The Vision of the Dark Philosopher...

By Paul Christensen

The Ancient Greeks are a truly fascinating people to read about. For the Greeks, philosophy, science and religion were not nearly so widely separated as they are now, and consequently it is a period of history with a great deal of relevence to anyone inquiring into the mysteries of existence. And one of the most fascinating figures of the whole era is the philosopher, prophet and sage known as Heraclitus. Strangely, I have never seen his name mentioned in any underground music zine, pagan or Satanic oriented publication. This is curious, as some of his doctrines are likely to be of tremendous interest to people in these sorts of circles. Read on...

THE LIFE AND THOUGHT OF HERACLITUS:

The exact dates of his life are uncertain, but Heraclitus is generally thought to have lived from around 540 to 480 BC. Only scant fragments of his original writings still exist, but they are enough to give a picture of a remarkably profound thinker.

He was a proud man with a high opinion of himself, but despite this he had no political ambitions whatsoever, having little but contempt for the mass of humanity (including most of his philosophic predecessors). He tended to favour tyranny over democracy, but was against mindless despotism as he believed strongly in the importance of law. Hermodorus, the tyrant ruler of Ephesus, was a friend of Heraclitus' family, as well as being a man of exceptional virtue. But the egalitarian Ephesians banished Hermodorus, saying "We will have none who is best among us; if there be any such, let him be so elsewhere and among others". Heraclitus retorted on behalf of his friend by inviting the entire adult population of Ephesus to go and hang themselves, then left the city to wander in the wilderness, living like an animal on only grass and herbs.

He could perhaps be thought of as an "aristocratic rebel", a true non-conformist in the manner of Lord Byron. Another obvious comparison is Nietzsche, who indeed was a great admirer of Heraclitus. They both wrote in an aphoristic style and, like Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Heraclitus was fond of using parable and metaphor as a way of encouraging those who heard him to seek the inner mysteries of life. Many of his sayings were deliberately obscure, probably because he thought that such riddles were a suitable way to convey the paradoxical nature of existence. This caused him to be known to many as the "Dark Philosopher" or "Heraclitus the Obscure".

Heraclitus boasted that he had never had a teacher. When he wanted to discuss anything he would say "Wait a moment while I go and inquire of myself", meaning he would travel within his own soul to get to the truth of a matter. While previous philosophers had looked outwards at nature, Heraclitus looked inwards, into his own soul, to find the answers he required. But although he looked inward, the answers he discovered there were the deepest secrets of nature, perhaps proof of the theory that each soul is a microcosm, a reflection of the cosmos in miniature.

He thought of the human soul as being a mixture of fire and water. The base of life is water, but life should always strive to grow from these roots and follow the upward path to become fire, which is more noble. He claimed that "The dry soul is the wisest and best" and that "It is death to souls to become water", water being a metaphor for material comfort and self-gratification, and fire representing self-overcoming through the confrontation of pain and hardship. He thus thought that power over ones own soul, through self-mastery, was the best kind of power.

On the other hand he must have suffered from pessimism and depression at times, as he once made the bleak declaration that "Time is a child playing chess, moving the pieces about the board". He also said that "Men wish to live, but even more do they wish to die, and they beget children in order to leave other destinies of death behind them", anticipating Freud's "death-wish" theory by two and a half thousand years. But despite all this, Heraclitus firmly believed his philosophy to be an account of the divine Logos, and nothing less than the truth behind the nature of existence itself.

THE DOCTRINE OF UNIVERSAL FLUX:

Like most ancient Greeks Heraclitus believed that the universe was eternal, never having been created and never dying, but he certainly didn't think of it as eternally unchanging. One of the central doctrines of his thought was the belief that everything is in a constant state of flux and strife. The following two famous quotes were attributed to him by Plato: "You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you" and "The sun is new every day". Also, according to Plato, Heraclitus taught that "Nothing ever is, everything is becoming".

But although he believed in perpetual change, he certainly didn't think of the universe as being mindlessly chaotic. In fact he thought of strife itself as the ordering process behind everything. He thought that underneath the surface of reality was an ever-living Fire. When he said that fire is the "substance" underneath everything however, he probably did not mean it as a physical substance, but rather the process of change itself. Everything, like flame in a fire, is born by the death of something else. There is nothing, animate or inanimate, which is not subject to change. But according to Herclitus, "Homer was wrong in saying: Would that strife would perish from among gods and men! He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away". For without strife, nothing would ever change, everything would stagnate.

