conception, whereas towards the other mode of conception which is
consummated by ideas and logical combinations, that is towards reason,
he shows himself cool, apathetic, even hostile, and he seems to
derive a pleasure when he is able to contradict reason by means of a
truth gained intuitively, and this he does in such propositions as:
"Everything has always its opposite within itself," so fearlessly
that Aristotle before the tribunal of Reason accuses him of the
highest crime, of having sinned against the law of opposition.
Intuitive representation however embraces two things: firstly, the
present, motley, changing world, pressing on us in all experiences,
secondly, the conditions by means of which alone any experience of
this world becomes possible: time and space. For these are able to be
intuitively apprehended, purely in themselves and independent of any
experience; _i.e.,_ they can be perceived, although they are without
definite contents. If now Heraclitus considered time in this fashion,
dissociated from all experiences, he had in it the most instructive
monogram of all that which falls within the realm of intuitive
conception. Just as he conceived of time, so also for instance did
Schopenhauer, who repeatedly says of it: that in it every instant
exists only in so far as it has annihilated the preceding one, its
father, in order to be itself effaced equally quickly; that past
and future are as unreal as any dream; that the present is only the
dimensionless and unstable boundary between the two; that however, like
time, so space, and again like the latter, so also everything that
is simultaneously in space and time, has only a relative existence,
only through and for the sake of a something else, of the same kind
as itself, _i.e.,_ existing only under the same limitations. This
truth is in the highest degree self-evident, accessible to everyone,
and just for that very reason, abstractly and rationally, it is only
attained with great difficulty. Whoever has this truth before his eyes
must however also proceed at once to the next Heraclitean consequence
and say that the whole essence of actuality is in fact activity, and
that for actuality there is no other kind of existence and reality,
as Schopenhauer has likewise expounded ("The World As Will And Idea,"
Vol. I., Bk. I, sec. 4): "Only as active does it fill space and time:
its action upon the immediate object determines the perception in
which alone it exists: the effect of the action of any material object
upon any other, is known only in so far as the latter acts upon the
immediate object in a different way from that in which it acted before;
it consists in this alone. Cause and effect thus constitute the whole
nature of matter; its true being _is_ its action. The totality of
everything material is therefore very appropriately called in German
_Wirklichkeit_ (actuality)--a word which is far more expressive than
_Realität_ (reality).[2] That upon which actuality acts is always
matter; actuality's whole 'Being' and essence therefore consist only in
the orderly change, which _one_ part of it causes in another, and is
therefore wholly relative, according to a relation which is valid only
within the boundary of actuality, as in the case of time and space."
The eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total instability of all
reality and actuality, which continually works and becomes and never
_is,_ as Heraclitus teaches--is an awful and appalling conception,
and in its effects most nearly related to that sensation, by which
during an earthquake one loses confidence in the firmly-grounded earth.
It required an astonishing strength to translate this effect into
its opposite, into the sublime, into happy astonishment. Heraclitus
accomplished this through an observation of the proper course of all
Becoming and Passing, which he conceived of under the form of polarity,
as the divergence of a force into two qualitatively different, opposite
actions, striving after reunion. A quality is set continually at
variance with itself and separates itself into its opposites: these
opposites continually strive again one towards another. The common
people of course think to recognise something rigid, completed,
consistent; but the fact of the matter is that at any instant, bright
and dark, sour and sweet are side by side and attached to one another
like two wrestlers of whom sometimes the one succeeds, sometimes the
other. According to Heraclitus honey is at the same time sweet and
bitter, and the world itself an amphora whose contents constantly need
stirring up. Out of the war of the opposites all Becoming originates;
the definite and to us seemingly persistent qualities express only the
momentary predominance of the one fighter, but with that the war is not
at an end; the wrestling continues to all eternity. Everything happens
according to this struggle, and this very struggle manifests eternal
justice. It is a wonderful conception, drawn from the purest source
of Hellenism, which considers the struggle as the continual sway of a
homogeneous, severe justice bound by eternal laws. Only a Greek was
able to consider this conception as the fundament of a _Cosmodicy;_ it
is Hesiod's good Eris transfigured into the cosmic principle, it is
the idea of a contest, an idea held by individual Greeks and by their
State, and translated out of the gymnasia and palæstra, out of the
artistic agonistics, out of the struggle of the political parties and
of the towns into the most general principle, so that the machinery of
the universe is regulated by it. Just as every Greek fought as though
he alone were in the right, and as though an absolutely sure standard
of judicial opinion could at any instant decide whither victory is
inclining, thus the qualities wrestle one with another, according to
inviolable laws and standards which are inherent in the struggle. The
Things themselves in the permanency of which the limited intellect of
man and animal believes, do not "exist" at all; they are as the fierce
flashing and fiery sparkling of drawn swords, as the stars of Victory
rising with a radiant resplendence in the battle of the opposite
qualities.
