, so should the ischyrizesthai be read in the middle voice as a

shared empowerment. The LSJ offers the translation ‘put one’s trust in’ for Heraclitus’ use of the

verb ischyrizomai here, as an alternative to the meaning of ‘to make oneself strong’ as seen in

Thucydides and Plato.37 Yet our interpretation can combine the two: an epistemological

attunement to the logos does not occur as an isolated act of cerebration, but requires one’s active

immersion into the material becomings of the world (ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν

ἐπαΐοντας Β.112 - ‘to speak and perform the truth perceiving things according to physis’). To put

one’s trust in what is shared is to embody it, and as a result of one’s role within the mutual

performance of others, one becomes strong through this coordination. Thus, through the

distribution of such a task across multiple participants, the well-attuned audience (or children) act

as cultural constructors.

The boundaries of the cultural sphere that they create are not, however, fixed and

impermeable, since it is the nature of their continuous performance of the logos, like the volatility

of the shared polemos, to evolve and change when one factors in the efficacy of time.38 And in the

same way that Heraclitus recommends that the object of knowledge should not be grasped as a

stable form somehow excised from the fluid intersections of the kosmos, but should be situated in

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37 LSJ 843

38 Here I strongly disagree with the overarching statement of Naddaf, p.2, that for Hesiod and the PreSocratics “The aim is to provide an explanation for the present social and natural order and a guarantee that these orders will remain as they are.”

a process of continuous change, so must the cultural form that is constructed be viewed with

regard to its inherent plasticity. Moreover, it is this very flexibility that enables it to develop and

flourish, providing a necessarily inclusive environment to allow coherence between its interacting

constituents, while also ensuring the possibility of alteration.39

The notion that the vitality of the cultural sphere resides in its vulnerability to change,

just as the potency of the play of children arose from their association with finitude, is clearly

brought out in another fragment that invokes polemos. It claims that the law (nomos) of the polis

acts as a material boundary that must be defended, and necessarily redrawn, according to the

warring interactions not only with outsiders, but presumably with the eristic discourses of the

citizens within:

µάχεσθαι χρὴ τὸν δῆµον ὑπὲρ τοῦ νόµου ὅκωσπερ τείχεος. (B.44) The people must fight for the law as for their city wall.

The constant, and communal, vigilance required to preserve the structure of the nomos elucidates

the contingency of the human laws (hoi anthrōpeioi nomoi) of B.114. Not only is their continuity

a result of deliberative, and literal, polemics, but their very emergence comes from these same

activities. The culture, and polis, that survives is one that affords its constitutive dynamism and

the differential forces behind its harmoniē the chance to assert themselves.

Yet the conflict inherent to the flux of human nomoi and the polis is not to be replicated

with regard to their subordination to the divine one (ἑνὸς τοῦ θείου) which rules (κρατεῖ). Its

supervening pervasiveness is something to be adhered to, as another fragment indicates:

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39 Naddaf, p.133, has noted how the law code of the polis, in Heraclitus’ view, should be formulated so as to ‘hold opposing forces....in harmony’ and even speculates that Hermadorus may himself have caused his exile by the ignorant masses through creating just such a fair system enabling the democrats and aristocrats to have ‘unity in diversity’. Leaving aside the questionable notion that Heraclitus conceives of the polis in terms of such political factions, what Naddaf ignores is that the back-turning harmony (παλίντροπος ἁρµονίη B.51) upon which Heraclitus’ philosophy insists as a central principle of his world is not concerned with suppressing change, denying the efficaciousness of αἰών, but rather with installing it as a principle of creative differentiation

νόµος καὶ βουλῇ πείθεσθαι ἑνός. (B.33) It is law also to obey the counsel of one.

Kahn has noted the syntactical ambiguity of the last word which makes it either a masculine or

neuter form, thus making Heraclitus’ sentiment oscillate between a valuation of the wisdom of

one man, or a necessary obeisance to a cosmic principle.40 This reading is plausible on first view,

though, as elsewhere, such bivalency should not simply result in an ambivalence from which one

is forced to make an interpretive choice (toward the micro or macrocosmic viewpoint), but the

semantic flexibility is deliberate, testifying to the interconnectedness Heraclitus envisages

between the activities of the mortal sphere and their embeddedness in the patterns of their

material environment. The one is both the activity of an attuned performer of the logos such as

Hermadorus whose excellence upset the inattentive mob of Ephesus (ἡµέων µηδὲ εἵς ὀνήιστος

ἔστω - ‘Let no one be best among us’ B.121) as well as the neuter force of wisdom that betrays

uncertainty about its being named as the generative power of Zeus (ἓν τὸ σοφὸν µοῦνον λέγεσθαι

οὐκ ἐθέλει καὶ ἐθέλει Ζηνὸς ὄνοµα. - ‘The wise is one alone, that both does and does not want the

name of Zeus’ B.32).41 A third alternative is proffered by the sense of boule as a political organ, a

council of citizen members. While it is clear that Heraclitus is not impressed with the behavior of

the current Ephesian ruling classes, it would be consonant with his philosophical valuation of

coordinated thinking in attunement with the logos that such an embodiment of collective wisdom,

if it were to occur within the political system, should be obeyed; not just played with outside. In

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40 Kahn p.179.

41 Kahn, p.270f., notes how the unusual genitive form for Zeus (Ζηνὸς) in B.32, as opposed to the more traditional Διός makes a clear wordplay with the form for life ζήν. Kahn utilises the etymology given in Plato’s Cratylus (396A7ff) which reflects the belief in Zeus as the ‘cause of life’. There is certainly a deliberate resonance here to the life force, and a link thereby with the everliving fire (πῦρ ἀείζωον B.30), but this association can be pushed further to acknowledge the destructive, and concealing forces that go in tandem with this generative power. Indeed, the essentially polemical nature of Zeus’ being suggests that the form of Ζηνὸς must function to provoke the audience into a second and deeper intuition, just as the wise one itself shies away from an unexamined acceptance of this affiliation.

this way, their distributed phronesis within the consensual framework of a deliberative body

would manifest the coherence of a ‘one’. Such a unanimity would, conversely, only be made

possible through the abandonment of the notion of separate and discrete individual selves, with its

potency achieved through the permeable overlappings that allowed a council of many to speak

with a unified voice.

What, though, is the compelling verdict that such a body could deliver, whether it be in

the form of a talented individual, or a harmonized group, or a divine pattern? Another fragment

preserved by Diogenes Laertius indicates that it is the doctrine of transition and movement, one

that describes the continuous intersections between all things:

ἓν τὸ σοφόν, ἐπίστασθαι γνώµην, ὁτέη ἐκυϐέρνησε πάντα διὰ πάντων. (B.41) The wise is one, to understand the insight by which it steers all things though all.

The neuter form of the one (ἓν) with to sophon as seen in B.32 leads most commentators to ally

this wisdom with a divine, cosmic principle, even in Reinhardt’s case as an arche above fire.42

Marcovich, however, specifies that it is to ‘human wisdom’ that to sophon refers and that the

understanding of the gnōme (γνώµην - ‘thought’ in his translation) is thus an ability available to

all men, as the one thing of which human wisdom really consists.43 Both interpretations position

gnōme as a cognitive insight into nature’s plan for the interactions between all things (πάντα).

Marcovich even insists, against the readings of earlier commentators such as Burnet and Diels,

that we should assume ‘the steering’ (ἐκυϐέρνησε) of all things takes place not directly between

things, but via paths (poroi) or ways (topoi).44 Yet such a notion of intentionality misses the

creative and aporetic collisions that mark Heraclitus’ theory of the emergence of, and reciprocal

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42 cf Kirk and Raven p.203; Kahn p.172. Reinhardt, Parmenides, p.205.

43 Marcovich p.450.

44 Marcovich p.453.

interpenetrations between, the spheres of knowledge, culture and nature. Furthermore, the views

of Reinhardt and Marcovich both work to deny the immanence of Heraclitus’ world view,

suggesting that there is either a divine principle or a constitutive interpreting subject able to stand

outside the material changes of the world. Heraclitus’ understanding of wisdom emphasizes its

performative and embodied aspect, as well as the multiple components that interact in order to

ensure its continuity. The last half of this fragment, therefore, provides the hermeneutic solution

to its own problem: wisdom is attained through the transactional collisions between multiplicities,

whose elements may include a plurality of individuals (as in a boule), just as they also require the

participation of other material carriers of the xynos logos (be they linguistic structures, ritual

objects or other creatures in nature). Such creative intersections never cease, and neither does the

embodiment of wisdom ever reach a state of conclusion but is always liable to evolve in

unexpected (cf. ἀνέλπιστον - B.22) directions that do not lie upon any preconceived poros. As we

noted with respect to fragment B.17 it is the failure to acknowledge these collisions and

immersions with the material world that leads to a failure of understanding (οὐδὲ µαθόντες

γινώσκουσιν - ‘nor do they recognize what they experience’) where the verb gignōskō

(γινώσκουσιν) is cognate with the noun gnōmē in B.41. It is in this light that we can characterize

the dichotomy introduced between human and divine in the only other fragment to contain the

noun form gnōmē to indicate, as elsewhere (cf B.53, B.62), that the boundary between these two

states is fluid and that one way to cross from the ‘mortal’ side is through the collective

performance of wisdom:

ἦθος γὰρ ἀνθρώπειον µὲν οὐκ ἔχει γνώµας, θεῖον δὲ ἔχει. (Β.78) Ηuman nature has no insight, but the divine does.

