Continuing on from my last post, which contained quotes from Walter Pater’s novel Marius: The Epicurean, illustrating the debt owed to Heraclitus for our aesthetic hedonism, I now present relevant selections from another work, Plato and Platonism. More evident in this case is an appreciation for the other side of Heraclitus’ flux theory, that is, the emphasis on natural laws harmoniously governing the perpetual motion of material and mental phenomena alike, the so-called “logos”. The healthy sceptical reticence to reify ontologically totalising and ossifying abstractions prohibits Pater’s protagonist, at this stage, from fully embracing Heraclitus’ universe, and rightly so, for in the religious sentiments with which he describes our cosmos, and in its pantheistic orchestration, he cannot assent. It awaits a later development in his journey to permit Marius’ contemplation of a demiurgic cosmic regulator. Nevertheless, G.T.W. Patrick makes the excellent case that, properly understood, Heraclitus’ appeals to immanent reason, and his invocation of Zeus, are the Ephesian’s nearest experiential and cultural equivalents for communicating a revolutionary idea, far beyond the grammar of his time: universal regularity. On the precise meaning of the logos, Patrick writes:
We have found ample reason for rejecting the notion that it was of a logical nature, or any objectification of that which is inherent in human thought. Yet it was not without human attributes. As fiery essence, it was identified with the universe and became almost material. As Order, it approached the idea of pure mathematical Relation or Form (cp. frag. 23, and Zeller, Vol. 1, p. 628, 3, and 620). As Wisdom, it was pictured as the intelligent power or efficient force that produces the Order. When we reflect what difficulty even at the present day we find in answering the simple question, What is Order? we are less surprised to find that the Ephesian philosopher did not always distinguish it from less difficult conceptions. (Patrick, 2015).
Exploring in greater depth the philosophy of Heraclitus is, I think, key to further developing New Cyrenaicism, beyond the somewhat limited scope of the orthodox school and Aristippus’ immediate concerns, and even beyond what Pater himself explicitly recognised, though in accordance with the sentiments touched upon towards the end of his novel. Nevertheless, in keeping with our key epistemic principles and axiological commitments, we must pull short of a full-throated endorsement of Heracliteanism and critically engage with the material. On that note, I present the excerpts.
From Plato and Platonism:
Philosophy itself, mental and moral, has its preparation, its forethoughts, in the poetry that preceded it. A powerful generalisation thrown into some salient phrase, such as that of Heraclitus—“Πάντα ῥεῖ,” all things fleet away—may startle a particular age by its novelty, but takes possession only because all along its root was somewhere among the natural though but half-developed instincts of the human mind itself.
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over.
Heraclitus, a writer of philosophy in prose, yet of a philosophy which was half poetic figure, half generalised fact, in style crabbed and obscure, but stimulant, invasive, not to be forgotten—he too might be thought, as a writer of prose, one of the “fathers” of Plato. His influence, however, on Plato, though himself a Heraclitean in early life, was by way of antagonism or reaction; Plato’s stand against any philosophy of motion becoming, as we say, something of a “fixed idea” with him. Heraclitus of Ephesus (what Ephesus must have been just then is denoted by the fact that it was one of the twelve cities of the Ionian League) died about forty years before Plato was born. Here then at Ephesus, the much frequented centre of the religious life of Ionia, itself so lately emancipated from its tyrants, Heraclitus, of ancient hereditary rank, an aristocrat by birth and temper, amid all the bustle of still undiscredited Greek democracy, had reflected, not to his peace of mind, on the mutable character of political as well as of physical existence; perhaps, early as it was, on the mutability of intellectual systems also, that modes of thought and practice had already been in and out of fashion. Empires certainly had lived and died around; and in Ephesus as elsewhere, the privileged class had gone to the wall. In this era of unrestrained youthfulness, of Greek youthfulness, one of the haughtiest of that class, as being also of nature’s aristocracy, and a man of powerful intellectual gifts, Heraclitus, asserts the native liberty of thought at all events; becomes, we might truly say, sickly with “the pale cast” of his philosophical questioning.
Amid the irreflective actors in that rapidly moving show, so entirely immersed in it superficial as it is that they have no feeling of themselves, he becomes self-conscious. He reflects; and his reflexion has the characteristic melancholy of youth when it is forced suddenly to bethink itself, and for a moment feels already old, feels the temperature of the world about it sensibly colder. Its very ingenuousness, its sincerity, will make the utterance of what comes to mind just then somewhat shrill or overemphatic.