That struggle which is peculiar to all Becoming, that eternal
interchange of victory is again described by Schopenhauer: ("The World
As Will And Idea," Vol. I., Bk. 2, sec. 27) "The permanent matter
must constantly change its form; for under the guidance of causality,
mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, eagerly striving
to appear, wrest the matter from each other, for each desires to
reveal its own Idea. This strife may be followed up through the whole
of nature; indeed nature exists only through it." The following pages
give the most noteworthy illustrations of this struggle, only that
the prevailing tone of this description ever remains other than that
of Heraclitus in so far as to Schopenhauer the struggle is a proof of
the Will to Life falling out with itself; it is to him a feasting
on itself on the part of this dismal, dull impulse, as a phenomenon
on the whole horrible and not at all making for happiness. The arena
and the object of this struggle is Matter,--which some natural forces
alternately endeavour to disintegrate and build up again at the expense
of other natural forces,--as also Space and Time, the union of which
through causality _is_ this very matter.
[2] Mira in quibusdam rebus verborum proprietas est, et consuetudo
sermonis antiqui quædam efficacissimis notis signat (Seneca, Epist.
81).--TR.
6
Whilst the imagination of Heraclitus measured the restlessly moving
universe, the "actuality" (_Wirklichkeit_), with the eye of the happy
spectator, who sees innumerable pairs wrestling in joyous combat
entrusted to the superintendence of severe umpires, a still higher
presentiment seized him, he no longer could contemplate the wrestling
pairs and the umpires, separated one from another; the very umpires
seemed to fight, and the fighters seemed to be their own judges--yea,
since at the bottom he conceived only of the one Justice eternally
swaying, he dared to exclaim: "The contest of The Many is itself pure
justice. And after all: The One is The Many. For what are all those
qualities according to their nature? Are they immortal gods? Are they
separate beings working for themselves from the beginning and without
end? And if the world which we see knows only Becoming and Passing but
no Permanence, should perhaps those qualities constitute a differently
fashioned metaphysical world, true, not a world of unity as Anaximander
sought behind the fluttering veil of plurality, but a world of eternal
and essential pluralities?" Is it possible that however violently he
had denied such duality, Heraclitus has after all by a round-about way
accidentally got into the dual cosmic order, an order with an Olympus
of numerous immortal gods and demons,--viz., _many_ realities,--and
with a human world, which sees only the dust-cloud of the Olympic
struggle and the flashing of divine spears,--_i.e.,_ only a Becoming?
Anaximander had fled just from these definite qualities into the lap of
the metaphysical "Indefinite"; because the former _became_ and passed,
he had denied them a true and essential existence; however should it
not seem now as if the Becoming is only the looming-into-view of a
struggle of eternal qualities? When we speak of the Becoming, should
not the original cause of this be sought in the peculiar feebleness of
human cognition--whereas in the nature of things there is perhaps no
Becoming, but only a co-existing of many true increate indestructible
realities?
