Heraclitus Part 1: Provocation as Philosophical Practice

I want to start this meditation with the 12th fragment of Heraclitus — the main one about never being able to step into the same river twice. Of course, we have no reliable record of him ever saying or writing quite this phrase. Plato says that he says this (Cratylus 401a), and many others have said that he said this. Most likely they’re referring to Fragment 12, but that’s not exactly what this text says.

Here’s the actual text of Fragment 12 as translated by T.M. Robinson:

As they step into the same rivers, different and [still] different waters flow upon them.

First thing to point out is the beginning of this fragment. It reads like a provocative response to someone else. Many of the fragments read this way. I don’t think I’m reading too far into this. I’ve come across at least three scholars of Heraclitus who have argued that many of his fragments are provocations to his readers/listeners to get out of their knee-jerk thinking to see the world in more complex ways. MM McCabe, in an interview I listened to frequently in preparing for this meditation, seems to think of these fragments as dialectics without the textual presence of an interlocutor. For my money, that is an enlightening reading because it unlocks so much of what I think Heraclitus is doing.

What if I take seriously this idea that Heraclitus’ fragments are provocations in addition to being enigmatic philosophical aphorisms? Treating them as philosophical aphorisms that mask a fully baked metaphysics leads one down the path of interpretation and exegesis. What does Heraclitus really mean to say? What is the phusis he is cryptically revealing in these fragments? By treating them primarily as provocations, I see something different. Heraclitus appears to be less of a metaphysician (though he is that) and appears more as a Nietzschean overman – someone who attempts to revalue all values and come up with new ways of being in the world.

To return to Fragment 12 as provocation: who is stepping into the same river? Who does “they” refer to? Fragment 12 (like so many other fragments) seems to be a response to someone else. It is hard to understand what the antecedent is, but by simply starting with the assumption of an antecedent unlocks the provocative nature of the fragments. Undoubtedly, Heraclitus is making one of his clearest cases for unity-in-diversity that seems to be a hallmark of his worldview. This is not a statement about constant change or “flux” as we get it from Plato’s (willful?) misreading. As Robinson says in his Commentary: “The change in question is not some sort of subatomic change, but rather constant change of the great world masses (see fragments 30, 31a, 31b), and the evidence of fragments 12 and 91a (qv) suggests that, in talking of rivers, Heraclitus is stressing their unity amidst change, rather than simply their change” (83-4).

This is an important interpretation. This fragment is not about subatomic flux such that the world is fundamentally always lacking in stable unities. What if we honestly ask ourselves how a named river comes to exist? It occurs because flowing water carves its way through the landscape to create “the same river.” It results from the interacting forces of the flowing water and the landscape that resists in some places and gives way in others as the water flows. Difference and unity, in other words, are not the main concepts that we should focus on. Rather, the flowing of the water creates the unity that is the river. Unity arises from flow, at least in this fragment. Heraclitus is provoking his absent interlocutor to take a step back from just seeing the river as a stable entity in order to observe the flow of water as constitutive of the thing we see.

This is not a nihilistic provocation to abandon our ability to name things or identify things — as Cratylus is purported to have done when he is characterized as only being able to point at the river but not to name it. It is a provocation to step back from the evidence of our senses and to reflect on the nature of things. It is to challenge us to pause a bit and not accept what we see, hear and feel as the undisputed truth.

But if this is all that Heraclitus is telling us, we wouldn’t be reading him today in the history of philosophy. Something more is happening here, and I want to spend some time in this meditation unfolding what I think Heraclitus was up to. To summarize briefly, I believe that Heraclitus’ fragments are early evidence of the birth of the will to truth as Nietzsche offered it in the Genealogy of Morals. Specifically, Heraclitus is trying to provoke a mental ability in his reader to separate reality from perception. Put even more specifically, he wants the reader to adopt a mental disposition that creates a gap between what one perceives and what is real. These fragments are, therefore, provocations to manage your attention in a new way. My belief is that what we have from Heraclitus are not just ordinary provocations that anyone of us can ask of others today. Rather, he is doing something historically new, and we can read in these fragments attempts to create a new form of attention that separates reality from perception and perception from knowledge.

As I argued in an earlier meditation, Plato’s Socrates’ use of the elenchus provokes a similar separation of doer from deed such that the doer’s deeds are evidence of his beliefs, which themselves can be true or false beliefs. These separations were necessary to create a form of self-reflective attention that would make one responsible for one’s actions. For Plato, this was an answer to the problem of a dysfunctional citizenry. But it is hard to imagine either Plato or Socrates creating these separations out of whole cloth. Heraclitus, I think, provided some of the early provocations to make these separations that Plato’s Socrates took much further.

