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 Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn

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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyWed Jun 12, 2013 8:20 am

LIX (D. 104) What wit (phren) or understanding (noos) do they have? They believe the poets of the people and take the mob as their teacher, not knowing that 'the many are worthless', good men are few.

There may be some specific or local reference here, as in the sarcastic attack on the Ephesians in LXIV (D. 121). But the comparison with XIX (D. 57), where Hesiod was described as 'teacher of most men', suggests Heraclitus has the mass of mankind in view. The slight incoherence in speaking of most men as taking the mob as their teacher is meaningful: they have in effect no leaders, the poets of the people (or 'of the peoples', with a curious plural form demon) being merely a reflection of popular ignorance. The mob is both teacher and pupil, leader and follower at once.


The term noos here recalls the understanding that distinguishes wisdom from mere accumulation of knowledge (XVIII, D. 40), the comprehension of 'what is common to all' (XXX, D. 114). The word phren 'wit' or 'mind' echoes the theme of 'thinking' (phronein) and especially 'sound thinking', 'good sense' (so-phronein).
The final contrast of the many and the few probably looks ahead to the praise of Bias in LXII (D. 39). 

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyWed Jun 12, 2013 8:23 am

LX (D. 87) A fool loves to get excited on any account (or 'at every word', logos).

LXI (D. 97) Dogs bark at those they do not recognize. 

The juxtaposition of these two fragments is intended to suggest a simile or ratio: as dogs react to strangers, so do foolish men to every logos. (For the pattern, compare VIII (D. 22) with IX (D. 35): as gold-seekers must dig up a lot of dirt, so lovers of wisdom must wade through a mass of inquiry.) The clue to LXI is given by the term 'recognize' (gindskosi) with its special sense: the recognition of the logos, the cosmic structure.214 Thus the fool or 'stupid human being' (blax anthropos) in LX stands for men generally in their incapacity sluggishness of human nature and the ease (literally, the desire: philei) with which it is aroused. It is because men in general are  to comprehend. The expressive term blax seems to have meant 'dull' or 'sluggish', as well as 'fool' or 'imbecile'. (In the form vlakas, with the general flavor of 'you idiot', it remains a popular term of abuse in Modern Greek.) There may be a pointed contrast between the  asleep on their feet that they become so suddenly alarmed by the challenge of a logos. The verb rendered 'get excited', eptoesthai, liter- ally 'set aflutter', can mean either 'terrified, dismayed', or 'agitated, aroused'; both senses are apt.

I assume a play on logos: 

(1) word, statement ('whatever you say to these fools, they lose their heads!'), and

(2) the specifically Heraclitean logos that involves measure or ratio, as in the pattern illustrated by LX-LXI and more schematically by LVII (D. 79). Such a ratio is a small-scale exemplification of the cosmic measures 'according to which all things come to pass'. Thus the fool who gets excited or alarmed over every bit of news, is (like the dog who barks at a strange face) a figure for the man who comprehends neither Heraclitus' discourse nor the cosmic pattern it reflects, but will be roused to some inappropriate response — alarm, disgust, or sheer irritation — by his own failure to recognize what he is confronted with.

 

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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reasonvemotion

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 1:34 am

Satyr:

I did confuse you, didn't I, sweetie?

Not at all.

I almost made you believe I am not Lyssa.

No, you don't have the ability to "made me" anything.


The only problem here is deception.  You choose to takeover "Lyssa" on her behalf, when you think you can more adequately "deal" with me or others on other Forums, under the guise of Lyssa.   For example, a flurry of PMs, S to L, "Let me respond to that bitch, I will deal with her", and L to S, "would you, thank you".   Isn't that so?  LOL.    That is the confusion here.  Lyssa is easily recognised, just look for the quotation marks. 

This is where the integrity is missing from this Forum, too much hidden.  Philosophy is about truth.

Regarding Heraclitus.  Some choose to parrot another's translation or perception of H.  Some have strong opinions and feel the need to point the finger, ridicule others for their disagreements or inability to "see".   I am naïve and usually rely on intuition, which I am doing with Heraclitus.  I make errors, but Heraclitus does not provide straightforward answers, he forces people to interpret them. His truths come to the attentive reader as discoveries resulting from the solution of a puzzle.  He wanted each man to discover "him" (H) for himself.  That takes time. 

That is why I persist in pursuing my own interpretation, albeit clumsy and simplistic.  I am strong and brave.

"You could not discover the limits of soul, even if you travelled by every path in order to do so; such is the depth of its meaning".

H.

How beautiful is that.
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 8:00 am

reasonvemotion wrote:

The only problem here is deception.  You choose to takeover "Lyssa" on her behalf, when you think you can more adequately "deal" with me or others on other Forums, under the guise of Lyssa.   For example, a flurry of PMs, S to L, "Let me respond to that bitch, I will deal with her", and L to S, "would you, thank you".   Isn't that so?  LOL.    That is the confusion here.  Lyssa is easily recognised, just look for the quotation marks. This is where the integrity is missing from this Forum, too much hidden.  Philosophy is about truth.

 Funny how some people present themselves as humble and clumsy and prone to errors and yet, in their heads they believe they are such a wowman of substance, such formidable foes, that someone like Satyr "needs" my guise to "deal with them" adequately. Such airs these wowmen have!
I'm straining my eyes to see when this demonstration of substance by the wowman of substance occurred.
Somewhere on this forum she showed her strength and bravery and apparently Satyr couldn't handle her... this has happened somewhere on this forum. We have to believe, because she's a wowman of substance.

"Bitch" is how some women fantasize they would be addressed by the ones they fantasize about; the image of Satyr as an aggressive barbaric towards women, is, too much of a tease. "Moron" is the word I'd fancy him picking for you. 

Never has Satyr lied when going with my name on other forums, and Never have we interchanged names on this forum. Some simpletons cannot think beyond the idea of pranks and the sole reason being to fool people. That's why they are morons. 
The need was to defend one's views and expose the hypocrisy of some forums when they speak of freedom and tolerance and exhibit their shallowness when they ban views that do not fall within their status quo. Satyr's name was banned, and so I let him use mine. Why would he use my name Here, on his own forum?! Maybe his life is just boring?, and he needs entertainment, no? Playing and fooling around with a wowman of substance must be it!!!... what wishful thinking...

The confusion here is the wowman cannot acknowledge I sound masculine-to-her, that she thinks its Satyr speaking through me. Instead of dealing with me straight on, the strong and brave wowman pretends to be a frail victim of pranks and makes excuses to hide from me. How easy it is to use Satyr as her punching bag, and she never has to face me - the real Barbaric, not Satyr. 

I excuse this simpleton for her weakness.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 8:03 am

LXII (D. 39) In Priene lived Bias son of Teutames, who is of more account (logos) than the rest.


Here again there must be a play on logos. The surface meaning is 'esteem' or 'renown'. But Heraclitus seems to have shown his own esteem for Bias by quoting his famous logos or saying (above, LIX, D. 104): the fame of the sage is inseparable from that of his 'word'. It is possible that here, as in LXI, we are expected to recall the deeper sense of logos as well. The word play will then contain some hint of the cosmic pattern expressed in geometric proportions — for there is after all only one order. And on what term could one play more meaningfully than on logos itself, the word for language and for cosmic structure?

In pursuing this clue, we can start from the fact that Bias is regarded with exceptional favor; as Diogenes says in quoting LXII, 'even Heraclitus who was so hard to please praised him particularly' (1.88). Bias was a leading citizen of the Ionian city of Priene (not far from Ephesus), who lived a generation or two before Heraclitus. The justice of Priene, represented by Bias, was proverbial in his own life- time. Herodotus praises him for the good advice he gave to the Ionians after their conquest by Cyrus: to combine forces and settle in the west, in Sardinia (1.170.1). As the popular legend of the Seven Wise Men took shape, Bias was one of the four (with Thales, Solon, and Pittacus) whose names appeared on all the different lists. Among the sayings associated with his name, Aristotle quotes the celebrated line 'power will reveal the man' (arche andra deixei), and the cautious counsel 'love your friends as if they are to become your enemies, and hate your enemies as if they are to become your friends'. The view underlying both these sayings is expressed in the aphorism Diogenes ascribes to him: 'most men are worthless (or 'vile', kakoi).'

If it is indeed this saying that is quoted in LIX and alluded to here, it is natural to connect Heraclitus' high regard for Bias with the judg- ment there expressed. No doubt Heraclitus shared Bias' harsh judgment of the common run of men. The sharpest statement of this is XCVII (D. 29), where we find something more than an aristocrat's contempt for the mob. While the many 'sate themselves like cattle', the saving grace of the excellent few is precisely their choice of ever- living glory, 'one thing in exchange for all'. (Cf. XL, D. 90, and the parallels cited above, p. 000.) The opposition in LXII between the single individual Bias, who by his justice and wisdom merited an esteem (logos) so much greater than the rest as to appear semi-divine, and the mass of mankind as characterized in his saying (logos) — this antithesis exemplifies in human terms that proportion (logos) be- tween the one and the many, between fire and all the rest, that struc- tures the order of the universe.

And in fact Bias achieved, in the most literal sense, 'ever-renewed fame among mortals' (kleos aenaon thneton), according to the terms of XCVII (D. 29). Not only was he widely remembered as wise judge and councillor, but his city dedicated a shrine in his honor, the Teutameion, making him the object of a hero cult after his death.218 The fact that the shrine bore the name of his father may account for the emphatic position of the patronymic in the center of LXII. (Con- trast the absence of a patronymic in the favorable reference to Hermodorus in LXIV, D. 121.)

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 8:04 am

LXIII (D. 49) One (man) is ten thousand, if he is the best.    


The opposition suggested in LXII is expressed here in numerical terms. In Greek 'ten thousand' (myrioi) is regularly used to mean 'countless', 'innumerable'. 

As Bollack-Wismann have pointed out, of the two citations that preserve the essential clause 'if he is best', neither one includes the personal reference 'for me'. (See texts 98 (a) and (c) in Marcovich, pp. 515f.) The alternative form 'one is ten thousand for me' was proverbial by Cicero's time and came to be assigned to Heraclitus. (Marcovich texts 98 (b), (e) and (e1).) Modern editors have been ill- advised to combine the two versions in a composite text that is not represented in any ancient source. The result is not only methodo- logically unsound; it trivializes the thought of LXIII by expressing the cosmic ratio as a personal opinion.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 8:07 am

LXIV (D. 121) What the Ephesians deserve is to be hanged to the last man, every one of them, and leave the city to the boys, since they drove out their best man, Hermodorus, saying 'Let no one be the best among us; if he is, let him be so elsewhere and among others.' 

Nothing more is actually known of Hermodorus. It is natural to assume (as later authors do) that Heraclitus is referring to a contem- porary event. Strabo, Pliny, and the jurist Pomponius report that after his exile Hermodorus went to Rome to help the decemvirs com- pose (or interpret) the Twelve Tables, the fundamental document of early Roman law. Pliny even says there was a public statue dedicated to him in the forum. Although it may explain the statue, the story itself is not credible: the Twelve Tables were not published until 449 B.C., which is a generation too late for a contemporary of Heraclitus. But the legend shows that LXIV was well known in Rome; it is quoted in Latin by Cicero.

Hermodorus and Bias are the only two persons mentioned by Heraclitus with praise; although their destinies were different, their qualities must have been similar in his eyes. The shame of the Ephesians is just that they, unlike the men of Priene, were unable to profit from their most profitable citizen. The rare word oneistos 'best', which here occurs twice, is cognate with the verb oninemi 'to profit or benefit (someone)'; it must have been chosen to bring out the irrational character of the Ephesians' action. They are deliberately doing harm to themselves by depriving their city of its most valuable asset.220 And Heraclitus' formulation of this point is even more subtle: if the Ephesians applied their principle recursively ('let no one of us be the best'), they would end by expelling every citizen to the last man, and thus deliberately give themselves 'what they deserve'.

The motive which Heraclitus attributes to his fellow citizens is a paradigm of human folly, for the principle they appeal to — let no one among us be the one who excels — is a rejection of the cosmic proportion that balances one thing (fire, gold, everlasting glory) against everything else. The egalitarian hostility towards unique excel- lence is more than a political mistake: it ignores the role which unity plays in the structure of the world as in the safety of the city. In the polis this principle of intelligent unity (hen to sophon) is represented both by the 'shared' order of the law (in XXX, D. 114, and LXV, D. 44), and by the human capacity to grasp the common interest and enforce the requirements of justice. Heraclitus' political tastes were no doubt conservative, but that is not the issue here. What he depicts is the self-destructive action of a community that rejects the leader- ship of its ablest citizens.

