(14) Blogging Through Prof Martin Heidegger’s Interpretations of Greek Philosophy (Heraclitus Part 1)

“We call those thinkers who think in the region of the inception ‘the inceptional [arche, 18] thinkers.’  There are only three such thinkers: Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus (Heidegger, Heraclitus, 4).”

Heidegger considers Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus as the thinkers at the inception of Western Philosophy. I have previously posted about Anaximander and Parmenides. I will now look at Heidegger’s 1943/44 lecture course on Heraclitus. As a beginning:

We have stories that the people come to see Heraclitus to see something extraordinary, him thinking in profundity, so that they can engage in entertaining chatter about him, but instead find him warming himself at the stove saying “here too the gods are present.”  They don’t want Heraclitus’s insights, but just to say they were in the presence of a thinker celebrity.  The gods presence or appear at the stove, and only here, in the inconspicuousness of the everyday. 

Another story is Heraclitus at the temple of Artemis playing dice with children instead of attending to the goddess in the way everyone else does. Heidegger names the polis, “the pole and the site around which all appearing of essential beings, and with it also the dreadful non-essence of all beings, turn (11).”  The  gaping of the Ephesians at Heraclitus playing dice with children at the temple of Artemis shows they think Heraclitus is engaged in a pastime, in which case the playing and the gaping would be the same. 

One story we have about Heraclitus is of him at the stove where the gods presence in his humble home, whereas the other has him at the temple of Artemis where he is not attending to the goddess but playing with children.  The crowd who only attend to what is pleasing and obvious are thus perplexed. 

The cosmos for the Greeks was self-concealing and essentially obscure in its very Being.  Light is ambiguous because it lights up what is seen but at the same time the brightness of light produces a blindness when looked at directly.  Heraclitus is phosphorus, bringer of light, and skoteinos, the obscure (the dark).  The bright and light are revealing but also concealing.  When we attempt what is most penetrating in thought we are there at the risk of leveling or dumbing down into mere mechanical chatter (27).  Heidegger notes “the region of the words of this thinker is like a minefield where the slightest misstep annihilates everything into dust and smoke (28).” 

We attempt to reconstruct Heraclitus’s fragments into a whole like a puzzle that we don’t know what the picture on the front of the box is, the inner core of the fragments.  Heraclitus thinks strife (eris) as the essence of Being (15), and we are trying to bring the fragmentary sources we have about Heraclitus into the “light of understanding (16).”  Heidegger gives the example of a broken Greek vase we are trying to put together without knowing what the whole is supposed to look like. The same is true of reconstructing Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, and Kant.  One can be a professional Philosopher fluent in German with many books and articles on Kant without understanding the core of Kant’s message: “The merely ‘erudite’ knowledge of its contents is as without insight into the historical as the bowdlerizing of its content for popular consumption (30).”  As soon as an essential thought is brought forth, it slips into a dumbing down.  The fact that we only have Heraclitus in fragments is fortuitous because it guards against trying to evoke “One Heraclitus for all time.”  The masses want quick and clear conclusions because “human beings now concern themselves , for various reasons, with the continually new and up to date [eg., the news], whatever exhausts itself in always and only being the same is completely boring to them.  It is precisely in order to ensure that this absolute (i.e., the boring same) will not be forgotten through the course of history of a people that a thinker occasionally arrives (32-3).”  Of course the thinker does not claim this origin, but yet there it is.  Thinkers belong to a “peculiar atmosphere (33)” and the goal is to relaunch that context to give sense to Anaximander’s fragments.