Yet Heraclitus, thus superbly turning aside from the vulgar to think, so early in the impetuous spring-tide of Greek history, does but reflect after all the aspect of what actually surrounds him, when he cries out—his philosophy was no matter of formal treatise or system, but of harsh, protesting cries—Πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει. All things give way: nothing remaineth. There had been enquirers before him of another sort, purely physical enquirers, whose bold, contradictory, seemingly impious guesses how and of what primary elements the world of visible things, the sun, the stars, the brutes, their own souls and bodies, had been composed, were themselves a part of the bold enterprise of that romantic age; a series of intellectual adventures, of a piece with its adventures in unknown lands or upon the sea. The resultant intellectual chaos expressed the very spirit of gifted and sanguine but insubordinate youth (remember, that the word νεότης, youth, came to mean rashness, insolence!) questioning, deciding, rejecting, on mere rags and tatters of evidence, unbent to discipline, unmethodical, irresponsible. Those opinions too, coming and going, those conjectures as to what under-lay the sensible world, were themselves but fluid elements on the changing surface of existence.
Perpetual motion, alike in things and in men’s thoughts about them,—the sad, self-conscious, philosophy of Heraclitus, like one, knowing beyond his years, in this barely adolescent world which he is so eager to instruct, makes no pretence to be able to restrain that. Was not the very essence of thought itself also such perpetual motion? a baffling transition from the dead past, alive one moment since, to a present, itself deceased in turn ere we can say, It is here?
A keen analyst of the facts of nature and mind, a master presumably of all the knowledge that then there was, a vigorous definer of thoughts, he does but refer the superficial movement of all persons and things around him to deeper and still more masterful currents of universal change, stealthily withdrawing the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one’s feet. The principle of disintegration, the incoherency of fire or flood (for Heraclitus these are but very lively instances of movements, subtler yet more wasteful still) are inherent in the primary elements alike of matter and of the soul. Λέγει που Ἡράκλειτος, says Socrates in the Cratylus, ὅτι πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει. But the principle of lapse, of waste, was, in fact, in one’s self. “No one has ever passed twice over the same stream.” Nay, the passenger himself is without identity. Upon the same stream at the same moment we do, and do not, embark: for we are, and are not: εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν. And this rapid change, if it did not make all knowledge impossible, made it wholly relative, of a kind, that is to say, valueless in the judgment of Plato. Man, the individual, at this particular vanishing-point of time and place, becomes “the measure of all things.”
Yet from certain fragments in which the Logos is already named we may understand that there had been another side to the doctrine of Heraclitus; an attempt on his part, after all, to reduce that world of chaotic mutation to cosmos, to the unity of a reasonable order, by the search for and the notation, if there be such, of an antiphonal rhythm, or logic, which, proceeding uniformly from movement to movement, as in some intricate musical theme, might link together in one those contending, infinitely diverse impulses.
It was an act of recognition, even on the part of a philosophy of the inconsecutive, the incoherent, the insane, of that Wisdom which, “reacheth from end to end, sweetly and strongly ordering all things.” But if the “weeping philosopher,” the first of the pessimists, finds the ground of his melancholy in the sense of universal change, still more must he weep at the dulness of men’s ears to that continuous strain of melody throughout it. In truth, what was sympathetic with the hour and the scene in the Heraclitean doctrine, was the boldly aggressive, the paradoxical and negative tendency there, in natural collusion, as it was, with the destructiveness of undisciplined youth; that sense of rapid dissolution, which, according to one’s temperament and one’s luck in things, might extinguish, or kindle all the more eagerly, an interest in the mere phenomena of existence, of one’s so hasty passage through the world.
The theory of the perpetual flux was indeed an apprehension of which the full scope was only to be realised by a later age, in alliance with a larger knowledge of the natural world, a closer observation of the phenomena of mind, than was possible, even for Heraclitus, at that early day. So, the seeds of almost all scientific ideas might seem to have been dimly enfolded in the mind of antiquity; but fecundated, admitted to their full working prerogative, one by one, in after ages, by good favour of the special intellectual conditions belonging to a particular generation, which, on a sudden, finds itself preoccupied by a formula, not so much new, as renovated by new application.