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The role of noos

Having positioned the divine one of B.114 (ἑνὸς τοῦ θείου) as a form of coordinated

intelligence, as a substrate constituted through the dynamical and permeable boundaries between

individuals, cultural structures and the patterns of nature, we can now return to the concept of

noos at the beginning of the fragment which is clearly formulated xyn nooi (ξὺν νόῳ) to resonate

with the need to take strength from what is shared toi xynoi (τῷ ξυνῷ). Kurt von Fritz’ classic

analysis of noos in Pre-Socratic thought as it developed from its use in Homer and Hesiod will

prove useful here, even as I diverge from his interpretation of Heraclitus.45 In particular, von

Fritz’ notion that the role of the noos in Heraclitus is to afford insight into the functioning of the

divine law allies his reading with the macrocosmic focus upon structures external to man.

However, as I have argued above, to read the divine one of B.114 as such a directive principle is

to ignore the way that human practitioners of the logos, those who are xyn nooi legontas, can

perform the creative tessellations of this divine one, actively shaping their environment just as

they are, in turn, determined by it. Nevertheless, his account of the multivalency of the term does

provide the tools to understand Heraclitus’ use in such a light. Thus, the empirically grounded

noos does not function to passively observe a transcendent and unalterable pattern in divine

nature, but instead prompts one to think beyond the boundaries of the self, to recognize one’s

embeddedness in a materialist process of thought, and to admit the possibility that the coordinated

performance of the shared logos is precisely the embodiment, with all its differentiating, aporetic

and indeterminate potentialities, of this same divine one.

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45 Kurt von Fritz ‘Noos, Noein and Their Derivatives in Pre-Socratic Philosophy’ Classical Philology 50 (1945-46): 223-42; 41:12-34. Daniel Graham, p.181, relies heavily on Fritz’s analysis in his own account of Heraclitus’ theory of knowledge: ‘With noos we see how all things are related to each other, and recognize the process by which things are interrelated. This cannot come merely by having experiences of the world, but only by reorganizing our experience so as to see the connections it it. It can come to us only suddenly.’

At the beginning of his account von Fritz emphasizes the empirical qualities of the noos

through its etymological link to the verb for smelling, while noting that in Homer it is most often

linked to the sense of sight. From its earliest occurrences the activity of using the nous is one that

requires the participation of the physical organs of the body, a notion that is picked up by

Heraclitus’ predecessor Xenophanes, who envisions his god as a whole who sees, uses noos and

hears (B.24 οὖλος ὁρᾷ οὖλος δὲ νοεῖ, οὖλος δέ τ᾽ἀκούει).46 Heraclitus’ theory of knowledge never

abandons this empiricism: the interpretation of one’s encounters with the kosmos may be

defective, but it remains fundamentally the case that the cognitive faculties cannot be separated

from the body’s dynamical interface with the material world. The deployment of noos, however,

is not just the correct use of the senses, but requires a thinking beyond to the understanding of a

situation: von Fritz gives the example of Odysseus recognizing the identity of the goddess

Aphrodite disguised as an old woman.47 Such a moment of insight, though, is not related to a

steady process of reasoning, but comes in an instant as a sudden flash of intuition.

von Fritz contends that is with Parmenides that we first see the unshackling of this

intuitive determination of noos as he introduces the idea of ways (hodoi - ὁδόι) of deductive

reasoning that the noos, here as the verbal form noein, can follow (αἵπερ ὁδοὶ µοῦναι διζήσιός

εἰσι νοῆσαι· ‘The only ways of enquiry that are to be thought of’ Parmenides B.2, line 3). As we

observed in the last chapter with regard to Heraclitus’ inducement to think off-piste, away from

the hodos and into the creative aporia where warring tendencies coalesce, the idea of a direct path

for thought and noos to follow is not consonant with Heraclitus’ philosophy: his invocation of

hodos seems to stress that its path does not necessarily lead anywhere:

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46 Subsequent orderings of this fragment, where noos has been separated from this linking with the senses and grouped with verbs for cognition like phronesis, for example in Diogenes Laertius Vit. Phil. ix.19, indicate, as von Fritz observes, that the later reading of nous as a form of reasoning has been read back into these earlier incidences where such a process is absent and the link to the senses, and hence the material world, is evident.

47 Odyssey III.386.

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω µία καὶ ὡυτή (B.60)

The path up and down is one and the same

But this is not to imply that Heraclitus denies the value of thinking as a path. The meaning of the

hodos is not something that can be grasped as an abstract and disembodied process of cognition, a

carefully mapped sequence of mental steps toward contemplation of transcendental truths. Rather,

the function of the hodos only becomes clear through literally following it with one’s actual steps.

As an individual walks to the agora and returns along the same hodos the path acquires its

meaning, and imprinted shape, through one’s material passage over it. And what is more, the

hodos acquires its contours through the repeated action of other individuals, their collective

comings and goings limning its form. The hodos in Heraclitus turns out to be a perfect illustration

of the co-evolutionary thesis: the path is selected as a cultural route through nature that

subsequently provides limits for future journeys, but the same flexibility that plotted its original

direction can be employed by the coordinated action of individuals, directing the poros (way) of

the hodos into the aporos, which in turn will become the new hodos. 48 It thereby indicates the

contingency and plasticity internal to all cultural forms and their concomitant paths of thinking.

The hodos in Heraclitus demonstrates that the intuitive grasp of the truth is performed by the

body acting in the world, and that it is the task of any subsequent reasoning to turn back from

disembodied intellection toward the creative movements it enacts in coordination with other

bodies. Martha Nussbaum’s reading that the noos is ‘gained as a consequence of linguistic

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48 Graham (2008) p.182, claims, as he too adopts von Fritz’ analysis, that such verbal puzzles in Heraclitus (he uses the example of one of the river fragments) work to provoke the reader to a higher awareness of a more general pattern in nature. He writes against von Fritz’s denial of any inferential capabilities to the noos in Heraclitus by classifying such an intuitive grasping as a form of inductive reasoning with Heraclitus’ riddling language providing the incentive to think again in listening to the hidden harmony. One would not deny that Heraclitus’ carefully constructed allusions and wordplay serve to arrest the straightforward interpretation in its tracks and send it in new directions, but Graham’s analysis, despite classifying Heraclitus’ philosophy as exercises in ‘right brain logic’, fails to fully ecognize the role of the body in thinking and that the inductive grasp of the truth only occurs after the literal embodiment of these connections through the individual’s exposure to the material intersections of the kosmos.

understanding’ as part of an argument that interprets the psyche as an epistemological faculty

centered around the manipulation of language surely puts it the wrong way round.49 It is the

body’s adaptive integration and thinking into the rhythms of the material world, including its

permeability to the influence of other bodies, that enables linguistic awareness to subsequently be

acquired: either to map this integration, or more frequently in the case of Heraclitus’ audience, to

turn away from it into a realm of solipsistic reasoning.

von Fritz’ emphasis on the empirical functioning of the nous as it intuitively moves to

grasp the deeper significance of a situation considers that such a revelation is provoked by

contemplation of an object, where such a truth is concealed somehow in its form. In this light, the

inability of Homer to perceive the significance of the lice in B.56 would stand as a failure of his

noos, unable to think beyond the visible insects to the hidden, and deadly, harmony lurking

within. To follow Nussbaum’s logic one could argue that a heightened linguistic awareness of the

way the name of the lice punned with the word for death would have provided the background for

the noos to operate; but we must remember that it is the coordinated and embodied activity of the

children as they play with one another that intuitively grasps the intersections (and wrigglings) in

nature, and that the linguistic gloss of the riddle is secondary to this. While the object can provide

the site for the noos to operate, it does not do so in Heraclitus to permit the excavation of a truth

external to that object, as just such a general pattern, or divine law. Heraclitus’ materialism makes

objects the very arena for the mutational becomings of knowledge, not a cipher through which

one attains intellection of a higher order. The attuned perception of an object puts the observer

into that object, merging into the unstable balance of tendencies that it contains within, rather

than contemplating it securely from outside. It is this thinking beyond the boundaries between