Beneath the apparently calm surface of the physical world are forces so powerful we can scarcely comprehend them, forces that partly reveal themselves as earthquakes, floods, storms, and so on. But it is really these forces that shape and drive the universe. Order and chaos are not, of course, contradictory, but each is present in the other (think of the Chinese yin/yang symbol). It is the same with creation and destruction.

Heraclitus perceived the cosmos as an intelligence which he called Logos or God. He compared this intelligence to Zeus' thunderbolt - "Thunderbolt steers the universe" (if he was from Northern Europe Thor's hammer would no doubt have been the appropriate metaphor). This conception of the universe as a living process, an organism, stands as a fine antidote to the dry, mechanistic universe imagined by many other philosophers and scientists throughout the years.

THE DOCTRINE OF OPPOSITES:

So the concept of order is forever present in chaos, and that of chaos in order: for how could one exist without the other? And creation and destuction are equally inseperable: for everything is born from the death of something else. These seeming paradoxes are explored in the other main doctrine of Heraclitus' philosophy - that of the unity of opposites. He was one of the few people to understand that concepts regarded as contradictory by lesser beings actually reinforce one another.

A basic example of this is the distinction we make between night and day. If there was no "night", we wouldn't know what "day" was, as it would always be day and we would not know there was anything different. Likewise, without day, we wouldn't know what night was. On a deeper level, we can say that without death, we wouldn't know what life was, (and vice versa obviously, as we wouldn't be alive to know!). This could be why we often hear people say they feel most alive when they are facing death. All this is embodied in one of Heraclitus' most famous sayings, "It is the opposite which is good for us". He also said that "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger", and that "Good and ill are one".

And good and ill are one, because the opposites actually support each other - if one extreme is supressed the other will also lose it's power. "It is disease that makes health sweet and good". All harmony in the universe (that which we know as structure or order) is the result of opposing forces that are in a precise state of reciprocal tension. The same cosmic justice (Logos) that steers the universe also prevents the complete victory of either opposite. It is the tension between opposing forces that creates what we perceive as a unified reality. There would be no unity if there were no opposites, but there would be no opposites if there was no unity.

Heraclitus expressed this idea in his beautiful metaphor of the bow and lyre. Just as the tension between the strings of the bow and lyre (moving in opposite directions) creates a musical note, so too the polarity of chaos-order, life-death, war-peace, heat-cold, up-down etc. etc., creates the cosmos. This metaphor may be even more significent than it seems: a recent proposition known as "superstring theory" claims that the physical universe is actually the result of the vibrations of an infinite amount of sub-microscopic "strings"! Heraclitus, considering his doctrine of the Universal Flux, may even have seen the universe as being an eternal piece of music, the greatest symphony (for)ever written. This would certainly justify the often-made claim that music is the highest form of art!

OPPOSING VIEWS: RATIONALISM AND MATERIALISM:

While Heraclitus taught that everything changes, it is change itself that is unchanging, Parmenides, his bitterest philosophical opponent, contradicted this completely by teaching that change is logically impossible. Parmenides was a rationalist (one who chooses reason over the senses), and using reason and logic he put forward three main points:

1. Nothing can come from nothing
2. Nothing existing can become nothing
3. Nothing can become anything other than what it is

The last point arose because the concept of change, which implies "becoming", implies that there was a previous time when when the thing in question did not exist. But the first two points make it clear that it is logically impossible for anything that exists to ever not exist. Parmenides maintained that we can neither recognise nor describe what is non-existent because, since we do exist, it is unattainable for us. "What is, is; what is not, is not". Our senses (sight, hearing etc.) show us that things change, so Parmenides denied the senses, considering them to be a mere illusion. He thought reality could only be one unchanging totality. But if everything existing is unchanging, from whence comes the lie of sensory perception in the first place? Parmenides' theory is obviously wrong, but it raises some important concerns, such as how much reliance we can place in logic and reason, and to what extent language itself restricts our thinking.

A "compromise" between the extreme views of Heraclitus and Parmenides was introduced by Leuccipus and Democritus with their theory of "Atomism". They held that reality was composed of unchanging, indestructible units called "atoms", that arrange themselves into patterns (obviously very complex patterns in the case of living things), and modern science seems to have comfirmed that there are indeed basic "units" of reality. So what these Atomists did, in their effort to compromise, was to give birth to the doctrine of materialism.

