|
Heraclitus-1
The philosophy and thought of the Greeks is perhaps the most intellectually
stimulating, the most fruitful of clarities the world has yet had. Indian
philosophy was intuitive in its beginnings, stimulative rather to the
deeper vision of things, - nothing more exalted and profound, more revelatory
of the depths and the heights, more powerful to open unending vistas
has ever been conceived than the divine and inspired Word, the mantra
of Veda and Vedanta. When that philosophy became intellectual, precise,
founded on the human reason, it became also rigidly logical, enamoured
of fixity and system, desirous of a sort of geometry of thought. The
ancient Greek mind had instead a kind of fluid precision, a flexibly
inquiring logic; acuteness and the wide-open eye of the intellect were
its leading characteristics and by this power in it it determined the
whole character and field of subsequent European thinking. Nor is any
Greek thinker more directly stimulating than the aphoristic philosopher
Heraclitus; and yet he keeps and adds to this more modern intellectual
stimulativeness something of the antique psychic and intuitive vision
and word of the older Mystics. The trend to rationalism is there, but
not yet that fluid clarity of the reasoning mind which was the creation
of the Sophists.
Professor R. D. Ranade has recently published a small treatise on the
philosophy of Heraclitus. From the paging of the treatise it seems to
be an excerpt, but from what there is nothing to tell. It is perhaps
too much to hope that it is from a series of essays on philosophers
or a history of philosophy by this perfect writer and scholar. At any
rate such a work from such a hand would be a priceless gain. For Professor
Ranade possesses in a superlative degree the rare gift of easy and yet
adequate exposition; but he has more than this, for he can give a fascinating
interest to subjects like philology and philosophy which to the ordinary
reader seem harsh, dry, difficult and repellent. He joins to a luminous
clarity, lucidity and charm of expression an equal luminousness and
just clarity of presentation and that perfect manner in both native
to the Greek and French language and mind, but rare in the English tongue.
In these seventeen pages he has presented the thought of the old enigmatic
Ephesian with a clearness and sufficiency which leaves us charmed, enlightened
and satisfied.
On one or two difficult points I am inclined to differ with the conclusions
he adopts. He rejects positively Pfleiderer's view of Heraclitus as
a mystic, which is certainly exaggerated and, as stated, a misconception;
but it seems to me that there is behind that misconception a certain
truth. Heraclitus' abuse of the mysteries of his time is not very conclusive
in this respect; for what he reviles is those aspects of obscure magic,
physical ecstasy, sensual excitement which the Mysteries had put on
in some at least of their final developments as the process of degeneration
increased which made a century later even the Eleusinian a butt for
the dangerous mockeries of Alcibiades and his companions. His complaint
is that the secret rites which the populace held in ignorant and superstitious
reverence "unholily mysticise what are held among men as mysteries."
He rebels against the darkness of the Dionysian ecstasy in the approach
to the secrets of Nature; but there is a luminous Apollonian as well
as an obscure and sometimes dangerous Dionysian mysticism, a Dakshina
as well as a Vama Marga of the mystic Tantra. And though no partaker
in or supporter of any kind of rites or mummery, Heraclitus still strikes
one as at least an intellectual child of the Mystics and of mysticism,
although perhaps a rebel son in the house of his mother. He has something
of the mystic style, something of the intuitive Apollonian inlook into
the secrets of existence.
Certainly, as Mr. Ranade says, mere aphorism is not mysticism; aphorism
and epigram are often enough, perhaps usually a condensed or a pregnant
effort of the intellect. But Heraclitus' style, as Mr. Ranade himself
describes it, is not only aphoristic and epigrammatic but cryptic, and
this cryptic character is not merely the self-willed obscurity of an
intellectual thinker affecting an excessive condensation of his thought
or a too closely-packed burden of suggestiveness. It is enigmatic in
the style of the mystics, enigmatic in the manner of their thought which
sought to express the riddle of existence in the very language of the
riddle.