This long sentence is structured by antithesis and implicit proportionality. The basic contrast between one man who has been driven out (despite his merits), and all who are left (and who, if they got what they deserve, would all hang) is reinforced by the suggestion that it is they who ought 'to leave the city'. The secondary contrast opposes the useful man to those whose action is self-destructive. Their uselessness is expressed by a familiar proportion in a new form: as citizens the grown men of Ephesus are even worse than boys!

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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Lyssa
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 8:12 am

LXV (D. 44) The people {demos) must fight for the law as for their city wall. 


LXVI (D. 33) It is law also to obey the counsel (boule) of one. 


These two references to the law (nomos) echo the thought of XXX (D. 114): the dependence of human laws on a 'divine one'. In CIV (D. 43) Heraclitus will compare violence or lawlessness (hybris) to a house on fire. In LXV the image of the defenders on the city wall defines the same threat, the need for law as a basis for civic life and the only protection of the weak against the strong. In emphasizing the rational necessity (chre) for the common people (demos) to pre- serve the law, Heraclitus appeals not to divine sanction or traditional obligations but to a recognition of their own vital interests.
We know nothing of the precise political situation in Ephesus, perhaps under moderate democracy established by the Persians immedi- ately after the disastrous Ionian revolt of 499—494 B.C.222 But we can understand the ideological background in terms of Solon's analysis of a political crisis in Athens about a century earlier:
Thus the public evil comes home to every man,
The gates of his courtyard will no longer hold it out,
It leaps over the high wall and finds him in every case,
Even if he flees inside, to hide in the nook of his chamber. These things does my heart bid me to teach the Athenians, How the greatest evils to the city are the gift of Lawlessness (Dysnomie);
While Lawfulness (Eunomie) makes everything orderly and right, And she frequently fetters the feet of those who are unjust. Lawfulness smoothes what is rough, puts a stop to excess (koros)
and makes dim the deed of violence (hybris).
It withers the flowers that bloom from disaster and folly (ate). It makes crooked judgments (dikai) straight, and humbles the work of arrogant pride.

And it puts an end to acts of civil strife, (fr. 3.26-37 Diehl)
Heraclitus must have approved of the political principles of Solon, his emphasis on the rule of law and his conception of social justice as a measure (metron) or balance between unequal parties. The conflict between the rich and the poor, of the sort that Solon confronted, is probably alluded to in Heraclitus' antithesis of 'satiety' or excess (koros) and 'need' (chresmosyne in CXX, D. 65) or 'hunger' (limos
in LXVII, D. 111).

Solon's image of the public disaster that leaps over the walls of a man's house to seek him out in the privacy of his bedroom illustrates perfectly (and probably influenced) Heraclitus' conception of the law which is 'common to all' and whose preservation is as vital as the city wall which protects the inhabitants from pillage and massacre.

Heraclitus goes beyond Solon in grounding this interest in law and civic concord upon a cosmic basis in 'the divine one'. And this reliance upon the one leads Heraclitus to emphasize the role of the outstand- ing individual in a way that is not theoretically articulated in Solon's political poetry, but exemplified in his career as statesman and law- giver. Heraclitus has, in effect, expanded Solon's political theory to include Solon's own practice of enlightened leadership, which is here articulated as a principle of universal unity. His reminder that it is also law 'to obey the counsel (boule) of one' is an echo of the 'wise one' of LIV (D. 41), where the term boule ('plan, advice') here is paralleled by the gnome ('insight, judgment') that controls the cos- mos. The most familiar of all the overtones of the phrase 'the boule of one' is 'the plan of Zeus' (Dios boule) announced in the proem to the Iliad, the plan and power of the supreme deity that dominates the entire epic.

Several features of LXVI (D. 33) call for comment. Boule here may signify (1) deliberation and (2) the council, as a constitutional body exercising some executive power, both in oligarchies and in democracies. Perhaps the thought is as follows. It is law to obey the Boule, the city council. But the role of the Boule is to deliberate, to make intelligent plans for the interests of the community. If such wise counsel {boule) is offered by a single man, it is no less the expression of what is common and lawful.

The final word henos 'of one' presents the grammatical ambiguity that is Heraclitus' stylistic signature. If this form is construed as masculine, the phrase means 'the advice of one man'; taken as neuter, it gives us 'the plan of one (principle)'. The political application pre- supposes the former reading, the cosmic allusion the latter. The sen- tence can thus be read as an elliptical resume of Heraclitus' political theory: law is what is common (XXX, LXV); what is common is thinking (XXXI); sound thinking is wisdom (XXXII); wisdom is the one (CXVIII) and the recognition of the cosmic plan (LIV). Hence it is law to follow this unified plan, even when it is represented by the wisdom of a single man.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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reasonvemotion

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 11:38 am

Quote :
The confusion here is the wowman cannot acknowledge I sound masculine-to-her, that she thinks its Satyr speaking through me. Instead of dealing with me straight on, the strong and brave wowman pretends to be a frail victim of pranks and makes excuses to hide from me. How easy it is to use Satyr as her punching bag, and she never has to face me - the real Barbaric, not Satyr. 

I excuse this simpleton for her weakness.

Yes sir!  Three bags full........ of it.
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 7:54 pm

reasonvemotion wrote:
 No, you don't have the ability to \"made me" anything. wrote:
Such spunk.
The only problem here is deception. wrote:
And this "problem is all yours, my sweet. You see me behind everyone.

No decpetion in this palce, my dear, but please never believe me.
You choose to takeover \"Lyssa" on her behalf, when you think you can more adequately "deal" with me or others on other Forums, under the guise of Lyssa. wrote:
It is true, "dealing" with you and your kind, is a chore. This is me dealing with you, my sweet, in the way you provide for me.
See, you lead, I sort of follow your lead, letting you take me where you will.

I will admit that your reasoning has challenged me.
All things considered you are one smart dame.
For example, a flurry of PMs, S to L, \"Let me respond to that bitch, I will deal with her", and L to S, "would you, thank you". wrote:
Your narrative is exquisite. I would not change a line.
Please, do proceed.
Tell me more about how you imagine me "dealing" with you and others.
Isn't that so? LOL. wrote:
A premature "LOL", but appropriate, given the circumstances.
A bit of nervous release, in that child-like manner of the "texting" modern lingo.

It is so, and more.
Tell me more.
That is the confusion here. wrote:
No doubt.
Lyssa is easily recognised, just look for the quotation marks. wrote:
And how wonderfully you see her behind her feminine admiration.

The reality would be shocking, perhaps, to one such as you.
This is where the integrity is missing from this Forum, too much hidden. Philosophy is about truth. wrote:

Truth, my dear, is a reference to an opinion. One's honest opinion is share only with those he trusts, and is confident will comprehend him.

The dog is man's best friend, but no man would share any "truth" with it beyond what this animal can comprehend and tolerate.

Here's some advice. Read a few books on Socrates, as a caricature of Plato.
Why did Socrates have a change of heart, after returning back to Athens?
Is Socrates completely honest, or does he display a coyness, a reluctance to be direct, and totally honest?

Dear woman, philosophy is about man in relation to the world, not man and how he copes with other men or how he chooses to share his insights with them.

In this world - your world - being honest can land you in jail, or can jeopardize your livelihood, your family.

Intimacy is a myth, if it is taken as another absolute. One shares with others as much as he determines to be prudent or in his interests to share.  
One does not spread his legs, like a whore, sharing himself with one and all.
You see, woman, some truths are dangerous.
One shares with friends, with those of his own kind. he does not give his mind away and he does not give his trust to anyone, no more than he gives his love and friendship and loyalty.

In this forum faces are not hidden...at least not by the upper echelon, the Homoioi and the Prytanes...and when ti is discovered amongst the other groups it is nipped at the bud.
I did play on other forums, but only because I was locked out and had concluded that nothing more was to be gained from participating in dialogue with sub-human, manimals, and degenerate sheeple.

But you do not believe me....and so?
So what?
Why would it matter to me, what you believe or do not believe, given the level of intellect you've displayed so far?

I slopped around in the mud with the swine, do you think a human judges himself by how he behaves when around animals?
If he lowers himself to their level, just for play, or to achive a goal, does he lose his integrity?  

I don't think you fully comrpehend what is being said, and if you did, I suspect that you would be dismayed.
For me, and many others, human being is not a term we just give to anybody.
Regarding Heraclitus. Some choose to parrot another's translation or perception of H. Some have strong opinions and feel the need to point the finger, ridicule others for their disagreements or inability to \"see". I am naïve and usually rely on intuition, which I am doing with Heraclitus. wrote:
You are doing fine, sweetie.
Your intuition, that female weapon of choice, is serving you well.
Look at how wonderfully you've intuited things thus far.
I make errors, but Heraclitus does not provide straightforward answers, he forces people to interpret them. His truths come to the attentive reader as discoveries resulting from the solution of a puzzle. He wanted each man to discover \"him" (H) for himself. That takes time. wrote:
No, sweets, he, like Nietzsche, wishes to weed out the rif-raf; he's talking over your head....not to you, over, beyond, you.
That is why I persist in pursuing my own interpretation, albeit clumsy and simplistic. I am strong and brave. wrote:
Really?
We'll see.

Begin by risking a possibility: what if I've never used Lyssa's moniker on this forum and only did so a few times on ILP?
What if Lyssa is a female far above the average in intelligence and nobility?
\"You could not discover the limits of soul, even if you travelled by every path in order to do so; such is the depth of its meaning". H. How beautiful is that. wrote:
Why is it beautiful to you?







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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyFri Jun 14, 2013 8:38 pm

I take no offense from your responses, as they are predictable.

I fully comprehend everything that is said and what I comprehend is that my opinions/presence are no longer necessary.

As you wish.
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySat Jun 15, 2013 9:53 am

Quote :
reasonvemotion
Quote :
The confusion here is the wowman cannot acknowledge I sound masculine-to-her, that she thinks its Satyr speaking through me. Instead of dealing with me straight on, the strong and brave wowman pretends to be a frail victim of pranks and makes excuses to hide from me. How easy it is to use Satyr as her punching bag, and she never has to face me - the real Barbaric, not Satyr. 

I excuse this simpleton for her weakness.

Yes sir!  Three bags full........ of it.


This is so childish.

You speak of shame and ridicule for expressing yourself here on your own terms, yet this thread digressed when you called me a nobody for frankly stating that I had not read Jung except through passages that came my way. Your "intuition" was immediately to Shame me, and Expose me as someone with no substance the minute you found some slight thing contradictory.
I initiated a personal communication with you to reach out and clarify, I am who I am, and you immediately distrusted and Shamed me for that too, as if! I wanted something from you!
I have already mentioned on this board, I am not here to flaunt my individuality or promote myself or my views whatever they be, or for self-exhibition to impress or attract someone - I'm here to Know Myself, and I don't give any if the manner in which I choose to know myself helps or bores or offends or annoys someone; that's their problem - citations are all I have time for. Heidegger says, one part of Thinking is rooted in Thanking, and owing thanks to so many thinkers, is Part of how I choose to think; I was like this even before I read heidegger. For you to then Shame me "hiding behind quotes" as you insinuated... now how original and brilliant an accusation can it be when I'm openly saying it??

Wowman, never have I hid behind another.
The instinct to Shame another is Yours and Yours Only.
From the start, its been You trying to shame others, just waiting for a chance to pounce and expose someone for their behaviour. This aspect of you is not just on this forum, but on PN as well.
Understandably your personaly history with men and people who have cheated you colours your interactivity, but to become a slave of your history and see conspiracy theories everywhere, people wanting to trick you, is what makes you a Moron. A slavish moron.

A strong and brave woman reserves the strength to admit she is wrong when she knows she is. If you still want to insist Satyr speaks through my name, after all that's been said, that's your cowardice. You are so weak and full of false pride, you cannot admit you and your intuitions were wrong.
You owe Satyr an apology, wowman.
Do it.
A woman of substance would.

