Heraclitus: Hidden Harmony, Strife as Father of All, and Fire

Orientation #

He says: “The last time we were on page two of the current readings, and we had seen this group of fragments” — Heraclitus on change between opposites and apparent contradiction. He points forward repeatedly to Empedocles, and more so to Anaxagoras, where matter and mover get separated and mind appears.

The class, in order #

1. Does Heraclitus assert contradictions? (“the hidden harmony is better”) #

Point: change is between opposites, and since we say the hard becomes soft, the healthy sick, day night, we seem to say one opposite becomes the other — a contradiction.

• Some took this as his real doctrine: Hegel, Marx.
• But DK 54 and neighbours suggest he is pointing out an apparent contradiction under which a true harmony hides. “Nature loves to hide” (said earlier) plus “the hidden harmony is better than the apparent.”
• Socratic parallel: Socrates asks what you think, pulls your thoughts out and compares them, and they contradict — he leads you out of apparent harmony into contradiction, beneath which lies the real harmony. Example: the slave boy in the Meno doubles the side of a 2×2 square to get 4×4, sees that this is not double; the hidden harmony is the true way, the diameter of the square as side.
• Extended to friendship: apparent harmony is “the harmony of the cocktail hour,” or of a couple being entertained; but you cannot become a real friend without some conflict, under which a true harmony may lie.

2. Opposition that is really cooperation (“as in the case of the bow and the lyre”) #

Point: things can seem opposed and not be.

• His hands: pushing one way and pulling the other are at cross purposes — unless it is a bow. Drawing the bow, the harder the pull against the push, the greater the force; the arrow crosses the room. Opposite directions, one work.

3. “The opposite is useful” #

Point: opposition is genuinely serviceable, in many orders.

• American economy: competition keeps prices down and forces improvement of the product.
• Government: opposing parties are useful; a one-party state in the 20th century is usually a tyranny (Communist, Nazi, fascist).
• Courtroom: one man argues guilt, another innocence, and truth is better reached than from either alone.
• Thinking: if I am wrong, opposition frees me from error; if I am right, it forces me to think it out and defend it better.
• Augustine: heresy helped develop theology — hence the patristic titles contra Manichaeos, contra Donatistas.
• “From those differing comes the most beautiful harmony”: Rembrandt’s man in the helmet, a shaft of light; a diamond most beautiful under candlelight (his mother’s saying); stars against a black sky — neither an all-lit nor an all-dark sky is beautiful; sunrise and sunset over midday; moonlight making the pattern of trees on snow.
• Aside: a student notes the moon now comes into the new chapel.

4. Strife as a third kind of cause (“War is the father of all things”) #

Point: with strife Heraclitus reaches past matter to the cause of motion and becoming, the mover or maker.

• DK 53: war is father and king of all; it has shown some gods, some men, made some slaves, some free.
• Very significant: he says father, not mother. Earlier, Mother Earth, and Latin materia from mater — matter is the mother. Saying “father” signals the other cause, the mover/maker. Hence God is called Father and not mother: he is cause as unmoved mover and first maker, not as matter. Aristotle, listing the mover cause, gives “the adviser or the father” — the father as mover by nature, the adviser as mover by reason.
• Next fragment: war is common, strife is justice, all things come to be by strife and necessity (fate).
• Hegel’s dialectical method is the struggle of opposites; Marx took it from Hegel; Lenin praised this fragment as a rudiment of dialectical materialism — matter as the beginning, development out of matter by the struggle of opposites. “There is some truth to this.”
• Because Heraclitus above all emphasized change — all things flow, nothing abides — it is not strange that he should be the one to think of this cause.

5. Reason looks for one (“listening not to me, but to reason”) #

Point: DK 50 states why the guesses are reasonable: reason by its nature seeks unity.

• More known perhaps: reason looks for order — but order rests on something one. Events are ordered chronologically by one event: he was born in 1936, Lincoln assassinated, Washington crossing the Delaware, Aristotle died 322 BC — all dated before or after the birth of Christ. An army is ordered back to one man.
• Thales, the first philosopher, looked for something one; the great physicists never give up the search for unity, the “equation of everything.”