These are Heraclitean loop-holes and labyrinths; he exclaims once
again: "The 'One' is the 'Many'." The many perceptible qualities are
neither eternal entities, nor phantasmata of our senses (Anaxagoras
conceives them later on as the former, Parmenides as the latter),
they are neither rigid, sovereign "Being" nor fleeting Appearance
hovering in human minds. The third possibility which alone was left
to Heraclitus nobody will be able to divine with dialectic sagacity
and as it were by calculation, for what he invented here is a rarity
even in the realm of mystic incredibilities and unexpected cosmic
metaphors.--The world is the _Game_ of Zeus, or expressed more
physically, the game of fire with itself, the "One" is only in this
sense at the same time the "Many."--
In order to elucidate in the first place the introduction of fire as
a world-shaping force, I recall how Anaximander had further developed
the theory of water as the origin of things. Placing confidence in the
essential part of Thales' theory, and strengthening and adding to the
latter's observations, Anaximander however was not to be convinced
that before the water and, as it were, after the water there was no
further stage of quality: no, to him out of the Warm and the Cold
the Moist seemed to form itself, and the Warm and the Cold therefore
were supposed to be the preliminary stages, the still more original
qualities. With their issuing forth from the primordial existence
of the "Indefinite," Becoming begins. Heraclitus who as physicist
subordinated himself to the importance of Anaximander, explains to
himself this Anaximandrian "Warm" as the respiration, the warm breath,
the dry vapours, in short as the fiery element: about this fire he now
enunciates the same as Thales and Anaximander had enunciated about
the water: that in innumerable metamorphoses it was passing along the
path of Becoming, especially in the three chief aggregate stages as
something Warm, Moist, and Firm. For water in descending is transformed
into earth, in ascending into fire: or as Heraclitus appears to have
expressed himself more exactly: from the sea ascend only the pure
vapours which serve as food to the divine fire of the stars, from the
earth only the dark, foggy ones, from which the Moist derives its
nourishment. The pure vapours are the transitional stage in the passing
of sea into fire, the impure the transitional stage in the passing
of earth into water. Thus the two paths of metamorphosis of the fire
run continuously side by side, upwards and downwards, to and fro, from
fire to water, from water to earth, from earth back again to water,
from water to fire. Whereas Heraclitus is a follower of Anaximander in
the most important of these conceptions, _e.g.,_ that the fire is kept
up by the evaporations, or herein, that out of the water is dissolved
partly earth, partly fire; he is on the other hand quite independent
and in opposition to Anaximander in excluding the "Cold" from the
physical process, whilst Anaximander had put it side by side with the
"Warm" as having the same rights, so as to let the "Moist" originate
out of both. To do so, was of course a necessity to Heraclitus, for
if everything is to be fire, then, however many possibilities of its
transformation might be assumed, nothing can exist that would be the
absolute antithesis to fire; he has, therefore, probably interpreted
only as a degree of the "Warm" that which is called the "Cold," and
he could justify this interpretation without difficulty. Much more
important than this deviation from the doctrine of Anaximander is a
further agreement; he, like the latter, believes in an end of the
world periodically repeating itself and in an ever-renewed emerging of
another world out of the all-destroying world-fire. The period during
which the world hastens towards that world-fire and the dissolution
into pure fire is characterised by him most strikingly as a demand
and a need; the state of being completely swallowed up by the fire as
satiety; and now to us remains the question as to how he understood
and named the newly awakening impulse for world-creation, the
pouring-out-of-itself into the forms of plurality. The Greek proverb
seems to come to our assistance with the thought that "satiety gives
birth to crime" (the Hybris) and one may indeed ask oneself for a
minute whether perhaps Heraclitus has derived that return to plurality
out of the Hybris. Let us just take this thought seriously: in its
light the face of Heraclitus changes before our eyes, the proud gleam
of his eyes dies out, a wrinkled expression of painful resignation, of
impotence becomes distinct, it seems that we know why later antiquity
called him the "weeping philosopher." Is not the whole world-process
now an act of punishment of the Hybris? The plurality the result of a
crime? The transformation of the pure into the impure, the consequence
of injustice? Is not the guilt now shifted into the essence of the
things and indeed, the world of Becoming and of individuals accordingly
exonerated from guilt; yet at the same time are they not condemned for
ever and ever to bear the consequences of guilt?
7
That dangerous word, Hybris, is indeed the touchstone for every
Heraclitean; here he may show whether he has understood or mistaken
his master. Is there in this world: Guilt, injustice, contradiction,
suffering?
Yes, exclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited human being, who
sees divergently and not convergently, not for the contuitive god;
to him everything opposing converges into one harmony, invisible it
is true to the common human eye, yet comprehensible to him who like
Heraclitus resembles the contemplative god. Before his fiery eye no
drop of injustice is left in the world poured out around him, and even
that cardinal obstacle--how pure fire can take up its quarters in
forms so impure--he masters by means of a sublime simile. A Becoming
and Passing, a building and destroying, without any moral bias, in
perpetual innocence is in this world only the play of the artist and of
the child. And similarly, just as the child and the artist play, the
eternally living fire plays, builds up and destroys, in innocence--and
this game the _Æon_ plays with himself. Transforming himself into water
and earth, like a child he piles heaps of sand by the sea, piles up
and demolishes; from time to time he recommences the game. A moment of
satiety, then again desire seizes him, as desire compels the artist to
create. Not wantonness, but the ever newly awakening impulse to play,
calls into life other worlds. The child throws away his toys; but soon
he starts again in an innocent frame of mind. As soon however as the
child builds he connects, joins and forms lawfully and according to an
innate sense of order.
