sea, was not yet Athenian. But there was no lack of tensions. Resentful, Heraclitus distanced himself from political life and rejected the request to lay down laws for the pólis, which he now considered governed by a bad Constitution. He retired to the temple of Artemides, where, as legend has it, he set down his great book, subdivided into three discourses: the first on everything, the second on politics, and the third on theology. Someone later gave this work a title which entered into widespread use: Perì phúseos. It is almost as if Heraclitus had written a treatise on phúsis, on nature understood as the principle and substance of all things. Aristotle helped to entrench this vision – a misleading and reductive one. Yet there also exists an ancient tradition, further embodied by the Stoic Diodotus, according to whom Heraclitus’ book had nothing to do with nature, except at a few points, and instead focused on political themes: perì politeías.
Moreover, it is not hard to recognise, against the numinous backdrop, the political-tragic inspiration of Heraclitus’ thought in the over 120 extant fragments of his work. The man who speaks here is not so much the explorer of the cosmos as the severe guardian of the city, the interpreter of the pólemos – that conflict, the ‘father’ of all things, which reigns over everything (B 53). The quarrel in the pólis is projected onto all reality in order to scrutinise the foundations of the law that governs it, to connect together in its unity all that is apparently scattered and multiple, to grasp the palíntropos harmoníe, the ‘discordant harmony’ of opposites (B 51). The city offers the paradigm for interpreting the world.
Perceiving the one in everything that is differentiated: this is the great merit of Heraclitus, recognised as the forerunner of the dialectic. As Hegel wrote: ‘Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic.’2 Yet, one should avoid any distortion of historical perspective here. The harmony of opposites – the enigmatic bond of which Heraclitus speaks – is not a speculative unity, but rather the unexpected passage through which the one incessantly changes into the other: life and death, day and night, wakefulness and sleep, summer and winter, peace and war. This vision has wrongly been ossified in a doctrine of perennial becoming, of fluidity, that pánta rheî of which there is no trace in the fragments from Heraclitus. He does, indeed, speak of the river ‘we enter and do not enter, we are and we are not’ (B 49a) – but only in order to emphasise the constant replacement of its ever-different waters. Unsurprisingly, it is the flame – which survives by transforming itself, which changes depending on the airs with which it mixes – that visually renders the harmonious concord among opposites.
Nothing can escape this law, not even the names which shed light on oppositions. Heraclitus was first in that line-up of thinkers who looked to language in order to understand reality. The hidden harmony which governs the cosmos is harboured within the lógos, which everything must happen in accordance with. This is an eternal and universal law, able to regulate becoming, which is not a blind plunge but rather a knowing move back and forth, from one opposite to the other.
But who will want to listen to the lógos? Who will want to listen to it, in its enigmatic ambiguity? This is Heraclitus’ question – and it already contains a warning. Deaf, absent, almost numbed, prey to flows of dreams and particular opinions – far from what is ‘wise’, sóphon – mortals draw away from listening. They live closed in on themselves, as if they were dreaming, prisoners of their own private existence, of their suffocating small-mindedness. Hence the denunciation of idiocy, which in Greek is etymologically related to property – idiótes derives from ídios, ‘one’s own’. It is, then, impossible to reach what is ‘common’, koinón. Heraclitus uses the Ionian form xunón, which through a play on words arrives at xùn nôi, that is, at noûs, ‘with reason’ (B 114). Not only is intelligence common, but that which is common is based on intelligence. This is not a matter of immediate intuition, but rather of the knowledge that orders the cosmos, which is articulated and combined in the lógos. An idiot is he who refuses to listen, who remains in the isolation of the night, cutting himself off from participation in the common day and the common world. Thus rings out the sentence passed by Heraclitus: ‘The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own’ (B 89).
As night and day follow one after the other, they beat the rhythm of time; but unlike what Hesiod imagined, they are not separate. Rather, they are a single whole, even if they alternate as opposites. But neither passes over into the other – for they remain distinct. Night and day point beyond themselves: they are indices, or rather symbols. The oppositions multiply. While the ultimate polarity of life and death appears enigmatically in the background – will there be a return, from death to life? – darkness and light summon sleep and wakefulness. The first metaphysician of light, Heraclitus represented the day as wisdom spreading out from the lógos, which makes common in the light. Wakefulness is the prelude to philosophy.
The call to wakefulness recurs constantly throughout the fragments.3 Philosophy would subsequently make this exhortation its own. To think is to have a part in keeping vigilance over the lógos which makes common. ‘Private wisdom’, idía phrónesis, is an oxymoron, because that which arises in the individual – dreams, images, opinions, ideas – is but an empty, dead illusion. This illusion is destined to persist so long as it does not find the path of commonality. So no, do not sleep! Do not let yourselves be carried off by the sleep of private idiocy! Heraclitus repeated this exhortation, directed at the many who lived in torpor. As his peremptory injunction has it: ‘It is wrong to act and speak like men asleep’ (B 73). But there’s sleep, and then there’s sleep. Healthy, restorative sleep is good. Yet, it is an error to mistake day for night, to confuse wakefulness with sleep, when what distinguishes them is that suddenness which, like a darting flame, ratifies the mysterious passage between opposites.
For Heraclitus, this is even more true for wakefulness than it is for sleep. Whoever sleeps, though remaining the same person, seems to be another, ergátas, the ‘artifice’ of a world of his own (B 75). He resembles a dead man lying there, inert and distant. In one abstruse fragment, passed down by Clement of Alexandria, it is said, ‘Man kindles a light for himself in the night-time, when he has died but is alive. The sleeper, whose vision has been put out, lights up from the dead; he that is awake lights up from the sleeping’ (B 26). Whoever gives in to sleep abandons the koinón, the common world, to plunge into his own world, where he lies with the dead. Sleep is like a brief descent into Hades, in the gloomy underworld beneath the city. Thus, the citizen who sleeps is not only apathetic and alogical, but also apolitical and anomic. He ceases, rather, to be a citizen; he unites with its dead in the private burial recess which is, at the same time, the tomb of the public. He twists and turns in his illusions, in his nightmares, in his imagination, in his hallucinations. When it is night in the city and the world seems to sink away, perhaps no one is left to watch, alert, over the pólis. Yet there is one exception, or perhaps two. For there is both the wise god who keeps watch over the city walls, and his vicarious adept, the philosopher, who attentively surveils the city from within, so that this brightly lit opening does not forever close down in a private idiocy.
Is politics, then, the daughter of philosophy? The philosopher combats the night’s tendency to reduce everything to nothing. And even if one day everyone should give in, the city would remain, conserved in the thought of this extraordinary and attentive citizen.
The guardian of the city even before Plato and his politéia, Heraclitus denounces the political night. He points an accusing finger against the sleepwalking so widespread among his co-citizens, who do not want to wake up even during the day. He speaks of ‘night-walkers’, nuktipóloi, who hang out at – and with – night rather than lead the life required by the common day of the city. Heraclitus’ words are inspired by sarcasm, disappointment and disdain; his diurnal lógos inaugurates the space of the Greek pólis and, more generally, the ambit of European politics. The city can exist only thanks to the koinón, the common, gathered in the lógos. This is the ordering intelligence which guarantees the nómos on which the city bases