6. Fire as first matter — a good guess and a bad one (“all things are exchanged for fire”) #

Point: fire is an excellent guess if you are thinking of the mover, a poor one if of matter.

• The fragment: all things exchanged for fire and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods (or goods for money) — though we do not really turn things into money.
• Good: fire is volatile, constantly changing, transforming; also fine, thin, penetrating.
• Bad: it has more definite qualities than water or air — more definitely hot and dry than water is cold.
• His lesson: what makes fire a good mover makes it a bad first matter — a sign that matter and mover should not be identified. Empedocles will separate them more, Anaxagoras more still. The Marxists want to keep the confusion, because separating them puts you on the road to the immaterial unmoved mover, to God.
• Heisenberg: substitute “energy” for “fire” and you can repeat Heraclitus word for word — all things exchanged for energy, energy for all things, E = mc². For modern physics energy is both that out of which and the mover — the same confusion. But Heraclitus’ fire is far more concrete; energy appears in the universal equations, an abstract mathematical thing.

7. Premises as matter and as mover (“a certain likeness… to the premises of a syllogism”) #

Point: universal equations resemble premises, which are like matter in one way and like mover in another.

1. A syllogism: something laid down, and another follows necessarily. Every B is A, every C is B, therefore every C is A.
2. The conclusion is made of its parts C and A, and these are found in the premises — so the premises are like its matter.
3. B, the middle term, is not a part of the conclusion; it brings C and A together — so it is more like the mover or maker.

• Illustration: a man arranged for a man and woman to be at a party where everyone else was married; they were quickly engaged. He is not a part of the marriage; they are the parts, he the mover. (A student: “catalyst.”) Like the middleman in economics joining consumer and producer.
• Conclusion for Heraclitus: his fire confusedly holds matter and mover together — still an advance on predecessors, since he saw the need for the mover.

8. Beginning and end in the circle (“Beginning and end are common in the circumference”) #

Point: for the Greeks reality is circular, beginning and end the same; but “beginning” and “end” can be said in another way.

• Already explicit in Anaximander about matter: what things come from they return to. The materialist’s version: Ash Wednesday’s “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return.”
• God too is beginning and end, but as maker/creator and as purpose, that for the sake of which. “I’d rather have a beginning and end in that sense” than have dust for both.
• Contrast: the modern world talks of progress, a straight line. Computers always better; handheld telephones that take pictures (his niece’s); a new computer outdated in six months. His complaint: he only word-processes, and updates usually make what he wants harder.

9. The way up and down (“the way up and down is one and the same”) #

Point: if earth, water, air and fire pass into one another, none of the four is the first matter — but he does not say what underlies them.

• The ordinary picture of the universe: earth at the centre, water on it, air above, then sun, moon, stars, fire above.
• “The death of earth is water coming to be,” and so up and down. Examples: snow or especially ice is earthy, and it is its death to become water; boiled water becomes air, hot and moist; a wax candle is earthy, liquid at the top like water, then fire. Reversed: steam condenses, water solidifies into ice. Solid, liquid, gas.
• “It is death to souls to become water” — here he speaks like Anaximenes, the soul being air.
• Aside on borrowed words: nature is taken from birth, opposed to death; we borrow words from living things for the non-living. He used to tease the physicists at St. Mary’s College in California about the “quantum jump”: how can it jump, it has no legs? “Jump” is taken from the act of the legs.

10. The everlasting fire (“kindled in measures, and extinguished in measures”) #

Point: DK 30 — whatever the early Greeks took as first matter, they took as eternal, not growing old, remaining under all change.

• The fragment: the universe, the same for all, no god or man has made; it always was, is, will be, an everlasting fire kindled and extinguished in measures.
• DK 30 plus DK 53 give the Marxist philosophy: materialism = matter is the beginning of all things; dialectical = things develop out of matter by the conflict of the opposites (“contradictions”) in it.
• Student: did they actually draw on these, or just find them interesting illustrations? — They do come back to these; Hegel was the original inspiration; modern science tends to be materialistic, e.g. evolution in biology: matter the beginning, the struggle for survival giving rise to different forms of life. Hence Marx dedicated an edition of Das Kapital to Darwin — they had that thought in common.

11. The cosmos as a heap piled up at random (DK 124) #

Point: this seems to contradict DK 50, and exposes what a mindless beginning would produce.