What for instance is the "ever-living Fire" in which he finds
the primary and imperishable substance of the universe and identifies
it in succession with Zeus and with eternity? or what should we understand
by "the thunderbolt which steers all things"? To interpret
this fire as merely a material force of heat and flame or simply a metaphor
for being which is eternal becoming is, it seems to me, to miss the
character of Heraclitus' utterances. It includes both these ideas and
everything that connects them. But then we get back at once to the Vedic
language and turn of thought; we are reminded of the Vedic Fire which
is hymned as the upbuilder of the worlds, the secret Immortal in men
and things, the periphery of the gods, Agni who "becomes"
all around the other immortals, himself becomes and contains all the
gods; we are reminded of the Vedic thunderbolt, that electric Fire,
of the Sun who is the true Light, the Eye, the wonderful weapon of the
divine pathfinders Mitra and Varuna. It is the same cryptic form of
language, the same brief and abundant method of thought even; though
the conceptions are not identical, there is a clear kinship.
The mystical language has always this disadvantage that it readily becomes
obscure, meaningless or even misleading to those who have not the secret
and to posterity a riddle. Mr. Ranade tells us that it is impossible
to make out what Heraclitus meant when he said, "The gods are mortals,
men immortals." But is it quite impossible if we do not cut off
this thinker from the earlier thought of the mystics? The Vedic Rishi
also invokes the Dawn, "O goddess and human"; the gods in
the Veda are constantly addressed as "men", the same words
are traditionally applied to indicate men and immortals. The immanence
of the immortal principle in man, the descent of the gods into the workings
of mortality was almost the fundamental idea of the mystics. Heraclitus,
likewise, seems to recognise the inextricable unity of the eternal and
the transitory, that which is for ever and yet seems to exist only in
this strife and change which is a continual dying. The gods manifest
themselves as things that continually change and perish; man is in principle
an eternal being. Heraclitus does not really deal in barren antitheses;
his method is a statement of antinomies and an adumbrating of their
reconciliation in the very terms of opposition. Thus when he says that
the name of the bow (biós) is life (os), but its work is death,
obviously he intends no mere barren play upon words; he speaks of that
principle of war, father of all and king of all, which makes cosmic
existence an apparent process of life, but an actual process of death.
The Upanishads seized hold of the same truth when they declared life
to be the dominion of King Death, described it as the opposite of immortality
and even related that all life and existence here were first created
by Death for his food.
Unless we bear in mind this pregnant and symbolic character of Heraclitus'
language we are likely to sterilise his thought by giving it a too literal
sense.
Heraclitus praises the "dry soul" as the wisest and best,
but, he says, it is a pleasure and satisfaction to souls to become moist.
This inclination of the soul to its natural delight in a sort of wine-drenched
laxity must be discouraged; for Dionysus the wine-god and Hades, the
Lord of Death, the Lord of the dark underworld, are one and the same
deity. Professor Ranade takes this eulogy of the dry soul as praise
of the dry light of reason; he finds in it a proof that Heraclitus was
a rationalist and not a mystic: yet strangely enough he takes the parallel
and opposite expressions about the moist soul and Dionysus in a quite
different and material sense, as an ethical disapprobation of wine-drinking.
Surely, it cannot be so; Heraclitus cannot mean by the dry soul the
reason of a sober man and by a moist soul the non-reason or bewildered
reason of the drunkard; nor when he says that Hades and Dionysus are
the same, is he simply discouraging the drinking of wine as fatal to
the health! Evidently he employs here, as always, a figurative and symbolic
language because he has to convey a deeper thought for which he finds
ordinary language too poor and superficial.
Heraclitus is using the old language of the Mysteries, though in his
own new way and for his own individual purpose, when he speaks of Hades
and Dionysus and the everliving Fire or of the Furies, the succourers
of Justice who will find out the Sun if he oversteps his measure. We
miss his sense, if we see in these names of the gods only the poorer
superficial meanings of the popular mythological religion. When Heraclitus
speaks of the dry or the moist soul, it is of the soul and not the intellect
that he is thinking, psuche and not nous. Psuche corresponds roughly
to the cetas or citta of Indian psychology, nous to buddhi; the dry
soul of the Greek thinker to the purified heart-consciousness, \'suddha
citta, of the Indian psychologists, which in their experience was the
first basis for a purified intellect, vi\'suddha buddhi. The moist soul
is that which allows itself to be perturbed by the impure wine of sense
ecstasy, emotional excitement, an obscure impulse and inspiration whose
source is from a dark underworld. Dionysus is the god of this wine-born
ecstasy, the god of the Bacchic mysteries, - of the "walkers in
the night, mages, bacchanals, mystics": therefore Heraclitus says
that Dionysus and Hades are one. In an opposite sense the ecstatic devotee
of the Bhakti path in India reproaches the exclusive seeker by the way
of thought-discernment with his "dry knowledge", using Heraclitus'
epithet, but with a pejorative and not a laudatory significance.
