Nov 05 2003
Heraclitus First and Last
review by Brian Charles Clark
Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus
Translated by Brooks Haxton; foreword by James Hillman
Viking, 2001
Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, may have written a book that he might have called On Nature. If Heraclitus did write such a book, and if that’s what it was called, he did so while Pythagoras, Buddha, and Lao Tzu were all alive. But nobody really knows for sure—all that survives the intervening 2,500 years are fragments incorporated in the works of others. Personally, I’m not convinced that Heraclitus wrote a book—whatever it may have been called—at all. I think the old philosopher was a little like Ludwig Wittgenstein in that respect: mistrusting of the permanence of words on paper, never quite satisfied with the way things came out when he did write things down. Heraclitus seemed to have preferred conversation (when, as legend has it, he let you within a hundred feet), just like Wittgenstein, so much of whose thought was written down by his students, his listeners.
But without a doubt, Heraclitus was a master of the first, last line, and only line. Heraclitus, like Wittgenstein, is unparalleled in giving us the line that stops our thought of the world in its tracks. The first line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the breathtaking “The world is everything that is the case” (which we realize, once we catch our breath, neatly dispenses with both the supernatural and metaphysics). With Heraclitus’s “The world is flux,” these are lines that define while escaping the pedantic box of definitionism. Instead of putting an end to further discussion and closing down thought, these lines open the mind to, well, everything that is the case: the world in flux. They begin conversations (or arguments!), which is just what a first line is supposed to do.
Not that “The world is flux” is the first line of Haxton’s translation of the scattered fragments attributed to Heraclitus. Haxton goes for the line that is an inverted echo of the line that, centuries later, John would employ to kick off his gospel: “The Word proves / those first hearing it / as numb to understanding / as the ones who have not heard.” Already we have a possible subtext for (re)reading John’s first line: “In the beginning was the Word” but no one understood it. Nevertheless, as Heraclitus continues, “all things follow from the Word.”
Like Wittgenstein, and the postmodernists who (mostly unwittingly) follow him, Heraclitus was obsessed with language. This really shouldn’t surprise us: in Heraclitus’s time Greek culture was being, to use scholar Walter Ong’s word, “alphabetized.” They were learning how to write—or, more accurately, they were debating whether to write at all, and asking the question, What will writing things down do to the mind, to a person’s character? We may think, immersed as we are in a thoroughly alphabetized culture, that such questions are naïve. But consider that, up until the fifth or fourth century BC, the way things got done was mostly by word of mouth—and the mouth’s necessary ally, memory. No wonder the Odyssey beings (in the old Harvard Classics translation), “Tell me, Muse, of that man.” Mnemosyne was the mother of the Muses, and the goddess of memory: her name survives in our word mnemonic. The ancient Greeks knew, at least some of them did, that taking pen to papyrus would rob Mnemosyne of some of her power, and us of our mindfulness. Thus, when Heraclitus uses verbs like “speak” he is not, as we modern writers would be, using them metaphorically:
Since mindfulness, of all things,
is the ground of being,
to speak one’s true mind,
and to keep things known
in common, serves all being,
just as laws made clear
uphold the city,
yet with greater strength.
Of all pronouncements of the law
the one source is the Word
whereby we choose what helps
true mindfulness prevail.
Heraclitus is always provocative, clarifying and simultaneously enigmatic: his lines, in other words, are chewy. He’s the kind of thinker, like his contemporary Lao Tzu, you want to devour one phrase at a time—making every opening of his book a reading of a first line, wherever it may happen to fall in the text. Heraclitus invites us to read him the way we found him: random bits in stolen moments, as unattributed quotes in the works of scores of writers over the last 2,500 years. For all his invisible popularity, Heraclitus may be the best-kept secret in Western literature.
Haxton’s poetic translation of these ancient wisdom sayings is as spare and dense as Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and flows like water drawn from the same well as Dickinson’s. This translation is inspired, generous, and stern—because wisdom is, I think, always all of those things. The book itself is a minor masterpiece of the designer’s art (Francesca Belanger gets the nod there): elegant and without frills. Best of all, the ancient Greek is presented side by side with the translation, giving the ambitious logophile a chance to ferret out the roots of modern English words in one of their oldest written contexts.
Originally published in The First Line