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49 Nussbaum p.14 also invokes von Fritz but criticizes his failure to realize the important relationship between noos and psyche. She writes that “It seems clear, however, that for Heraclitus psyche is far more central, and noos becomes subordinate to it.” While the psyche is clearly a very important term in Heraclitus, Nussbaum’s conclusion of relative importance is predetermined by her initial premise about the linguistic capabilities of the psyche. If we begin our analysis without this framework, we will observe how our understanding of the functioning of psyche is enriched by the empirical qualities that nous implies.

bodies toward their interpenetration that acts as the shared (xynos) performance of the logos. An

earlier occurrence of noos as a simile in Homer, noted by von Fritz, indicates its ability to reflect

just such a mobility beyond the demarcated confines of space and time:

ὡς δ᾽ ὅτ᾽ ἂν ἀΐξῃ νόος ἀνέρος, ὅς τ᾽ ἐπὶ πολλὴν γαῖαν ἐληλουθὼς φρεσὶ πευκαλίµῃσι νοήσῃ ἔνθ᾽ εἴην ἢ ἔνθα, µενοινήῃσί τε πολλά ὣς κραιπνῶς µεµαυῖα διέπτατο πότνια Ἥρη (Iliad xv.80-82) Just as when the noos of a man who has seen many lands darts from one place to another as he thinks in his wise heart, ‘If only I were here or there’, longing for many things, just as swiftly in her eagerness did queenly Hera fly through the air.

von Fritz does not apply this aspect of noos to Heraclitus, preferring to note the more profound

insight, in his view, that the Heraclitean noos affords toward the divine law.50 However, this

Homeric example of the potentiality of the noos to cross the boundary of the individual and to

situate itself imaginatively in distant lands does instead speak directly to the extended process of

knowledge we have discerned in Heraclitus. In association with the xynos logos and phronesis,

noos allows the individual to think beyond their limits and to recognize the distributed operation

of their thinking in coordination with other bodies.51

This tension between the insight to be gained from contemplation of an object and the

need to recognize how one’s subjectivity is shaped through a permeable relation to the forces

latent within that object, is also brought out in the noun mathesis and the verbal form manthano.

Bruno Snell has written of how this concept betokens a knowledge acquired through practical

experience as well as a form of expertise acquired from an explicit focus upon a select object or

subject.52 Snell thereby perceives a strain between a subjective understanding occasioned through

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50 von Fritz pp.232-233.

51 We might also be put in mind here of the elastic intellect of the Empedoclean wise man able to travel through the dimensions of time in B.129 (ὀρέξαιτο πραπιδεσσιν) as discussed in chapter 2.

52 Snell ‘Die Ausdrüke für den Begriff des Wissens in der vorplatonishen Philosophie’, p.72f.

the experiences of one’s nurture and existence in the world, as well as an objective understanding

delimited by a field of study. We have noted how fragment B.17 comments upon the failure to

recognize the first subjective side of this equation (οὐδὲ µαθόντες γινώσκουσιν), such that the ill-

attuned and isolated student cannot parse the meaning of their constitutive immersion into the

flux and overlappings of the world. Another fragment in which Heraclitus criticizes previous

thinkers appears to speak to the second objective type of knowledge, a form of intellection that

cannot of its own give rise to noos:

πολυµαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει·Ἡσίοδον γὰρ ἂν ἐδίδαξε καὶ Πυθαγόρην αὖτίς τε Ξενοφάνεά τε καὶ Ἑκαταῖον (Β.40) Much learning does not teach noos. For it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, as well as Xenophanes and Hecateus.

von Fritz infers that this quartet all possess a form of theoretical knowledge of specific fields as

opposed to the practical knowledge gained through experience.53 But it is also the case that the

very act of division into subject areas, just as in the perception of a hierarchy between the macro

and microcosmic views of the logos, is to miss the constitutive harmoniē that binds all together,

affecting and shaping each other. The polymathy of Ionian science represents a false

categorization: an excision of discrete areas of knowledge from the latent connections that

Heraclitus wishes to perceive via one’s intuitive turn toward the dynamical relations between

objects and those who observe them.

Another fragment condemning the polymathy of Pythagoras provides further evidence of

the isolated and bounded nature of this knowledge:

Πυθαγόρης Μνησάρχου ἱστορίην ἤσκησεν ἀνθρώπων µάλιστα πάντων καὶ ἐκλεξάµενος ταύτας τὰς συγγραφὰς ἐποιήσατο ἑαυτοῦ σοφίην, πολυµαθίην, κακοτεχνίην. (B.129)

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53 von Fritz p.231.

Pythagoras son of Mnesarchus pursued inquiry further than all men and, making a selection from his writings, made a wisdom out of himself, much learning, evil artifice.

The last two adjectives, both neologisms coined by Heraclitus, seem to qualify the two main

clauses. Polymathy would therefore, as in B.40, refer to the pursuit of scientific inquiry as the

term historiē (ἱστορίην) indicates; while the construction of a ‘wisdom’ (σοφίην) of ‘his

own’ (ἑαυτοῦ), or out of himself, according to a definite ‘editing’ (ἐκλεξάµενος), deserves the

adjective kakotechniē (κακοτεχνίην). This is the bad craftsmanship that has shaped the

information acquired from his research into an unpalatable form, a private type of wisdom that

does not accord with Heraclitus’ notion of the performative sophiē of B.112 that recognized one’s

communal exposure to the movements of physis. It is the arrogance of Pythagoras, from

Heraclitus’ perspective, to believe that he alone can determine the borders of wisdom, and in

doing so deny the possibility that its contours may change according to the actors that perform it.

As we have noted, in fragment B.50 Heraclitus exhorts his audience that it is wise, sophon, to

listen to a logos beyond his own. Such an acknowledgement, seen through our analysis of the

shared performance of the logos by multiple individuals, could now be taken to imply that the

dimensions of knowledge evolve and change according to the intersections and collisions among

those who embody it. And moreover it is the efficacy of time, as the playful aion moving these

component pieces around, which ensures the emergence of new configurations. Pythagoras’ error,

and that of the other practitioners of polymathy and Ionian historie, is to fail to think beyond the

borders of the interpretive subject researcher and their object of knowledge. It is the mark of

Heraclitean noos to transcend this polarity: situating the act of philosophical interpretation as a

performance that enmeshes all in an overlapping substrate, where such plasticity testifies to the

fluid boundaries of the subject, the object, the cultural structures of the polis and the natural strife

of the environment.

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Heraclitus does not, though, disdain the notion of Ionian historiē entirely:

χρὴ γὰρ εὖ µάλα πολλῶν ἵστορας φιλοσόφους ἄνδρας εἶναι (Β.35) It is necessary for men who love wisdom to be good inquirers into many things.

As opposed to the polymathy which constructs false boundaries, the historiē of many things

(πολλῶν) speaks not simply to a breadth of information, but also to an attuned thinking of the

very meaning of the many, and the changing relationships such multiplicities can enter into with

one another. And it is through the coordination of this inquiry with the faculties of the senses that

true insight can be gleaned:

ὅσων ὄψις ἀκοὴ µάθησις, ταῦτα ἐγὼ προτιµέω (Β.55) Whatever comes from sight, hearing and mathesis, this I prefer

This formulation is very close to that of Xenophanes B.24, without the reference to a supreme

deity and with mathesis standing in for noos. It is thus that mathesis, in its restrained form, is

available and expedient for humans to use in order to understand the flux of the world, as long as

it is allied with the visual and aural acuity to see and listen, and thereby embody the logos that is

shared beyond the limits of the individual. The fault of polymathy, and its inability to teach noos,

lies in its failure to acknowledge these originary empirical and intersubjective qualities.54 And it

is this turn to the intersubjective that Heraclitus’ emphasizes in allying xyn noos with xynos in B.

114. The insight that noos affords is not the abstraction of a divine law hidden in the logos of

things as von Fritz claims, but exactly this recognition of the latent creativity that the mutual

performance of logos, as well as of phronesis and polemos, can offer.

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54 Thus Snell’s two categories of mathesis are really two sides of the same coin, with the subjective experience of the world as the primary factor upon which the attempt to delimit a field of study is a secondary act upon this information, which runs the risk of erring into polymathy if this constitutive link to the knowledge bequeathed through one’s material encounters in the world, and connections with others, is forgotten.

Collaborative fashionings

The importance of acting, and thinking, with regard to what is xynos can clarify more of

the interpretative failures that the ill-attuned audience make in their isolated deafness (B.2). In B.