Thus only is the world contemplated by the æsthetic man, who has
learned from the artist and the genesis of the latter's work, how the
struggle of plurality can yet bear within itself law and justice,
how the artist stands contemplative above, and working within the
work of art, how necessity and play, antagonism and harmony must pair
themselves for the procreation of the work of art.
Who now will still demand from such a philosophy a system of Ethics
with the necessary imperatives--Thou Shalt,--or even reproach
Heraclitus with such a deficiency. Man down to his last fibre is
Necessity and absolutely "unfree "--if by freedom one understands the
foolish claim to be able to change at will one's _essentia_ like a
garment, a claim, which up to the present every serious philosophy
has rejected with due scorn. That so few human beings live with
consciousness in the _Logos_ and in accordance with the all-overlooking
artist's eye originates from their souls being wet and from the fact
that men's eyes and ears, their intellect in general is a bad witness
when "moist ooze fills their souls." Why that is so, is not questioned
any more than why fire becomes water and earth. Heraclitus is not
_compelled_ to prove (as Leibnitz was) that this world was even the
best of all; it was sufficient for him that the world is the beautiful,
innocent play of the _Æon._ Man on the whole is to him even an
irrational being, with which the fact that in all his essence the law
of all-ruling reason is fulfilled does lot clash. He does not occupy
a specially favoured position in nature, whose highest phenomenon is
not simple-minded man, but fire, for instance, as stars. In so far as
man has through necessity received a share of fire, he is a little
more rational; as far as he consists of earth and water it stands
badly with his reason. He is not compelled to take cognisance of the
_Logos_ simply because he is a human being. Why is there water, why
earth? This to Heraclitus is a much more serious problem than to ask,
why men are so stupid and bad. In the highest and the most perverted
men the same inherent lawfulness and justice manifest themselves.
If however one would ask Heraclitus the question "Why is fire not
always fire, why is it now water, now earth?" then he would only just
answer: "It is a game, don't take it too pathetically and still less,
morally." Heraclitus describes only the existing world and has the same
contemplative pleasure in it which the artist experiences when looking
at his growing work. Only those who have cause to be discontented
with his natural history of man find him gloomy, melancholy, tearful,
sombre, atrabilarious, pessimistic and altogether hateful. He however
would take these discontented people, together with their antipathies
and sympathies, their hatred und their love, as negligible and perhaps
answer them with some such comment as: "Dogs bark at anything they do
not know," or, "To the ass chaff is preferable to gold."
With such discontented persons also originate the numerous complaints
as to the obscurity of the Heraclitean style; probably no man has ever
written clearer and more illuminatingly; of course, very abruptly,
and therefore naturally obscure to the racing readers. But why a
philosopher should intentionally write obscurely--a thing habitually
said about Heraclitus--is absolutely inexplicable; unless he has some
cause to hide his thoughts or is sufficiently a rogue to conceal his
thoughtlessness underneath words. One is, as Schopenhauer says, indeed
compelled by lucid expression to prevent misunderstandings even in
affairs of practical every-day life, how then should one be allowed to
express oneself indistinctly, indeed puzzlingly in the most difficult,
most abstruse, scarcely attainable object of thinking, the tasks of
philosophy? With respect to brevity however Jean Paul gives a good
precept: "On the whole it is right that everything great--of deep
meaning to a rare mind--should be uttered with brevity and (therefore)
obscurely so that the paltry mind would rather proclaim it to be
nonsense than translate it into the realm of his empty-headedness.