To ignore the influence of the mystic thought and its methods of self-expression
on the intellectual thinking of the Greeks from Pythagoras to Plato
is to falsify the historical procession of the human mind. It was enveloped
at first in the symbolic, intuitive, esoteric style and discipline of
the Mystics, - Vedic and Vedantic seers, Orphic secret teachers, Egyptian
priests. From that veil it emerged along the path of a metaphysical
philosophy still related to the Mystics by the source of its fundamental
ideas, its first aphoristic and cryptic style, its attempt to seize
directly upon truth by intellectual vision rather than arrive at it
by careful ratiocination, but nevertheless intellectual in its method
and aim. This is the first period of the Darshanas in India, in Greece
of the early intellectual thinkers.
Afterwards came the full tide of philosophic rationalism, Buddha or
the Buddhists and the logical philosophers in India, in Greece the Sophists
and Socrates with all their splendid progeny; with them the intellectual
method did not indeed begin, but came to its own and grew to its fullness.
Heraclitus belongs to the transition, not to the noontide of the reason;
he is even its most characteristic representative.
Hence his cryptic style, hence his brief and burdened thought and the
difficulty we feel when we try to clarify and entirely rationalise his
significances. The ignoring of the Mystics, our pristine fathers, purve
pitarah, is the great defect of the modern account of our thought-evolution.
Heraclitus-2
What precisely is the key-note of Heraclitus' thinking, where has he
found his starting-point, or what are the grand lines of his philosophy?
For if his thought is not developed in the severe systematic method
of later thinkers, if it does not come down to us in large streams of
subtle reasoning and opulent imagery like Plato's but in detached aphoristic
sentences aimed like arrows at truth, still they are not really scattered
philosophical reflections. There is an inter-relation, an inter-dependence;
they all start logically from his fundamental view of existence itself
and go back to it for their constant justification.
As in Indian, so in Greek philosophy the first question for thought
was the problem of the One and the Many. We see everywhere a multiplicity
of things and beings; is it real or only phenomenal or practical, maya,
vyavahara? Has individual man, for instance, - the question which concerns
us most nearly, - an essential and immortal existence of his own or
is he simply a phenomenal and transient result in the evolution or play
of some one original principle, Matter, Mind, Spirit, which is the only
real reality of existence? Does unity exist at all and, if so, is it
a unity of sum or of primordial principle, a result or an origin, a
oneness of totality or a oneness of nature or a oneness of essence,
- the various standpoints of Pluralism, of Sankhya, of Vedanta? Or if
both the One and the Many are real, what are the relations between these
two eternal principles of being, or are they reconciled in an Absolute
beyond them? These are no barren questions of logic, no battle of cloudy
metaphysical abstractions, as the practical and sensational man would
have us contemptuously believe; for on our answer to them depends our
conception of God, of existence, of the world and of human life and
destiny.
