Thread by @ZoharAtkins

The time has come for a @threadapalooza about Heraclitus, an Ancient Greek thinker (Ephesus, 500 BCE) whose fragments read as a contemplation on our inability to say what is.

If I were being cheeky, I'd tweet "you can't step into the same tweet twice" and retweet 99x...

Heraclitus did not write fragments, but like most work from that time, his fragments are what remain. Anne Carson, though would say that these works find their completion in their fragmentation, are more whole in their wrecked, elliptical form. 2

The notion that a fragment can be whole precisely because it is broken is a theme commonly found amongst the German romantics who wrote fragments as a genre (just as they adored ruins). 3

The Kotzker Rebbe, a Hasidic contemporary of German romanticism, was fond of explaining why the broken and whole tablets sat together in the ark of the covenant:

"the wholest heart is broken heart." 4

Heraclitus saw life itself as a fragment of an ungraspable whole so it's fitting that his form accidentally matches his content. His work says what it does. 5

Heraclitus was a contemporary of Lao Tzu whose Tao Te Ching reads similarly as a cautionary manual against those who arrogantly think their dogmas can match the complexity, ineffability, and dynamism of reality. 6

We refer to Heraclitus today as a "pre-Socratic," which is, as Heidegger points out, a kind of unfair framing and insult. Why not refer to Socrates and Plato as post-Heraclitean? 7

In calling those who lived and thought before Socrates as pre-Socratics we betray our biases.

We assume that their thought is only preliminary, only justified by virtue of what came next...8

There are a handful of reasons for this bias. Among them:

1) The pre-Socratics write in an oracular fashion (which chafes against our rational sensibility).
2) Their work is typically not offered as a coherent treatise or thesis.
3) Their work tends to feel mythological. 9

For example Heraclitus says "everything is fire." Thales says "everything is water."

Either they are wrong or we don't know what fire and water are. Or, better yet, we don't know what everything is.

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On the one hand, the thinkers are called philosophers because they had a theory of everything; on the other hand, they are looked down upon as non-scientific because they seem to be stating their theory without showing any work...11

The Pre-Socratics think at a time before our neat separation between religion, philosophy, and science. Their thought shows elements of all of these. Of course, to moderns who think religion, philosophy, and science are autonomous domains, the pre-Socratics seem confused. 12

Yet without them there would be no Plato, no Aristotle... So even if you go with the triumphalist account of philosophy that sees philosophy as a series of replacements/upgrades, they are the proto-type for Western thought, the tohu bohu out of which 'reason' emanates 13

The first rule of reading Heraclitus is that if you think you've figured him out or learned all there is to learn, you're wrong. Heraclitus is not to be read for content as if one could simply digest the information and be done with it. 14

Those apps that distill philosophy into practical "take aways" would be making a mockery and performative contradiction of Heraclitus.

Heraclitus is the sage who appears out of nowhere to say, "no, you're still too one-sided, too prosaic, too attached to your narrative." 15

When I say "Heraclitus believed" what I mean is Heraclitus used words to comment on a singular experience he understood to be beyond words. When you consider that his view is that all is flux, any attribution of dogma to him becomes false, one-sided. 16

Heraclitus is a thinker who grasped the need to write poetically in order to capture the EXPERIENCE of what is, rather than simply to describe it or prove something about it.
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Plato came to see poetry as the enemy of philosophy; yet the pre-Socratics were poets BECAUSE they were thinkers.
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Now that we've done some throat clearing, let's get into the substance (we've just said cannot be delimited without misspeaking):

For Heraclitus, it's not just that life is about change, it's that life is about conflict. 19

You can't have anything without its opposite; pain and pleasure, good and bad, life and death, love and hate, etc.

It's a banal point, but it's also an important, mystical one, for it means that good can come from bad and bad from good. That should leave us humble. 20

Out of catastrophe comes insight; and from good accomplishments can come terrible, unforeseen consequences. When you take a macro view of things, everything is mixed. Nothing (worldly) is purely evil or purely good. 21

In Freudian terms, Heraclitus shows the cosmos to be a place of ambivalence. 22

Ambivalence and time are connected. We want more time because nothing (gold) can stay. Time kills and heals. Time wounds and worries. Time stops and leaps. Time rends. Time is borrowed, leant, spent, owned. Time gives life and time takes it away. 23

To birth is to give something time. To die is to go before before one's time. Geniuses are ahead of their time. Reactionaries are "behind the times." There's no time like now to take time out.