It is in this way that the most modern metaphysical, and the most modern empirical philosophies alike have illustrated emphatically, justified, expanded, the divination (so we may make bold to call it under the new light now thrown upon it) of the ancient theorist of Ephesus. The entire modern theory of “development,” in all its various phases, proved or unprovable,—what is it but old Heracliteanism awake once more in a new world, and grown to full proportions?
Πάντα χωρεῖ, πάντα ῥεῖ—It is the burden of Hegel on the one hand, to whom nature, and art, and polity, and philosophy, aye, and religion too, each in its long historic series, are but so many conscious movements in the secular process of the eternal mind; and on the other hand of Darwin and Darwinism, for which “type” itself properly is not but is only always becoming. The bold paradox of Heraclitus is, in effect, repeated on all sides, as the vital persuasion just now of a cautiously reasoned experience, and, in illustration of the very law of change which it asserts, may itself presently be superseded as a commonplace.
Think of all that subtly disguised movement, latens processus, Bacon calls it (again as if by a kind of anticipation) which modern research has detected, measured, hopes to reduce to minuter or ally to still larger currents, in what had seemed most substantial to the naked eye, the inattentive mind. To the “observation and experiment” of the physical enquirer of to-day, the eye and the sun it lives by reveal themselves, after all, as Heraclitus had declared (scarcely serious, he seemed to those around him) as literally in constant extinction and renewal; the sun only going out more gradually than the human eye; the system meanwhile, of which it is the centre, in ceaseless movement nowhither. Our terrestrial planet is in constant increase by meteoric dust, moving to it through endless time out of infinite space. The Alps drift down the rivers into the plains, as still loftier mountains found their level there ages ago. The granite kernel of the earth, it is said, is ever changing in its very substance, its molecular constitution, by the passage through it of electric currents.
And the Darwinian theory—that “species,” the identifying forms of animal and vegetable life, immutable though they seem now, as of old in the Garden of Eden, are fashioned by slow development, while perhaps millions of years go by: well! every month is adding to its evidence. Nay, the idea of development (that, too, a thing of growth, developed in the progress of reflexion) is at last invading one by one, as the secret of their explanation, all the products of mind, the very mind itself, the abstract reason; our certainty, for instance, that two and two make four. Gradually we have come to think, or to feel, that primary certitude. Political constitutions, again, as we now see so clearly, are “not made,” cannot be made, but “grow.” Races, laws, arts, have their origins and end, are themselves ripples only on the great river of organic life; and language is changing on our very lips.
Mobility! We do not think that a necessarily undesirable condition of life, of mind, of the physical world about us. ’Tis the dead things, we may remind ourselves, that after all are most entirely at rest, and might reasonably hold that motion (vicious, fallacious, infectious motion, as Plato inclines to think) covers all that is best worth being. And as for philosophy—mobility, versatility, the habit of thought that can most adequately follow the subtle movement of things, that, surely, were the secret of wisdom, of the true knowledge of them. It means susceptibility, sympathetic intelligence, capacity, in short. It was the spirit of God that moved, moves still, in every form of real power, everywhere. Yet to Plato motion becomes the token of unreality in things, of falsity in our thoughts about them. It is just this principle of mobility, in itself so welcome to all of us, that, with all his contriving care for the future, he desires to withstand. Everywhere he displays himself as an advocate of the immutable. The Republic is a proposal to establish it indefectibly in a very precisely regulated, a very exclusive community, which shall be a refuge for elect souls from an ill-made world.
Metaphysical formulae have always their practical equivalents. The ethical alliance of Heraclitus is with the Sophists, and the Cyrenaics or the Epicureans; that of Parmenides, with Socrates, and the Cynics or the Stoics. The Cynic or Stoic ideal of a static calm is as truly the moral or practical equivalent of the Parmenidean doctrine of the One, as the Cyrenaic μονόχρονος ἡδονή—the pleasure of the ideal now—is the practical equivalent of the doctrine of motion; and, as sometimes happens, what seems hopelessly perverse as a metaphysic for the understanding is found to be realisable enough as one of many phases of our so flexible human feeling.
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Sources:
Pater, W. (1893). Plato and Platonism. Praeger.
Patrick, G.T.W. (2015). The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature; Translated from the Greek Text of Bywater, with an Introduction Historical and Critical. Digireads.com Publishing.
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