Provocation is crucial to Heraclitus’ fragments. If you’re out to jar the attention of your readers/interlocutors so that they pause for a moment and have to think about reality and their perception of it as two separate things, provocation is an excellent tactic in your strategic endeavor. Let me try to make this as obvious to myself as possible. If you live in a society where war is regularly on your doorstep and the consequences of loss mean going into slavery (or worse) for you and your family, then the events that happen around you are simultaneously true, knowable, and self-evident. There is no need to separate out reality from perception. Your crops are growing or they aren’t. You’re living a free life running your household, or you’re enslaved by an invader. The sun is shining or it isn’t. In such a world, the gods are important explanations for the ups and downs of fortune, but they aren’t anything like a separation of reality from our knowledge of it. The gods do what the gods do because they are not the hidden laws of nature operating consistently behind the scenes. They are actors within the scene itself, and their actions are not necessarily predictable. They are driven by motivations that any human being could recognize in themselves and others.

Let’s take deeds on the battlefield as an example. If the difference between freedom and slavery has everything to do with the courageous deeds of your military leaders to fend off invading forces, then the deeds stand alone and are in themselves true and real. You either lost or you won. You either continue to be free or you are enslaved. There is no need for a psychological reality behind the deeds. What you perceive is true and self-evident.

To see reality as something hidden behind the events of life and subject to laws of nature requires a different form of attention. It requires someone to teach you how to do this. Like all teaching, it requires the marshaling of a conceptual scaffolding to guide the mind’s attention in new ways. For my money, many of Heraclitus’ fragments are the scaffolding. As such, they don’t just represent what he thinks — the reality behind the enigmatic aphorisms — they are tactical moves to create a form of attention in the reader/interlocutor that creates a belief that there is a reality behind isolated events. Perception, experience, knowledge, truth and reality all begin to separate, and a subject that seeks to rejoin them is provoked into being, or “bred” to use Nietzsche’s term.

To see this in action, I want to pair a couple of fragments, 107 and 112. Here are Robinson’s translations:

107: Poor witness for people are eyes and ears if they posses uncomprehending (literally, ‘barbarian’) souls [psyche].

112: Sound thinking is a very great virtue, and [practical] wisdom [consists in our] saying what is true and acting in accordance with [the] real constitution [of things], [by] paying heed [to it].

107 directly calls for a separation of what we experience through our senses (“eyes and ears”) and places our ability to comprehend reality into the psyche. From our modern vantage point, this is a benign and familiar admonition. Don’t judge a book by its cover. There is always more than meets the eye. But what if we read 107 assuming that this separation is not yet as commonplace as it is for us? Robinson’s commentary on Fragment 45 suggests that this might be the case. He argues that Heraclitus’ is the first known Greek to equate psyche (soul) with “a cognitive principle, not simply a biological principle and/or source of our ‘emotional,’ non-rational selves as seems to have been thought by most of his predecessors… (109-110).

This starts to make sense as a provocation. He now seems to be saying, “Slow down. Take a step back from what you see and hear. There might be something else going on here than meets the eye.” Doubling back to Fragment 12, you need to look at the river differently. From the perspective that sees reality as self-evident, the river is a source of life or death — it can flood and ruin your property; it can dry up and ruin your crops; it can be a barrier between you and your enemies. It is always the same river just taking on different realities, which are self-evident. Heraclitus seems to be provoking his reader to see the river in more abstract terms. What does it mean to call it the same river? What is its relationship to the “different and [still] different waters” that flow through it? This perspective requires his reader to become a different kind of person — one that separates reality from perception and uses thought to attempt to rejoin them.

Now Fragment 112 starts to come into greater clarity as a provocation. Thinking, virtue, wisdom, saying what you think, truth, action, reality and attention (paying heed) are all crammed into this fragment. Again, from our modern vantage point, this sounds commonplace. Any teacher or parent has probably uttered some form of this to the children in their charge. It’s part of our education. But isn’t this evidence that this disposition needs to be taught, or “bred” to use Nietzsche’s term yet again? What if we’re seeing in this fragment the tentative beginning of this form of attention for humanity? Do we have here one of the first moments of askesis — the trained ability to step back from one’s knee-jerk reactions and transform ourselves to see, think, and act differently? Possibly. Undoubtedly we have an early moment in the history of humanity where all these concepts are woven together in such a way that the provocation is a technique of askesis.