A strong and brave woman stands up to what she believes, be it even the "mature view of God", and does not try to Shame 'Shame and Ridicule' in a philosophy forum, that is a testing ground to challenge another through mockery, reason, ridicule, rhetoric, offence, intrusion, humour, subterfuge, whatever mechanism comes one's way.
This place is not a social club where Offence immediately means one is not "likeable", one's "company is not wanted here", etc. etc.  Imagine reducing arguments to "I am liked/I am not liked" !!! You wouldn't know Shallowness if it stared in your face, wowman! and you speak of shallowness? This victim mentality and pretentiousness of being "offended" is what is really ridiculous when Knowledge if authentic MUST - MUST come to life and death. Among the Germanics, the rune for Knowledge 'K' was associated with Wounding, burns, blisters, fire. To stiffle this MUST as barbaric and "offensive" and brutish is YOUR trying to Shame what is a healthy disposition.

Let me also say, no doubt you suffered the aggression of some real primitive cluts and his animaline authority
once before in your life and never want to be with such a man again, and its healthy to be Paranoid when your trust has been abused now and then, but to see all Barbarism as the same "same as he was", and to see people as potential tricksters out to get you, forever the frail victim, such vanity!, is what makes and will continue to make you a Moron, in the literal sense *dull*, stagnant, death-like immobility. When your attraction has been so transparent and forthcoming here, be strong and brave, and stop hiding in these fearful conspiracy webs and excuses you weave to entomb yourself.

This ends here and I will not repeat myself or waste anymore time on this again.

I am NOT Satyr;
if you find any comments made under my name barbaric and violent, you are facing me, a woman, NOT Satyr.
There are a Few Goodmen out there; can You handle the truth?

Are we clear? Are we Clearrrr???

Don't make me really play pranks on you.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*


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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySat Jun 15, 2013 9:56 am

LXVII (D. 110-11) It is not better for human beings to get all they want. It is disease that has made health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.

These two sentences provide the point of connection between what has been called Heraclitus' 'ethics', that is to say his view of human folly and wisdom, and the doctrine of opposites which is generally recognized as his central thought. I shall first argue that the two sentences are to be read together.

There is a familiar rhetorical device in early Greek poetry and prose, strangely dubbed a 'Priamel', which is illustrated in a poem of Sappho that begins 'some say a troop of cavalry is the fairest thing, some say foot-soldiers, others a fleet of ships . . . but I say it is what- ever one loves' (fr. 16 Lobel-Page). One of the best known examples of this scheme is an elegiac couplet cited by Aristotle as the Delian inscription:

The fairest is what is most just, the best of all is health;
But the sweetest thing of all is to obtain what one loves (erai). 

Aristotle tells us these verses were inscribed in the propylaeum to the shrine of Leto in Delos; they thus formed a kind of Ionian sister to the inscription 'Know thyself at the entrance to Apollo's temple in Delphi. The same couplet is preserved, almost in the same words, in the verses of Theognis (255f.). A prose version of the second verse is also found among the sayings ascribed to Thales: 'The sweetest thing is to obtain what you desire (epithymeis).^'1 Whether Heraclitus knew this sentiment as a saying of Thales or, more likely, as an inscription at Delos, the first sentence of LXVII seems intended pre- cisely as a denial of this familiar adage: 'It is not better for men to get whatever they want.' Now the traditional formula contains the word 'sweetest' (hediston or, in Theognis, terpnotaton). And this thought is continued in Heraclitus' second sentence: 'It is disease that has made health sweet and good.' Hence it is only when the two sen- tences are taken as a unit that their polemical reference to the con- ventional word of wisdom is fully expressed.

The three pairs of opposites, each consisting of one positive term (health, satiety, rest) and one negative (disease, hunger, weariness), are thus introduced in a denial that what is good (or 'better') for human beings is getting what they want. The three pairs illustrate a common pattern of strong contrast between positive and negative terms, with some kind of causal dependency of the former on the latter. In each case it is opposition that is obvious, while reflection is required to perceive the causal link that explains why it is not better for human beings to get everything they desire.

In rejecting the traditional aphorism Heraclitus points to a unity which conventional wisdom ignores. What passes for wisdom is a form of folly deeply grounded in the structure of desire itself. The negative experiences of disease, weariness, and hunger are necessary conditions for the enjoyment of health, rest, and satiety. The first pair of contraries differs from the other two in that disease is not a physical pre-condition for health in the way that exertion and hunger are directly required for resting and satisfying one's appetite. But it is only the contrast with sickness that permits us to recognize health as something 'sweet and good'. Thus it would not be better, it would not even be good, for human beings to get all they want. The struc- ture of desire is irrational in that it is potentially self-destructive; if we got everything we desired, nothing would be desirable. Just as the wish for an end to strife would, if fulfilled, destroy the cosmic order that depends upon opposition (LXXXI, D. A22), so the wish that all human desires be satisfied would, if fulfilled, destroy the order of human life by eliminating desire and depriving us of our conception of what is good and precious.

According to the insight of LXVII human desire is inevitably imprisoned within the structure of opposition. The opposites appear as limitations on the human condition, natural deficiencies in the human point of view. (Hence the opening word is anthropois: [font=Times]'for human beings'.) From this irrationality there is no escape except through wisdom: dominating what is unreasonable by comprehending it in a larger unity. And the first step is to recognize the positive con- tribution made by the negative term in the link that unites them. For then these oppositions can be seen for what they are, as a mirror of the universal pattern manifest in the alternate kindling and quenching of cosmic fire. So the unity in opposition is not only the constitutive feature of our mode of being as human animals, where need and gratification, hope and fear, joy and grief are bound together. A simi- lar structure will recur at other levels: to link (by antithesis) human experience to that of different animals (LXX—LXXII), to link the fate of mortals to that of immortals (XCII, D. 62), and to link cosmic powers to one another (as in the unity of night and day, XIX, D. 57).

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySat Jun 15, 2013 10:03 am

LXVIII (D. 102) Scholia to Iliad: [Heraclitus says that for god all things are fair and good and just, but men have taken some things as unjust, others as just.]

As Bywater recognized, and Wilamowitz and others have pointed out since, the wording here is that of some anonymous Homeric com- mentator, perhaps a Stoic, and we cannot know how well it reflects what Heraclitus said.229 The second clause can be seen as an extension of the thought of LXVII to the moral distinctions between just and unjust, right and wrong. Heraclitus cannot have meant, as the scholiast's wording might suggest, that the distinction is man-made in the sense of being arbitrary or groundless. This is excluded by the doc- trine of XXX (D. 114) that human laws and moral codes (nomoi) are the expression of cosmic order. The authentically Heraclitean thought (known from LXIX, and imperfectly expressed in the present text) is that men cannot define justice except by specifying its violation: the city determines what is just by making laws that prohibit and punish actions recognized as unjust. The conceptual point is a general one. As Socrates (or Plato) said, the knowledge of opposites is one and the same. But justice is a peculiarly 'negative virtue' in that instances of injustice are more striking.

Less clear is the statement that such moral distinctions are can- celled or non-existent from the divine point of view. It is difficult to extract from this a thought that is uncontaminated by Platonic or Stoic conceptions of providence and universal harmony. But we do know that Heraclitus conceived of a hidden fitting-together of oppo- sites in which conflict and justice would coincide (LXXVIII— LXXXII). It is only in this perspective that he could have asserted that 'for god all things are fair and good and just'.

It is not that the human distinctions cease to have validity — for the only validity they ever had was validity for men. The distinction between rest and weariness will not disappear from the point of view of divine wisdom; wisdom will recognize this distinction for what it is: an essential feature of the human condition.230 And the same must be true for the distinction between right and wrong. Its validity for human society is not in question. But this antithesis, like any other, is con- tained within a total order that is itself designated as just — and then the term 'just' is used in such a way that nothing can actually be unjust. Notice that there is still some meaning attached to the term 'unjust' at the level of cosmic order, although here the term has no true application. The violation of justice in this sense would have to be, per impossibile, the violation of the world order, as in the contrary- to-fact hypothesis of the sun diverging from his ordained path. Even for a god this would not be just and fair and good!

We must separate two questions that are confounded in the word- ing of LXVIII: (1) the general question whether it is valid and neces- sary for men in society to distinguish between right and wrong, to have some moral or legal code, and (2) the specific question whether in any given society (sixth-century Ephesus, or twentieth-century America) this distinction is correctly drawn. Heraclitus' doctrine of opposites is properly concerned only with the former question: all human laws are nourished by the divine (XXX, D. 114). But from a recognition that some established and generally respected system of nomos or 'law' is required for any society to survive, it is possible to argue that whatever distinctions are in fact recognized ought to be respected. This conservative reasoning (which is roughly that of Protagoras and Herodotus, and later of Hobbes) may have tempted Heraclitus. But it is not clear that he yielded to it in his defense of nomos. In questions of religious cult and belief he was anything but a conservative.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySat Jun 15, 2013 10:06 am

LXIX (D. 23) If it were not for these things, they would not have known the
name of Justice (Dike).


'They' here are human beings generally and Greeks in particular (since the fragment plays upon the sense of dike in Greek). These things' probably refer to acts of injustice (adikia), violations of the law, with their resulting penalties and punishment.231 Heraclitus seems to be alluding to the old, but not obsolete use of dike for the decision or 'indication' of a judge.232 The dike may be either (1) the decision itself, characterized as 'straight' or 'crooked' if the judge is thought to have 'pointed' in the right direction or deviated from the true course of judgment, or (2) the punishment or compensation decided upon, as in the phrase didonai diken 'to pay the penalty', literally 'to give what was indicated (as compensation)'.

And dike also comes to be used (3) for the lawsuit or the trial itself. Thus the word properly designates 'justice' as the principle for settling legal disputes, the prin- ciple personified by Hesiod as daughter of Zeus, who watches over lawsuits and reports to her father when the ruling princes 'judge crooked sentences (dikas)' (Works and Days 256—64; cf. 219—24). Although the term also comes to mean lawful conduct and the virtue of justice, the original connections with lawcourts and punishment remain prominent. So when Dike is invoked as guarantor of the sun's course in XLIV (D. 94), the point is that the sun would be found out and punished if he were to transgress his lawful measures.

The thought of LXIX seems then to be the conceptual dependence of justice upon the existence of injustice and legal disputes. But the thought is expressed not in terms of concepts but in terms of the name by which Justice is known. If there were no judgments and penalties, men could not know or understand the word dike that denotes them. But then they would not know the name of Justice.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySat Jun 15, 2013 10:10 am

LXX (D. 61) The sea is the purest and foulest water: for fishes drinkable and life-sustaining; for men undrinkable and deadly.

LXXI (D. 9) Aristotle: [As Heraclitus says, 'Asses prefer garbage (syrmata,
sweepings? chaff?) to gold.']

LXXII (D. 13 and 37) Clement and Columella: [Heraclitus says that 'swine delight in mire rather than clean water'; chickens bathe in dust.]


These three fragments, only the first of which is preserved in Herac- litus' own words, contrast the needs or preferences of mankind with those of another species: fishes, donkeys, pigs, perhaps also chickens and cows. The relationship between opposites here thus differs from that in LXVII—LXIX, where the terms (health-sickness, justice- injustice, and the like) were both defined within the framework of human experience. Here the human point of view is restricted to one member of an opposing pair. (The reference to men is explicit in LXX, implicit in the other two.)

We may safely reject the moralizing interpretation of LXXI and LXXII, which construes the inter-species comparison as a rhetorical device for assimilating the preferences of most men to the taste of asses and pigs.234 This moral judgment is expressed in XCVII (D. 29), where two forms of human life are contrasted, one of which is com- pared to that of beasts. But the striking element in LXXI and LXXII is precisely the concrete description of animal behavior. There is an old and fairly constant tradition which utilizes such descriptions to make a point about inter-species relativism. The most elaborate state- ment is that which Plato puts in the mouth of Protagoras.

I know many things which are unprofitable to human beings, both food and drink and medicine and much more, and others which are profitable. And some which are neither profitable nor unprofitable to human beings, but to horses; and some to oxen only; others to dogs. But some are good for none of these, but for trees. And some are good for the roots of trees, but bad for the buds, like manure
. . . Thus olive oil is very bad for all plants and quite inimical to the hair of all animals except man, but it is an aid to human hair and to the whole body. So complex and varied is the good, that even in this case what is good for the external use of the human body is quite bad for internal use. And hence all doctors forbid sick persons to take olive oil in their food, except in very slight quantities. (Protagoras 334A—C)

This is a Platonic development of the thought expressed in LXX. There are echoes both in an early and in a late treatise of the Hippo- cratic Corpus.235 Finally, a sceptic like Sextus will include both the Heraclitean examples of sea water (LXX) and pigs bathing in the mire (LXXII) and Plato's point about olive oil among the standard argu- ments for suspending judgment. The argument is designed to show that 'the same objects do not produce the same impressions (phan- tasiai) because of the difference between animals'.236 Sextus' point is that 'we can say how the object is regarded by us, but not how it is in nature', since we cannot sit in judgment between our own im- pressions and those of the other animals (1.59). Thus Sextus finds the same thought in LXXII as in LXX. And this inter-species comparison is also the point of LXXI according to Aristotle, our only source in this case: The pleasure of a horse and a dog is different from that of a man.'