Time is our given. This is the core of Heidegger, but it comes from Heraclitus. 24

Heraclitus is often contrasted with Parmenides. Where Heraclitus says all is flux, Parmenides says Being is Being. Where Heraclitus says X is also not X, Parmenides says the deepest, truest thing we can say is X is X. 25

For Heraclitus, the point is singularity, dis-analogy, inimitability. For Parmenides the object on which the thinker meditates is tautology. 26

Heraclitus and Parmenides both imagine a whole--but for Heraclitus the whole is animated by opposition; for Parmenides, conflict is subsumed into a higher harmony, noise is a manifestation of a more original stillness. 27

For Heraclitus, all things disagree--what they have in common is their disagreement. For Parmenides all things ultimately agree even when they seem not to. 28

So the opposite of thinking everything is time is thinking everything is space, in a way. You can't be in the same time twice, but you can be in the same space twice (over multiple points in time); this is called "duration." 29

Heraclitus is the thinker of what Kabbalists call "Hod" (the splendor of the momentary); Parmenides is thinker of what they call "Netzach" (the power of continuity in change). 30

Jewish liturgy captures both sentiments when it calls God "El Chai V'kayam." The God who is both living and established. Chai, living, means in flux. Kayam, established, means unchanging.

At a high level, Heraclitus and Parmenides may be 2 ways of looking at the same thing. 31

In Biblical terms, I think of Heraclitus as aligning with Ecclesiastes (all is futile, nothing under heaven lasts); and Parmenides with the end of Hosea, in which God pledges an everlasting covenant, or with the rabbinic interpretation of Ecclesiastes: 32

Under heaven, all is vanity, but above heaven...They were good lawyers, though I don't think their interpretation does justice to the despair of the original text. (They admit this when they say that were it not for their interpretation the book would have to be expunged). 33

Which, by the way, is another way of saying that commentary is itself a form of cancellation (and probably a more effective way to censor). If you want to be a good practitioner of cancel culture, better to say Y didn't mean X than to say Y should be punished for saying X. 34

"To the soul, belongs the self-multiplying Logos" may sound like gobbleydook, but to me it's a kind of postmodern (Derridean) premonition that we can't but contain multitudes, can't but differ from ourselves and defer meaning for another day, another sentence. 35

Put metaphysically, the cosmos is open, not closed, and the reason is that Language constantly makes it new. Language in the literal sense, but also in the metaphorical sense. The world itself is made of language (a thesis affirmed by chemists, geneticists, and coders). 36

One of the famous fragments reads “Ethos anthropoi daimon".

It's often translated as a man's character (ethos) is his fate (daimon)" although daimon (from which we get the Christian, demon is better translated as something like a second self, a dopple-ganger, or spirit. 37

Apparently, the origin of birthday celebrations is Roman. They believed the day of birth was a day to celebrate and give thanks to one's daimon, one's accompanying spirit, one's personal god. Maybe in secular times the daimon is the inner voice of conscience we carry around. 38

For Agamben, the daimon is the creative muse that animates us when we lift up a pen or when we urinate (as it takes over when we are in a receptive state). 39

Heidegger famously wrote his "Letter on Humanism" in response to a question about whether his work was concerned with ethics. Yes, he says, but only in the sense entailed by Heraclitus in the fragment that the ethos of man is his daimon. 40

In Heidegger's hands the daimon is existence; our character is to ek-sist, to struggle with our finitude. We are fated to be free, not to be enclosed by definition. 41

Heraclitus's view of the cosmos is acutely true of the self: not only can't we step in the same river but, we can't hold onto ourselves. 42

I recently read @AgnesCallard's thoughtful and provocative essay on the ethics of breaking up. harpers.org/archive/2021/0… From a Heraclitean point of view, we can't but break up with others because we can't but break up with ourselves. Life is continuous breaking. 43

@AgnesCallard describes breaking up as a psychologically violent act, akin to depriving someone of a limb. But if "war" (polemos) is the ruler of all things, then breaking up, in the basic sense, is not a special phenomenon, but a staple of being. 44

We are inescapably violent just as we inescapably suffer violence. Which isn't to say we shouldn't concern ourselves with the ethics of how to contain our violence, but Heraclitus, like Freud, offers a sobering reminder to liberals that our nature can be reworked, not defied. 45