51, where Heraclitus coruscates his audience for its inability to discern the essential connection,

the back stretched harmony between things, which we have stressed includes one’s own

constitutive torsion with other beings and their environment, the very verb for understanding

highlights the need for knowledge to be acquired through collaboration:

οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόµενον ἑωυτῷ ὁµολογέει· παλίντροπος ἁρµονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης. (B.51) They do not comprehend how what differs agrees with itself; it is a back-stretched attunement, like that of bow and lyre.

The verb xyniēmi (ξυνίηµι) literally means a bringing together; one of its earliest occurrences at

the very beginning of the Iliad situates it with terms we subsequently find playing an important

role in Heraclitus, such as council/counsel (boulē, B.33), strife (eris, B.80) and fighting

(machesthai, B.44):

Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή, ἐξ οὗ δὴ τὰ πρῶτα διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε Ἀτρεΐδης τε ἄναξ ἀνδρῶν καὶ δῖος Ἀχιλλεύς. τίς τ᾽ ἄρ σφωε θεῶν ἔριδι ξυνέηκε µάχεσθαι; (Iliad I.5-8) And the plan of Zeus was accomplished, from the time when first they parted in strife, Atreus’ son, the king of men, and godlike Achilles. Who then of the gods brought these two together to fight in strife?

As opposed to the destructive eris that threatens to tear the Achaeans asunder, Heraclitus employs

this principle as a creative force that causes the world to change and develop and which is thereby

just (dikēn B.80). Furthermore, the fighting (machesthai) on behalf of the nomos that B.44

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advocated modeled the shared polemos that enabled the boundaries of the polis to emerge, adapt

and survive. And as I have argued, the creative potential of logos arises as a result of the literal

bringing together, the shared (xynos) participation, of multiple polemical individuals, and other

material bodies of phronesis. Heraclitus’ materialist conception of the distributed process of

thought, therefore, takes its meaning from the active collisions that xyniēmi implies.

Understanding is fundamentally related to conflict between parties.

Yet while Heraclitus’ audience turn away from their embedded role in this collaborative

knowledge, it is the play of children that enacts an appropriate and embodied form of wisdom.

We have noted how the ascription of kingship to their ludic rearrangements in B.52 allied them

with the creative intersections of polemos similarly described as ‘king of all’ (pantōn de basileus

B.53), and how consequently through the nexus around the form xynos it links them with the

activity of the logos and phronesis. An interesting later passage in Democritus uses the noun form

of xyniēmi, xynesis (ξύνεσις), together with its opposite axynesis (ἀξυνεσίς), to draw a contrast

between the collective perspicacity of the young and the solipsistic ignorance of adults:

ἔστι που νέων ξύνεσις καὶ γερόντων ἀξυνεσίη. χρόνος γὰρ οὐ διδάσκει φρονεῖν, ἀλλ᾽ὡραίη τροφὴ καὶ φύσις. (Β.183) There is, I suppose, an intelligence of the young and an unintelligence of the aged. For it is not time that teaches wisdom, but early nourishment and physis.

The form xynesis is employed by Homer in its literal sense as a ‘union’ or ‘bringing together’ in

book ten of the Odyssey when Athena describes the route Odysseus must take in order to gain

access to the spirits of the underworld in Hades:

ἔνθα µὲν εἰς Ἀχέροντα Πυριφλεγέθων τε ῥέουσιν Κώκυτός θ᾽, ὃς δὴ Στυγὸς ὕδατός ἐστιν ἀπορρώξ, πέτρη τε ξύνεσίς τε δύω ποταµῶν ἐριδούπων: (Odyssey X.513-515)

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There into the Acheron flow Periphlegeton and Cocytus, which is a branch of the water of the Styx, and there is a rock and the meeting place (xynesis) of the two thundering rivers.

One should not push speculation too far, but we may note in passing how the association of

xynesis with regard to the joining of rivers provides a literal backdrop to the cognitive relation I

have argued Heraclitus makes between the emergence of intelligence and the necessary

overlappings of psychai that are illustrated in Cleanthes’ introduction to B.12 (discussed in the

last chapter) where these interactions are compared to the incessant flows of rivers (ποταµοῖσι

τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐµβαίνουσιν ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρει - ‘As the <same> people step into the

<same> rivers, other and still other waters flow over them’) .

The Democritus passage also provides other analogies with Heraclitus’ notion of the

collaborative production of knowledge. The phrase ‘chronos does not teach wisdom’ (χρόνος γὰρ

οὐ διδάσκει φρονεῖν) nearly mirrors the first half of Heraclitus fragment B.40 (πολυµαθίη νόον

οὐ διδάσκει - ‘Polymathy does not teach wisdom’) with the substitution of the closely related

term of phronein for noos and the use of chronos as a similarly ill-equipped teacher of proper

embodied intelligence as Heraclitus considered polymathy to be for Hesiod, Pythagoras,

Xenophanes and Hecateus. The mere passage of time, as chronos, does not bequeath insight,

which should remind us of the aion associated with the child in Heraclitus B.52. The constitutive

relationship of the pais to the force of becoming in aion stands in contrast to the passive

ineffectiveness of the flow of chronos over the adults in Democritus’ fragment. Adult

unintelligence (axynesis) is a mark of disconnection, while the attuned minds (xynesis) of the

young manifest wisdom through the coordinated production of knowledge. Even the term trophē

(τροφὴ), normally translated as ‘nurture’ or ‘training’, should be seen in its literal sense of

‘nourishment’, hence food for thought, just as the syllapsies of B.10 manifested the material

grasping of knowledge.

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This model of knowledge arising from the interactions between individuals should not be

seen, however, as a denial of individuality, even as it blurs the edges of their boundaries. To return

to the beginning of B.51 we can see how what is misunderstood by the atomised audience is not

so much the object of knowledge as the process of understanding itself (οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως

διαφερόµενον ἑωυτῷ ὁµολογέει - ‘they do not bring together to understand how in differing from

itself it agrees with itself), or even that there should be any distinction between the two. If

thinking is performed by the body, embedded in a series of connections across the material world,

we cannot extract a separate observing subjectivity somehow external to the persistent flux. To

put it in Heraclitus’ terms, the active listener to the logos plays an important role in the

continuance of the palintropos harmoniē. And just as this harmoniē can be seen to be constructed

through the materialized tension between parts and forces in the stringing of the bow, so does the

process of understanding arise when the participation of differing individuals enables the logos to

function in agreement (homologeii).

The occurrence of the same verb homologein for agreeing with and thereby performing

the logos in B.50 can now plot an escape from the polarity between the macro and microcosmic

views of logos as either an objective cosmic formula, or as a purely human form of

reasoning55:

οὐκ ἐµοῦ, ἀλλὰ τοῦ λόγου ἀκούσαντας ὁµολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν ἓν πάντα εἶναι (B.50) It is wise listening not to me, but to the logos to agree that all things are one.

The listening beyond the discourse of Heraclitus is in part, as we noted above, a turn toward the

cognitive capabilities of the body in its interface with the world, but it is also to participate in the

movement of logos through collaborative assent (and productive dissent). The notion of a

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55 Kirk, p.68, has noted how ὁµολογεῖν was a neologism in the time of Heraclitus. Its employment clearly marks its importance for Heraclitus’ conception of the functioning of the logos.

distributed logos can reveal the meaning of the phrase ‘all things one’ (ἓν πάντα εἶναι). It is not,

as in the argument of Cherniss, that it intuits a unique ‘formula’ beyond perceptual reality, or in

Marcovich’s similarly macrocosmic reading of its ‘ontological implication’ that ‘beneath all this

phenomenological plurality of things there is an underlying unity.’56 Neither should we view the

performance of the logos as a primarily linguistic form of reasoning and deliberation that occurs

within the individual, as the microcosmic focus of the arguments of Dilcher and Nussbaum run,

and which possesses no efficacy to alter and manipulate the environment. In other words, we

should not reduce the attentive audience to a many that is passively observing a cosmic

structuring one, nor to a bounded one who is able, if only intellectually, to follow the dialectical

movements of the many. It is the productive tension between the one and the many that ‘the

performance of the logos together’ (homologein) invokes, where this one is not a stable and

abstract principle, but is itself pregnant with tendencies ready to differentiate in divergent

directions.

The thinking back toward this unity thus allows the perception of connections between

entities that otherwise appear separate and unrelated, as indicated by the hidden and back-

stretched harmonies of B.51 and B.54.57 But such an insight also requires the acknowledgement

of the many’s own relationship to a one where the boundaries that currently appear to demarcate

individuals from one another, as from other material bodies in the world, fall away. It is the

collective embodiment of this volatile tension between the one and the many that enables the

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56 Cherniss Journal of the History of Ideas 12 , 333; Marcovich p.116.

