PHILOSOPHICAL EGGS

Abraham Janssens, Heraclitus (c1601) We know very little about Heraclitus’ life, but he is often depicted as someone bemoaning the world’s follies with aristocratic disdain for the mob and many so-called authorities of his day

Opening Remarks

We’ve come to know the ideas of the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. c. 500 B.C.E.) through various fragments quoted by subsequent thinkers in antiquity. These fragments are often perplexing and paradoxical. Indeed, some many even appear contradictory like fragment 49a which reads “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.” And they usually employ metaphors, puns, images, and grammar which, as Charles Kahn pointed out in his book The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge 1979), generate linguistic density and resonance: “By linguistic density I mean the phenomenon by which a multiplicity of ideas are expressed in a single word or phrase. By resonance I mean a relationship between fragments by which a single verbal theme or image is echoed from one text to another in such a way that the meaning of each is enriched when they are understood together” (89). But these challenges to stable meaning don’t prevent most people from discerning a set of unifying themes such as this set described in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry “Heraclitus”:

“A Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BCE, Heraclitus criticizes his predecessors and contemporaries for their failure to see the unity in experience. He claims to announce an everlasting Word (Logos) according to which all things are one, in some sense. Opposites are necessary for life, but they are unified in a system of balanced exchanges. The world itself consists of a law-like interchange of elements, symbolized by fire. Thus the world is not to be identified with any particular substance, but rather with an ongoing process governed by a law of change. The underlying law of nature also manifests itself as a moral law for human beings. Heraclitus is the first Western philosopher to go beyond physical theory in search of metaphysical foundations and moral applications.”

This interplay between unity and diversity in the fragments generates a fascinating and mysterious interpretation space which, after some 2,500 years, keeps giving rise to new insights. This has certainly been the case in my own life. I first encountered Heraclitus in 1992 while taking an ancient philosophy class with Professor John Peterman at William Paterson University. I then took two graduate classes on him at the New School (Spring 96′ with the late Professor Fritsche and Spring 98′ with the late Professor Benardete which is archived here). Over the subsequent 30 years they continue to fascinate and perplex me. This perplexity can be tiresome at times and I usually end up with more questions than answers. But in a world where so many things are superficial it is comforting to know I can always return to Heraclitus the Obscure to encounter philosophical depths that appear to have no discernible bottom.

Thinking of Heraclitus Upon Awaking

And so it was that I recently returned to him as I emerged from a dream in which I encountered my late father in a very moving fashion. He seemed to enter my dream as a vision which I was still able to access to some degree upon waking. Upon reflection it seemed like three aspects of reality—the waking, the sleeping, and the dead—were somehow connected to one another and this lead me to think of fragment 26 which comes to us indirectly from the Christian philosopher Clement of Alexandria (147-215):

ἄνθρωπος ἐν εὐφρόνῃ φάος ἅπτεται ἑαυτῷ [ἀποθανὼν] ἀποσβεσθεὶς ὄψεις, ζῶν δὲ ἅπτεται τεθνεῶτος εὔδων, [ἀποσβεσθεὶς ὄψεις], ἐγρηγορὼς ἅπτεται εὕδοντος

Many translations of this fragment are available and its meaning is often contested in part because the phrases in brackets are contested. I will, however, not enter into such controversies here. Rather, I want to present one plausible translation/interpretation, discuss how it helped me think about my dream, and suggest that the ideas conveyed in the fragment may, despite being outlandish, expand our minds and be worthy of our serious consideration.

