SCIENCE  AND  PHILOSOPHY

                            By    Franz J. T. Lee

                         PANDEMONIUM  BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS.

       Merida, Venezuela, 1999.    COPYRIGHT: Franz J. T. Lee.
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CHAPTER  THIRTY-FIVE

HISTORY  OF  WISDOM  X
 

Heracleitus: Everything Flows!

As we have seen before, the three Milesians, Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, had regarded the Cosmos, in its chemical, natural essence
as being composed of four major elements: water, air, fire and earth.
Everything else was derived from the interaction of these elements; like
in the future formal logics: All Non-A is derived from A.

The Ephesian hylozoistic aristocrat, Heracleitus, wanted to explain why things change, why they have to change. In our unilogical conception, he wanted to explain the " and " Bezug, the Non-Relations within the One Principle, within Cosmos, within his "World of Worlds", within the Universe. Of course, he saw this as Being-In-Flux, as Change, as Motion -- patrian conceptual meanings which all difffer from the dialogical connotations of our diagory: Rest  a n d  Motion. He wanted to know why things, why beings exist, why they move, why they labour, why they work, why they live. Why they drink Thales' water; why they breathe the air of Anaximenes; why they think at all; why they are reasoning in apeironic manner.

These questions logically produce contradictions, dilemmas, dialectics, all things that nowadays are being declared by homo ignoramus as forbidden fruits, as communist gibberish, as Marxist obsolescence.  Today, even in patrian terms, although very fast global potable hydor is evaporating from the face of the Earth, and although very rapidly oxygen is vanishing from the aer, yet as the result of the systematic annihilation of apeironic thinking, of the current  dissocialization for savagery, billions on Earth do not even dream about asking such fundamental, childlike, existential, dialectical questions anymore. It was Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel who had decorated Heracleitus as the Originator of the Laws of Dialectics, and it was Friedrich Engels who had praised the Ancient Greek philosophers, including the Milesians, as having been excellent "natural-born" dialecticians. Heracleitus was the first philosophic analyser of the general Laws of Motion. Surely, even the Patria had a lively, vivid, productive, reproductive youth; it still bore the historic birth-marks of creative, recreative, natural feminism. For this very reason, we could learn quite a lot about ourselves, and also a few historic, emancipatory things from these early Western Philosophers.

Being in Motion, Becoming-Being
 

Now, what preoccupied Heracleitus? As stated above, he wanted to know why things cannot remain as they are, at rest, and why they have to change, why they are in motion.

Anaximenes still had considered Fire to be rarefied Air, but Heracleitus has agitated the Arché, precisely because he placed Pýr and Phos, Fire and Light, into his primordial Being; by placing Supreme Light, the Empyreum and the Bringer of Light, Lucifer, all together in his genetic, archaic crucible, he logically brought about strife, commotion, dialectics; he converted Being into Becoming-Being, thus, he set Being in Motion. As the fiery essence of cosmic dikaiosyne (justice), now Agon (Strife, War, Dialectics) was agonizing  Being in its totality.

As such, in Western Philosophy, the cosmogonic, cosmological Promethean Fire luciferously, dialectically, entered into many of its idealist and materialist currents.  As we could note, it was not the mythologic, "heroic" Hercules, but the philosophic, "obscure" Heracleitus, who had rescued "divine" Fire to be placed productively in the service of earthly, patrian development and progress. Now we understand why Karl Marx in his doctoral dissertation fierily had ordained Prometheus as the first heroic saint in the philosophic calendar of historical materialism.

For Heracleitus, Virgil's words are quintessentially true:
    flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo,
    If I can't move the Gods, I'll stir up Hell!

But, let Heracleitus for himself speak clarus et distinctus:

"This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods
or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever
shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures kindling and
measures going out. ... War is the father of all and the
king of all; and some he has made gods and some men,
some bond and some free. ... Homer was wrong in
saying: 'Would that Strife might perish from among
Gods and men!' He did not see that he was praying for
the destruction of the Universe; for, if his prayers were
heard, all things would pass away. ... We must know that
War is Common to All, and Strife is Justice."
(See: Diels, Fragments 30 and 53.)
 

In all the preserved "Fragments' of Heracleitus, about 140 in number, of which some 14 are either not genuine, or are falsified, we can trace the fiery, blazing trails of eternal gignestai (Motion, Change).