I assume, then, that we may treat LXX—LXXII as a group, though it is only in the first instance that we have the assurance of an auth- entic text.
The thought of LXX is built upon an observation so familiar as to escape ordinary notice. Despite the necessity for human life of an adequate supply of water, the most conspicuous form of water for those who inhabit a coastal town, namely the sea, is not only useless for this purpose but actually dangerous. For other forms of life, how- ever, the sea is not a threat but a home; for them, sea water is truly water, the element of life.

Thus we are both right and wrong to perceive the sea as water. For it is water in physical or cosmic terms. (Cf. XXXVIII—XXXIX, D. 31.) But it cannot function as water for the vital needs of men. This is a limitation on human nature, however, not a defect of the sea. Its virtue as water is manifest in the life of fishes.

This thought is articulated by three pairs of contrasting adjectives, each with its own resonance. The physiological contrast between man and fish is mentioned in second place, as comment on the first pair of terms, more suggestive and more obscure: the sea is 'water, purest and foulest'. The meaning of this initial opposition cannot be restricted to the physiological contrast that follows: the first pair of opposites is not subordinated to the contrast between men and fishes. There is an exclusively human dimension in which the sea is both pure and foul. It serves in certain rites of purification as the universal cleanser (as in Iliad I.314f.); but it is defiled or polluted (miaros) by all the garbage of harbor and ships, by excrement and carcasses of man and beast. This contrast (and union) of the clean and the foul, the pure and the polluted, is recalled in the reference to swine in LXXII, for whom mire is better than clean (katharos) water, and in the compari- son of purification by blood to washing with mud in CXVII (D. 5).

The contrast between men and fish is expressed in the third pair of adjectives as an opposition between life and death: the sea is both preserver (soterion) and destroyer (olethrion). Beyond the basic opposition of drinkable-undrinkable, Heraclitus thus hints at a broader antithesis: the sea, so necessary for the life of fish, is a constant threat and often a tomb for men who sail upon it.

There were probably similar overtones in the original text of LXXI and LXXII. Thus the pure-impure contrast is alluded to in LXXII; in LXXI the mention of gold may have been intended to invoke its sym- bolic value (cf. VIII, D. 22 and XL, D. 90); just as the word for 'gar- bage' or 'sweepings' (syrmata) may be echoed in the description of the cosmos as a heap of sweepings (sarma) in CXXV (D. 124). With- out a full and literal text, however, it would be idle to pursue such hints.

In LXXI and LXXII the contrast is a matter of natural preference or pleasure (pigs in mud, asses in garbage or the like), whereas in LXX it is a question of life and death. But in all three cases we have the opposition between a negative and a positive term: an object of pursuit (haireton) and one of avoidance (pheukton). And the point in each case is that what has negative value for human beings (sea water, mud, garbage) is a positive term of desire, delight, or vitality for another kind of creature. There is surely something here about the underlying unity of opposites, but the thought is not so vague, naive, or confused as it is often made to appear.

There is no reason to make Heraclitus conclude that life and death are the same because the sea can be source of both, or that delight and disgust are identical because both reactions might be provoked by the same object in dif- ferent subjects. The trivial reading of Heraclitus' doctrine here is that there is no accounting for tastes. The fallacious reading is that because one man's meat is another man's poison there is no difference between meat and poison. The confused reading is that all things are inherently contradictory.239 If we wish to ascribe an intelligent doctrine to Heraclitus in some coherent connection with LXVII—LXIX, these texts provide the basis for a valid generalization: in an opposed pair the negative term, as defined by human needs and desires, is never wholly negative. Just as in LXVII—LXIX a term like hunger was noted as a necessary condition or point of contrast for the posi- tive experience of satiety, so here the negative term for human beings is revealed as a positive term for another form of life.

It is this positive interpretation of the principle of negativity that has made the thought of Heraclitus so congenial to Hegel and his followers. For there is indeed something like an anticipation of Hegelian dialectic in Heraclitus' treatment of the opposites. In the examples just considered, this dialectic of opposites is focussed on the partiality of the human perspective. (See the great summary statement in CXXIV, D. 10: 'graspings: wholes and not wholes'.) It is not that we are mistaken in preferring sweet drinking water and clean baths, any more than we are wrong to prefer health to sickness and satiety to hunger. But the doctrine of opposites is, among other things, an attempt to attain a larger vision by recognizing the life-enhancing function of the negative term, and hence comprehending the positive value of the antithesis itself.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySat Jun 15, 2013 10:11 am

LXXIII (D. 58) Doctors who cut and burn [and torture their patients in every way] complain that they do not receive the reward they deserve [from the patients], acting as they do.

Despite the textual uncertainty, this sentence clearly points to the positive or beneficial aspects of something generally perceived as negative and destructive. In a phrase that seems to have become pro- verbial, Heraclitus refers to the paradoxical harm-for-the-sake-of- benefit exemplified in the fearsome medical practice of cutting and cautery: temnein kai kaiein, 'the twin horrors of pre-anaesthetic sur- gery'.241 The primary point is that doctors do (or at least seek to do)
good to their patients by inflicting what is in an obvious sense grave damage or harm. Such suffering, normally regarded as an evil to be avoided (pheukton), is accepted by sick men as a benefit (haireton). Both positive and negative terms are here defined by reference to human needs and experience, as in LXVII—LXIX. But the 'unity of opposites' (that is, the positive value of the negative term) is seen from a new point of view. There is an implicit contrast between what is beneficial for the healthy man and what is beneficial for the sick, and hence a structural parallel to the inter-species comparisons of LXX-LXXII.

What is perplexing, and obscured by textual difficulties, is Heraclitus' reference to the doctors' reward. On one reading, doctors demand a fee when in fact they deserve nothing. This version ascribes the negative evaluation of surgery to Heraclitus himself, which is un- likely on philosophical grounds. The reading accepted here makes the doctors complain that they do not get the fee they deserve. This is better attested in the tradition (as Kirk has shown), and gives an excellent sense. The patients, suffering the torments of the damned at the hands of their 'benefactors', are unwilling to pay the exorbitant fee requested. The doctors are unsatisfied with what they get, and insist upon the high value of their services. This 'strife' between doc- tors and patients neatly reflects the opposition between harm and benefit inherent in such cures.

The worst puzzle is the last phrase in the Greek text: ta agatha kai tas nosous 'the good [consequences] and the diseases'. I follow Kirk in regarding this as a corrupt gloss.242 Ending LXXIII with the emphatic phrase 'acting as they do' (tauta ergazomenoi) leaves it suspended between the neutral comment 'they claim high fees for what they do' and the malicious one: 'they have the cheek to claim such fees for torturing their patients!'.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyMon Jun 17, 2013 11:19 am

LXXIV (D. 59) The path of the carding wheels is straight and crooked.

This text of LXXIV is in doubt, and its interpretation has been the subject of controversy quite out of proportion to the philosophical issues at stake.

The first problem is to identify the instrument Heraclitus is refer- ring to, and to see in what sense its path is both straight and crooked (or twisted, skolie). The word for the instrument or for its user, trans- lated here as 'carding wheels', seems to be corrupt in the manuscripts and has been emended in two or three different ways.

Such textual diversity shows how uncertain any interpretation must be. I follow Marcovich in assuming some reference here to a circular carding instrument set with thorns or spikes, for Herodotus tells us that such an instrument was used by Croesus for inflicting a painful death.244 Since the torture instrument is referred to by the name from carding (knaphos), it must have been related to some equipment used in the operation by which hairs of raw wool, after an initial washing, are combed, disentangled, and regularized so that they are ready for spinning into thread. Carding proper (knaptein) in the sense assumed here is a more elaborate alternative to the process of combing the wool by hand (xainein).

The ancient sources speak of thorns, spines or spikes (akanthai) set in a circular roller (gnaphos or knaphos); and the passage in Herodotus suggests an instrument large and strong enough for a man to be broken on, as on the rack. We do not know the form of the ancient instrument. I shall describe instead a modern instrument which serves the same purpose and illustrates Heraclitus' point rather vividly. This is a machine now used for carding in Andritsaina, a mountain village of the western Peloponnese. Today its frame is made of steel and it is driven by electricity; but perhaps the principle is simple enough to reproduce the general practice of antiquity. The striking feature of this contemporary carding machine is that it consists of a fixed half-drum, roughly semicircular in shape, around which are set a number of movable rollers, of two alternating sizes, each of which is furnished with metal spikes or teeth. (Note that Marcovich's text restores gnaphon in the plural for paleographical reasons; but the plural form requires some explanation.) The rough wool is fed into the machine at one end of the drum and, as the rollers turn, it passes under a large roller and then over a small one, and then again under the next large one, and so on over and under the wheels until it emerges fully combed at the other end of the drum. There is a direct, intuitive sense in which the path of the wool through this machine is both straight and crooked: its mean course around the drum is a smooth curve, like a semi-circle, but its actual path is continually up and down, over and under the successive rollers, in a serpentine or zig-zag movement.

It would be foolish to claim that this modern machine is a replica of the instrument Heraclitus had in mind. But his carding wheels might have worked in this way, turned by hand, perhaps, or by water power like a mill. I cannot imagine a simpler machine that would both fit the ancient texts and illustrate Heraclitus' point. In any case, our machine requires no fancy screw or cochlias (as Hippolytus assumes in his citation of LXXIV, probably on the basis of some more sophisticated device for pressing cloth rather than carding). All that is needed is a source of rotary motion, as in a mill for grinding grain. Whether driven by water power or by hand, it would not require much adjustment to transform this equipment into a fearful instrument of torture — though the man would of course be dragged over the rollers and not, like the wool, between them.

Assuming some such literal sense for LXXIV, what is its philo- sophic point? The text is cited by Hippolytus following LXXIII (D. 58) which (on his interpretation) shows that good and evil or medical treatment and disease come to the same thing; and he next cites CIII (D. 60): 'The way up and down, one and the same.' The term hodos, 'way' or 'path', occurs both in LXXIV and in CIII.

Modern interpreters have taken this as one more example of how 'what are conventionally counted as irreconcilable opposites are found to inhere at one and the same moment in the same activity', or in the same object.248 Such an attribution of contrary predicates to the same subject led some to suppose that Heraclitus had, in effect, intended to deny the principle of contradiction.

Strictly speaking, he cannot have done so, since the principle itself was not formulated before the poem of Parmenides, and then only indirectly; the first explicit formulation (in terms of the incompatibility of contraries) is in Plato's Republic. But that is not the point in any case. Of course it is no contradiction to assert that the path of wool through the carding machine (whatever its exact construction) is straight in one respect but crooked in another. But that is also not a very interesting proof that these opposites are 'one and the same'. What it shows is that they are essentially connected — within the structure of a unified, purposeful activity. In my model, the straightening of the fibres is ingeniously effected by a circuitous course of the machine. (And this will be true for any carding process that justifies the description as 'straight and crooked'.) In this perspective, the unity of the opposites is their necessary co-presence as cause and effect within a single intelligent activity. And this process is motivated by the con- trast between the initially twisted and finally straight condition of the fibres.

So interpreted, the figure of the carding instrument points to a dif- ferent aspect of the doctrine of opposites, illustrated by the drawn bow in LXXVIII (D. 51): the functional unity of opposing tendencies within a purposeful human activity. But the occurrence here of the word 'path' (hodos), echoed in CIII (D. 60) for the 'way up and down', may also point to a larger unity of opposites within the pro- cess of cosmic change.

In this generalized version of the doctrine illustrated by the archer's bow and the process of carding, the positive-negative contrast seems to be lost from view. In fact, it will be represented in LXXVIII by
the pairing of the bow and the lyre, as here by the contrast between twisted and straightened wool. Furthermore the positive-negative opposition is directly preserved by the connotations of the terms 'straight' (euthus, Ionic ithus) and 'crooked' (skolios). We have seen these as opposed characterizations of dike, the judgment rendered by a prince or law court.