Self-transformation is essential to truly understanding Heraclitus’s fragments. His provocations are not meant to be momentary flashes of brilliant insight. Rather, the provocations target the psyche as a permanent entity that one must take care of over a lifetime:

113: Thinking is common to all.

116: All people have a claim to self-knowledge (literally ‘self-ascertainment’) and sound thinking.

Neither of these fragments says that we don’t have to work to attain sound thinking. Rather, we all have the capacity, but the process of attaining knowledge of divine things (which Heraclitus believes is possible) does not happen quickly. It is a lot of work to habitually step back from the obvious and try to see a larger reality operating behind and within the scene.

22: Those who seek gold dig up a great deal of earth and find little.

123: [A thing’s (the world’s)] real constitution [according to Heraclitus] has a tendency to conceal itself.

Attaining knowledge is hard work on oneself. It requires askesis as self-transformation in order to see reality and to see oneself as ignorant of that reality. So much of what we have from Heraclitus is as much about this need for self-transformation as it is about difference, unity, sameness and all the other metaphysical concepts we believe to be lurking within the fragments. Let’s take a particular sequence of fragments for example:

17: Many people do not ‘understand the sorts of things they encounter’! Nor do they recognize them [even] after they have had experience [of them] – though they themselves think [they recognize them].

18: If [he] does not expect the unexpected, [he] will not discover [it]; for [it] is difficult to discover and intractable.

19: [Reproving certain people for their credulousness, Heraclitus says:] [They are] people who do not know how to listen or how to speak.

These fragments say nothing about the metaphysics that so many like to find as the exciting part of Heraclitus’ “system” or worldview. Yet they are crucially important to understanding his fragments as provocations. These particular fragments emphasize the disposition one must have 1) to reality (which is “difficult to discover and intractable”) and 2) to oneself as someone who wishes to know this reality from which we have become estranged. This is a key moment in the birth of the will to truth. At the very moment Heraclitus separates perception/recognition from reality, he provokes his reader to modify their focus of attention back on themselves as the kind of person who can know this reality.

Fragment 17 directly addresses the tendency I discussed above to take reality at face value. “Recognition” is the mental state that is brought into question by separating it from “understanding” or comprehension. Even after they are told the truth of the reality underlying everything they think they recognize, they still have a lot of work to do to overcome a lifetime of taking things at face value. In other words, for Heraclitus, to recognize does not equate to automatic knowledge. He separates recognition from knowledge as mental states. Recognition is at best a starting point that must be worked on over a lifetime for it to become wisdom.

Fragment 18 specifies at least one technique in that lifetime of work: suspending one’s knee-jerk recognitions to “expect the unexpected.” Discovery as understanding occurs after taking up a disposition that sets aside one’s inherited expectations so as to see, hear and think more carefully about what they think they recognize and know.

Fragment 19 makes this concrete by focusing on the capacities for speaking and listening. These human capacities must be transformed so as to step back from one’s easy recognitions and see those recognitions as having a hidden truth from which we have been estranged. “Credulousness” is the problematic state of the soul that takes recognitions at face value and must be unlearned to achieve wisdom, which will be reflected in how one speaks and how one listens.

Now we can return to the psyche, (soul) which is central to how one works on oneself. The psyche is not just a concept, but the central focusing concept that is the seat of our actions. On the one hand, it is an entity that is capable of understanding the not-self-evident complexities of reality as we saw in Fragments 107 and 112 above. On the other hand, Heraclitus is not just talking about abstract knowledge. He is talking about the psyche as a guide to the actions of its owner:

85: It is difficult to fight passion [one’s heart], for whatever it wishes it buys at the price of soul.

117: Whenever a man is drunk, he is led along, stumbling, by a beardless boy; he does not perceive where he is going because his soul is wet.

In these fragments, the psyche is clearly something to be cared for over a lifetime. It is not only what allows us to attain knowledge; it is what allows us to control our passions (thymos, which can be interpreted in many ways, including anger, passion, desire, according to Robinson’s notes). After reading or hearing these statements, how could you not come to believe that the seat of your actions is within you and that it has a name – it’s your psyche and it is the driver of your actions and must be cared for as part of your own moral development. To come to see yourself as having one of these is a crucial moment in the history of humanity. With Nietzsche, I do not believe that this is a natural occurrence. Man must be bred to have this capability. Heraclitus’ fragments can be well understood in the form of provocations to his reader/listener to adopt this disposition to themselves and to their estranged reality.