“The polemos named here is a strife that holds sway before everything divine and human, not war in the human sense. As Heraclitus thinks it, struggle first and foremost allows what essentially unfolds to step apart from each other in opposition,....in coming into presence........ Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same”1
An insightful author on this site, Mike Kay, responded to my last post in such a way as to reveal to me something I hadn’t thought before, and upon which inspiration, I actually found that something in the writing of the philosopher (Martin Heidegger) who was the subject of that essay.
The issue is what Heidegger understood the ancient philosopher, Heraclitus, to have meant in his (fragmentary) exposition of the “logos” as the essence of Being.
Firstly, Mr Kay, is completely correct, and I would have understood likewise, namely, that Heraclitus, in contrast to the slightly dippy woozy characterisation that he gets according to a lot of pop psychological self-help literature, was a true mystic. He was such, in that he attuned his thought to the more comprehensive, the deeper principle of the Being of the universe. He wasn’t simply a “go with the flow....man” type of aphorism spouting woo-merchant.
What I hadn’t really thought of, and which Mike had, is that Heraclitus’ understanding, far from being ‘limited’ to the realm of the absolute, has a very direct implication for the realm of human organisation, history and creativity; things I tend to ignore in accordance with a pseudo-ascetic bias in my psyche. In this understanding of Heraclitus, Mike is completely in accord with Heidegger himself on the issue.
“Struggle first projects and develops the un-heard of, the hitherto un-said and un-thought. This struggle is sustained by the creators, by the poets, thinkers and statesmen”
Heidegger concludes the chapter in question with a criticism (one of many) of – unfortunately – one of my own philosophical ‘heroes’, Arthur Schopenhauer. I suppose the context for Heidegger’s antipathy towards Schopenhauer is important-
The latter had become, in contrast to how he was received in his own lifetime, extremely popular in Germany and elsewhere by Heidegger's time. Schopenhauer’s own quite caustic criticisms of the German idealists, most notably Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling for whom Heidegger had a great admiration, certainly didn’t help.
Aside from these facts, in purely philosophical concerns, whereas Heidegger was intensely interested in the question of Being in a historical aspect, Schopenhauer regarded history, politics, and practically everything else of human endeavour besides art and philosophy as either useless or positively malignant. Whereas Heidegger thought historical Being as urgent, Schopenhauer thought it illusion and a nuisance. Between these positions stood Eduard Von Hartmann, a largely neglected philosopher but one to whom I have a certain devotion.
Heidegger was very much concerned with the political, cultural and historical aspects of Being. So much so, it seems, that he overestimated the commitment of the gaggle of political players of his day, and naively believed what (as always) was merely the rhetorical and aesthetic facade which covers the basest, and least benevolent, least constructively beneficial desires of wealth and power, in other words political bullshit, at face value. Perhaps he rather willed himself to believe it against his better judgement. Either way, it was disastrous, and a very un-Heraclitean human war, among other horrors, was the outcome of that political project.
But, back to Heraclitus now; he articulates a vision of the Being of the universe (as opposed to existence of, which Heidegger tells us the Greeks regarded as denoting ‘non-being’; empty, indifferent, and so, illusory) as the unity of the interplay of occult forces bringing into presence beings among other beings, and through and as these beings, unfolding the Cosmos with it’s gods and mortals (apart from Zeus, who is the reality of this creative cosmos, who is the One, the logos, and the God beyond the gods) and as history-
That is Heraclitus’ ‘Being’.
But here too, I think I can tack on my understanding of Schopenhauer, and say his Being (the Will) belongs with Heraclitus and Heidegger. Because, as mentioned above, ‘existence’ for the Greeks was analogous to non-being; just empty phenomena, constantly changing without the assertion of individual beings of themselves and their forcing themselves into significance, meaning and history. That ‘existence’ is nothing but what Schopenhauer viewed as the phenomenal world, which shimmers as a mirage, as the exterior aspect of the true inner nature of the world which is the Will.
And if both understandings belong together, then both pertain to Being, and the truth of Being.
****
MEANING
“Through the glass at the end of day,
the sun still casts a spectrum, where
a magic found a child at play,
and meaning seems to linger there”
Heidegger, Martin, “Introduction to Metaphysics”, both quotations