FIRE AT NIGHT: A VERSION OF HERAKLEITOS

1 R F I R E A T N I G H T : A V E R S I O N O F H E R A K L E I T O S H . L . H I X Philosophers call it a category mistake when something is treated as if it belonged in a category to which in fact it does not belong. And philosophers consistently make two category mistakes with regard to the influential ancient Greek public intellectual Herakleitos : that he wrote fragments and that he was a pre-Socratic philosopher. First Mistake: Herakleitos Wrote Fragments It is true that nothing of Herakleitos’s work has come down to us in continuous or complete form. We might have only a small handful of Sophocles’ apparently numerous plays, but what plays we do have are complete; what dialogues we have of Plato might be (ironically) copies of copies, but they are complete. Of Herakleitos , though, we have only short citations embedded in various works by later authors. Earlier translations, without exception, preserve (and even emphasize) that fragmentation: of course it would be irresponsible to present what has arrived to us as if it had arrived whole. No self-respecting translator would downplay the 2 H I X Y incompleteness and discontinuity of what we have from Herakleitos . Yet one of the short passages that has reached us warns, ‘‘Let us not thoughtlessly consent to common sense in momentous matters .’’ In this matter at least, the warning is apt: the common sense of things in regard to Herakleitos’s work is mistaken and ought not to be consented to. That the work has reached us in fragments does not mean that Herakleitos wrote fragments. Of the passages we have from Herakleitos, to take their current fragmentation as definitive of their character is to mistake an e√ect of transmission history for a revelation of authorial intention or a disclosure of original textual architecture. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven in their anthology The Presocratic Philosophers fall into this trap, perfectly exemplifying consent to common sense. ‘‘The surviving fragments,’’ they suggest, ‘‘have very much the appearance of oral pronouncements put into a concise and striking, and therefore easily memorable, form; they do not resemble extracts from a continuous written work.’’ Kirk and Raven admit that the one longish passage that appears to have been the opening of Herakleitos ’s treatise on nature (‘‘Logos is ever . . .’’) is ‘‘a structurally complicated sentence’’ that is continuous enough to stand as a counterexample to their view, but they wave it away by speculating that ‘‘possibly when Heraclitus achieved fame as a sage a collection of his most famous utterances was made, for which a special prologue was composed.’’ With a vicious circularity, Kirk and Raven take this speculation as both supportive of and supported by the view – part of the common sense – that ‘‘the fragments we possess’’ (as if the ‘‘Logos is ever . . .’’ passage were not one of them) are ‘‘obviously framed as oral apothegms rather than as parts of a discursive treatise’’ (emphasis mine). Parity of reasoning would sanction a view that the Roman Colosseum, because it is now in ruins, must have been originally designed and built as a ruin, must in its nature be a ruin, and that the large intact portion, so unlike the rest, was a later addition. Even translators alert to the dubiousness of taking current fragmentation as a fulfillment of original form still replicate that gesture. Charles H. Kahn, for example, in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, wisely disputes Hermann Diels’s curious decision to F I R E A T N I G H T 3 R list the surviving passages ‘‘in alphabetical order according to the name of the author citing them,’’ and replaces Diels’s alphabetical ordering with a thematic ordering on the premise that ‘‘Heraclitus ’ discourse as a whole was as carefully and artistically composed as are the preserved parts, and that the formal ordering of the whole was as much an element in its total meaning as in the case of any lyric poem from the same period.’’ Yet that imputation of wholeness notwithstanding, Kahn’s book bears...