Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: The World of the Polis

Titel: The World of the Polis

Stichwort: Heraklit B 12 ("panta rhei") und andere Fragmente;

Kurzinhalt: The soul, the psyche, appears for the first time as the object of human concern.

Textausschnitt: 308b We shall start with the flux of things. Heraclitus has expressed his experience of flux in such famous sentences as: "You cannot step twice into the same river" (B 91) and "You step into the same rivers, and other and other waters will flow on" (B 12). Man participates in the flux, and the feat of stepping into the same river twice is impossible also because man has changed in the meantime and is no longer the same: "Into the same waves we step and do not step: we are it and we are not it" (B 49a). The permanent change may even become monotonous: "One day is like every other" (B 106). The aimless monotony of the flux, then, is broken through desire to participate in it, through something like an animal urge: "When they are born, they desire to live, and to meet their fate; and they leave children behind also to suffer their fate [morous]" (B 20). And this animal urge to live at the price of death has even deeper roots in the cosmic urge of the Eris (B 80) that brings all things into being. (Fs)

309a Eris and the desire to live symbolize the passion to participate in the flux, but they do not suggest a purpose. The question of the end is raised, in the most general form, in an account of Heraclitus' philosophy given by Diogenes Laertius. The reporter says: "Of the opposites that which urges toward birth [genesis] is called war and strife, and that which urges toward destruction by fire [ekpyiosis] is called homologia and peace."1 The Stoic ekpyrosis is a doubtful item in this account, but for the rest, the language sounds genuine enough to justify the assumption that Heraclitus had indeed conceived the end of being as a liberation from the war of existence and a transfiguration into the peace of the homologia. The direction toward the peace of the Logos, however, is counterbalanced by the reflection that Homer was wrong in wishing "that strife [eris] might perish from among gods and men" for then life, which is existence in strife, would disappear altogether.2 On the level of the animal and cosmic urge, death is the price that must be paid for life; on the level of the reflection on the end, life is the price that must be paid for the transfiguration in death. The tension is masterfully expressed in the symbol: "The name of the bow [bios] is life [bios], but its work is death" (B 48). (Fs)
309b Life, thus, becomes the arena for the struggle in which union with the Logos is achieved, or rather should be achieved, for not all men are willing to undertake it. "The many do not understand such things, even though they run into them; and when learning they do not experience them, though they believe they do" (B 17). "For what thought or wisdom have they? They believe the singer in the street and take the vulgar as their teacher; not knowing that 'the many are bad, and few are the good'" (B 104). The ways divide sharply. "The best choose one thing before all others: eternal fame among mortals; the many eat their fill like cattle" (B 29). And the way of the few is not easy to walk; it is a continuous struggle, as suggested by the elliptic B 85: "It is hard to fight with one's heart desire [thymos]" and nevertheless it must be done because "whatever it wishes to get, it buys at the price of the soul." The soul, the psyche, appears for the first time as the object of human concern; its well-being must be sought through the repression of desires. "For men to gain whatever they desire is not good" (B 110); and when the desires become exuberant then "Hybris must be put out, more than a fire" (B 43). The soul should burn, but with the divine fire of the cosmos: "The dry soul is wisest and best" (B 118); on the other side: "When a man gets drunk, he is led by a beardless boy; he stumbles, not knowing where he steps; for his soul is moist" (B 117); but unfortunately: "It is a delight to souls to become moist" (B 77).3 The discipline that creates and preserves the health of the soul, however, is not theoretical like the later Aristotelian; it is the discipline of a warrior and aristocrat in obedience to the War that is father and king of all things: "Gods and men honor those who are slain in battle" (B 24). The peace of the Logos can be reached only through participation in the war of existence; and there is held out the promise that "Greater fates will gain greater portions" (B25).4 (Fs)
310a A final group of fragments has most intensely absorbed the experiences that Heraclitus had with his Ephesians. "The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man, and leave their polis to the beardless boys, for they have banned Hermodorus, the best man among them, saying: 'None of us will be the best, and if he is, he will have to be it elsewhere and among others' " (B 121). Hermodorus went to Rome and, according to tradition, his advice was taken in giving the law of the Twelve Tables. To a sensitive witness an event of this kind might well reveal the fundamental foulness of a society and open his eyes to the possibility that one man might be right and the whole people wrong. From such experience may have sprung the pointed B 39: "In Priene lives Bias, the son of Teutamas, who is of greater account [logos] than the rest," as well as the grim B 49: "One man is to me ten-thousand if he be the best." In a corrupt society there may be only one man in whose soul burns the cosmic fire, who lives in love to the divine nomos; then the situation envisaged by B 33 may arise: "It may be law [nomos] to obey the will [or: counsel] of one." In the light of this sentence must also be read B 44: "The people [demos] must fight for its law as for its walls"-with the implication that the actual people is not desirous to engage in the fight for the law that nourishes itself from the divine (B 114). (Fs)