57 Heidegger in his essay on this fragment, Aletheia p.71, makes a similar point with regard to the role of logos in unconcealment and its constitutive relationship to concealing: “The ἓν πάντα lets lie together before us in one presencing things which are usually separated from, and opposed to, one another, such as day and night, winter and summer, peace and war, waking and sleeping, Dionysus and Hades.”

moulding of the cognitive, cultural and natural landscapes. And of course, the same volatile

becoming which has caused emergence will also, as the physis of B.123 dictates, require their

inevitable concealment.

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Chapter Five: The extended psyche

The previous chapter, with which this one forms a dipytch, traced Heraclitus’ logos as a

process of evolving understanding that functions materially through the coordination of many

bodies of thought, mediated by, but also capable of manipulating the environment in which its

performers are embedded. In turning now to the related question of the psyche (ψυχή)1 we shall

see how the same notions of being distributed beyond the boundary of the individual, being

engaged in a fluent coupling with the world, being linked to the action of the body, and being

plastic with relation to its experiences in time, will provide a theory of cognition, and a

questioning of the unity of the self, that speaks cogently to certain modern theories of an extended

mind that have emerged from work in the cognitive neurosciences.2 In positioning themselves

against what is seen as the Cartesian inheritance of classical and connectionist cognitivism that

postulates that mind exists solely in the brain, such theories emphasize instead that the boundaries

of thought do not end with the skull, but merge into the world. For Michael Spivey, a proponent

of the continuity of mind thesis, this extension implies that the mind is “a natural continuous

dynamical event - whose decidedly nonmetaphorical substrate consists of the brain and the body

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1 I will not translate psyche as ‘soul’, but will leave it in transliterated form to defer any leading associations toward a dualism of soul and body. The temptation to translate it as ‘soul’ induces commentators to downplay the importance of the body and the external world in the production of knowledge. And with regard to the question of mind, my conjecture that psyche plays an important, but not demarcated, role in the processes of cognition together with bodily and environmental structures, makes it worthwhile resisting. Important studies on the psyche in Heraclitus immediately translate it as ‘soul’, prejudicing their reading of the fragments that emphasise the psyche’s materiality and its coordination with other material bodies in the construction of thought. See for example Bruno Snell, The Discovery of Mind, especially chapter 1; Malcolm Schofield, ‘Heraclitus’ theory of soul and its antecedents’; Dilcher pp.67-98.

2 In particular I will make reference to the work of Michael Spivey (2009), Mark Rowlands (2010), Andy Clark (1997). With regard to the neural plasticity exhibited by brain synapses to experiences in the world see Ansermet and Magistretti The Biology of Freedom who write, p.6, that “plasticity shows that the neuronal network remains open to change, to contingency, that it can be modified by events and the potentialities of experience, which can always alter what has come before.”

and the environment with which they interact.”3 And as Mark Rowlands reminds us, the theory of

the extended mind moves beyond the idea that the environment and bodily structures provide

causes and drives for the cognitive process, to the more interesting argument that these very

structures, and the way in which they are manipulated, in fact constitute and are part of our

mental processes.4

An important consideration of this perspective is the recognition of time as a factor

involved in the mutability of mind and the processes of cognition.5 Rowlands’ employment of the

term ‘amalgamated mind’ in combining the insights afforded by the emphases of the embodied

and extended theories of the mind stems in part from his reticence toward the term ‘extended’ as

he notes how it can prompt a thinking of mind in terms of determinate spatial location, even if it

has been stretched into the ‘extracranial’ world.6 So does Spivey’s emphasis upon continuity and

dynamism foreground the temporal in considering the emergence and change of mind as its

constitutive agents enter into new patterns. Consequently, the form of mathematical modeling that

Spivey and Andy Clark advocate for describing these complex interactions, that of Dynamical

Systems Theory, explicitly includes time as one of the very agents that prompt the creation of new

forms of behavior, as of thought.7

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3 Michael Spivey, The Continuity of Mind p.29.

4 Mark Rowlands, New Science of the Mind p.61 writes that ‘The extended mind, on the other hand, does not simply claim that mental processes are, in this way, situated, in a wider system of scaffolding, a system that facilitates, perhaps in crucial ways, the operation of these processes. That would be a claim of dependence. Rather, it claims that things we do to this system of scaffolding in part compose or constitute (some of ) our mental processes.’

5 Spivey p.31: “There is no point in time during which the mind is not changing.”

6 Rowlands pp.84-5.

7 Andy Clark, Being There p.99 provides a neat definition of a Dynamical Systems model, noting how its permeable borders change according to the feedback processes that slash across them, provoking new configurations and potential ‘trajectories’ which the mind can adopt : “The core ideas behind a Dynamical Systems perspective are the idea of a state space, the idea of a trajectory or a set of trajectories through that space, and the use of mathematics (either continuous or discrete) to describe the laws that determine the shapes of these trajectories. The Dynamical Systems perspective thus builds in the idea of the evolution of a system over time as fundamental feature of the analysis.”

This focus upon the fluidity of changes across time means that pinpointing an exact

location for mind is a futile endeavor. Spivey even employs the metaphor of quantum

indeterminacy to highlight the effect that observation has on this dynamical system within the

brain of what he terms the ‘probabilistic flows of neuronal populations’ whereby it creates an

unnaturally static snapshot of an essentially continuous and multidimensional activity.8 For

Spivey the brain spends its life moving between multiple transitions rather than resting in stable

locations. The impossibility of the brain reaching such an equilibrium is, moreover, a direct result

of the multiple tasks and volleys of information that constantly arrive, due to the mind, of which

it is part, being open to the world.9

Indeterminacy, transitions, and the futility of thinking exclusively in terms of spatial

location, bring us back to Heraclitus’ emphasis on thinking into the uncertain aporetic time where

multiple tendencies coalesce, as opposed to a spatialised location where objects, bodies and states

are demarcated from each other. The movement beyond boundaries that the last chapter discerned

in Heraclitus’ theory of how logos operates, and which this one will also do for psyche, is in some

ways a conception of how cognition functions without ‘determinate’ boundaries, but arises from

the indeterminate time of aion.10 It also indicates that the mind, and the self, should not be viewed

as a stable state, but as a continuously changing process: one that garners its alteration through its

permeability to the durational qualities of other agents in the activity of thought, including the

body, other psychai and environmental structures as well as the cultural information stored,

‘offloaded’ in the phraseology of cognitive science, in the forms of language and material

artifacts. The manipulation of language, objects and the creatures of nature we noted in the

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8 Spivey p.5ff.

9 As Clark, p.98 notes: “real embodied intelligence, we have seen, is fundamentally a means of engaging with the world”.

10 Rowlands p.83: “It is not that cognitive processes have determinate extended boundaries..It is rather that they have no determinate boundaries at all.”

activity of children in chapter one can now be seen as an example of this way that mind evolves

creatively through exploiting the resources of the world, with the result that such playful

graspings renders these resources partially constituent of the activity of mind.

It is in this light that we shall observe how Heraclitus’ treatment of psyche provides a

theory of a distributed mind as a process that alters according to its experience in time.

Furthermore, we will note how this conception of its constitutive extension and immersion into

the physical processes of the world, as in its overlapping with the activity of other psychai as we

saw in Cleanthes’ comparison of the emergence of the psyche to the flowing currents of rivers in

B.12, will question the very idea of the unity and identity of the individual self. Such a viewpoint

challenges the dominant reading of the psyche in Heraclitus advocated by Martha Nussbaum in

two influential articles from 1972. Nussbaum postulated that Heraclitus re-evaluated the Homeric

picture of psyche as an ineffective breath that flitted away at the moment of death into a more

important concept that functioned as a ‘central and connecting life-faculty’ whose abilities arose

from its linguistic understanding and which, in grasping the connected discourse of logos, would

give rise to the ‘unity of the individual’.11 The lines of her argument are also visible in Roman

Dilcher’s subsequent analysis, where Heraclitus’ psyche ‘is conceived as the self of man to which

all states of consciousness can be referred.’12 And moreover, for Dilcher, Heraclitus’ renovation

of the term meant that ‘the mental life is for the first time categorically distinguished from the

external, observable and tangible world.’13 Just as it attempts to restrict the operation of psyche to

a disembodied cognitive realm, so does such a clear demarcation also function to divide one

psyche from another.

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11 Nussbaum p.9.

