‘Fragments’: A Mosaic Vision of the Nature of Reality
A review of ‘Fragments’, by Heraclitus; Penguin, 2003.
The Canadian poet Jan Zwicky believes that, roughly speaking, philosophers fall into two classes. There are those who trust their perceptions more than they trust language, and there are those who trust language more than they trust their perceptions. Into the second class fall John Locke and Parmenides. Into the first class fall Berkeley and Heraclitus. Locke, known best for advancing political liberalism, believed that understanding springs from our ability to reflect, through reason, on what we receive through our senses. Bishop Berkeley, who was roughly his contemporary, advanced the idea of esse is percipi (‘to be is to be perceived’)—a form of ‘hard idealism’ which, in simple terms, conveys the belief that our perceptions are the only reality: your cup of coffee only exists because you can see it, smell it, and taste its contents.
But long before them, before Socrates even, Parmenides and Heraclitus were having a very similar disagreement. Parmenides thought reality was unchanging and that change itself was an illusion. Reason, and not the senses, reveals to us the true nature of reality. What exists, he argued, cannot change because change would involve its becoming something else, which is illogical. Heraclitus, who I am very fond of quoting (as you may have noticed), thought panta rhei (‘everything flows’). He viewed reality as a process or, if you like, an unfolding. Iain McGilchrist, author of Against Criticism, The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, laments the fact that Parmenides won the argument. ‘The static and the timeless has been privileged in the West ever since Plato followed [his] path.’
Heraclitus was born in what is now Selçuk, Turkey in around 540 BC and died in around 480 BC, roughly ten years before the birth of Socrates. He is thought to have written a book during his life but it has not survived the centuries since. What we have instead is Fragments, a collection of short sayings, aphorisms and passages quoted or referenced by later writers. There are about 130 of these, and they are cryptic and paradoxical. (Not for no reason was Heraclitus called, in his own time, ‘the obscure’.) And yet, they reflect quite beautifully his vision of the world.
Parmenides thought reality was unchanging and that change itself was an illusion.
What was that vision, exactly? That the only constant in our world is that it is always changing. ‘No man ever steps into the same river twice,’ he writes. ‘For it is not the same river, and it is not the same man.’ Stability, the apparent solidity of things, is a fiction: things may endure long enough for us to see them as stable and static, but they are in fact, at some level, changing. We age; flowers grow; buildings are worn down, eroded or corroded by wind and rain and sun. Thus everything transforms continuously into its opposite: night become day, hot becomes cold, life leads to death. The tension produced by opposites is what gives us an impression of stability. The regular cycle of day and night or the changing of the seasons are the product of a temporary balance between opposing forces. The stability of the whole cosmos comes from the constant changing of its parts. This, says Heraclitus is the underlying principle that governs reality, the logos.
Of course, this being a collection of sayings set down later by writers and thinkers, we cannot be completely sure of Heraclitus’ intended meaning or the context in which he said what he said. Already, his way of seeing the world is deeply paradoxical, which some people—often those with highly analytical or systematising minds—can find difficult to tolerate. Furthermore, these are translations, or translations of translations: Heraclitus would have spoken and written in ancient Greek, and those who referenced him later might not have spoken it, or might have misunderstood it. Mistranslations have consequences: when St. Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin Vulgate, he mistranslated the Hebrew word keren (‘radiant’ or ‘shining’) as ‘horned’. As a result, Moses, the skin of whose face ‘was radiant while he talked’ with God in Exodus, has horns in Michelangelo’s statue of him.
Stylistically, Fragments has a profound and poetic quality, partly on account of its brevity and partly on account of its paradoxical character. It has a beauty and a depth that could rival whole volumes of philosophy. Every sentence is charged with meaning. There is something of the Buddhist koan about some of the fragments: you either grasp them intuitively, understanding them by way of instinct, not intellect, or you do not understand them at all. Perhaps it is too romantic of me to say that because they are fragments—because they are loose and disjointed and disorderly—they have the character of a mosaic or an impressionist painting. And this seems fitting to me because at the heart of Heraclitus' vision of the world is the idea that order springs from chaos, that what is one is also many, that there is, at once, unity and division.
There is something of the Buddhist koan about some of the fragments
To the extent that we can trust that at least most of these sayings flowed from the lips of Heraclitus, he does not set out to convince us of anything. He is not here to argue. He is here to challenge. He says what he believes and asks us to consider the possibility that he might be right or, if nothing else, to question what we might believe to be true. He is a peculiarly brilliant and prescient thinker. Recent findings in the field of quantum physics are so paradoxical that they lend credence to the Heraclitian view of reality, as against the Parmenidean one. There are closer parallels with the Taoist and Buddhist understanding of reality, as well as the Christian one, best captured by the mystics: St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. In point of fact the Trinity reflects the coexistence of the mortal and the divine, the one and the many, the unity of opposites. Bach explores this in his cantatas, most notably cantata 148, at Trinity XVII. So does Dante. As he writes in his Paradiso:
In its profundity I saw — ingathered
and bound by love into one single volume —
what, in the universe, seems separate, scattered:
substances, accidents, and dispositions
as if conjoined — in such a way that what
I tell is only rudimentary.
It is a reflection on the divine vision, a vision of how all the diversity of the universe is unified and contained within ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’—that is, God. This indescribable perception is felt, not comprehended; affective, not intellective; intuited, not calculated. We know this because Dante tell us that ‘saying this, I feel that I take joy.’ And that, I think, points to something ironic and tragic about Heraclitus, who in his life was thought arrogant and depressed, misanthropic and melancholic, a ‘weeping philosopher’. The vision he describes, the vision Dante describes, the vision in which everything suddenly comes together in a flash, in all its mystery and beauty, comes about for most of us, through joy.