Heraclitus, differing in this, as Mr. Ranade reminds us, from Anaximander
who like our Mayavadins denied true reality to the Many and from Empedocles
who thought the All to be alternately one and many, believed unity and
multiplicity to be both of them real and coexistent. Existence is then
eternally one and eternally many, - even as Ramanuja and Madhwa have
concluded, though in a very different spirit and from a quite different
standpoint. Heraclitus' view arose from his strong concrete intuition
of things, his acute sense of universal realities; for in our experience
of the cosmos we do find always and inseparably this eternal coexistence
and cannot really escape from it. Everywhere our gaze on the Many reveals
to us an eternal oneness, no matter what we fix on as the principle
of that oneness; yet is that unity inoperative except by the multiplicity
of its powers and forms, nor do we anywhere see it void of or apart
from its own multiplicity. One Matter, but many atoms, plasms, bodies;
one Energy, but many forces; one Mind or at least Mind-stuff, but many
mental beings; one Spirit, but many souls. Perhaps periodically this
multiplicity goes back, is dissolved into, is swallowed up by the One
from which it was originally evolved; but still the fact that it has
evolved and got involved again, compels us to suppose a possibility
and even a necessity of its renewed evolution: it is not then really
destroyed. The Adwaitin by his Yoga goes back to the One, feels himself
merged, believes that he has got rid of the Many, proved perhaps their
unreality; but it is the achievement of an individual, of one of the
Many, and the Many go on existing in spite of it. The achievement proves
only that there is a plane of consciousness on which the soul can realise
and not merely perceive by the intellect the oneness of the Spirit,
and it proves nothing else. Therefore, on this truth of eternal oneness
and eternal multiplicity Heraclitus fixes and anchors himself; from
his firm acceptance of it, not reasoning it away but accepting all its
consequences, flows all the rest of his philosophy.
Still, one question remains to be resolved before we can move a step
farther.
Since there is an eternal One, what is that? Is it Force, Mind, Matter,
Soul? or, since Matter has many principles, is it some one principle
of Matter which has evolved all the rest or which by some power of its
own activity has changed into all that we see? The old Greek thinkers
conceived of cosmic Substance as possessed of four elements, omitting
or not having arrived at the fifth, Ether, in which Indian analysis
found the first and original principle. In seeking the nature of the
original substance they fixed then on one or other of these four as
the primordial Nature, one finding it in Air, another in Water, while
Heraclitus, as we have seen, describes or symbolises the source and
reality of all things as an everliving Fire. "No man or god"
he says "has created the universe, but ever there was and is and
will be the everliving Fire." In the Veda, in the early language
of the Mystics generally, the names of the elements or primary principles
of Substance were used with a clearly symbolic significance. The symbol
of water is thus used constantly in the Rig Veda. It is said that in
the beginning was the inconscient Ocean out of which the One was born
by the vastness of His energy; but it is clear from the language of
the hymn that no physical ocean is meant, but rather the unformed chaos
of inconscient being in which the Divine, the Godhead lay concealed
in a darkness enveloped by greater darkness. The seven active principles
of existence are similarly spoken of as rivers or waters; we hear of
the seven rivers, the great water, the four superior rivers, in a context
which shows their symbolic significance. We see this image fixed in
the Puranic mythus of Vishnu sleeping on the serpent Infinite in the
milky ocean. But even as early as the Rig Veda, ether is the highest
symbol of the Infinite, the apeiron of the Greeks; water is that of
the same Infinite in its aspect as the original substance; fire is the
creative power, the active energy of the Infinite; air, the life-principle,
is spoken of as that which brings down fire out of the ethereal heavens
into the earth. Yet these were not merely symbols. The Vedic Mystics
held, it is clear, a close connection and effective parallelism to exist
between psychical and physical activities, between the action of Light,
for instance, and the phenomena of mental illumination; fire was to
them at once the luminous divine energy, the Seer-Will of the universal
Godhead active and creative of all things, and the physical principle
creative of the substantial forms of the universe, burning secretly
in all life.
It is doubtful how far the earlier Greek philosophic thinkers preserved
any of these complex conceptions in their generalisations about the
original principle. But Heraclitus has clearly an idea of something
more than a physical substance or energy in his concept of the everliving
Fire. Fire is to him the physical aspect, as it were, of a great burning
creative, formative and destructive force, the sum of all whose processes
is a constant and unceasing change. The idea of the One which is eternally
becoming Many and the Many which is eternally becoming One and of that
One therefore not so much as stable substance or essence as active Force,
a sort of substantial Will-to-become, is the foundation of Heraclitus'
philosophy.