12 Dilcher p.77.

13 Dilcher p.75,

It is important to note, therefore, that the fragment which associates psyche with a

cognitive function allies it clearly to the senses and the body:

κακοὶ µάρτυρες ἀνθρώποισιν ὀφθαλµοὶ καὶ ὦτα βαρϐάρους ψυχὰς ἐχόντων. (Β.107) Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language. (trans. Kahn) Nussbaum’s analysis of this fragment interprets barbarous (βαρϐάρους) as referring to linguistic

incapability, specifically the inability to speak Greek, as opposed to a general crude, ‘barbarian’,

understanding.14 In employing this fragment as part of an argument that prioritizes the role of

language in learning she writes:

Thus it seems that Heraclitus is not making the rather bland and vague statement that sense-data are deceptive if you have a crude and uncomprehending psyche, but the far more interesting statement that your senses will deceive you if you do not have an accurate understanding of your own language.15

Nussbaum draws a boundary between the body exposed to the world and a cognitive psyche that

interprets their information according to its own understanding of the connected language of

logos. The mental flexibility of the psyche is directly indexed to its parsing of the structuralist

oppositions that logos holds in harmony, and any misperception of the ‘actual’ world is a result of

their linguistic foundation having gone awry.16 We have argued, however, that the logos functions

as a process of understanding that takes its efficacy through being embodied by various agents.

While language is certainly part of its meaning, although we have privileged the creative schisms

and aporetic gaps concealed behind any cohesive and unifying structure, its pervasive character,

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14 We might note, however, that her definitive example of βάρβαρος not carrying a pejorative connotation in the 5th century due the fact that this is how the Persians self-identify in Aeschyus’ play of 472BC ignores the obvious fact that this is how Aeschylus, a Greek, writes them in a play that celebrates Greek values of liberty.

15 Nussbaum p.10.

16 Nussbaum p.10: ‘their errors in understanding the nature of the world can be understood, form a slightly different viewpoint, as failures to understand the structure of their language.’

shared across the kosmos, made it a material constituent of things that was physically

encountered. Logos is certainly not to be limited to the representative level of language, divorced

from one’s experience of the world. Nussbaum’s analysis redounds on the idea of a disembodied

cognitive sphere, linked to the understanding of language, that is separate and functionally

different from a bodily interface that passively accumulates sensory information.

Such a division, however, seeks to isolate an interpretative mind, and concomitantly a

stable underlying self, from the activities of the body and its mingling with the world.17 We have

already noted with regard to the logos that thinking is partly performed by the body and that the

epistemic isolation of individuals is caused through their misrecognition of this knowledge that

embeds them in a shared world. And just as we saw with regard to fragment B.55 (ὅσων ὄψις

ἀκοὴ µάθησις, ταῦτα ἐγὼ προτιµέω - ‘Whatever comes from sight, hearing and mathesis, this I

prefer), it is the coordination of these different modes of thinking that produces understanding. To

situate cognitive capability with regard to the understanding of language, as Nussbaum does,

repeats the viewpoint of classical cognitivism which characterized the mind as a machine inside

the head, processing strings of information on the model of a computer. It is here that the thesis of

embodied mind offers an alternative, emphasizing the important role that the body plays in

cognition, and thus the need to situate the cognitive process in terms of its engaged coupling with

the material world. Andy Clark describes this shift in perspective:

Intelligence and understanding are rooted not in the presence and manipulation of explicit, language-like data structures, but in something more earthy: the tuning of

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17 Although Nussbaum, ‘Ψυχή in Heraclitus II’ pp.160-166, correctly argues, I believe, against the notion of the survival of the psyche after death, as in the Homeric world view, she nevertheless suggests that the wisdom attained in its role as a coodinating life faculty means that it can achieve what she terms a ‘kinetic immortality’ after death. On one level this simply reiterates Greek ideas about fame, but viewed through her perspective upon the cognitive realm of the psyche, it rather indicates that this incorporeal perseverance of fame through words might lie behind her discernment of the psyche as a unified self that is disembodied and therefore immune, unlike material bodies, to the degradations of time.

basic responses to a real world that enables an embodied organism to sense, act, and survive.18

Cognition, on this view, is a distributed process spread across the brain, body and world, and not

a disembodied reasoning device: the idea of the ‘rational deliberator’ gives way to the ‘adaptive

responder’ in Clark’s formulation.19 Lawrence Shapiro, another advocate of the embodied mind

thesis, has also highlighted the importance of bodily structures and processes for the activity of

the brain in arguing against the perspective of ‘body neutrality’ according to which “the

characteristics of bodies make no difference to the kind of mind one possesses.”20 His valuation

of the perceptual work performed by bodily organs does not, therefore, make them mere sources

of sensory information, but participatory agents in the activity of mind, such that “psychological

processes are incomplete without the body’s contributions”.21 Shapiro provides examples of how

the brain uses information garnered from the distance between the eyes to calculate visual depth

just as it does that between the ears to work out the proximity and direction of sounds.

If we are to discern a picture of how mind functions in B.107 it must include the

coordinated cognitive agency of the ‘witnesses’ (µάρτυρες) of the eyes and ears together with that

of the psyche as they are all exposed to and are able to manipulate the material becomings of the

logos. Yet just as we have criticized Nussbaum’s vision of a disembodied logocentric psyche that

performs acts of interpretation upon sensory information, it would also be anachronistic for us to

assume that we can instead simply map psyche onto the role of the brain in the extended theory of

mind, where it works together with the cognitive processes of the body (and other external

environmental structures). Indeed, the association of psyche with language that Nussbaum

220

18 Clark p.5.

19 Clark p.33.

20 Lawrence Shapiro, The Incarnate Mind p.175.

21 Shapiro p.190.

originally delineated in the adjective barbarous can now be viewed in a different light. The

linguistic ability of the psyche would be a means not of interpretation, but of communication:

consequently, this ability would be a way of performing the shared (xynos) logos through making

one’s experiences accessible to others, and in doing so fulfill a vital role in the construction, and

alteration, of the cultural sphere. Such an acknowledgement of the importance of language in the

processes of cognition situates it outside the individual as a cultural resource that can be

manipulated and transformed: language performs cognitive work along with the persons using it.

The Soviet psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria claimed that language was a key

external structure for the offloading of information, a theory that is important for adherents of the

extended mind thesis.22 Following their argument we can view language not as the primary

condition for the emergence of the psyche, but as an additional, if essential, element in its

integration into the cultural community.

This emphasis reminds us that mind functions as an activity that is engaged with the

world. A useful corollary here would be the enactivist approach to mind that highlights the way

that action is not secondary to thought, but that the movement of the body, and its potentialities

for activity, affect our cognitive expectations.23 One’s experience in the world, as a body

permeable to its rhythms, but also able to exploit the pliancy contained within its knowledge

bearing structures (be they language, artifacts like the bow and lyre of B.51, or other cultural and

natural forms such as the lice of B.56) determines that the processes of mind are constituted in

part through this exposure. We can return to fragment B.112 here to discern how Heraclitus’

theory of thinking need not imply that speaking the truth and acting according to physis are only

the results of appropriate thought, but that they can, in fact, shape its very trajectories:

221

22 See A. Luria and L.Vygotsky, Ape, Primitive Man, and Child:Studies on the History of Behavior.

23 See in particular Noë Action in Perception; also E. Thompson Mind in Life.

σωφρονεῖν ἀρετὴ µεγίστη, καὶ σοφίη ἀληθέα λέγειν καὶ ποιεῖν κατὰ φύσιν ἐπαΐοντας. (Β.112)

Thinking well is the greatest excellence, (it consists of) acting and speaking what is true, perceiving things according to their physis.

The ability of the psyche to exploit the structure of language testifies to its originary

intermingling with the world, not to its epistemological boundedness.24 The psyche, being part of

the activity of mind, is not a stable state detached from the world, but a flexible process that

extends into it, taking its vitality from its permeability to other bodies and grammars of thought.

This approach to an extended and enacted psyche will help us to assess the implications

of B.45, where its boundlessness is foregrounded:

ψυχῆς πείρατα ἰὼν οὐκ ἂν ἐξεύροιο, πᾶσαν ἐπιπορευόµενος ὁδόν· οὕτω βαθὺν λόγον ἐχει. (B.45) You will not find out the limits of psyche by going, even if you journey over every way, so deep is its logos.

For Nussbaum and Dilcher this fragment indicates the limitless extent of the mental realm, a

disembodied sphere of knowledge, where one can wander and increase one’s understanding

through one’s grasp of the language, or reasoning, of logos.25 Macrocosmic readings of the logos,

for instance that of Kirk and Raven, prefer to postulate that the depth of the logos does not

account for the possibility of an increased self-understanding, but must refer the capabilities of

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24 Research on the functioning of mirror neurons in the Brocas Zone of the brain discovered by Iaccomo Rizzolati and Vittorio Gallese posits that the imitative capacity of the brain, so essential to its acquiring of language and other essential contextually dependent skills, makes no distinction between the repetition of an action by oneself, or by an external person. On the potential for this research to affect theories of ethics, empathy and social intelligence see Gallese, Keysers, Rizzolati ‘A unifying view of the basis of social cognition’ TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences. Vol.8, No.9 September 2004, and also Iacoboni, Molnar-Szkacs, Gallese, Buccin, Mazziota, Rizzolati ‘Grasping the Intentions of Others with One’s Own Mirror Neuron System’ PLoS Biology 3(3): e79. March 2005.

