Social Roots of the Heraclitean Metaphysics - II

Social Roots of the Heraclitean MetaphysicsAuthor(s): Bertrand HelmSource: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1964), pp. 565-571Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2708186 .

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SOCIAL ROOTS OF THE HERACLITEAN METAPHYSICS

By BERTRAND HELM

A recurrent task of the history of thought is that of describing how philosophy differentiates itself out of religion and myth. Investigators seek to show in detail how some of the bare assertions about religious reality linger on in transmuted form as the ultimate starting points of philosophical inquiry. Studies of this kind abound within the fields of the history of Greek philosophy and of the origins of Western culture. Many of them can be seen as well-documented elaborations of the judgment that "there is no discon- tinuity between Ionian natural philosophy and the Homeric epics." 1 The- ogony lingers on as a rudimentary form of physics or astronomy. The genealogy of the gods provides the plausibility for announcing the inter- relatedness of all things.

The religious ideas of Homer and Hesiod on the one hand and the mystery religions on the other make up the two forms of tradition which have been most vigorously sifted in order to detect the earliest forms of ration- ality. Relationships between this two-fold religious tradition and philosophy have been detailed quite thoroughly in the case of the pre-Socratics. When examining Heraclitus, however, the customary approach needs at least some re-appraisal. For in only an imperfect fashion do the Olympian or mystery religions provide a bridge for the understanding of the "dark sayings" of Heraclitus. He dissociates his own work from the prestige of Homer, Hesiod, and the mysteries explicitly.2 His philosophy seems sui generis in many re- spects. Terse, caustic, hieratic, its discontinuities with the Ionian philosophical traditions are at least as striking as its harmony with parts of that tradition. Our concern here is one which grows out of an effort to throw greater light upon that part of his thought which breaches the usual affinities between the early philosophers. The position that will be set forward here is that Heraclitus is a good deal more comprehensible to us when we see part of his thought as rooted in a third religious tradition of ancient Greece, the domestic religion of the patriarchs. This is the private religion of the aristocratic household which centers around the hearth.

The family of Heraclitus can be traced back through Androclus to Codrus, the legendary king who founded Athens. The hereditary kingship of Ephesus was seated in this family. It was, moreover, a kingship whose religious and political functions were closely intertwined. Heraclitus, heir to the royal priesthood of Ephesus, abdicated in favor of his brother.3 He held, as a consequence, neither a hierarchic nor a monarchical office. His moral and religious authority was nevertheless quite extensive. "There is no doubt that he frequently intervened in the politics of his birthplace, and he is even said to have induced the ruling prince, Melancomas, to resign his usurped au-

l Werner Jaeger, Paideia (New York, 1943), I, 151. 2 Fr. 14, 42, 56, 57, and 68, in Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla (Oxford, 1948). All

other fragments referred to here are from this translation. 3 Diogenes Laertius, IX, 4-6.

565



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thority." 4 The rest of his public activities evidently centered around the Ephesian temple of Artemis. The book he is said to have written was de- posited there. Moreover, he preferred lingering at children's games in the temple courtyard to mingling with his fellow Ephesians; they, he thought, should end their own lives.5 Behind his outspoken jests at the populace of his city lay a mind which was openly critical of the "bad constitution" which linked the people together. Bitterly critical of many of his great predecessors in poetry and philosophy, Heraclitus had no rapport with his own peers.

Ephesus was a colony planted on the shore of Asia Minor by Athens. The relations between colony and parent city were close and constant. Every Greek colony of the early period, including Ephesus, justified or legitimized its continued life by showing that life to be derivative, through an unbroken succession of hereditary priest-kings, from the original city which sired it.6 Heraclitus knew that Ephesus, legally and religiously, was right and true insofar as its public cult life was derivative, through his family, from the public life of Athens whose legitimate founder was Codrus. The priestly caste into which he was born had as its chief task the undeviating mainte- nance of the spiritual relation between Ephesus and Athens. But impor- tantly, the public religion which the caste upheld was at the same time the private religion, or rooted in the private religion, of an aristocratic family.

