The Task of the Bow: Heraclitus' Rhetorical Critique of Epic Language

Before the leaves can mount againTo fill the trees with another shade,They must go down past things coming up.They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and putBeneath the feet of dancing flowers.However it is in some other worldI know that this is the way in ours.

—Robert Frost, "In Hardwood Groves"

The rhetorical theory and form of Heraclitus' work and the relationship of his manner of exposition to his ideas have vexed critics from Plato and Aristotle through the present. Although Heraclitus has not been studied frequently in rhetorical scholarship, it can be argued that his work is critically important for understanding developments in early rhetorical theory and practice, especially as background to the Gorgianic account of logos, Protagorean hermeneutics and epistemology, and the Platonic account of Protagoras in the Theaetetus. The neglect of Heraclitus by rhetoricians is due to a phenomenon, which Edward Schiappa (1991, 1999) has cogently analyzed, of contemporary rhetorical theorists bringing to bear anachronistic assumptions about disciplinarity on "predisciplinary" ancient thought, especially about relationships among "philosophy," "sophistic," and "rhetoric," terms which, in antiquity, demarcated fluid rhetorical positions rather than fixed concepts.¹

Perhaps the most important reason for rhetoricians to study Heraclitus, however, is not merely his subsequent influence on those writers who form part of the contemporary canon of ancient rhetorical scholarship, but the ways in which his work both presents and enacts the rhetorical and hermeneutic consequences of an ontology of flux within a tradition of religio-philosophical rhetoric. Heraclitus is a pivotal figure in a thread of mystical thinking about production and interpretation of discourse that runs through the Orphics (especially as exemplified in the Derveni papyrus), Pythagoreans, Empedocles (particularly as he has been reinterpreted in light of the Strasbourg papyrus), Plato, the Stoics, and Platonists. This tradition, other parts of which I have discussed elsewhere (1993, 1998, 2001), exemplifies a way of thinking about production and reception of discourse distinct from, and complementary to, the more widely studied rhetorics of assembly and courtroom.

This essay investigates Heraclitus' theories of style, meaning, and persuasion in light of his critiques of epic language and worldview and explores the consequences of his theories concerning interpretation of language for his practices of production of discourse. I begin with a preliminary methodological discussion, then explicate Heraclitus' rhetorical and hermeneutic theories by close reading of DK22b48 and related fragments, and conclude with a discussion of the implications and reception of Heraclitean hermeneutics.

Interpreting Heraclitus: Problems and Methods

Heraclitus is one of several archaic thinkers who wrestled with the problem of expressing ideas in verbal genres belonging to a cultural tradition that they were criticizing. They had available the discourses of ritual, traditional epic, and ordinary speech, but none of these were precisely commensurable, formally or ideologically, with their radically new conceptions of the world, which were in accord neither with traditional religion nor with "common sense."² This sense of inadequacy of existing forms of discourse can be seen in the critiques of epic by Xenophanes and Heraclitus, which challenged not only the contents but the very semantic habits and literary devices of the traditional epic itself.³ At the same time, as new theories concerning the human, physical, and divine worlds demanded new verbal forms, so new modes of expression themselves functioned to cast doubt on conventional views of these matters and how they could be known. As rhetoricians, for example, argued both sides of a case equally well,⁴ it became more difficult for their hearers to accept unproblematically the stability of universal natural or social laws grounded in fixed standards of absolute truth and articulated in a homeostatic body of epic tradition. Reinterpreting natural phenomena and using new verbal modes were not independent activities; the means and the ends of intellectual inquiry were constantly interacting with and reshaping each other. Ontology could only be discussed in words; and words, in some manner, not only signified things but served to construct phenomena by reshaping the way in which raw sense data were conceptualized and...