ROYALLY SECLUDED AND ALL-SUFFICING

Nietzsche’s boundless love (here’s a jocular allusion to Anaximander) for the pre-Socratics has been noted by us on several occasions, as well as his special preference for some over the others. But none of these has a higher standing with Nietzsche than Heraclitus. Not only is he a part of the small “wonderfully idealized company of philosophers,” but he is also claimed elsewhere as one of Nietzsche’s four ‘ancestors,’ namely Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, and Goethe. (Observe that two out of four here are pre-Socratics!)

To make matters even more personal in Nietzsche’s reverence for Heraclitus, here is a remarkable passage from Ecce Homo (Chapter on Birth of Tragedy #3):

“…I have the right to understand myself as the first tragic philosopher--- that is, the most extreme opposite and antipode of a pessimistic philosopher. Before me this transposition of a Dionysian into a philosophical pathos did not exist: tragic wisdom was lacking; I have looked in vain for signs of it even among the great Greeks in philosophy of the two centuries before Socrates. I retained some doubt in the case of Heraclitus, in whose proximity I feel altogether warmer and better than anywhere else.

“The affirmation of passing away and destroying, which is the decisive feature of a Dionysian philosophy; saying Yes to opposition and war; becoming, along with a radical repudiation of the very concept of being -- all this is clearly more closely related to me than anything else thought to date. The doctrine of “eternal recurrence,” that is, of the unconditional and infinitely repeated circular course of all things-- this doctrine of Zarathustra might in the end have been taught already by Heraclitus. (!!!) At least the Stoa has traces of it, and the Stoics inherited almost all of their principal notions from Heraclitus.” (!)

According to this, the weeping philosopher is by no means a pessimist, but is in fact his antipode, and what he actually represents is tragic philosophy, which immediately evokes the image of the Greek tragic mask, which can be mistaken for a weeping face, when in reality it signifies something much more profound and pointed.

So far we have seen Nietzsche carelessly dismissing any silly discussion of Heraclitean unpleasantness, but rather getting directly down to the latter’s philosophical worth. It is therefore extremely instructive to look at some of his references to Heraclitus throughout the totality of Nietzsche’s Works, conspicuously starting with his pre-Socratic magnum opus Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks. The first excerpt we quote has been noted already earlier. Characterizing Plato as a hybrid type, as opposed to the pure types of the pre-Socratics, Nietzsche writes:

“In Plato’s ideology are united Socratic, Pythagorean, and Heraclitean elements, and for this reason it is no typically pure phenomenon. As person, too, Plato mingles the features of the royally secluded, all-sufficing Heraclitus, of the melancholy compassionate and legislatory Pythagoras and the psycho-expert dialectician Socrates.”

His characterization of Heraclitus as royally secluded and all-sufficing, which I have chosen as the title for this entry can be just as much applied to Nietzsche himself, establishing that close connection between the two, which Nietzsche has explicitly emphasized.

Nietzsche’s analysis of Heraclitean philosophy takes several chapters in his Philosophy During the Tragic Age of the Greeks, and to these chapters (5-8 and beyond) I direct the interested reader. For much more of this, see also my next entry Being And Becoming, which I’ve found necessary to insert between the present entry and the one on the Heraclitean Fragments, for the reasons explained there.

According to Nietzsche, “Heraclitus has as his royal property the highest power of intuitive conception, but toward the other mode of conception, consummated by ideas and logical combinations, which is 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, doing this in such propositions as: Everything has always its opposite within itself”. (Which did not fail to scandalize Aristotle!)

Nietzsche obviously dearly loves Heraclitus, and even the latter’s vice of spiteful misanthropy turns into a virtue in Nietzsche’s treatment: “As human among humans, Heraclitus was incredible. He had no need of people, 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 endeavoring to ascertain. He was disdainful of such questioning, collecting, in short historic humans. “I sought and investigated myself,” he said, with the 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 millennia 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 is of concern to humans and not to himself; the immortality of mankind needs him, not he the immortality of the man Heraclitus.”

Now, here is a reference to Heraclitus in Nietzsche’s Götzen-Dämmerung (From Chapter Reason in Philosophy: #2):

“(On the question of some philosophical idiosyncrasies.) With the highest respect, I except the name of Heraclitus [from “the rest of the philosophic folk rejecting the testimony of the senses”]. When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses, because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony, because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus, too, did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way that the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed: they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies: for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. ‘Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.” (In other words, Nietzsche praises Heraclitus for repudiating the thing in itself two millennia before Kant would become yet another knight errant on that never-ending quest of a lost cause…)

As promised, our discussion of Nietzsche’s opinion of Heraclitus does not end here, but continues into the next entry with a discussion of Being and Becoming. And here it comes (to be posted tomorrow). ---