Finally, like Thales, also the aristocratic slave-owning Heracleitus expressed the superstructure of his epoch, of  primitive accumulation of Capital. Again, let Heracleitus himself say it expressis verbis; he wrote:

"All Things are in exchange for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares for gold and gold for wares." (Diels, Fragment 90)
 
 

This confirms that, in ancient Ephesus, gold, money, as economic exchange
element, had already become an essential social reality, but, simultaneously, this fluent fact found its philosophic reproduction In the search for the primordial, micro- and megacosmic arché.

Nonetheless, we are still investigating the philosophic realities
of the 6th Century B. C., a socio-historic part of res externae, in
which the contradictions of mythology and primitive science
continuously and continuatively erupted. In that human environment, clairaudience and clairvoyance, but also éclaircissement, that is obscurity and enlightenment, dialectically existed side-by-side.

Heracleitus, who had the nickname „The Obscure One“, in spite of all
his Promethean Fire and Light, was himself an expression of these contradictions. His philosophy reflected and reproduced the social contradictions and conflicts, the strife and war of that epoch. He even
had the mythological "negation" of interpreting the world-out-of-itself as
contradiction in his very "aristocratic blood". Within himself, the agon between theoría, mythós and empeiría raged.

After the destruction of Miletus by the Persians in 494 B. C., Ephesus,
not only had become the new flourishing economic and cultural centre
of Hellas, but, moreover, it still remained the seat of the mystery
cult of Artemis (Athena or Diana), to which Heracleitus’ aristocratic
family belonged and which they even supervised. Heracleitus, like Marx
later, first had to emancipate himself from the family superstitions. This explains ipse in re why he later fundamentally attacked all such religious cults and all “mystery-mongers“.

But, like Prometheus, Heracleitus „stole“, discarded and saved
much of the fiery emancipatory substances and essences from
the divinities and mythology; thus, simultaneously, he negated
and affirmed these contradictory elements. However, when his
aristocratic friend, Hermodorus, was banished; in protest, Heracleitus
withdrew into Artemis’ temple, and sought philosophic solace,
inspiration and chastity in the arms of the daughter of Zeus and the
twin sister of Apollo; there, he later faded into eternal material
bliss. In the next century, the „great men“ of the Periclean Age would
do likewise, with the differentia specifica, that their hetairaí like Aspasia were real, wise, intelligent, chthonic beauties.

With the philosophic obscurity and profundity of the works of
Heracleitus, numerous materialists had to grapple in the
centuries to come; some of them were intellectual authorities of
no lesser stature than Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
Lasalle and Bloch. (See: Georg Max Hartmann, Der Materialismus
in der griechisch-römischen Antike, Lebendiges Altertum, Band I,
Akadamie-Verlag, Ost-Berlin, 1959, pp. 10 - 14.) In his
philosophical bequest, Lenin concluded that the ancient
panpsychic, panvitalistic materialism of Heracleitus „is an
excellent exposition of the principles of dialectical materialism”.
 

The following fragments will serve further as a noteworthy
elucidation of these hylozoistic principles, as expounded by
Heracleitus’ intellectual genius, by his light and shade contrasts,
by his Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro of philosophic imagery:

          „The sun is new every day“. (Frag. 6)
          „Good and ill are one“. (Frag. 58)
          „Common is the beginning
          and the end of a circumference“. (Frag. 103)
          „The way up and the way down is one and the
          same“. (Frag. 60)
          „The fairest harmony is born of
          things different, and discord is what produces all
          things. ... Couples are things whole and not
          Whole, what is drawn together and what is
          drawn asunder, the harmonious and the
          discordant. The One is made up of all things, an
          all things issue from the One“. (Fragments 8 and 10)
          „Men do not know what is at variance agree
          with itself; it is an attunement of opposite
          tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre“. (Frag. 51)
          „What lives in us is always one and the same,
          a living and dying, an awakening and a slumber,
          young and old; it is a perpetual interchange of
          the one for the other“. (Frag. 88).
          „Coldness warms itself, warmth cools itself down, wetness
          dries itself, and dryness wets itself“. (Frag. 12)

(Also see: Diels, pp. 21 - 31, Russell, pp. 57 - 65; and,
George Novack, The Origins of Materiality, Pathfinder Press,
New York, 4th printing, 1979, pp. 97 - 100.)