But dike suggests punishment, and that idea may be in the background here if Heraclitus was familiar with the carding wheel as an instrument of torture used by his Lydian neighbors, the former rulers of Ephesus. At the most allusive but also most meaningful level, this brief text can be understood as a comment on the order of nature and the course of human life. Irrational, cruel, and needlessly destructive as it often appears, this 'twisted' course of events is pilotted according to a wise pattern that is — like the course of the elements and the seasonal variations in the sun's path — ulti- mately to be seen as 'straight' and just.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 Empty
PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyMon Jun 17, 2013 11:20 am

LXXV (D. 8 )Aristotle: [Heraclitus says 'the counter-thrust brings together', and from tones at variance comes the finest attunement (harmonia), and 'all things come to pass through conflict'.]

There is now general agreement that (as Bywater had already sup- posed) this text is a reminiscence rather than a direct quotation. But Aristotle's memory was a remarkable one, and the last clause ('all things come to pass according to strife') is a literal, though partial, citation of LXXXII (D. 80).

Similarly the first clause, though not elsewhere attested, seems to be a faithful reflection of something in Heraclitus' text, as the presence of the Ionic word antixoun indicates. (So rightly Kirk, p. 220.) It is only the second clause, 'from notes at variance (i.e. differing and quarreling, diapheronton) comes the finest harmonia9, whose accuracy is subject to doubt. Recent authors, beginning with Gigon, have assumed that this is a paraphrase of LXXVIII (D. 51); and Marcovich (p. 124) has plausibly suggested that Aristotle was influenced here by the memory of a Platonic phrase, offered (at Symposium 187A) as an exegesis of LXXVIII: 'from high and low notes that were previously at variance . . . when they later come to an agreement, a harmonia is produced'.

That leaves us with the initial antithesis, antixoun sympheron, as a possible quotation not otherwise preserved. My rendering suggests the literal image: pressure in the opposite direction has the paradoxical effect of bringing things together, as in the case of the bow, where the movement of the hands apart brings the two ends of the bow closer to one another. This thought recurs in the pairing of 'conver- gent, divergent' (sympheromenon diapheromenon) in CXXIV (D. 10). But the two terms also have a figurative sense: 'the hindrance is a benefit', 'opposition is profitable'. This gives an explicit statement of the thought implicit in LXVII—LXXIV: in the perspective of wisdom, the negative term will always have a positive value.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 Empty
PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyMon Jun 17, 2013 11:21 am

LXXVI (D. 11) All beasts are driven by blows.
LXXVII (D. 125) Theophrastus: [As Heraclitus says, even the potion separates unless it is stirred.]

Theophrastus: [As Heraclitus says, even the potion separates These two texts emphasize the beneficial role of motion and compul- sion, in overcoming the natural tendency of a mixed drink to separate and of cattle or flocks to stand still or to wander off in the wrong direction. The unity and stability of the mixture depends on its being disturbed and agitated; the safety of the herds is preserved and their appetites satisfied, as it were against their will. Compare LII (D. 84A): 'it rests by changing'.

Beyond this first level of meaning we may recognize 'signals' (semata) of a deeper view. The violence illustrated in LXXVI and LXXVII probably alludes to the guidance by which the general order of things is maintained.

The commentators have noted that the word plege for the herdsman's blow invokes an old poetic theme 'the stroke of Zeus', which applies literally to the thunderbolt and figuratively to the power and decisive action of Zeus in human affairs. The application to human life is indicated by the term herpeta 'creeping things' for animals or beasts, in another Homeric echo of the phrase for human beings, most miserable 'of all the things that breathe and creep upon the earth'.252 In the image it is the cattle on their way to pasture, in the figurative allusion it is ourselves that receive the herds- man's stroke.

There is probably another hyponoia, implied in the stirring move- ment by which the unity of the potion is preserved in LXXVII. This may serve as an image for the celestial rotation of sun and stars by which cosmic order is maintained, and which is itself the residue of a primordial vortex o r whirlpool (dine) from which this order was generated.

The rotary motion of the heavens, which plays a central part in the cosmology of Anaxagoras, was later satirized by Aris- tophanes in his description of Whirl (Dinos) as driving out Zeus and stealing his throne (Clouds 380f.; cf. 828). It must have figured conspicuously in the system of turning wheels (kykloi) that composed the original cosmos of Anaximander; and it will be such a motion that Xenophanes has in mind when he speaks of his greatest god as 'effortlessly shaking all things by the intention of his mind' (fr. 25). So the motion of the drink whose name means 'stirring' or 'churning' (kykeon, from the verb kykao), and whose consistency depends upon the continuation of this motion, is an apt figure for the cosmic rotation.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 Empty
PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyWed Jun 19, 2013 8:51 am

LXXVIII (D. 51) They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself:
an attunement (or 'fitting together', harmonie) turning back , like that of the bow and the lyre.

The philosophical interpretation of LXXVIII has been obstructed by needless controversy over three textual and philological problems, which must be briefly dealt with before the content can be discussed.

(1) The manuscripts of Hippolytus have the reading homologeein, a trivial miswriting of homologeei: 'it (that is, the universal arrange- ment or any particular instance of it, speaking as a logos) agrees with itself'.254 Zeller, insensitive to the imagery and flexibility of Heraclitus' language, proposed that we 'correct' this admirable text on the basis of no paleographical evidence whatsoever, in order to conform with a free paraphrase in Plato's Symposium 187A, in the speech of Eryximachus quoted above, where instead of homologeein Plato writes sympheresthai, obviously on the basis of the sympheromenon-diapheromenon contrast in CXXIV (D. 10: 'con- vergent divergent'). It is one of the strangest phenomena in Herac- litean scholarship that this indefensible alteration of an unexceptional text transmitted by our most reliable ancient source — an alteration based upon nothing more than an inexact quotation in an after-dinner speech — has been accepted by a whole generation of recent editors from Gigon and Walzer to Marcovich. But in thus 'emending' the text they are certainly ill-advised. With Diels-Kranz and Bollack-Wismann, we may keep the text of Hippolytus with complete confidence.

(2) For palintropos 'back-turning' as epithet of harmonie in Hippolytus, Plutarch (who cites this fragment three times) once sub- stitutes the Homeric epithet for the bow: palintonos 'back-stretched' or 'back-bending'. This misquotation is a natural one, since the expression palintona toxa 'back-bending bow' is familiar to everyone brought up on Homer. And that it is a misquotation is guaranteed by the fact that Plutarch confirms Hippolytus' reading in two out of three cases. Hippolytus is our best source; and his reading is also the lectio difficilior, as Wilamowitz pointed out. It is predominant in Plutarch, our only other reliable authority for this fragment. And this phrase palintropos harmonie turns out to have a definite philosophic importance. So here again we can accept Hippolytus' text without the shadow of a scholarly doubt.

(3) The last preliminary problem concerns not the text but the meaning of harmonie, a term which occurs at least twice in Heraclitus (here and in D. 54; in LXXV, D. 8, it may not represent an indepen- dent citation). The original sense and development of the term are fairly clear. Harmonie is derived from a root (represented in the verbs ararisko and harmozo) meaning 'to join' or 'to fit together'; it is used by Homer, Herodotus, and some later authors to mean a joint or seam or a 'fitting together', as in works of carpentry or shipbuilding (Od. V. 248, 261; Hdt. II.96.2). But from the beginning the word is also used figuratively, for 'agreements' or 'compacts' between hostile men (//. XXII.255), and hence for the personified power of 'Recon- ciliation', the child of Ares and Aphrodite in Hesiod (Theogony 937). So Empedocles could employ Harmonie as another name for Philotes or Aphrodite, his counterpart to Strife or Conflict, the principle of proportion and agreement which creates a harmonious unity out of potentially hostile powers. Another figurative use is for the tuning of a musical instrument, the 'fitting together' of different strings to produce the desired scale or key. This musical application is well attested in Pindar, where the term occurs three times in the semi-technical sense of 'scale', 'mode', or 'musical composition'. Both musical and wider metaphorical values of the word are combined in the Pythagorean view that opposing powers of the cosmos are held together by a principle of harmonia, an 'adjustment' or 'reconciliation' that takes the form of a musical 'octave' (Philolaus fr. 6). The Pythagorean doctrine of the music of the spheres, presupposed in Plato's Myth of Er and reported by Aristotle (De Caelo II.9), seems to be implicit in Philolaus' notion of harmonia and might go back to the founder of the school.

Thus we have a triple range of meaning for harmonie: physical fit- ting together of parts, as in carpentry; military or social agreement between potential opponents as in a truce or a civic order; and musical attunement of strings and tones. The half-musical, half- political sense of 'concord' or 'harmony' which predominates in the later history of the term had not been established as a fixed usage for harmonie in the time of Heraclitus.260 But that usage is nothing more than a simplified fusion of two of the three archaic senses of the term just surveyed.

On the view of Heraclitus' verbal technique which I have proposed, we expect to find harmonie used in all available senses: as a physical fitting together of parts, as a principle of reconciliation between opponents, and as a pattern of musical attunement. These three senses are combined in the new, specifically Heraclitean notion of the structure or fitting together of the cosmic order as a unity produced from conflict.

Now for a literal exegesis. I consider the phrases one by one, and then survey the thought of the fragment as a whole.
The opening words ou xyniasin 'They do not comprehend' take us back to the theme of the proem: 'men ever fail to comprehend this logos' (I.I); 'uncomprehending (axynetoi), even when they have heard they are like the deaf (II, D. 34). The syllable xyn- echoes or anticipates the term xynos, 'what is shared' or 'common': the logos is shared (xynos), but men treat their thinking (phronesis) as though it were private (III, D. 2). The uncomprehending are precisely those who do not grasp what is common (xynon); speaking with under- standing (xyn nodi) means holding fast to what is shared (toi xynoi) by all things (XXX, D. 114). LXXVIII tells us just what this common structure is: the logos 'according to which all things come to pass' is here articulated as the agreement or 'fitting together' of a system of tension and opposition.

'They do not comprehend how a thing at variance with itself (diapheromenon heoutoi) speaks in agreement (homologeei)' It is difference or conflict that is obvious; what men do not see is the unifying structure. (Compare XIX, D. 57 on the unity of day and night.) The term for opposition, diapheromenon, has an etymological sense of 'moving apart', 'diverging', hence 'differing'; but the syntax with the dative singles out the notion of hostility as predominant. The principle of agreement-in-conflict is expressed in neuter form, as in CXXIV (D. 10): sympheromenon diapheromenon 'it moves together and it moves apart' ('convergent divergent') and synaidon diaidon 'it sings together and it sings apart' ('consonant dissonant'). In both cases we have a strangely personified neuter, which there sings and here quarrels and 'speaks in agreement' with itself. (Compare the neuter in LII, D. 84A: 'it rests by changing'.) The force of the neuter is one of generalization: this pattern applies to the uni- verse as a whole and to every organized portion thereof.

The term for agreement, homologeein, must echo or anticipate XXXVI (D. 50, which Hippolytus has just quoted): wisdom consists in listening to the logos and saying in agreement (homologein) that all things are one. This term thus connects LXXVIII both with the initial theme of logos and the culminating assertion of unity, as well as with that notion of wisdom that is grounded in the recognition of unity. (Cf. LIV,D. 41.)

This implicit personification of the cosmic pattern, as a logos that while quarrelling agrees with itself, lapses after the word homologeei. In its place we have an image involving two comparisons: 'a harmonie, turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre'. In this
image one aspect is clear and two are obscure. What is clear is the notion of harmonie for the lyre, since the term immediately denotes the stringing or tuning of the instrument, and a 'tune' which the lyre may play.

The double enigma lies in
(1) 'harmonie of the bow',
where harmonie cannot have the same sense, and
(2) the epithet palintropos 'back-turning', which has no obvious point, but is emphatically placed at the very center of the fragment.

Consider first the 'harmonie of the bow'. Taken by itself, the phrase is unproblematic: harmonie means the physical fitting together or construction of the bow. The riddle lies in the conjunction of the two comparisons: how is a single pattern illustrated both by the har- monie of the bow and by that of the lyre?

We can avoid the paradox by taking harmonie in the same sense twice: structure of the bow, structure of the lyre. But this is not very plausible for the lyre, given the musical connotations of harmonie. (Both Plato and Aristotle understood the musical sense here, as will be seen.) In fact, this is one of those 'solutions' to Heraclitus' riddles that simplify the text by impoverishing its range of meaning — in this case, by eliminating the semantic tension between two senses of har- monie: the structure (and function) of the bow, the tuning (and play- ing) of the lyre. The music of Apollo's favorite instrument and the death-dealing power of his customary weapon must be taken together as an expression of the 'joining' that characterizes the universal pattern of things.