A Translation and Interpretation

In his book Heraclitus (University of Toronto Press, 1987) T.M. Robinson translates fragment 26 as follows:

A person in <the> night kindles a light for himself, since his vision has been extinguished. In his sleep he touches that which is dead, though <himself> alive, and while waking touches that which sleeps. (23)

Robinson argues the fragment can be “plausibly interpreted as the description of a form of ‘continuity’ (haphē, literally ‘contact; cf haptesthai) that constitutes a cycle closely analogous to the everlasting cycle of change of the great world-masses (fragment 31 (93). Charles Kahn concurs: “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 everlasting fire, its own mode of survival and revival where life and death will somehow alternate like sleeping and waking” (The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 214). Heraclitus has a set of cosmic fragments that refer to elemental transformations which can be described as follows:

“Fire is transformed into water (“sea”) of which half turns back into fire (“firewind”) and half into earth. Thus there is a sequence of stuffs: fire, water, earth, which are interconnected. When earth turns back into sea, it occupies the same volume as it had before it turned into earth. Thus we can recognize a primitive law of conservation—not precisely conservation of matter, at least the identity of the matter is not conserved, nor of mass, but at least an equivalence of matter is maintained. Although the fragments do not give detailed information about Heraclitus’ physics, it seems likely that the amount of water that evaporates each day is balanced by the amount of stuff that precipitates as water, and so on, so that a balance of stuffs is maintained even though portions of stuff are constantly changing their identity.” (See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry “Heraclitus”)

Fragment 26 appears to offer a microcosmic version of such transformations, a psychological version in which the waking, the sleeping, and the dead are three potential states through which the soul can endlessly cycle insofar as it is part of a universe which, according to fragment 30, is an everliving fire being kindled in measures and put out in measures: “This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.” Robinson offers a helpful elaboration:

“The point is made clearer if one takes Heraclitus’ assertions in reverse order. Our waking selves and our sleeping selves are, as Heraclitus might well have expressed it (fragments 60, 88), ‘one and the same.’ In terms of the cyclical metaphor, there is no break between them, ie, no break in their continuity. The continuity is also such that the soul of the awake person in this world is describable as being at the furthest possible remove from, in the sense of ‘most dissimilar in state to, the soul of that same person when dead, and closest of all to, in the sense of ‘most similar in state to,’ the soul of that same person when asleep. The same can be said for the continuity between the soul of the living person and the soul of the same person when dead; it is once again one and the same soul, but the two ‘states’ thereof are the most similar to each other of all possible states of soul and thus, in terms of the cyclical metaphor, in closest ‘contact’ with each other. At death (ie, at the time of separation of soul and body), the soul, which with the loss of physical sight loses contact with this world, establishes immediate contact, without break in the continuity, with the obscure world beyond by means of its own organ of vision (what Plato will later call ‘the eye of the soul,’ Republic 7.518c, 519b); in terms of Heraclitus’ own metaphor, the ‘striking up’ (haptesthai) of the light (always there but only lit on the occasion it is needed) and the ‘striking up of contact’ (haptesthai) with the next world are one and the same activity, and the soul in question is one and the same soul, in ‘separate’ states that are in fact continuous with one another.” (93)

According to David Vender (see his paper “Heraclitus on life after death”) this set of soul transformations, far from being just one interesting facet of Heraclitus’ rich world-view, is actually the key to his teaching which is all too often overlooked:

“The ruling thought that Heraclitus put in his riddles and reversals is not that rivers keep flowing, but that the vast majority of men are asleep when awake and absent when present. This elevates one fragment to a place that in a sense makes it rule all the rest: B26. This is the key fragment to grasp if the unity of what Heraclitus had to say is to be recovered from the fragments. The transformations of the soul through different states of consciousness, from the ordinary use of eyes and ears, through dreams and sleep and on to death and Hades are the logos which men ever fail to understand, even after they have heard it.” [This refers to fragment 1: “Though this Word is true evermore, yet men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all. For, though all things come to pass in accordance with this Word, men seem as if they had no experience of them, when they make trial of words and deeds such as I set forth, dividing each thing according to its kind and showing how it truly is. But other men know not what they are doing when awake, even as they forget what they do in sleep.”]

Should We Take Any of This Seriously?