Of course, in these fragments are reflected patriarchal norms,
concepts and beliefs. In respect of what is within or behind (méta) Being-Becoming (phýsis), concerning its influent and effluent essence;
about that which cannot be interpenetrated by dóxa; in relation to that
which is metempirical; Heracleitus boldly focused his attention on
Thales’ psyché, on Anaximenes' pneuma, on nous or even lógos,
namely, on those entities which are generally known as gods,
devils; intellect, reason, mind; angels, spirits or souls. We would
recollect that Thales had thought that in the lodestone, in the
hýle or arché a mysterious, incognizable „spirit“ lives, which
enlivens, gives bíos or zoé to the seemingly inorganic magnetic
stone.

In Heracleitean méta ta physiká - metaphysics, understood in its
archaic, metonymical sense - the basic elements of mythology,
cosmogony, religion, theology and idealism, the Word, Idea,
Spirit, God, Devil, Soul, etc., have a material, "historical"
existence. All of them are intellectual and physical products of
Being-Becoming and Becoming-Being. In consequence, they cannot
exist apart from the arché in perpetuum mobile; they are not natura
naturans, they do not create matter; they are not even its major
contradiction, its non-ens, Non-Matter; obviously, also not its total
apóphasis, Nothing. Here we note the philosophic limits of Heracleitus,
caught up in his single principle, in his one and only fiery arché.

Furthermore, for him these basically mythological elements are not
primordial elements, not creative- and creating-in-themselves, like, for example, the arché, the „ever-living Fire“.  This is the reason, why for
Heracleitus nothing „supernatural“, supramundane, natural or human
could be mysterious, strange or indifferent to him.

In the last analysis, Heracleitus had explained all divinities,
spirits, transcendental beings, transcending essences and
surpassing thoughts scientifically, id est, out-of-themselves; and
because of their real, material existence, they do not enter the
multiplex processes of eternal pýr as a deus ex machina. This is
what is meant when a patrian dialectical materialist states that matter
is primordial and primeval. Of course, in the patria, god, mind, spirit or the idéa are basic contradictions and opposites but not necessarily negations,
of matter; they are part of its superstructure, of its essential products. Seemingly, Idealism contradicts, opposes materialism; but, it was Gorgias'  nihilism which negates both ancient philosophic trends; Nihilism, which was ostracized out of patrian philosophy, is the Nothing of the universal, dialectical Contradiction “Materialism-Idealism.”

In reality, all the magical-superstitious, mythological-theological,
religious-idealist, existentialist-agnostic, and even nihilistic-absurd ideas, concepts and categories were all true historical reflections of different being-becoming and becoming-being, were different ancient Greek philosophical levels and degrees of human consciousness-in-process. When Heracleitus vigorously attacked them, especially in their Bacchic-Orphic forms, perhaps sub-consciously he had considered them to be philosophically false, unscientific intellectual interpretations and interpenetrations of the equal, unequal and combined multiplex levels of material development, in the human and social spheres, as well as in universal dimensions.

Studying Heracleitean philosophy, a part of the history of Western
Materialism, is investigating the human record of intra-systemic
"negation", of intellectual acceleration-deceleration in its momentous
task of approximating the multiveloce motions of matter, as functions of
totality, of the "Whole Truth" (Hegel), thus, is reflecting the real, ancient
Greek production process, the quintessence of Man.

Heracleitus' "soul"

Taking one step backward to Heracleitean „metaphysics“, in the
attempt to grasp his historical level of reflections concerning the
psyché, we first have to note that his soul is material, consequently,
alive. The psyché is the synthesis of a dialectical commixture of Thales’ water and Heracleitus’ own fire, where the former is the antithesis and the latter the thesis, in other words, water is the opposite of fire and vice
versa. This is the case with all qualitative dialectical processes.
However, it should he noted further, that for Heracleitus fire is a synthesis
of its own internal contradiction, a unity-and contradiction-of-opposites. As
such, in process, it produces a new contradiction to itself, its
opposite, its not-Being, water. The synthesis of the contradiction, fire-water, is the psyché, the soul.

The human psyché with the most luciferous Promethean fire in it, is  the „dry soul“; is the „wisest and best(Frag. 11), it has the greatest amount of sophía in its contents and its motion strives to achieve virtuous perfection to the summum bonum, but not in a Socratic-Platonic sense.

However, note, it is not the essence of an aristocratic philosopher-king or
king of philosophy, but of patrian philosophic man - novus homo, the coming homo faber. The erotic, fiery drive to achieve virtuous perfection we will encounter later again in Epicurus’ pursuit towards human hedoné, fraternal, philanthropic happiness - total human eleuthería (freedom).