• Reason seeks unity (DK 50) and also order; consistently he should say “agree that there is order in things.” Einstein — not a believing Jew or Christian — said all scientific work of a high order rests on a feeling like religion, that there is order in the universe and it can be found.
• Cosmos means beautiful, well-arranged, well-ordered (whence “cosmetics”); the Greek name itself respects the order in the universe. Our word universe means turned into one — one language takes the name from unity, the other from order, and the two go together.
• Yet he says this beautiful ordered whole is “a heap piled up at random.” Explanation: from a mindless matter or a mindless mover like fire, what else would you expect? If fire went through this building, would a beautiful ordered whole result? The terrorists’ fire in the World Trade Center left a heap piled up at random.
• Student: he had not realised cosmos was rooted in order, and thought of it simply as a material unity — such as you would have at the end of a fire, everything charcoal.
• So Heraclitus again points out an apparent contradiction; and negatively this anticipates that some mind other than ours is the beginning of the ordered universe, and of the order in your body, a dog’s, a cat’s, even a tree’s. That greater mind comes out in Anaxagoras, whom the young Socrates read so enthusiastically.

12. Something infinite about the soul (“So deep is the reason it has”) #

Point: Heraclitus already hints at what Anaxagoras will say of mind — something endless.

• Fragment: one could not find the ends of the soul, having travelled every road, so deep is its reason.
• Aristotle, in the third book on the soul, after treating sensing and understanding, says the soul is in some way all things: the things we sense and understand are in our senses and our understanding, so through sense and understanding we are in some way all things. “It’s very important to see.”

His words #

• Reasonable guess — a guess reasonable because there is good reason for it, or because reason (the power, the ability) is naturally inclined toward it.
• Hidden harmony vs. apparent harmony — the true agreement under seeming conflict, against the surface agreement of the cocktail hour.
• Mover, maker [ed.: efficient cause] — the third kind of cause, “the cause of motion and becoming”; Aristotle’s “the adviser or the father.”
• Matter / mother — materia from mater; hence “father” in DK 53 signals the mover.
• Dialectical materialism — matter the beginning of all things, development by conflict of the opposites in matter.
• Cosmos — beautiful, well-arranged whole; universe — turned into one.
• Middle term — not a part of the conclusion but what brings C and A together, hence like the mover.

Texts #

Read in class

• Heraclitus fragments, handout p. 2 of current readings (verified handout “On the Natural Fragments”, p. 19): the hidden harmony; harmony of opposites, bow and lyre; the opposite is useful; DK 53 war father of all; war common, strife justice; DK 50 all things are one; fire exchanged for all things; beginning and end in the circle; the way up and down; death of earth/water/air; DK 30 everlasting fire; DK 124 heap piled up at random; the ends of the soul.
• Plato, Meno: the slave boy doubling the square.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, On the Soul III: the soul is in some way all things.
• Aristotle on the mover cause: “the adviser or the father.”
• Augustine and patristic contra works (contra Manichaeos, contra Donatistas).
• Marx, Das Kapital (dedication of an edition to Darwin); Lenin on Heraclitus; Hegel’s dialectic.
• Heisenberg on fire and energy; Einstein, E = mc².

His questions #

• Does Heraclitus really think day and night, sleeping and waking, are the same? No — he points out an apparent contradiction under which a hidden harmony lies.
• Can you really become a good friend to somebody without coming into some conflict with them? No; the true harmony is hidden under the conflict.
• With the bow, are my hands working at cross purposes? No — opposite pull and push produce one greater force.
• Why does he say war is the father of all things, not the mother? Because mother/mater names matter; “father” names the mover or maker — as God is called Father.
• Is fire as good a guess as water or air? Better as mover (volatile, fine, penetrating), worse as matter (more definite qualities, hot and dry).
• What does the middle term contribute, since it is not in the conclusion? It brings C and A together, so it is like the mover, not the matter.
• If earth, water, air and fire turn into one another, is any one of them the first matter? No, unless something underlies them — and he does not say what that is.
• Why call the beautiful ordered cosmos a heap piled up at random? Because that is all a mindless matter or mindless mover like fire could produce — which points to a greater mind, developed by Anaxagoras.