Let us examine this patriarchal family religion.7 It was both a series of practices and a system of beliefs. Almost habitual in nature, the practices were a constituent part of each family's daily activities. The beliefs, on the other hand, were brought to clear expression only at times of crisis in the life of the family. But in a unique way both practice and belief were brought to sharp focus in the family hearth. Having the hearth as its prin- cipal axis, this domestic cult established the family as such. As Glotz puts it, the family is a group which breathes the same altar smoke.8

It was in reference to the realities of the hearth that family life took on full meaning. The hearth was invoked at all personal and family crises. All those cultic practices Arnold van Gennep referred to as the "rites of passage" were centered around it. Supporting their invocations with strict ritual, the patriarchal families made claim upon the powers of the hearth at times of birth, marriage, and death. At these transitional climaxes of human life, safe passage from one stage of existence to the next was assured through the intercession of the fire on the hearth. The waxing and waning of the fire were

4Theodor Gomperz, Greek Thinkers (London, 1955), I, 60. 5 Diogenes Laertius, IX, 2-4; Fr. 114, "they should hang themselves." 6 Martin Nilsson, Greek Piety (Oxford, 1951), 6; and Fustel De Coulanges, The

Ancient City (New York, 1956), 176-179. 7 The best general account is still in De Coulanges, op. cit., Book Two. For the

position of the man without a family, see B. A. Van Groningen, In The Grip of The Past (Leiden, 1953), 54-58. In order to fill in the wider social context of the Greek family, refer to Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (New York, 1956), 61-75.

8 G. Glotz, The Greek City (New York, 1930), 6.



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seen as expressive of the periodicity underlying the whole of human life. No natural born infant was a child of this man or an heir of this family until several days after coming from the womb. The rite of acceptance, the birth- rite really, was acted out when the father or ruling elder of the family ran around the hearth several times with the infant. He allowed the fire to scrutinize the novitiate, and to accept or reject it.9 Later on, marriage was valid only if the bride-to-be was introduced to her husband's hearth properly. At the critical moment, bride and groom shared a cake with the fire. She was acceptable when the fire did not give an unfavorable sign. Finally, at death, a ritually exact burial was needed to ensure safe passage to the next world. The authenticity of the burial was assured through proper invo- cation of the powers of the hearth. The hearth was overseer for correct departure and insured safe arrival at that farther place.10

Thus, the hearth mediated or interceded during the rites of passage. This was the supreme test of the potency of the fire that burned on that hearth day and night. The fire was the authoritative council of the full family, drawing together both the living and the dead; the continuing presence of the dead was made manifest in and through the fire." Each family had a fire representing its own set of ancestors, but the conviction was common to all families that the fire was a definite being. It was the continued life of those who were dead revealed and intervening for the benefit of the living. The fire was the corporate soul of the preceding generations; their spirit remained incarnate in it. It was the theatre pit of the family in solemn assembly. It was due to this spiritual or social nature of the fire on the hearth that the hearth took on its capacity of officiating at the crises of personal and familial life. This belief was so deeply ingrained in the thought of that time that it lingered on persuasively into later periods of social development. At a far advanced stage in the growth of the city-state, the hearth still retained its primitive ascendancy in certain affairs. Homicide, for example, was never a civil offense; it was personal and domestic.'2 The family still retained jurisdiction in such cases, for it and it alone could properly judge of the passing of a man from this world to the next. The domestic, patriarchal religion here seemed to stand impervious to the more general developments of society. Civic law, late in its development, could not override the essential legal prerogatives of the family, prerogatives

9 An interesting relic of this belief is preserved for us by Plato (Theaetetus, 160- 161). He has Socrates say "then this is the child (i.e. the judgment that knowledge is perception) which you and I have with difficulty brought into the world. And now that he is born, we must run around the hearth with him, and see whether he is worth rearing, or is only a wind-egg and a sham." Socratic midwifery is based upon forcing opinions to "run around" the fire of critical inquiry to see if they can stand up as knowledge.

10 See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, 1960), for further discussion of the ritual identification of spiritual development and progression with spatial or territorial passage or movement.

"Konstantinas Rodocanachi, Athens and The Greek Miracle (Boston, 1951), 36. 12 Paul Vinogradoff, Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1922), II, 177.



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rooted in the rites of the hearth. In observing these practices focused around the hearth, we see that they

were based upon the unquenched conviction that fire is a personal being. It is a moral agent which directs and admonishes, and it is an intelligence which criticizes, teaches, and decides. It was seen as the cumulative wisdom of all the preceding male members of the family. But it was also procreative or generative. Future generations were richly present in it. It was, moreover, representative of a composite agency. Its insights were the refined understandings which could come from criticism and judgment of the family as a whole. That is, the truths the fire carried on were truths which need to be seen in the light of the judgment of many. It was this depth element in the nature of fire, its spiritual richness, that constituted the authenticity it could guarantee for all human relations worked out under its auspices.