Here is the Heraclitus in full (caveat: translation impossible). War [polemos] is both father of all and king of all: it reveals the gods on the one hand and humans on the other, makes slaves on the one hand, the free on the other. 46

Enrique Dussel, an Argentinian leftist thinker influenced by Levinas and liberation theology, says there's a straight line from this Heraclitus fragment to Henry Kissinger...maybe that's shallow, but it's kind of fascinating. 47

You can read the fragment as glorifying violence, but you can also read it as a basic description of conflict as an unshakable truth of life, which needs to be acknowledged and properly contained. 48

The agonistic theory of democracy tries to do this by taking Schmitt's illiberalism and sublimating it back into a liberal framework. Often thinkers who do this draw on Arendt, because in her romantic view, politics is about appearing in the open and competing for glory. 49

If we read the Heraclitus fragment through Agamben's lens, then conflict can be the sovereign of all only insofar as there is something else to which it is subject and over which it is not sovereign. We might call this something else Logos (Language). 50

For Agamben, the sovereign is the inverse and correlate of the homo sacer. Both the refugee and the celebrity, the accused criminal awaiting trial and the dictator, stand on the edge of the system, gesturing at something outside the system...51

Liminal figures, displaced characters who don't fit into the system, help us see the system as a system, help us see beyond the matrix of what we take for granted. They are our cultural phantoms. 52

This is a great prophetic-sounding fragment

"It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one."

Here Heraclitus says "it's not about me. It's about what I'm aiming to disclose. 53

Often we get stuck in the pedantry of close reading and miss the larger point, the greater insight. We want to know what X meant, instead of what X was aiming at. Scholars are rewarded for expertise in parsing X's words, not for contemplating that which X gave them to think. 54

It's also a disclaimer. we have biases that cause us to miss the insight in people's words because we want to know what the person is signaling, what the motive is; we decide how to hear based upon whether we like or trust the speaker, instead of considering the substance. 55

Heraclitus is saying don't listen to me because I'm Heraclitus, listen to me because of the Word, because the universe is using me to say something.

There's no escaping credentialism, but in thinking credentialism is a distraction at best, a hazard at worst. 56

It reminds me of the advice from Pirkei Avot that a sage is one who can listen to and learn from anyone. 57

Which is actually very difficult, in practice. To be a good listener requires not just having "listening skills" (pace HR workshop leaders). You need to know something about the world; only someone who knows can know that they don't know. 58

A person who knows nothing can't know their ignorance. Only a person who knows something can know their limits.

The master isn't a novice; the master is a post-expert. 59

One of the stranger images in Heraclitus is his statement that "time is a child playing draughts: a child's kingdom."

The image conjures a sense of life's randomness. 60

It also connects the theme of randomness to play...the world is the result of spontaneity, not design. You can't get less teleological. In this image, Heraclitus diverges from Aristotle's notion of intelligent design and from the Biblical tradition's idea of a divine plan. 61

Maybe Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe" is a response to Heraclitus. One way to parse the Einstein quote is that if there is a God, God by definition can't be so cavalier...atheism and a view that there is no teleological point to life amount to the same. 62

But God is not above playing. God may not play dice, but God plays w/ the Leviathan. See Psalm 104:26

"There go the ships; there is Leviathan, whom Thou hast formed to sport therein."

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Psalm 119:92 compares the Torah to a plaything (sha'a'shua), the Law to a toy...

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Medieval theologians, especially Islamic ones, debated whether God could create the world out of caprice, since doing so out of necessity would render God unfree...65

Thus, the apparently heretical image of a child playing dice and producing this world may be reconcilable with monotheistic orthodoxy, if you want it...I'll leave the Midrash to you...66

Also note that a game of draughts still has constraints; the result might be random, but the randomness is still bounded by the laws of the game (and the laws of physics). 67

Why does it matter that time is a child and not an adult? 68

One possibility is that children are "present"--less burdened by the past or the future. People who have cares can't play. Conversely, if you want to stop worrying try playing. 69

But this raises the problem that, play, to a serious person seems like a dalliance, a triviality; while gravity looks to a playful person like pretension, arrogance, foolishness. Both are probably right and wrong. 70

But Heraclitus is writing to adults and so it's most provocative to say the child is wiser than us, that we are at the whim of the child, the ultimate master. 71