But the two images can also be understood separately. The best commentary on the 'fitting' of the bow — the fitting of the string to the bow-arms and the fitting of an arrow to the string — is still that of Lewis Campbell (who took his inspiration from Plato's remark at Republic 439B): 'As the arrow leaves the string, the hands are pulling opposite ways to each other, and to the different parts of the bow.'

A single rational intention (in the most literal sense of intendere: aiming at a target) is realized by a system in which physical tensions in opposite directions serve both as instance and as symbol for the general principle of opposition. The opposing forces 'speak as one' in the flight of the arrow. In the lyre, however, while the thought of the tense strings, perhaps even of the curving arms, con- tinues the idea of harmonie of the bow, the predominant notion is the distinctly musical thought rendered in CXXIV (D. 10): synaidon diaidon 'consonant dissonant', or, as Aristotle puts it, 'from tones at variance comes the finest harmonie. Whether 'the harmonie of the lyre' means a scale, a mode, or a melody, it is in any case a unity produced from diversity which, but for the musician's skill in tuning (and plucking) the strings, would easily fall apart into dissonance or cacophony. And the diversity is essential. If the strings stood in mechanical agreement, or if the musician plucked only one string with constant tension, no music could result.

This leaves us with the enigmatic epithet palintropos, in its dominating position at the center. Some editors have sought to avoid (rather than resolve) this riddle by preferring the textual variant
palintonos 'back-stretched', a regular, almost ornamental epithet of the bow. Its occurrence here would not be surprising, just as it is no surprise to find this as a variant in some ancient citations. But in fact Heraclitus seems deliberately to have chosen palintropos as an unexpected substitute for the familiar epithet, and he has left us to wonder why. What is the point to this less banal and less perspicu- ous epithet? For although palintropos 'back-turning' has roughly the same sense as palintonos 'back-stretched', it does not apply so neatly here, precisely because (since it omits the root of -tonos, teinein) it does not refer directly to the stretching or tuning of strings.

The solution to this puzzle is obvious, once we grasp the allusive nature of Heraclitus' style and his systematic use of resonance. By Homeric reminiscence, palintropos immediately suggests pa Unto no s (as the variant citations show). Hence the former term is richer, since by association it includes the latter as well. But it adds something more in the notion of -tropos. This is the clue to the significance of the whole fragment as a description of cosmic structure and unity. For the epithet 'back-turning' provides a direct allusion to the 'turnings' or 'reversals' (tropai) of fire in XXXVIII (D. 31 A), and hence to their more familiar parallel, the seasonal turning back of the sun in summer and winter. (See above on XLIV, D. 94.) By this perplexing use here of a compound in -tropos 'turning', Heraclitus recalls that other riddle about the 'turnings' of fire. And he recalls its solution as well, in the annual pattern of reversals of the sun when it reaches its termata or limits (XLV, D. 120), north in summer, south in winter, the slow seasonal pendulum swing of the sun back and forth, the palintropos harmonie by which the diversity and uniformity of the life cycle of nature is guaranteed.
With the phrase palintropos harmonie Heraclitus thus forges the link between his doctrine of opposites and his cosmology. The notion of a harmonie or fitting together serves to connect the anthropo- centric doctrine of opposites outlined in LXVII—LXXIII with the wider notion of the cosmic logos (echoed here in homo-logeei) and with the notion of the kosmos itself, the world ordering represented by the measures of fire, as exemplified in the alternation of day and night and in the annual cycle of the sun.

It is appropriate that this link between various kinds of opposition be articulated by the very notion of 'joining' or 'fitting together' (harmonie). This concept is more vividly illustrated by the drawn bow, more richly and subtly by the tuning and playing of the lyre, and most completely by the con-
junction of the two: the twin attributes of 'the lord whose oracle is in Delphi', whose 'sign' in this case is a pair of instruments related to one another as war to peace. (For the appearance of war and peace between the 'cosmic' terms day and night, winter and summer and the 'human' opposites satiety and hunger, see CXXIII, D. 67.)

The mediating concept which makes possible the generalized doc- trine of opposites, and which therefore provides the key to under- standing the unity of Heraclitus' system, is precisely this notion of harmonie as an intelligent structure or purposeful activity, a unified whole whose essential parts (or stages or tendencies) are related to one another by polar contrast.

Although this notion is most clearly exhibited in products of human art or in activities such as archery and music, carding wool and stirring the kykeon drink, it also applies to the understanding of (that is, the comprehension of unified struc- ture within) such natural phenomena as night and day, summer and winter, and the cycle of elementary transformations. The concept of harmonie as a unity composed of conflicting parts is thus the model for an understanding of the world ordering as a unified whole. And it is the comprehension of this pattern in all its applications that con- stitutes wisdom. For it is this structure that is common (xynon) to all things. And this pattern, or its recognition, is what Heraclitus desig- nates as gnome, the plan or intention by which all things are steered through all (LIV, D. 41).

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 Empty
PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyWed Jun 19, 2013 8:52 am

LXXIX (D. 48) The name of the bow is life; its work is death.

This is one of three fragments in which Heraclitus' interest in words and word play manifests itself in the mention of a particular name. The concern with the truth and falsity of names, with 'etymology' understood as a search for the deeper significance hidden in words and naming, is characteristic of archaic thought generally, not only in Greece. But it is particularly striking in the literature and philosophy of the early fifth century. We find a comparable interest in Parmenides, though with a different philosophic bias. In the Eleatic conception of language, names typically express a false or mistaken view of reality. Heraclitus is closer to the standard archaic view reflected in Aeschylus, that names are 'truly' given (etetymos, alethos) and hence that there are truths expressed in them for whoever knows how to read the meaning. This view gives rise to the allegorical interpretation of divine names that is developed in the Cratylus and even more sys- tematically by the Stoics. It is probably no accident that three out of four of the references to naming in Heraclitus concern the designation of divine powers (Zeus, Dike, and 'the god' of CXXIII, D. 67).

But the truths hidden in divine names or familiar words are for Heraclitus only a special case of the epistemic situation: the truth is continually speaking to men, like a logos or discourse, but they cannot grasp the hyponoia, the underlying thought or meaning.

LXXIX is the only instance where Heraclitus refers to a name that is not that of a deity. But the bow is important in its own right, as weapon and symbol of Apollo, in addition to the special use that Heraclitus makes of it in LXXVIII. Now at the surface level our text presents a paradoxical opposition between the old name for the bow (bios), which in the unaccented written form was indistinguishable from the ordinary word for life (bios), and the actual use of the instrument in hunting and warfare. This opposition is expressed by a verbal antithesis (onoma versus ergon) that prefigures the sophistic contrast between 'in word' (logos) and 'in deed' (ergon). A superficial judg- ment would thus conclude that the bow had been ill-named. But that judgment implies the error of taking the opposition of life and death as irreducible, by failing to see 'how it agrees in variance with itself. The life-signifying name for the instrument of death points to some reconciliation between the opponents, some fitting together as in the unity of Day and Night (XIX, D. 57).

The connections of the bow with death and destruction are obvious enough. But how can it also stand for life, or for some union of the two? One might think of the use of the bow in hunting, where the death of animals sustains the life of the killers. But probably more is meant here, some deeper connection between life and death such as is indicated in XCII (D. 62) and XCIII (D. 88). Taken alone, LXXIX can only stand as ^griphos, a riddle in which the name of the bow hints at some larger meaning that we cannot yet make out.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyThu Jun 20, 2013 1:42 pm

LXXX (D. 54) The hidden attunement (harmonie) is better than the obvious one.

This is one of the shortest and most beautifully designed of the frag- ments. Out of four Greek words (harmonie aphanes phaneres kreit- ton) two are presented as epithets of harmonie, while the third is con- strued as epithet of the same noun elliptically understood (in the genitive). Two of these three adjectives are formally related as positive and privative: phaneros, aphanes Apparent, unapparent' or 'obvious, hidden5. By placing these terms in central position, Heraclitus has exhibited the unifying role of opposition within the verbal structure of this brief sentence. And by affirming that the negative term is superior to the positive, he has expressed in a formal way the dialecti- cal re-evaluation of the negative principle that characterizes so much of what he has to say about the opposites.

Any exegesis of LXXX must be speculative, since the sentence itself does not specify what is meant by the hidden harmonie. But a literal reading poses no real problems, as long as we avoid the trap of supposing that Heraclitus intends his words to be taken in only one sense. The range of meaning for harmonie is too wide for any one rendering to be adequate. As partial translations we might offer 'Sweeter than heard harmonies are those unheard' (after Keats), or 'Hidden structure is more powerful than visible structure' (after Bronowski). If we give up the attempt to render harmonie, the rest can be translated literally as: 'Harmonie which does not appear clearly is superior to that which is clear and apparent.'

The adjective kreitton is again polysemous, meaning 'stronger, more powerful', but also 'better, more desirable'. The latter will presumably be the natural sense on first reading; the physical or political notion ('stronger', 'dominant') brings with it a deeper interpretation. For once we take kreitton in this sense, it suggests a verbal allusion to the 'divine one' mentioned in XXX (D. 114), which 'prevails (kratei) as it will and suffices for all'. The universal harmonie or fitting together and the divine unity that structures the world are only different modes of designating the same principle.
The phrase 'hidden structure', harmonie aphanes, might thus be taken as a general title for Heraclitus' philosophical thought.269 And it is no accident that the same title may describe his mode of expression, where the immediate 'surface' meaning is often less significant than the latent intention carried by allusion, enigma, and resonance.

What is the contrasting notion of phanere harmonie, the 'visible structure' or 'plain attunement'? In the musical sense, the manifest harmonie must be the tune, the fitting together of notes produced by the musician and apprehended by the audience. On this reading LXXX states that the less conspicuous attunement (between human or cos- mic opposites) is finer and more powerful than the harmonies of the lyre. But if harmonie is taken physically, as the construction of a bow or any work of plastic art, then the thought becomes: no joiner builds as well as the pilot of the universe. No work of art achieves a unity and fitting together as strong as the natural kosmos which most men fail to see.

These musical and structural senses of harmonie are combined in the Pythagorean notion of the harmonie of the heavens, the cosmic music ordered by the basic ratios of 2:1, 3:2, 4:3. Now the music of the heavens, according to the Pythagoreans, is something we cannot hear. In this sense it is aphanes, hidden. In view of Heraclitus' con- spicuous antipathy for Pythagoras, it is not likely that the harmonie he has in mind in LXXX is just the one defined in the Pythagorean doctrine — even if we could be sure that the doctrine in question was known at this time. But just as Heraclitus' doctrine of the psyche and its destiny after death can only be understood as a modification and development of Pythagorean ideas, so perhaps his conception of an all-pervasive harmonie is best seen as a response to Pythagoras' own conception of the world in terms of the musical numbers.

The ratios 2:1, 3:2, and 4:3 will represent the underlying, non-apparent fitting together of strings and instrument that permits the musician to produce tones that are perceived as consonant or concordant.
Thus the connection between measures, cosmic order, and the pat- tern of opposites and their agreement, could have been suggested to Heraclitus by a Pythagorean concept of musical harmonia in numerical terms, presented as a key to the structure of the heavens. Now the notion of cosmic measures goes back to Miletus. But Heraclitus' own conception of this order in terms of logos and harmonie is more directly intelligible as a generalization of the Pythagorean notion of the musical ratios, where these are conceived as a principle of 'attune- ment' by which opposing principles are reconciled and set in order, as Philolaus says (DK 44.B 6). Philolaus comes later, of course, and it is possible that his own conception of a cosmic harmonia joining the opposites by musical proportion is itself derived from Heraclitus. It is my guess that the line of influence goes in the opposite direction, and that Philolaus here preserves an old Pythagorean view utilized by Heraclitus.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyThu Jun 20, 2013 1:43 pm

LXXXIA (D. A22) Aristotle: [Heraclitus reproaches the poet for the verse 'Would that Conflict might vanish from among gods and men!' (Iliad XVIII. 107). For there would be no attunement (harmonia) without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites.]

LXXXIB Scholia A to Iliad XVIII.107: [Heraclitus, who believes that the nature of things was constructed according to conflict (eris), finds fault with Homer , on the grounds that he is praying for the destruction of the cosmos.]