So pitted against Heraclitus' metaphysical "fire of life" are the doctrines of rationalism and materialism. Parmenides, an extreme rationalist, couldn't face the truth of the sensory world because it seemed to be riddled with contradictions and paradoxes. Reason told him that all must be One, unchanging. The Atomists believed in change, but thought it only occured due to the rearrangment of particles that were themselves unchanging. But could Heraclitus not have been closest to the truth by saying that all is One AND changes? Unity results from infinite diversity, and diversity from unity."All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things".

Could it be that the concept of time itself is what Parmenides has failed to grasp? Just because something dies does not mean it does not still exist to a being that perceives things on a higher dimensional level than us, able to view what we call "time" as a totality. From the point of view of the Logos, and in the eyes of nature, what we call the "past" still exists!

And as materialism has led us to lose our spiritual links with nature and generally make life into a meaningless spectacle, surely it would have been better to base our sciences on the doctrine of perpetual flux? (This would mean trusting the senses over reason, as Heraclitus did, which is quite in line with the empirical nature of scientific inquiry). Twentieth century science has eventually come to reject materialism anyway...

I would conjecture that this material understanding of the world is behind much of the human race's collective inability to understand reality. Now that most people no longer believe in god or the "supernatural", we are confronted with a physical world, a sensory world, and we don't know where it came from. We regard the blank lifeless objects in front of us (eg. tables, chairs, computers) as somehow existing independently of us, but because no higher power enters into the picture, they are just inert lumps of matter. If one is asked what "matter" is, we will usually be unable to reply. What is it, after all? We can never know it. But if we can't know it then, to us, it doesn't exist!

So wouldn't it be better to realise that there is no such thing as "matter", that everything we see in front of us is spirit (for want of a better word), the same as we are? We separate things into a "real world" of "matter", and an invisible world of "spirit". Why not realise that matter IS spirit? You will probably say "oh, but we can touch these things, they are material", but what is the contradiction here? WE are spirit too, as are our senses!! It doesn't matter what we CALL the sensory world - it will still be there - but to conceive of things as just dead, inert "matter" makes the universe into a place devoid of meaning, as rationalists have indeed managed to do over the centuries. To conceive of the cosmos as spirit (Heraclitus' "eternal fire of life") is much more realistic in a sense, as it also makes us realise how much everything is interconnected - what the Norse referred to as Wyrd.

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM HERACLITUS:

In my opinion, certain ways of thinking will always be valid, no matter how many millenia have elapsed since they were first conceived of. Heraclitus is one of these people whose thought has remained extremely valuable, and who still has some profound insights to offer us. A lot of people may find it difficult to grasp some of his concepts, or will think them irrelevant, as they involve thinking about the "big picture", trying to look at things sub specie aeternitatis (from the viewpoint of eternity). But I think it is extremely relevant to think about the big picture, as long as we don't forget the "small" picture of day-to-day life as well. A true heretic should try to see things simultaneously in the short term and the long term. And, as I stated, looking at the cosmos as an evolving spirit to which change, death and rebirth are all integral parts is infinitely more rewarding than seeing it as an inexplicable piece of lifeless matter, thus making ourselves less able to cope with the realities of change and death when they do inevitably occur.

But perhaps the most valuable insight we can gain from studying Heraclitus is the realisation that opposites are not dualities but polarities, and that they support one another. The reason this is such an important concept is that it gives the person who realises it a greater insight into (and hence power over) both extremes.

We can see what happens when one extreme is supressed - the other also perishes. Christianity, for example, by going against nature and seeking to suppress and destroy what it regards as "evil", has unknowingly sown the seeds of it's own destruction. But on the other side, it can be said that the legions of Black Metal groups who sing about nothing but darkness, "crush the light" etc., have degraded the power that the music once possessed by their constant, boring repetition of the same old one-sided themes. The "eternal darkness" so many bands dream of is actually impossible because, without the light, darkness as a concept would not even exist...

Back in the days when such Black Metal was new and extreme, these sorts of lyrics and imagery had a strong validity, because they were a necessary reaction against everything that had gone before, a sort of sonic catharsis, a burning away of stale ideas and prejudices, a casting aside of the shackles of morality before learning to think in a different way (just as a forest needs fire to regenerate itself). But the time has come for us to go beyond such black and white extremes and learn to see the world as it is. To accept nature's wisdom and to learn from it, to actually gain strength from it. For in order to be stronger than the ubiquitous forces of Jerusalem, we also have to be wiser than they are, and as a starting point on the road to higher thought, Heraclitus is a very good teacher indeed.

Source material:

History of Western Philosophy - Bertrand Russell

An Introduction to Greek Philosophy - J.V.Luce

The History of Greek Philosophy - Luciano De Crescenzo