It's also a way of saying "don't take it too personally." Of course, there is a value--in my view--to taking life personally, too; to thinking the world has been optimally designed for you specifically. Maybe we need one view in one pocket and the other in the other. 72

Since Heraclitus believes that opposites come together, he can't be pinned to saying the world is random; he'd have to say that randomness and providence belong together. 73

The modern thinker most associated with the co-belonging of opposites is Hegel. Wrote 100 tweets on him here:

https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1372687239755468805

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But Hegel believed in synthesis, whereas Heraclitus seems to be a guy who thinks vitality is about tension, not resolution. 75

Again, though, since he's all about paradox and opposites, it might be more accurate to say that he thinks you can have tension and resolution at the same time. Synthesis isn't relief, synthesis is the ambivalent pain-pleasure of affirming yes and no. 76

He's not a nay-sayer, he's a yay-nay sayer, which is why he's both delightful and frustrating...77

Is Heraclitus anti-expertise? Yes and no. Yes in that expertise is always going to be limited. No in that being anti-expert is not a license for crowning the snake oil salesman. 78

Skepticism is like napalm, it's an equal opportunity offender. But many who use skeptical tactics don't realize this. With one part of the mouth they say we can't know anything. Then with the other they tell us they have the truth. 79

I have a pet peeve about those who do this when they say we can't know anything about God, but still maintain that there is a God. If you're going to be apophatic, be consistent. God must be so mysterious that we can't even say God exists. 80

Heraclitus simultaneously posits a Logos and posits its unknowability. But that he does this doesn't mean he believes what he says, or that we know what he says or means. 81

We find the same problem in Kant and the reception of Kant. Kant simultaneously says we can have no knowledge of the noumenal realm and says there is a noumenal realm. 82

The contradiction was resolved by commentators in two divergent ways. 83

Romantics maintained there was a noumenal realm, and that we could access it through non-rational modes, like art, poetry, dance, prayer, etc. 84

Neo-Kantians bracketed the question of whether the noumenal realm exists; instead, they say that consciousness must posit the existence of the noumenal realm to be perceptually and/or morally coherent. 85

Take Hermann Cohen, for whom messianism--the idea that the world can and will be redeemed, will reach perfection--was a regulative ideal. 86

As I understand it, this means he didn't necessarily believe the messiah or an end of history would come, but that it was necessary to believe it if one was to be a moral agent. This is sometimes called the "as if" philosophy. You find it in William James. 87

Franz Rosenzweig criticizes "as if" thinking as being weak and unmotivating, a form of insincerity.

Paul Ricouer popularized the concept of second naiveté, the notion of a return to faith after walking the path of secular reason. 88

Is second naiveté a rejection of as if, or still a form of as if thinking? Jury is out. 89

One might criticize it as a form of LARPing, play acting at belief. But CBT (and CBD) and Kierkegaard might say that if we can fake it until we make it. What matters is that we take the leap, not the interiority that follows...90

To conclude the inconcludable (and inconclusive), Heraclitus makes us aware that we are idiots. This is precisely the kind of sermon accomplished type A people need to hear. It's not clear that under achievers who are happy and complacent need the skeptical kick in the pants. 91

Perhaps they should be urged to know and do something before being encouraged to unlearn it and consider the Logos...92

Does the child need to be told that time is a child, too? This line of questioning raises the issue of audience. Is Heraclitus for everyone? Strauss would say great thought is only for the few. What is the Heraclitean secret most of us cannot handle? 93

Maybe it was one of the fragments that are permanently lost, since no initiates grasped it had any worth. 94

Maybe it will turn up in a Geniza and interpreted centuries in the future. 95

"It is the thunderbolt that directs the course of all things." 96

What a line! It strikes before we get the meaning, if we ever do. Thunder is a premonition of what's to come. Hearing precedes seeing. We know only through anticipation and memory. 97

Hear, but don't understand, says Isaiah. What was a curse or punishment for obstinacy is, for Heraclitus, the human condition. We are more confused than we can know. Yet our confusion and our knowledge need one another, like quarrelsome lovers. 98

As I wrote about here in my weekly d'var, Heraclitus is a thinker for whom philosophy is a practice of finding awe in everyday life, not about finding direct or final answers to practical problems. etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/an-ever-livi…
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