Of the translations I have read, I fancy Jaeger’s might capture the gnomic, terseness of Heraclitus’s Greek. ‘Character-man’s demon’ , ‘Dry flash–wisest and best soul’, ‘Way up and way down–one and the same’ , ‘Invisible harmony–better than visible’ , ‘One man–to me ten thousand, if he be the best’. Jaeger links this terseness of expression to Hesiod’s Works and Days and to the collection of Theognis of Megara – ‘Here again we meet long rows of apophthegms strung loosely together’. But they are strung together by one who loved wisdom (there was as yet no word for philosophy …); like Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Parmenides, Heraclitus brings a tone to philosophy different to the Ionians who were content to dispassionately report their observations and research.
Heraclitus, separate and proud, having removed himself from the common run, presents himself as a man who has awoken. He addresses us, the sleepers. Do not heed what he says, heed what resounds through what he says. Heed the logos and wake up! His discourse is a war machine. It must be; it is in harmony with what he teaches.
War, he says – the clash of forces, with its associations of carnage and horror – is ‘father of all and king of all’. This is shocking, but Heraclitus is insistent: the division of the world into gods and mortals, slaves and the free is premised upon war, which is to say, the struggle of opposing forces and their interchange. Contra Homer, who laments the strife in the world of men and gods, and against Hesiod, who does not understand why the day is also the night, Heraclitus presents strife as the hidden principle behind everything. This is what one should hear in the logos.
This is illustrated through examples, each of which has to be grasped intuitively. Tension – the lyre – a joining together or harmony that allows opposing forces to work in unison. Thus the lyre can make music through a redoubled tension and the bow, whose name is life (a pun on bios, which means life and a bow), can accomplish its work of death. Take this fragment: ‘They do not understand how that which draws apart agrees with itself: a fitting-together with counter-tension, as of the bow and the lyre’. Harmonia, Jaeger argues, is the third term which arises out of ‘the dynamics of two opposing forces stretched together so that they work in unison’.
Harmony? This word, which suggests peace and reconciliation, cannot translate harmonia. In another fragment we find ‘Invisible harmony–better than visible’; hidden, all we have are symbols which can point us towards making the right intuition. But the logos is common even if it calls each of us to separate ourselves from the others. Heed the play of the logos in the war-like language of Heraclitus. Heed the common-uncommon logos which attends to the countertension to what appears peaceful and calm in the visible world.
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