Nietzsche, whom Mr. Ranade rightly affiliates to Heraclitus, Nietzsche,
the most vivid, concrete and suggestive of modern thinkers, as is Heraclitus
among the early Greeks, founded his whole philosophical thought on this
conception of existence as a vast Will-to-become and of the world as
a play of Force; divine Power was to him the creative Word, the beginning
of all things and that to which life aspires. But he affirms Becoming
only and excludes Being from his view of things; hence his philosophy
is in the end unsatisfactory, insufficient, lop-sided; it stimulates,
but solves nothing. Heraclitus does not exclude Being from the data
of the problem of existence, although he will not make any opposition
or gulf between that and Becoming. By his conception of existence as
at once one and many, he is bound to accept these two aspects of his
everliving Fire as simultaneously true, true in each other; Being is
an eternal becoming and yet the Becoming resolves itself into eternal
being. All is in flux, for all is change of becoming; we cannot step
into the same waters twice, for it is other and yet other waters that
are flowing on. And yet, with his keen eye on the truth of things, preoccupied
though he was with this aspect of existence, he could not help seeing
another truth behind it. The waters into which we step, are and are
not the same; our own existence is an eternity and an inconstant transience;
we are and we are not. Heraclitus does not solve the contradiction;
he states it and in his own way tries to give some account of its process.
That process he sees as a constant change and a changing back, an exchange
and an interchange in a constant whole, - managed for the rest by a
clash of forces, by a creative and determinative strife, "war which
is the father and king of all things." Between Fire as the Being
and Fire in the Becoming existence describes a downward and upward movement
- pravritti and nivritti - which has been called the "back-returning
road" upon which all travels.
These are the master ideas of the thought of Heraclitus.
Heraclitus-3
Two apophthegms of Heraclitus give us the starting-point of his whole
thinking. They are his saying that it is wisdom to admit that all things
are one and his other saying "One out of all and all out of One."
How are we to understand these two pregnant utterances? Must we read
them into each other and conclude that for Heraclitus the One only exists
as resultant of the many even as the many only exist as a becoming of
the One? Mr. Ranade seems to think so; he tells us that this philosophy
denies Being and affirms only Becoming, - like Nietzsche, like the Buddhists.
But surely this is to read a little too much into Heraclitus' theory
of perpetual change, to take it too much by itself. If that was his
whole belief, it is difficult to see why he should seek for an original
and eternal principle, the everliving Fire which creates all by its
perpetual changing, governs all by its fiery force of the "thunderbolt",
resolves all back into itself by a cyclic conflagration, difficult to
account for his theory of the upward and downward way, difficult to
concede what Mr. Ranade contends, that Heraclitus did hold the theory
of a cosmic conflagration or to imagine what could be the result of
such a cosmic catastrophe. To reduce all becoming into Nothing? Surely
not; Heraclitus' thought is at the very antipodes from speculative Nihilism.
Into another kind of becoming? Obviously not, since by an absolute conflagration
existing things can only be reduced into their eternal principle of
being, into Agni, back into the immortal Fire.
Something that is eternal, that is itself eternity, something that is
for ever one, - for the cosmos is eternally one and many and does not
by becoming cease to be one, - something that is God (Zeus), something
that can be imaged as Fire which, if an ever-active force, is yet a
substance or at least a substantial force and not merely an abstract
Will-to-become, - something out of which all cosmic becoming arises
and into which it returns, what is this but eternal Being? Heraclitus
was greatly preoccupied with his idea of eternal becoming, for him the
one right account of the cosmos, but his cosmos has still an eternal
basis, a unique original principle. That distinguishes his thought radically
from Nietzsche's or the Buddhists'. The later Greeks derived from him
the idea of the perpetual stream of things, "All things are in
flux." The idea of the universe as constant motion and unceasing
change was always before him, and yet behind and in it all he saw too
a constant principle of determination and even a mysterious principle
of identity. Every day, he says, it is a new sun that rises; yes, but
if the sun is always new, exists only by change from moment to moment,
like all things in Nature, still it is the same everliving Fire that
rises with each Dawn in the shape of the sun. We can never step again
into the same stream, for ever other and other waters are flowing; and
yet, says Heraclitus, "we do and we do not enter into the same
waters, we are and we are not." The sense is clear; there is an
identity in things, in all existences, sarvabhutani, as well as a constant
changing; there is a Being as well as a Becoming and by that we have
an eternal and real existence as well as a temporary and apparent, are
not merely a constant mutation but a constant identical existence. Zeus
exists, a sempiternal active Fire and eternal Word, a One by which all
things are unified, all laws and results perpetually determined, all
measures unalterably maintained. Day and Night are one, Death and Life
are one, Youth and Age are one, Good and Evil are one, because that
is One and all these are only its various shapes and appearances.