There is only one point here that clearly goes beyond a summary of doctrines better preserved in other quotations, namely, that Heraclitus introduced his own apotheosis of strife and warfare by a rejection of the prayer uttered by Achilles in his great speech of regret over the quarrel with Agamemnon. This attack on Homer, which must be con- nected with Heraclitus' own view of war in LXXXII—LXXXIII, is the counterpart to his criticism of Hesiod for failing to recognize the
unity of night and day. Homer and Hesiod, the pre-eminent wise men and teachers of the Greeks, represent the general folly of mankind in failing to perceive the 'unapparent harmonie9 in which the tension between opposing powers is as indispensable as their reconciliation within a larger unity. The thought here is probably connected with the riddle of XXII (D. 56) where Homer like other men is 'deceived in the recognition of what is apparent'. For to recognize the apparent is precisely to see it within the framework of the hidden fitting together.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptyThu Jun 20, 2013 1:46 pm

LXXXII (D. 80) One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass (and are ordained?) in accordance with conflict.

In this and the next fragment (LXXXIII, D. 53) Heraclitus formulates his doctrine of opposition as an explicit theme, under the title of War (polemos) and Conflict (eris). LXXXII may be read as a further state- ment of the thought of LXXVIII, the insight that Homer and most men cannot grasp: how anything at variance with itself is also in agreement. Four clauses represent four different answers to the ques- tion 'What is it that most men do not comprehend?'

(1) 'One must realize that War is common (xynos, shared).' Heraclitus pursues his polemic against Homer (cf. LXXXI) by adapting the poet's own words; and since the quotation is also familiar from Archi- lochus there may be a side-thrust in this direction as well.
Homer had said: 'Enyalios (i.e. Ares) is common (xynos), and the killer gets killed' (//. XVIII.309). The passage occurs just 200 lines after Achilles' curse on strife, which was prompted by the death of Patroclus. This time it is Hector, Patroclus' killer, who is speaking and who is, in effect, predicting his own death. Archilochus repeats the sentiment with emphasis: 'truly, Ares is common (xynos) to men' (fr. 38 Diehl).

The sense of 'truly' (etetymon) may be echoed here by Heraclitus' use of the participle eonta: 'war is really common'. But in place of the familiar thought that the fortunes of war are shared by both sides and that the victor today may be vanquished tomorrow, Heraclitus takes xynos 'common' in his own sense of 'universal', 'all-pervading', 'unifying' (above, pp. 101 f.), and thus gives the words of the poets a deeper meaning they themselves did not comprehend. The symmetrical confrontation of the two sides in battle now becomes afigura for the shifting but reciprocal balance between opposites in human life and in the natural world, for the structure designated harmonie in LXXVIII (D. 51). The imagery of the bow and the lyre is thus sup- plemented by that of two champions or two armies facing one another. The description of this combat as xynos hints at the principle which unites and reconciles the warriors, not by an open truce or agreement but by a more obscure harmonie in 'the divine one', the structure that is 'common to all things' and binds them together, as the law of the city is a common bond for all the citizens (XXX, D. 114).

(2) 'Conflict is Justice' or 'justice is strife'. The word order does not permit us to distinguish subject and predicate; it makes no differ- ence, since Heraclitus is in effect identifying the two terms. This
identification is at first sight utterly perverse. For in the tradition of moral thinking represented by Hesiod and Solon, the notions of con- flict and violence are systematically opposed to those of law and jus- tice. In an innovation that might be seen as an earlier response to Homer's curse on eris, Hesiod had distinguished 'good conflict' or creative competition from evil strife that leads to warfare, lawlessness, and crime.

It is a natural consequence of Heraclitus' monism that he should reject Hesiod's distinction between good and bad strife. But the provocative character of his assertion is best appreciated if we think of him as accepting the distinction for the sake of the argument, and then equating evil Eris with the principle of justice. The point of this paradoxical equivalence can be understood only if we bear in mind that warfare has become a figure for opposition in general: only at the cosmic level can Conflict and Justice be reconciled and seen as one. In human terms, the relationship between strife and 'straight judgments' is as Solon and Hesiod have depicted it: it is quarrelling that makes Justice necessary, and it is the function of wise judgment to eliminate violence from the community.

But just as war has been generalized for the opposition that structures all things, so Heraclitus (following Anaximander) has taken Justice in the widest possible sense, as the pattern of order and reciprocity in the cycle of the seasons, the principle of regularity that oversees 'the measures of the sun'. (See on XLIV, D. 94.) In this larger order, the principle of just requital and compensation (dike and antamoibe) coincides with the principle of tension and opposition, for these are alternative descriptions of a single, all-embracing structure.
In the fragment of Anaximander adikia, 'injustice', denotes the victory of one opposing power over another. Hence Heraclitus' identi- fication of conflict with Justice can be seen as a deliberate correction. Thus Vlastos wrote:

Two of the fundamental ideas in Anaximander — that there is
strife among the elements, and that a just order is nevertheless preserved — are reasserted in a form which universalizes both of them and thereby resolves the opposition between them: what is
a 'nevertheless' in Anaximander, becomes a 'therefore' in Heraclitus. The result is that no part of nature can 'over-step its measures' . . . and not . . . that long-term excess is punished . . . which is . . . what Anaximander had taught . . . There can be no excess at all, long- term or short-term either. ('On Heraclitus', in Furley and Allen, p. 419)

Since dike is regularly thought of as a balance of crime and punish- ment, Heraclitus' extension of this notion to a cosmic system of opposition and 'reversals' (tropai) might have been made even without Anaximander's phrase about injustice and retribution. But the general dependence of Heraclitus' thought on Milesian cosmology is so clear, and the conception of the elementary opposites so similar, that it is natural to suspect some allusion to Anaximander's words in the juxta- position here of Conflict and Justice. Still, the polemical thrust of this identification is probably directed less against the recondite text of Anaximander than against the mainstream of Greek thought represented by Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, and Solon.

Polemical intent aside, Vlastos is clearly right to insist that Herac- litus' conception of cosmic justice goes beyond that of Anaximander, since he construes dike not merely as compensation for crime or excess but as a total pattern that includes both punishment and crime itself, as necessary ingredients of the world order. We have here the cosmic analogue to LXIX (D. 23): 'If it were not for these things, they would not have known the name of Dike.'

(3) 'All things come to pass (ginomena) in accordance with con- flict.' The stylistic echo of the proem ('all things come to pass in accordance with this logos9) serves to define the central role of op- position. When logos is understood not merely as the discourse of Heraclitus but as the structure he describes, this structure is seen as one of antithesis, tension, conflict.
The word ginomena, 'come to pass', can also mean 'come into being', 'be born'. This vivid sense of birth, perhaps latent here, be- comes explicit in LXXXIII, where war is described in mythic terms as 'father of all'.

(4) 'And (all things) are ordained (?) in accordance with conflict.' Unfortunately the last word of LXXXII (chreomena in the manu- script) is almost certainly corrupt. I have kept this reading with only the faintest hope that this might be possible Greek for 'are ordained (as by an oracle)', 'are established as right and necessary', with the sense of the participle oriented by the opening word of the fragment (chre), as Bollack-Wismann suggest. But the text is too uncertain to support any interpretation that will not stand on its own feet.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySun Jun 23, 2013 10:41 am

LXXXIII (D. 53) War is father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free.

The doctrine of opposition is here restated in even more dramatic and more puzzling form. How can war, the typical cause of death and destruction, be universal father responsible for birth and life? And if it is clear how warfare can account for the distinction between free men and slaves (since it was common practice to enslave the popu- lation of a conquered city), in what sense does it fix a distinction be- tween men and gods?

The resolution of both puzzles turns on the ambiguity between war in the literal sense and Heraclitus' use of the term for a universal principle of opposition. It is the second notion that is personified here in the phrase 'father of all and king of all', echoing the Homeric formula for Zeus: 'father of men and gods'. The term panton 'of all' is ambiguous (as elsewhere) between personal and neuter form, so that War is presented as father not only of gods and men like Zeus, but of 'all things that come to pass' (ginomena panta in LXXXII); and the phrase 'king of all (persons, or things)' is not formulaic, hence even more emphatic here.276 Thus War figures not merely as a substitute for Zeus but as a kind of super-Zeus, like 'the divine one' of XXX (D.114).

An assimilation to Zeus is also suggested by the verb edeixe 'he has shown some as gods, some as men', which recalls the typical sig- nal of Zeus' governance, when he gives an omen on high 'showing a sign' of his favor or ill-will.277 This personification of the chief cos- mic principle, in terms of imagery normally associated with the king of the gods, prepares and explains the announcement that 'the wise one alone is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus' (CXVIII,D. 32).

As long as War is understood in this general sense there is no diffi- culty in seeing how it is responsible for mortality and divinity, slavery and freedom, since it is (by definition) the decisive plan or causal factor in everything that comes to pass. It remains to be seen whether another coherent interpretation can be given by taking polemos liter- ally throughout, as ordinary combat. There is no problem with the freedom-slavery distinction on this reading. But what sense can we make of war 'showing' or 'designating' gods as well as men? Gigon thought that the reference must be to death in battle: those who sur- vive remain men; those who fall are raised to the condition of deity. Insofar as this question concerns the fate of human beings after death, it will be dealt with below (on XCII, D. 62; XCVI, D. 25; C, D. 24; and especially CIX, D. 118).

By contrast with LXXXII, the apotheosis of War in LXXXIII is distinguished by its vivid personification and sharper focussing on the destiny of mankind. The human condition is defined by a double set
of oppositions: the internal antithesis between free and servile status (the most radical contrast conceivable in ancient society); and the external contrast between men and gods, as in the traditional con- ception of human beings as mortal earthlings. The parallel may suggest that just as freedom and slavery are alternative, sometimes successive, conditions for the same beings, so humanity and divinity are alterna- tive, even alternating states which — like day and night, war and peace, life and death — define by their opposition and succession the full dimensions of human existence. (Recall 'war is common': the killer gets killed, and he who conquers one day may be vanquished the next.) It is just such an equivalence-in-succession that we find in XCII (D. 62): mortals are immortals, immortals mortals.

Before turning to texts dealing with the afterlife, we may sum up the doctrine articulated in LXVII—LXXXIII. These fragments list pairs of opposition of different kinds which are all in some sense anthropocentric, in that the opposing terms correspond to two con- trasting human experiences (LXVII and LXXIII), two states or con- cepts governing human life (justice and injustice in LXVIII—LXIX, slave and free in LXXXIII), the contrast between a human response and that of another species (LXX—LXXII), some tension characteriz- ing a human activity (LXXIV—LXXIX), or an opposition between
the human and the divine (as in LXVIII, LXXXIII; cf. the human lack of insight in LV—LVIII). Other fragments present a different range of oppositions more properly described as cosmic, in that the relevant contrast does not depend in any essential way upon the existence of human beings: night and day in XIX and CXXIII, cold-warm and moist-dry in XLIX, fire-sea, sea-earth and sea-prester in XXXVIII— XXXIX, winter-summer in CXXIII. The 'cosmic' fragments are full of cosmic antitheses; and nearly all of these may be thought of as manifestations of the kindling and quenching of universal fire (XXXVII, D. 30).

Now it would be tedious to attempt a catalogue of all examples of polar contrast or opposition: there is scarcely a text of Heraclitus that would not have to be included. The pattern of antithesis struc- tures his whole work, just as it structures the reality he is trying to describe. In this sense the doctrine of opposites, like the thesis of unity which is its counterpart, is coextensive with Heraclitus' thought as a whole. Perhaps the only generalization which applies in every case is that the opposition between the terms is obvious, whereas some insight is required to grasp the harmonie binding them together.

And this insight will generally involve recognition of a positive role for what is prima facie a negative term. At the very least, the negative term functions as a point of contrast by reference to which the positive contrary is made conceptually definite and distinct; but the link between the two is never merely conceptual.

My distinction between anthropocentric and cosmic oppositions is somewhat artificial, since by allusion or direct juxtaposition (as in CXXIII, D. 67) Heraclitus will insist upon the connections between these two sets of terms. But the distinction has the merit of focussing attention upon the crucial antithesis between life and death, formu- lated in the riddle of the bow (LXXIX) and developed in the theory of the psyche. This topic of life and death lies at the very point of contact or fitting together of the cosmic and anthropocentric dimensions in Heraclitus' thought.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySun Jun 23, 2013 10:43 am

LXXXIV (D. 27) What awaits men at death they do not expect or even imagine.