The most profound characteristic of the fire was its religious power. It represented that in man which is immortal. The spirit of the man who died joined with or flowed back into the abiding family, a being that does not die. But it was the detailed correctness in observing the hearth rites of the living members of the family which somehow helped to keep the whole of the family alive. A man's worst crime, one which allowed of no forgiveness, was that of allowing the fire to die. To permit this was to take active part in dissi- pating the family. But to keep the fire active and nourished was to con- tribute to the vitality of the family. For the living and the dead were in constant communication with each other through the fire. Each was the guarantor of the other; 13 each cared for the other. The hearth fire, and the wisdom and moral power of it, was the constant mediator between the two parts of the family. In a strong sense, both the living and the dead were simply differentiations of it. The fire was seen as the unifying substance, the abiding reality, of the family; it was the source of the existing human beings in the patriarchal home.

The traditions of the hearth were non-rational in a not insignificant manner. They served to help the "breathers of the same altar smoke" through transitions in life which defy explanation. Men touched mysteries here, and reason could only partly secure them in a grasp of the powers which dis- closed and hid themselves around the hearth. The powers and the rites of any one hearth were not discussed with outsiders, because such a revelation to the uninitiate was a profanation of the divinities of the family. This is why our sources are mute on the specific content of any one domestic religion. Only general accounts of the more formal elements common to all survive, a kind of "common law" of the hearth.14

13 Emile Mireaux, Daily Life in The Time of Homer (New York, 1959), 84. 14 Vinogradoff, op. cit., II, 6, "The connection between family law and family

religion, the efforts to keep up the material households centered around the ancestral cults . . . these features recur over and over again and evidently go back to an archaic association of kinsman common to all Greeks." For a quite clear statement of this relation between ancestral sacrifice and a common law of the Greeks, TaN KOcM r'V 'EXAXtvwv voputa, see Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (Harvard, 1961), Book Three, 59-60.




We have examined the patriarchal family religion of the Greeks. It is this set of beliefs and attitudes which provides us with the most accurate context for the Heraclitean philosophy. The problems of interpreting his position with confidence are sizeable, but not insurmountable. In addition to the work of the historians of philosophy, the results of the investigations of the classical philologists allow us to have constantly deepening insights into the pre-Socratic philosophy. Our own inquiry here, we argue, places additional weight behind the cutting edge of those investigations. For seen against the traditions present in Hellenic society surrounding the hearth fire, some of what seems to us to be relatively vague in the thought of Heraclitus becomes rather clear. He makes uncommon good sense when we read his 'fire' in many passages in terms of the hearth-fire.15 He was called "The Obscure" at a later time partly because his interpreters and critics had lost any meaningful contact with the aristocratic religion of the hearth. But if we allow some of his "dark sayings" to be illuminated by the fire on that hearth, then they can help enlighten us about the place of the philosophy of Heraclitus in the history of ideas.

Let us examine a few of the central theses of his philosophy in the light of our previous discussions. That is, we shall judge the manner in which our survey of the patriarchal domestic religion allows us to discern the "distin- guishing characteristics and discriminating effects" of his more important utterances, especially those dealing with the logos doctrine and the concept of fire.

The analogy central to much of the Heraclitean metaphysics is the fire analogy. We are to see the beliefs and rites connected with the hearth fire as providing the explicit interior relations of his philosophy.'6 The key analogy

15 However, see G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge, 1954), 316, for an opposing view on this point: "The fire in question is not simply that which burns in the hearth, because this has no claim to be more important or more primary than sea or earth." I take firm exception to Kirk's judgment on this point. Inasmuch as he did not argue his view here in any way, we proceed with a consideration of our own evidence.

16The opportunity is at hand for putting to rest forever speculation about why Heraclitus chose fire as his central concept. Such speculation generally proceeds from a reference to traits possessed by our "empirical" fire; e.g. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (London, 1956), I, 40; only cautiously suggested by Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1962), 200; most clearly stated in a work which has had wide influence in the past by John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London, 1908), 161, where Burnet said that we can easily see why Heraclitus chose fire as the unifying concept "if we consider the phenomenon of combustion." The implications of this naturalistic kind of explanation can be seen in Eduard Zeller, Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy (New York, 1955), 46, where "the reason for this hypothesis lies in the first instance in the fact that fire seemed to the philosopher the substance which has least stability and least toler- ates it than others." That is, we can still tend to read Heraclitus as the philosopher of change, becoming, and flux to the extent that we are unclear about his root analogy. We would still tend to see his concepts of logos and fire as opposing each other. They do not.



570 BERTRAND HELM

could be stated in these terms: the cosmos is the hearth-fire writ large. Just as the fire mediated within the family, so too does it allow of the transitions of some things into other things in the universe. Heraclitus took all the moral, religious, and spiritual relations which permeate the aristocratic religious rites and formed the rest of the reality after their image. For him, the physical world was seen qua world, as ordered, insofar as the relations which give it the quality of wholeness were conceived along the lines of a familial, moral corporation. Each thing is to be appraised and assigned its own peculiar importance from the point of view of the parliament of all things. "Fire, having come upon them, will judge and seize upon all things." 17 This was just what fire did as a regular part of family living, and did critically well at each of the central rites of passage.