As stated earlier in spite of his philosophic openness of mind, in
the attempt to cognize the essence of the multiple obscure and
radiating phenomena, and his scientific preparedness to
interpenetrate the horizons of the unknown, Heracleitus was
resolutely hostile to all superstitious, religious beliefs, including
all their concomitant, conservative, reactionary-social practices.
With revolutionary anger he opposed the „moist“; intoxicating,
opiating elements of Bacchic religious cults; he fervently attacked
all „night-walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of
the wine-vat and mystery-mongers“ (Frag. 14) „and promised them
Cosmic Justice of Fire after death. He considered Hades, the
underworld, as being „the same as Dionysus, in whose honour they
became insane“ (Frag. 15), where their „souls smell“ (Frag. 98),
obviously, of wine. Hence a mental excursion into moist airiness, accompanied by intellectual aquabatics and ideological opiates, certainly, would „wet“ and stupefy the human soul, human intellect and reason.

A careful analysis of the Heracleitean fragments reveals that he,
like Anaximander, had elevated the essence of the Cosmos, as
necessary justice, as intensive, hylozoistic contradiction, as living
dialectics,to the same level as that which generally is being considered as
the „Divine“, the „godly“:

„God is day and night, winter and
summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger;
but, He takes various shapes, just as fire,
when it is mingled with apices, is
named according to the savour of each“. (Frag. 67)

Logos, Cosmic-Ontic, Panvitalistic God, Fire

But, his spicy, savoury God is not the arché, He is like Fire;
He regulates the processes of Fire, according to anánke (part of a
dialectical category), „with measures kindling and measures going
out“, in accordance with the rhythmic, multiveloce movements of the
eternal, living arché. This God, the symphonic conductor of
Cosmic Justice, has His limits and limitations, He cannot
„overstep His measures” if He does, the Erinyes, the handmaids
of Justice, will find Him out“. (Frag. 94) Thus, female universal
guards watch Helios’ operations within the Cosmos, of which he
is part and parcel, and, as „Sun-God“, he has no alternative but
to rule democratically and universal-dialectically; hence, He has
no affinity; to either a despotic philosopher king, or a republican
„queen“ of all the sciences. Certainly, instead of a Puritan or Roman
Catholic God, the contemporary Highest Courts of Justice of the USA
and Venezuela urgently need such a philosophic God, such a "Logos"
in whom we all democratically could really trust.

Transcendental "Hope"

Referring to the formal-logical tendency within all universal
processes, Everything or Nothing, „it is Death to souls to become
Water“ (Frag. 36), and concerning the „wisest and best“ human soul,
Heracleitus made a philosophic statement which is
fundamentally paradoxical and obscure, and which causes
momentary mental apoplexy, if not perfervid perplexity; „He who
does not hope for the unexpected, will not find it, because it is
incognizable and unattainable“. (Frag. 18) This statement surely seems
to differ from, seems to transcend the normal accepted connotation of
"hope".

Nonetheless, this philosophic intransparent, intranslucent jewel, which seriously challenges any form of translation or transmediation, is a direct
supratemporal, anticipatory, transhistoric déja vu of Ernst Bloch’s coming 20th century "Prinzip Hoffnung“ (principle of hope), already shining more
than twenty-five centuries. Hoping (elpís) and Finding (praxis) are
dialectically linked and are precisely aimed at the concrete-utopian, Blochian Not-Yet-Cognizable-Not-Yet-Attainable. Thus, according to Heracleitus,
„one should not speak and act like a sleeping person“ (Frag. 73), one should practise gnóthi seautón, „should thoroughly examine oneself“ (Frag. 125); and, last, but not least: „To think healthy is the greatest perfection; Wisdom is to tell the Truth, to act according to Nature, to listen to her“. (Frag. 112)

Here we see the still close, intimate "healthy" relation with Mother Nature, with Nyx, still with emancipatory, feminist magic touches of ancient Greek Mythology, inherited (or plagiarized) from the whole African and Asian region. It is evident now, why, in previous chapters, we have emphasized sensitive „magnetic needle like“ thinking and underlined „atomic-watchlike“
conceptual precision, and also stressed that human social praxis must
have the corresponding scientific-philosophic, influent-effluent, delitescent-deliquescent, theoretic-theoretical contents, under the straight, conscious directions, but not directives, of Sophía.

Continuation:
As Chapter IV of the Publication Online:
"HISTORY OF WISDOM" .

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX:  PARMENIDES OF ELEA: SPHERE


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