For common minds have an ugly ability to perceive in the deepest and
richest saying nothing but their own every-day opinion." Moreover and
in spite of it Heraclitus has not escaped the "paltry minds"; already
the Stoics have "re-expounded" him into the shallow and dragged down
his æsthetic fundamental-perception as to the play of the world to the
miserable level of the common regard for the practical ends of the
world and more explicitly for the advantages of man, so that out of his
Physics has arisen in those heads a crude optimism, with the continual
invitation to Dick, Tom, and Harry, "_Plaudite amici!_"
8
Heraclitus was proud; and if it comes to pride with a philosopher then
it is a great pride. His work never refers him to a "public," the
applause of the masses and the hailing chorus of contemporaries. To
wander lonely along his path belongs to the nature of the philosopher.
His talents are the most rare, in a certain sense the most unnatural
and at the same time exclusive and hostile even toward kindred talents.
The wall of his self-sufficiency must be of diamond, if it is not to
be demolished and broken, for everything is in motion against him. His
journey to immortality is more cumbersome and impeded than any other
and yet nobody can believe more firmly than the philosopher that he
will attain the goal by that journey--because he does not know where
he is to stand if not on the widely spread wings of all time; for the
disregard of everything present and momentary lies in the essence of
the great philosophic nature. He has truth; the wheel of time may roll
whither it pleases, never can it escape from truth. It is important
to hear that such men have lived. Never for example would one be able
to imagine the pride of Heraclitus as an idle possibility. In itself
every endeavour after knowledge seems by its nature to be eternally
unsatisfied and unsatisfactory. Therefore nobody unless instructed
by history will like to believe in such a royal self-esteem and
conviction of being the only wooer of truth. Such men live in their
own solar-system--one has to look for them there. A Pythagoras, an
Empedocles treated themselves too with a super-human esteem, yea, with
almost religious awe; but the tie of sympathy united with the great
conviction of the metempsychosis and the unity of everything living,
led them back to other men, for their welfare and salvation. Of that
feeling of solitude, however, which permeated the Ephesian recluse
of the Artemis Temple, one can only divine something, when growing
benumbed in the wildest mountain desert. No paramount feeling of
compassionate agitation, no desire to help, heal and save emanates from
him. He is a star without an atmosphere. His eye, directed blazingly
inwards, looks outward, for appearance's sake only, extinct and icy.
All around him, immediately upon the citadel of his pride beat the
waves of folly and perversity: with loathing he turns away from them.
But men with a feeling heart would also shun such a Gorgon monster
as cast out of brass; within an out-of-the-way sanctuary, among the
statues of gods, by the side of cold composedly-sublime architecture
such a being may appear more comprehensible. As man among men
Heraclitus was incredible; and though he was seen paying attention to
the play of noisy children, even then he was reflecting upon what never
man thought of on such an occasion: the play of the great world-child,
Zeus. He had no need of men, not even for his discernments. He was
not interested in all that which one might perhaps ascertain from
them, and in what the other sages before him had been endeavouring to
ascertain. He spoke with disdain of such questioning, collecting, in
short "historic" men. "I sought and investigated myself," he said, with
a word by which one designates the investigation of an oracle; as if
he and no one else were the true fulfiller and achiever of the Delphic
precept: "Know thyself."
What he learned from this oracle, he deemed immortal wisdom, and
eternally worthy of explanation, of unlimited effect even in the
distance, after the model of the prophetic speeches of the Sibyl.
It is sufficient for the latest mankind: let the latter have that
expounded to her, as oracular sayings, which he like the Delphic god
"neither enunciates nor conceals." Although it is proclaimed by him,
"without smiles, finery and the scent of ointments," but rather as with
"foaming mouth," it _must_ force its way through the millenniums of
the future. For the world needs truth eternally, therefore she needs
also Heraclitus eternally; although he has no need of her. What does
his fame matter to _him?_--fame with "mortals ever flowing on!" as he
exclaims scornfully. His fame is of concern to man, not to himself;
the immortality of mankind needs him, not he the immortality of the
man Heraclitus. That which he beheld, _the doctrine of the Law in the
Becoming, and of the Play in the Necessity,_ must henceforth be beheld
eternally; he has raised the curtain of this greatest stage-play.
9
Whereas in every word of Heraclitus are expressed the pride and the
majesty of truth, but of truth caught by intuitions, not scaled by
the rope-ladder of Logic, whereas in sublime ecstasy he beholds but
does not espy, discerns but does not reckon, he is contrasted with his
contemporary _Parmenides,_ a man likewise with the type of a prophet
of truth, but formed as it were out of ice and not out of fire, and
shedding around himself cold, piercing light.