Well, we most likely would take it seriously if we grew up under the influence of Homer and certain ideas in Greek mythology. Francis Cornford, in his classic From Religion to Philosophy (Harper and Row, 1957), points out that “Man in Homer has two souls. His eidolon or psyche escapes from his mouth at the moment of death; it is his recognisable shape, which may, for a time, revisit his survivors in dreams. It does not exist until the moment of death ; and it does not carry with it to the world of shades any of his vital force. This resides in the other soul (θυμός), whose visible vehicle is the blood; and it is only by drinking blood that the eidolon can recover its ‘wits’ (φρένες) or consciousness” (111).

Orpheus in Hades by Pierre Marcel-Beronneau (1897)

And then we have the close affinity between death and sleep expressed mythologically in the relationship of the twin brothers Hypnos (Sleep) and Thanatos (Death). These brothers, who originate from Nyx (the Night) and dwell together in the underworld, represent the natural and close connection between resting and passing away. This close connection was beautifully depicted by John Waterhouse in this painting:

John William Waterhouse, Sleep and his Half-Brother Death (1874) The painting expresses the close continuity of Sleep and Death, expressed by their bodily touch, with what appears to be Hades in the background. I like to see us, the viewers of the work, representing the third aspect of wakefulness which would offer a nice aesthetic expression of Heraclitus’ three soul states.

And, while Socrates followed the Presocratics in demythologizing the human condition in many ways, we still come across this passage from Plato’s Apology (the trial of Socrates) in which his speculations about the fate of his soul after execution yoke sleep to death and hold out the possibility of an afterlife in which he can converse with heroes in Hades:

“Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things—either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and finds the true judges who are said to give judgment there, Minos and Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and Triptolemus, and other sons of God who were righteous in their own life, that pilgrimage will be worth making. What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with theirs. Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and women too! What infinite delight would there be in conversing with them and asking them questions! In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. For besides being happier than we are, they will be immortal, if what is said is true.”

Socrates (470-399 B.C.E)

But surely it is more intelligent for us to think that my vivid and moving dream of my late father was just a function of matter in motion—complex brain activity—with no spiritual reality or significance whatsoever. And surely it is nonsense to believe in a soul which can enter different realms of experience and encounter things in those realms such a physical people, dream images of people, and dead people from Hades. Believing in such things wouldn’t, well, be normal and certainly wouldn’t be in accordance with the widespread materialism of the sciences that typically denies the existence of the soul and the reality of the afterlife.

Taking Fragment 26 Seriously

However, Heraclitus cautions us against being confident in our norms when it comes to our understanding of nature in general and ourselves in particular! Consider these fragments (translated by John Burnet):

Nature loves to hide. (frag. 123)

You will not find the boundaries of soul by traveling in any direction, so deep is the measure of it. (frag. 45)

The hidden connection is better than the open. (frag. 54)

There awaits men when they die such things as they look not for nor dream of. (frag. 27)

Dogs bark at every one they do not recognize. (frag. 97)

I am currently inclined to take his cautionary remarks seriously since, as I have argued in many previous posts, I think substance dualism—the view that, along with a body, we also have a soul or an immaterial substance capable of thought and action—is in fact true. If we take the existence of the soul seriously then we might take Heraclitus vision of the continuity between waking, sleeping, and death seriously as well. Now, I won’t defend substance dualism in earnest here (see links at the end of this post for more thorough argumentation). But consider this: doesn’t it seem obvious that, along with our capacity for visual site, that we also have an eye of the soul that looks at things as well? Close your eyes, imagine, and look around: are you not using the eye of the soul to see things no one else can see? And aren’t the images you see immaterial? Mental images have never been detected in the brain and if they are immaterial we have a reason why this is the case. And what of our dream life? The other day I was looking at a physical garbage can in front of my house and then suddenly I recalled my dream in which I failed to put out the garbage on time ( a recurring domestic nightmare). I saw the image from my dream in my mind’s eye at the same time as I was looking at the physical object. And in the dream itself I was certainly experiencing things with some kind of vision. In his book God and Forms in Plato (Parmenides, 2005), Richard D. Mohr rightly points out that for Plato “dream-objects…are apprehended on some analogue with seeing. It is important here to remember that for the Greeks one always sees a dream; one does not have a dream. A dream is not a quality that attaches to the mind nor is it a mere activity of the mind. Rather, it is something perceived by the mind’s eye” (220). Isn’t what was true for Plato true for us? Our eye balls move in REM sleep but we appear to be looking with another set of eyes that belong to the soul. These eyes can see in the absence of physical light as Eugene Fink notes in his response to Martin Heidegger in Heraclitus Seminar (Northwestern, 1993):