25 Nussbaum p.15; Dilcher, p.75 writes that ‘It is apparently not the nature of the soul in a general sense to be deep and limitless, but more specifically its capability of reasoning’.

the psyche to its being a partial component of the vast extent of the cosmic fire.26 Our reading of

the boundlessness can combine elements from these two perspectives: suggesting that the infinite

capacity for the extension of the psyche arises from its material intermingling with the world. The

deep logos that it performs arises in coordination with other constituents of mind, their cognitive

processes formed through their encounter with and manipulation of the environment. Moreover,

we may read ‘depth’ (βαθὺν) as referring to not just to spatial extension, but also to a thickness in

substance, as in the ‘dense fog’ (ἠέρα βαθεῖαν) of Iliad XXI.7.27 It is the overlapping presence of

other agents in the process of cognition that makes it difficult to pinpoint the spatial boundaries of

the individual psyche. As we noted above, Mark Rowlands’ preference for the term ‘amalgamated

mind’ over ‘extended mind’ reflects a similar sentiment, namely that the location of mind is not

relevant, but it is the multiple components of which it is formed that are.28 To search for a

boundary is to ask the wrong question of mind.

The impossibility of journeying to the indeterminate location of psyche also implies that

it cannot be isolated from the flow of time. Its plasticity with regard to its coordination with other

bodies and structures of thought means that it is always changing, that it is a process that never

reaches any equilibrium as a result of its engagement with the world. The other fragment that

explicitly links psyche with logos gestures toward the sort of substrate that Michael Spivey

discerned with regard to the continuity of mind:

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26 Kirk and Raven p.207; Kahn sits in between the micro and macrocosmic accounts, whereby the depth of the psyche means it must reach the universal logos, which for him, is that which ‘structures everything in the world’ and as such is external to man, even as it is available for him to use, p.130. Marcovich’s correction, p.367, of Kirk and Raven, foregrounding the materialism of Heraclitus’ psychology, takes the elemental origin of psyche as water (cf B.36), which can then be seen to refer to its exhalation from blood and eventual return to it. Marcovich’s translation of πείρατα as ‘bonds’ along the lines of rope ends in Iliad VII.102, using Onians’ reading (1951, 324), seems to ignore the fact that one can not reach these ‘ends’, or ‘bonds’ in B.45, instead of their being essential and unavoidable.

27 By the time of Pindar, close to that of Heraclitus, this sense has been extended to mean ‘abundant’ or ‘copious’ cf in Olympian 13.62. LSJ 302.

28 Rowlands p.85.

ψυχῆς ἐστι λόγος ἑαυτὸν αὔξων. (B.112)

The psyche has a logos that increases itself.

Fundamentally situated in the world, the psyche here testifies to its development according to the

possession of a logos which, as we have argued, functions through its shared (xynos)

performance. And just as the “intrinsic temporal focus and easy capacity to criss-cross brain/

body/environment boundaries” of Dynamical Systems Theory was an effective way to model the

interactions that continually alter the mind, so here does the logos of the psyche refer not to a

bounded realm of linguistic understanding, but to a constant series of intersections with the

material world causing the processes of cognition to evolve over time.29

The mutability of the psyche brings us back to its place in the physical transformations of

the world. Although Nussbaum and Dilcher acknowledge the materiality of the psyche, its

physicality is treated as a condition of its genesis before the delineation of its mental

boundedness, not as a continuous quality that explains its perpetual openness to and participation

in the flux of Heraclitus’ kosmos:

ψυχῇσιν θάνατος ὕδωρ γενέσθαι, ὕδατι δὲ θάνατος γῆν γενέσθαι, ἐκ γῆς δὲ ὕδωρ γίνεται, ἐξ ὕδατος δὲ ψυχή. (B.36)

For psychai it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth. Out of earth is born water and out of water soul.

Just as the readings of Kirk and Guthrie posited the supervening logos as a cosmic formula to

which the individual can only attempt to align himself with, so does their notion of psyche make

it an ember from the divine blaze of rationality, ignoring its watery origins.30 This connection is

224

29 Clark p. 101.

30 Kirk and Raven p.204; Schofield, ‘Heraclitus’ theory of the soul’ p.20; Guthrie, p.476ff speculates that this kinship with fire offers the possibility of reincarnation on the Orphic model.

seen as primary and thereby denudes the importance of the constitutive relationships the enacted

psyche can enter into with other psychai and material elements. On this line of thought, the

correctly attuned psyche only manifests proper intelligence when it attains a fiery, dry and

individuated state described in B.11831:

αὐγὴ ξηρὴ ψυχὴ, σοφωτάτη καὶ ἀρίστη (Β.118) Α gleam of light is the dry soul, wisest and best.

Such an evaluation of what constitutes wisdom appears to stand in opposition to the degraded

waylessness of the lost wet soul, where the above term for dry (ξηρὴ) is opposed by that for moist

(ὑγρή), terms employed elsewhere in the humoral theories of early Hippocratic writers to indicate

a moral dimension linked to the condition of the soul32:

ἀνὴρ ὁκόταν µεθυσθῇ, ἄγεται ὑπὸ παιδὸς ἀνήϐου σφαλλόµενος, οὐκ ἐπαΐων ὅκη βαίνει, ὑγρήν τὴν ψυχὴς ἔχων. (B.117) A man when drunk is led around by a beardless child, deceived, not knowing where he is going, having his psyche moist.

Marcovich considers the changes of B.36 as the physiological counterparts of the measured

meterological turnings (tropoi) of fire in B.31A. As a result, the criticism of the drunken man for

having let his psyche return to this deadly state of moisture is that such behavior is a

“transgression by men of the measures of this change.”33 For Kirk, even, the ability to die in one’s

fiery state, as he reads fragment 24 (ἀρηϊφάτους θεοὶ τιµῶσι καὶ ἄνθρωποι - ‘Gods and men

honor those who die in battle’), proffers an afterlife for the psyche through avoiding the shame of

225

31 Kahn’s reading, p.250, of this fragment disagrees with this prevailing association of the psyche with fire, instead positing it as a form of atmospheric air, on the model of Anaximenes.

32 See Dilcher pp.77-80 for a discussion of these associations.

33 Marcovic p.361.

a weakened immersion back to water.34 Yet such approaches disavow the importance of the

watery state that is responsible for the very emergence of psyche: while the dry psyche can

manifest wisdom, it cannot do so without its constitutive torsion to its fluid and permeable

origins. The psyche should not, therefore, as the extended thesis postulates for the mind, be

considered as a stable state, but as a continual process that gains its potency from its back-

stretched harmony to the concealment from which it has risen. Moreover, as the differentiating

potential latent within any union of B.51 implied, this creativity is liable to emerge from and

disrupt any appearance of stability. The watery imbrication with other psychai is an internal and

vital condition for the functioning of mind to which one can intuitively turn back.

It is also significant that the failure of the inebriated psyche to know where it is going -

the spatial metaphor for knowledge - leads to its being guided by a beardless child (ὑπὸ παιδὸς

ἀνήϐου). For it is the child’s association with the catalyzing play of aion which modeled the

emergence of mind through its embodied manipulation of, and plasticity to, the scaffolds of

knowledge contained in language, ritual objects and the rhythms of the natural world. The games

of children, as they are intersected by and transform the world to which they are dynamically

coupled, enact the distributed process of cognition with which we have allied psyche in

coordination with the cognitive work performed by the body. As a result, the return of the psyche

to its watery origins does not solely illustrate an irrational condition, but this tropological

movement allows it to reconnect with this aporetic time, one where boundaries are dissolved by

material collisions that afford new knowledge.35

226

34 Kirk, ‘Heraclitus and death in battle: Fr.24D’, AJP 70 (1949), 389ff.

35 J.D. Meewaldt’s emendation (Mnemos. 1951. 53-4) of voerai to vearai, adopted by Marcovich, but not Kahn , thus ‘becoming new/young’ instead of ‘becoming wise’ for the exhalations of the psychai in Cleanthes’ summary of Heraclitus before introducing B.12, might now in light of our investigation be adopted without any change in sense since it is the condition of the young at play to manifest the possibilities of such an attuned intelligence.