The key fragment in depicting the analogical base of the metaphysics of Heraclitus is the following: "This ordered universe (cosmos), which is the same for all, was not created by any one of the gods or of mankind, but it was ever and is and shall be ever-living Fire, kindled in measure and quenched in measure." 18 The religious and the regulative elements are strongly intertwined here. For every Hellenic aristocrat, the fire on the hearth was immortal. The purpose in tracing one's family back to a mythical founder was to show that the family line bridged the gulf between the human and the divine even in its first members. Each hearth-fire, moreover, as a religious collegium, was "everliving." Just as it waxed and waned according to the time of day or particular domestic use, so too the world-fire, the hearth for all existing things, kindles and goes out in measures.

In his fire analogy, Heraclitus is perhaps saying, the world is one in the same way a family with all its living and its dead and its future generations is one. The unifying powers of the hearth were the result of counsel, judgment, and controversy. They were expressive of a needed equilibrium in the affairs of the family, the family with all its present, past, and future dimen- sions. As is often noted, beyond his apparent concern with the diversity of experience we discover Heraclitus' real emphasis to be upon the order and rhythm which make diversity something more than fragments of things in unsettled turmoil.

The position we argue here takes on its complete contours in the light of the logos doctrine of Heraclitus. In that doctrine, Heraclitus still remained within the analogical ambit of the hearth-fire. In that tradition, the hearth- fire, as fire, is residual, purified wisdom. It derived from innumerable con- claves. His logos doctrine was his way of speaking of the parliamentary, dialogical, interpersonal element that was revealed in the full efficacy of the fire which unified the whole family. For that fire was the forum where "the divine-human encounter" took place. Just as the hearth-fire allowed each

17 Fr. 66. This does not place fire in opposition to order, but makes it the basis of order. See, however, the opposing view stated strongly by Olof Gigon, Unter- suchungen zu Heraklit (Leipzig, 1935), 58-65. For Gigon, fire and cosmos in the philosophy of Heraclitus stand over against each other. On such a view, Heraclitus is seen as developing the thought of Anaximander in the direction of the theories of Empedocles and the principles of love and strife. 18 Fr. 30.




person the position which he had in the family structure, so too did the logos or proportion revealed through that fire take precedence over the understandings of the individual. Heraclitus, we observe, specifically disclaimed final responsibility for his philosophy.19 The truths he sought to speak bore fruit in the degree that his own comprehension was rooted in the logos. It is the logos which proportions our understandings to the real reach of things, enabling us to separate things according to their kinds,20 or perhaps to di- vide things at their proximate joints.21 And it was this logos, moral and cognitive, which was to show us that all things are one. Revealed in the fire, but still hidden and potential,22 it supplies the ultimate congruence for all things which have arisen through it. The logos provides the discriminating standards for authentic thought.23 It is that tense harmony through which things are brought into existence and ushered out again. That is, the logos officiates at all rites of passage.

The closest kind of relation existed between impartiality and imperson- ality for Heraclitus.24 Subjectivity has merit only in the degree that the logos speaks through the subject. We are to follow what is universal, what is common to all. The logos provides that, even though the majority live as if they had a law of understanding peculiar to themselves. This objectivity of the logos could only have been seen by Heraclitus as dialectical in nature. It is not arbitrary or blind, but is the common law of the mind ar- rived at in family council around and through the fire, a harmony achieved through the concert of opposing views.25 It was the beautiful, many-sided understanding that can be achieved through strife.

As dialectical, it is also full of potential, even as the meeting of mind on mind is volatile with endless potential. Mind or soul has no limit, nor does the law expressed in it.26 Not only is there no limit to the objectivity of the logos, but the objectivity that is present is a growing, intensifying kind of ordering of things. The soul has its own law that increases and grows.27 Mind is dialectical because it is dynamic, a thing in becoming ex- tensively as well as intensively. For Heraclitus, reality is a growing, deepening, intensifying, contrapuntal sort of thing. He asserted that it was like the hearth-fire. In that analogy, he gave us a key to his metaphysics.

Northwestern State College, Louisiana. 19 Fr. 50. 20Fr. 1. 21 Fr. 10. 22 Fr. 54. 23 Fr. 90. 24 Fr. 2, 50. 25Fr. 8. 26Fr. 45. 27Fr. 115.



Social Roots of the Heraclitean Metaphysics - II

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