Heidegger: A human sees nothing in the dark.
Fink: Nevertheless everyone sees something in the dark. (131)

A drawing by Robert Fludd (1574-1637) of the minds eye, oculus imaginationis, envisioning a set of scenes (the Tower of Babel, Tobias and the Angel, an obelisk, a sea storm, and the last judgment) with which to connect various concepts to facilitate the art of memory (ars memorativa)

And, just like the mental images we imagine while awake, our dreams appear to be, unlike the third-person accessible ontology of physical objects studied by science, absolutely private as Heraclitus points out:

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own (frag. 89)

Now, I’m not trying to be completely convincing here. I’m just encouraging you to bracket what you think you know and consider the possibility that, while we wake, we may indeed have a soul partially in contact, through recollections and daydreaming, with another of its potential states (sleep) and the realm of objects proper to that state (dream images). Once we enter sleep we fully actualize that state by striking up a dreamlight in order to see things not visible with our physical eyes.

But what about touching the dead in our sleep while alive? The kind of dead that somehow live like the Shades in Hades? Well, our ability to privately entertain seemingly immaterial mental images suggests we have a soul or an immaterial thing not made of parts. Moreover, an old argument from Plato’s dialogue Phaedo claims our ability to think, combine, and make judgments about non-spatial universal concepts or Forms also suggests our soul is immaterial (again, see the link below to my argument for substance dualism that develops this line of reasoning). Here is a formalization of the argument from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry “Plato: Phaedo“:

1. There are two kinds of existences: (a) the visible world that we perceive with our senses, which is human, mortal, composite, unintelligible, and always changing, and (b) the invisible world of Forms that we can access solely with our minds, which is divine, deathless, intelligible, non-composite, and always the same (78c-79a, 80b).

2. The soul is more like world (b), whereas the body is more like world (a) (79b-e).

3. Therefore, supposing it has been freed of bodily influence through philosophical training, the soul is most likely to make its way to world (b) when the body dies (80d-81a).  (If, however, the soul is polluted by bodily influence, it likely will stay bound to world (a) upon death (81b-82b).)

Now if we have an immaterial soul then it may not disintegrate since only composite things like the body disintegrate. And if it can’t disintegrate then maybe it can’t die. So if these considerations of the soul’s immaterial simplicity are at all convincing then we can’t rule out the possibility of encounters with souls.

But perhaps one of the most powerful vindications of the soul’s ability to touch those in Hades is just what happened to me recently and what has happened to so many people: having an encounter with someone dead in the physical sense and experiencing them, in a startling vision, as nonetheless alive as they appear to enter our dream from another realm.

Again, I’m not trying to be convincing here. I’m just thinking about these issues myself and offering you, with the help of a set of possible interpretations of Heraclitus’ fragments, the opportunity to think about them as well. It really might be the case that, as he says in a fragment which we can take as addressed to us,

They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse. (frag. 72)  

But we won’t overcome such estrangement if we don’t expect the unexpected:

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult. (frag. 18)

And who knows? If we can keep an open mind we might come to see that, despite plenty of experience and arguments to the contrary, that

It is the same thing in us that is living and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former. (frag. 88)

John Roddam Stanhope Spencer, Charon and Psyche (1883)

Go here for Heraclitus’ fragments translated by John Burnet.

Go here for my post on Heraclitus’ view of justice.

Go here for my post on Heraclitus view of common people as barking dogs.

Go here for my post on substance dualism which includes links to my others posts on the soul.