We can now turn to the disputed fragment B67a, preserved by Hisdosus’ twelfth-century

commentary on Chalcidius’ translation of Plato’s Timaeus, to see how it fits into Heraclitus’

theory of the relationship between the psyche, the body and the environment.36 Its germaneness

to this theory will work to support the argument for its authenticity, albeit in a Latin translation of

the original (with anima standing for psyche), while its poetic vision will serve to enliven the

picture of a dynamic mind we have discerned elsewhere. The context for the quotation is a

consideration of section 34d of the Timaeus which details the placing of the world soul in the

middle of the kosmos and its elastic envelopment of the world. This leads Hisdosus to note the

opinion of other thinkers who believe the sun to be the centre, in analogy with the position of the

anima in the heart of man, where both have the vital heat (vitalis calor) to animate their

extremities, be it other organisms in the case of the sun, or the limbs of the body in the case of the

anima. It is with regard to this context that Hisdosus introduces Heraclitus’ vision of the anima:

cui sententiae Heraclitus adquiescens optimam similitudinem dat de aranea ad animam, de tela araneae ad corpus. sic aranea, ait, stans in medio telae sentit, quam cito musca aliquem filum suum corrumpit itaque illuc celeriter currit quasi de fili persectione dolens, sic hominis anima aliqua parte corporis laesa illuc festine meat quasi impatiens laesionis corporis, cui firme et proportionaliter iuncta est. (B.67.a)

Heraclitus, in agreeing to this viewpoint, gives an excellent comparison of the spider to the soul and the body to the spider’s web. As the spider, he says, standing in the middle of the web, senses as soon as a fly breaks any thread and then rushes quickly to that spot, as if grieving at the penetration of her web, so does the soul of a human, whenever any part of the body is harmed, move swiftly to that place, as if disturbed by the wound of the body, to which it is tightly and proportionately linked.

Nowhere, however, in the Heraclitus passage is the anima said to reside in the heart, merely in the

middle of her web (‘in medio telae’) whence it moves, and the key characteristic of the anima for

Heraclitus is its ability to range quickly (‘festine meat’) over its corporeal threads in responding

227

36 The text comes to us in Latin and has been accepted verbatim by Kranz and followed by Diels, Pohlenz, Kirk, Nussbaum, and Dilcher. Marcovich and Kahn consider it spurious. Nussbaum’s argument against Marcovich’s critique pp.6-7 is convincing, even if she puts the fragment to a different use than I shall.

to stimuli, not its remaining in one place as a controlling and interpretative faculty.37 One of the

other thinkers whom Hisdosus reports to have believed that anima was located in the heart is the

Stoic philosopher Chryssipus, who is quoted in Chalcidius’ original commentary upon the same

passage of the Timaeus. The spider simile which Chrysippus employs is very similar to that of

Heraclitus which Hisdosus adduces, but it betrays important differences which support the

authenticity of Heraclitus’ version and render Chysippus’ as a subsequent interpretation:

ut ait idem Chrysippus: sicut aranea in medietate cassis omnia filorum tenet pedibus exordia, ut cum quid ex bestiolis plagas incurrerit ex quacumque parte de proximo sentiat, sic animae principale, positum in media sede cordis, sensuum exordia retinere, ut cum quid nuntiabunt de proximo recognoscat. (Chalcid. in Plat. Tim. c.220 Wrobel = SVF II. nr. 879) And Chrysippus says the same: as the spider in the middle of the web holds the entire warp of the threads with its feet, so that whenever some small beast inflicts blows from whatever part it senses them closeby, so does the overseer of the soul, positioned in the middle seat of the heart, hold the warp of the senses, so that it recognizes closeby whatever they announce.

The power to which the spider analogy refers for Chysippus is not the anima, however, but the

animae principale - ‘the controlling faculty of the anima’, which Marcovich has correctly noted

refers to the Stoic idea of the hegemonikon, a guiding principle for the anima.38 Although this

faculty can perceive the outside world through its connection to the vibrating web of the senses, it

does not move itself, but stays in the heart. As such, the animae principale acts as the site of

thinking and mind, utilising its embedded link to the sensory world in order to react to the

information that arrives from outside, but nevertheless remaining bounded and immobile.39

228

37 This is the viewpoint of Nussbaum p.8: “All stimuli are referred to psyche which holds the body and faculties together...It responds to stimuli, but these stimuli remain external to it.”

38 Marcovich p.577.

39 A.Long, Stoic Studies p.247 notes that this ability of the hegemonikon to frame and judge the sensory requirements of the body is important with regard to the development of Stoic ethics.

Viewed against Chysippus’ version of the mind as a stable spider open to the world

though its sensory web, Heraclitus’ account seems more grounded in empirical observation. For

not only do real spiders move to different parts of their web to feed, repair and alter its

dimensions according to the impacts it suffers, but the very construction of the web is a process

that takes time and involves a continual integration to its material environment. Moreover,

Heraclitus’ version foregrounds the link between the spider’s web and the human body (de tela

araneae ad corpus), whereas for Chysippus the spider’s web is analogous to the web of the

senses (sensuum exordia). Chrysippus has perhaps jumped ahead in his logic, foregrounding the

importance of the body’s sensory abilities for the cognitive deliberation undertaken by the animae

principale to which they are connected. This is certainly not to deny of the materiality of thought

in Chrysippus’ version, or of the role of the body and its openness to the beastly intersections with

the world as an important interface for the activity of mind; but it does enact a functional division

between the sensory role of the external body and the cognitive judgment enacted by the animae

principale atop the director’s chair of the heart. Observation of a real spider yields the insight that

the web is created out of the spider as an actual part of its body. There is a literal continuity

between the spider and its web, brought out compellingly in Heraclitus’ passage by the notion of

the distress that the spider feels when its web is physically ruptured (quasi de fili persectione

dolens). And, similarly, the anima to which the spider is compared reacts as if in pain to any

assaults upon its body (quasi impatiens laesionis corporis). Just as there is no boundary between

the web and the spider, so are the anima and its body an integrated whole that thinks in unity.

Nussbaum’s use of B.67a to support her argument for the psyche as a connecting and

knowing faculty thus seems to refer more to Chrysippus’ version of the spider analogy than

Heraclitus’ original. She writes that the fragment illustrates how “All stimuli are referred to

psyche, which holds the body and its faculties together”, where ‘holds’ appears to translate the

tenet and retinere of Chrysippus’ version as opposed to the rapid movement and conjunctive

229

hinge between the anima and the corpus in Heraclitus’ (firme et proportionaliter iuncta est).40

And furthermore, Heraclitus’ vision of the operation of mind, coordinating the psyche (anima)

and body, as well as the environmental structures that they literally incorporate into their

cognitive activity, does not make reference to any linguistic capability. As we have implied,

language plays a vital role as an accessible and mutable resource necessary for the cohesion and

adaptability of the cultural community, but it does not contain the blueprint for how to weave

these shared connections.

The difference between Chrysippus’ and Heraclitus’ spider similes could, finally, be

characterised as that between the embedded and extended theories of mind. While the embedded

theory emphasizes the importance of the brain’s use of its body and the environment in which it is

situated for the process of cognition, it does not recognize the way that their structures actually

constitute part of the activity of thought.41 The enigmatic simile of Heraclitus’ spider enables us

to fully grasp his radical theory of mind, since it is through the web that the psyche extends its

cognitive body into the world, utilising the nooks of the environment to provide intellectual

sustenance.42 But the web, as a ‘nonmetaphorical’ substrate of mind, is also a flexible system that

evolves over time, where its plasticity is its strength: its encounters with other beings leave a trace

that can be reworked and patched into the continual process of constructing (and deconstructing)

the material of knowledge. It is the play across these boundaries, beyond boundaries even, in this

230

40 Kranz, ‘Gleichnis und Vergleich in der frühgriechischen Philosophie’, p.113, offers a tentative translation of this phrase back into Greek. He discerned the term logos behind proportionaliter, qualifying the yoking according to an appropriate measure (ᾡιπερ συνέζευκται ἰσχυρῶς τε καὶ κατὰ λόγον); though we might instead take the joining of the psyche and the body through logos to refer to the shared logos they perform.

41 Rowlands p.60 writes that “Composition is a quite different relation from dependence. Thus, the extended mind is a stronger and more distinctive claim than one of environmental embedding; and it must be clearly distinguished from that of the embedded mind.”

42 Dilcher’s claim p.82 that “the web would be nothing without the spider - it is useless on its own” might be read in reverse, the ‘spider, as the psyche, would be nothing without its web - it would be useless on its own.” The relationship is surely more balanced than the ‘dominance and subservience’ he perceives.

interconnected system of mind that provides the vital heat (vitalis calor) Hisdosus references.

And so then is meaning only kindled in coordination with others, where our shared production

truly is ‘the thunderbolt that steers all’ (τάδε πάντα οἰακίζει κεραυνός. Β.64)

231

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