LXXXV (D. 28A) The great man is eminent in imagining things, and on this he hangs his reputation for knowing it all.

LXXXVI (D. 86) Incredibility escapes recognition.

LXXXVII (D. 28B) Justice will catch up with those who invent lies and those who swear to them.

LXXXIV announces a new doctrine of human destiny after death: it raises the curtain on what we might call Heraclitus' eschatology, the doctrine of the end or endlessness of human life. But for the moment the curtain rises on a bare stage. It is only with the parallel between death and sleep in LXXXIX and XC that Heraclitus gives us some hint of his own conception of what awaits us when we die.

The two verbs that express men's ignorance in LXXXIV, elpontai and dokeousin, are suggestive but ambiguous: elpontai '(what) they expect' can also mean '(what) they hope for'. Is the fate in store for us better than our fondest hopes or worse than our grimmest expec- tations? The point of LXXXIV is that we do not know; and the choice of words is not designed to give us any further clues. The verb elpontai may recall another remark: 'He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected (anelpiston), for it is trackless and unexplored' (VII, D. 18). This echo would indicate that the inquiry
or search for wisdom will not be complete until it has resolved the riddle of death.

The verb dokeousin, 'they do not imagine', contains another echo of the fragments on human ignorance: most men 'do not recognize (ginoskousin) what they experience, but they believe their own opinions' (heoutoisi dokeousi in IV, D. 17). The self-delusion of men in the face of death is of a piece with the complacent failure of in- sight that characterizes their life throughout.

The theme of 'seeming', 'imagination' or 'opinion' represented by the verb dokein provides the historical root for the metaphysical dis- tinction between appearance and reality. This distinction was first systematically drawn in the poem of Parmenides, where divine cognition (noein) and truth are contrasted with mortal opinions (doxai) 'in which there is no true trust (pistis)\ But before Parmenides, and before Heraclitus, Xenophanes had denied that a man can have clear vision or certain knowledge of the most important matters and insisted that we must be satisfied with guesswork (dokos, fr. 34) or with opinions like unto truth (dedoxastho, fr. 35). Thus dokein in LXXXIV invokes the notion of a typically human and typically fallible type of cognition. This same notion of dokein or guess-work is taken up and played upon in LXXXV, where the eminence of the man who enjoys public recognition and approval (ho doki- motatos) is contrasted with the shabby credentials of what he him- self recognizes and accepts: dokeonta, mere seeming or imagining.

The thematic resonance of dokeousin in LXXXIV and LXXXV, together with the context of the second quotation in Clement, suggests that LXXXV also implies some reference to the mystery of the afterlife. (This would be confirmed if LXXXV was directly fol- lowed by LXXXVII in Heraclitus' text, as many editors have thought.) If so, the great man of general esteem will be some supposed expert
on the afterlife, like Pythagoras. There is not much to be made of the brief and enigmatic LXXXVI.

I include it in this context because of the play on ginoskein (a possible echo of LXXXV) and because our sources (Plutarch and Clement) both take apistie 'incredulity' or 'incredibility' in a sense relevant to the mysteries of death and afterlife. For Plutarch the reference is to ta theia, 'divine (or supernatural) matters': it is because the truth in these matters is so strange and difficult to credit that they succeed in escaping our recognition.

Finally, LXXXVII announces that Justice will catch up with inventors of lies and those who testify on their behalf.283 The role of Dike here in regard to human transgressors recalls that of XLIV (D. 94), where she (with her ministers, the Furies) watches to see that the sun does not exceed his measures.
The parallel between cosmic order and the human situation is what we have come to expect. What is more surprising is the focus on lies and false testimony as the crimes calling out for punishment. This is the only reference in the fragments to falsehood as such, as distinct from ignorance and lack of under- standing. The closest parallel to this charge of fabricating lies is the accusation of 'artful knavery' and 'imposture' directed at Pythagoras (XXV-XXVI, D. 129 and 81). Hence it is natural to suppose that it is not the poets and wise men generally but Pythagoras and his like, the solemn mystifiers and specialists on the fate of the soul after death, whom Heraclitus has in mind here.

We are left wondering how Dike will take retribution. Heraclitus is relying upon the traditional Greek feeling that 'for great wrongdoings (adikemata) there are great punishments sent by the gods' (Hdt. II.120.5). But our text does not tell us whether punishment will come in this life or the next.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySun Jun 23, 2013 10:44 am

LXXXVIII (D. 96) Corpses should be thrown out quicker than dung.

No utterance of Heraclitus is better calculated to offend the normal religious sensitivities of an ancient Greek than this contempt for the cult of the dead, as every reader of the Antigone will recognize. The shock effect of this aphorism made it one of the best known throughout antiquity.285 Even Heraclitus' mockery of purification rites and temple worship does not touch such deep feelings of piety as this attack on the usual forms of ritual respect for the dead. Older than the cults of the city and closer to every human being's sense of his own vulnerability, the mourning and burial of a kinsman represents the most fundamental stratum of ancient religion. If Heraclitus chooses to mock it in this extravagant way, that may be because he touches here on the nerve center of his own preoccupations, because he wishes to provoke us into an appreciation of the radical insight which his predecessors have missed. Ordinary cult practice and abstruse doctrine on the afterlife are equally remote from true understanding.

Behind its provocative character, the statement itself remains enigmatic. Perhaps there is some allusion to the return of the dead body to the earth and its contribution, by way of its own decay, to the renewal of life from the soil. Still, the comparison is scarcely flattering. It suggests that what awaits men at death is what awaits their excrement and the offal of their farm animals. For Heraclitus any other sense to death and any other continuation of life must be concerned not with the corpse but with the element that has abandoned it: the psyche or life-spirit.

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySun Jun 23, 2013 10:44 am

LXXXIX (D. 21) Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep.

I have placed this carefully constructed sentence at the climax of Heraclitus' riddling, the darkest moment following on a succession of other mysteries (war distinguishing gods and men, justice apprehend- ing liars, the surprise of death, corpses thrown out like dung) that have not yet been resolved. The sentence opens with the promise of a decisive clarification, a definition of death ('Death is . . . '), whose scope is surprisingly general: 'all we can see'. But the restriction to 'when we are awake' is puzzling, and the next clause frustrates any hope of clear information. Since sleep and waking are opposite states, if what we see awake is death, then what we see asleep should be life — or so the symmetry of the clauses leads us to expect. But when we reach the last word, we find not 'life' but 'sleep'.

Does Heraclitus mean after all to identify life with the private, half-conscious, phantom experience of the dream world? Apparently not, and that is why the sentence does not end as symmetry would require. Why then does he deliberately arouse our expectations in this misleading way?
Until we know what life is, we cannot understand the definition of death: what does it exclude? And since much of what we see awake is alive in the ordinary sense, in what extraordinary sense does death include this visible realm of living plants and animals?

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

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Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 Empty
PostSubject: Re: Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn Heraclitus' Fragments: Kahn - Page 4 EmptySun Jun 23, 2013 10:47 am

XC (D. 26) A man strikes (haptetai) a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched. Living, he touches {haptetai) the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches {haptetai) the sleeper.

Here the word play on haptetai and aposbestheis, the two terms for the kindling and quenching of 'everliving fire' in XXXVII (D. 30), offers an initial clue for drawing together the cosmology and anthropology of Heraclitus into a unified vision of life and death: it is the phenomena of sleep and dreaming that may initiate us into these mysteries.

We have seen that one aspect of what awaits men at death can be understood by attending to the fate of corpses which, like dung, are reabsorbed into new life and vegetation by regression to more elemen- tary forms. As Eliot put it, the earth is flesh, fur and faeces. Human beings, like plants and animals, are 'everliving' in as much as their bodies pass into the unending cycle of elemental transformation, which is a cycle of life. This emergence of all bodily forms from the perishing of what has gone before seems to provide the most plausible reference for the enigmatic statement in LXXXIX that 'death is all things we see awake': the death of old structures and organisms that have yielded to something new.

The second part of LXXXIX ('everything we see asleep') refers to the dream experience and thus to a different mode of transformation. In XC Heraclitus pursues his reflection upon sleep, the twin of death, as a partial revelation of the limitlessness of the psyche, that deep logos that will not permit us to find the ends of the soul, 'even if you travel over every path' (XXXV, D. 45). The description of our psychic experience in terms of quenching and kindling suggests that the soul must have its own mode of exemplifying the cycle of everliving fire, its own mode of survival and revival where life and death will some- how alternate like sleeping and waking. Hints of such a view are given here in the play on haptesthai ('lighting' and 'grasping') and in other stylistic peculiarities of XC.

The first sentence seems to be a straightforward description of lamplighting at dusk. But there is the dramatic generality of the open- ing words (anthropos en euphronei 'human being in (the) night') a most unusual construction in the phrase 'strikes (haptetai) a light for himself, and an implicit suggestion that some other light is being replaced. Above all, there is the curious wording of aposbestheis opseis, which literally says that he, the man and not his eyes, has
been extinguished like a lamp. The fall of night is thus depicted as a kind of death, a quenching of personal fire.

These hints are more fully worked out in the next sentence, where the sense of haptetai shifts from 'kindles' to 'touches, grasps': 'Living, he touches the dead in his sleep.' It is difficult to see how this can refer to anything but the dream experience of the psyche, in Pindar's phrase the 'phantom of life' (aionos eidolon), which 'sleeps when the limbs are active but shows to sleeping men in many dreams' the vision of things not seen by day. Unlike Pindar, Heraclitus refuses to admit a more penetrating psychic life in dreams: in sleep 'all we see is sleep'. At nightfall we have lost our contact with the daylight, the fire that is shared.

So each one is obliged to strike a light 'for himself. (Compare VI, D. 89, on sleep as a turning-away from what is com- mon.) The experience of nightfall is one of isolation, where the indi- vidual, in his own person, reflects the quenching of diurnal fire. Like the lighting of the lamp, the dream experience is a weaker counterpart for the lucid fire of the day. The juxtaposition of XC and LXXXIX suggests a contrast between this private encounter with the dead in the flickering light of sleep and the more public vision of death that is given in all our waking hours.

'Waking (literally 'having awakened'), he touches the sleeper.' With its own form of ring structure, XC ends by a return to the point from which it began its descent into the darker regions of the psyche. How does the waking man grasp the sleeper? Presumably not as one man awake touches another man asleep, but rather by the contact of memory and physical continuity between the awakened sleeper and his own former self in sleep. The riddle lies less in the statement itself than in its studied parallelism with what precedes. Why should the waking continuity with the dream self be assimilated to the dream experience of contact with the dead? And why are both experiences presented as formal parallels to the lighting of a lamp at nightfall?

We are surrounded by a thicket of riddles, but a pattern begins to emerge: a sequence of psychic stages linked to one another by a thread of quenchings and lightings and ending by a cyclical return to the starting point. The failure of ordinary visual experience at nightfall is compensated by the lighting of a lamp. Our waking consciousness is in turn 'put out' in sleep, but we kindle for ourselves a new lamp, and thus make contact with the realm of the dead — a realm which is 'touched' but not entered, since the sleeper is still alive. The final stage, when the sleeper awakes, is a return to the initial daytime state, but now 'in touch' with all that precedes.

Every stage but the last one represents an increase of darkness and death over daylight and life — a kind of psychic descent into the under- world. In this respect the pattern of night-time, sleeping and waking parallels the elemental stages outlined in CII (D. 36), which represent the 'death' of psyche into inert forms and its rebirth from these elements. Since some parallel to a physical or cosmic cycle is strongly suggested by the terminology of 'quenching' and 'kindling', there has been a temptation to interpret XC in elemental terms, as when Kirk speaks of the soul in sleep 'approaching the completely watery state which means its thanatos' or death.291 But no physical doctrine is stated in XC; and there is no clear basis in the fragments for a stage- by-stage correlation of waking and sleeping with the elemental cycle of CII(D. 36).

Neither CII nor XC says anything about a destiny of the psyche that rises above its normal waking state, whose vision was equated with death in LXXXIX. In this sense the whole range of ordinary human experience, asleep or awake, can be seen as so many different stages in a cycle of death. Where then is true life to be found? This question can only be answered from other fragments: XCII, XCIII, and CIX(D. 118).

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"ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν." [Heraclitus]

"All that exists is just and unjust and equally justified in both." [Aeschylus, Prometheus]

"The history of everyday is constituted by our habits. ... How have you lived today?" [N.]

*Become clean, my friends.*
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