Heraclitus would not have accepted a purely psychological principle
of Self as the origin of things, but in essence he is not very far from
the Vedantic position. The Buddhists of the Nihilistic school used in
their own way the image of the stream and the image of the fire. They
saw, as Heraclitus saw, that nothing in the world is for two moments
the same even in the most insistent continuity of forms. The flame maintains
itself unchanged in appearance, but every moment it is another and not
the same fire; the stream is sustained in its flow by ever new waters.
From this they drew the conclusion that there is no essence of things,
nothing self-existent; the apparent becoming is all that we can call
existence, behind it there is eternal Nothing, the absolute Void, or
perhaps an original Non-Being. Heraclitus saw, on the contrary, that
if the form of the flame only exists by a constant change, a constant
exchange rather of the substance of the wick into the substance of the
fiery tongue, yet there must be a principle of their existence common
to them which thus converts itself from one form into another; - even
if the substance of the flame is always changing, the principle of Fire
is always the same and produces always the same results of energy, maintains
always the same measures.
The Upanishad too describes the cosmos as a universal motion and becoming;
it is all this that is mobile in the mobility, jagatyam jagat, - the
very word for universe, jagat, having the radical sense of motion, so
that the whole universe, the macrocosm, is one vast principle of motion
and therefore of change and instability, while each thing in the universe
is in itself a microcosm of the same motion and instability. Existences
are "all becomings"; the Self-existent Atman, Swayambhu, has
become all becomings, atma eva abhut sarva\,ni bhutani. The relation
between God and World is summed up in the phrase, "It is He that
has moved out everywhere, sa paryagat"; He is the Lord, the Seer
and Thinker, who becoming everywhere - Heraclitus' Logos, his Zeus,
his One out of which come all things - "has fixed all things rightly
according to their nature from years sempiternal", - Heraclitus'
"All things are fixed and determined." Substitute his Fire
for the Vedantic Atman and there is nothing in the expressions of the
Upanishad which the Greek thinker would not have accepted as another
figure of his own thought. And do not the Upanishads use among other
images this very symbol of the Fire? "As one Fire has entered into
the world and taken shapes according to the various forms in the world,"
so the one Being has become all these names and forms and yet remains
the One. Heraclitus tells us precisely the same thing; God is all contraries,
"He takes various shapes just as fire, when it is mingled with
spices, is named according to the savour of each." Each one names
Him according to his pleasure, says the Greek seer, and He accepts all
names and yet accepts none, not even the highest name of Zeus. "He
consents and yet at the same time does not consent to be called by the
name of Zeus." So too said Indian Dirghatamas of old in his long
hymn of the divine Mysteries in the Rig Veda, "One existent the
sages call by many names." Though He assumes all these forms, says
the Upanishad, He has no form that the vision can seize, He whose name
is a mighty splendour. We see again how close are the thoughts of the
Greek and very often even his expressions and images to the sense and
style of the Vedic and Vedantic sages.
We must put each of Heraclitus' apophthegms into its right place if
we would understand his thought. "It is wise to admit that all
things are one," - not merely, be it noted, that they came from
oneness and will go back to oneness, but that they are one, now and
always, - all is, was and ever will be the everliving Fire.
All seems to our experience to be many, an eternal becoming of manifold
existences; where is there in it any principle of eternal identity?
True, says Heraclitus, so it seems; but wisdom looks beyond and does
see the identity of all things; Night and Day, Life and Death, the good
and the evil, all are one, the eternal, the identical; those who see
only a difference in objects, do not know the truth of the objects they
observe. "Hesiod did not know day and night; for it is the One,"
- esti gar hen, asti hi ekam. Now, an eternal and identical which all
things are, is precisely what we mean by Being; it is precisely what
is denied by those who see only Becoming. The Nihilistic Buddhists [Buddha
himself remained silent on this question; his goal of Nirvana was a
negation of phenomenal existence, but not necessarily a denial of any
kind of existence.] insisted that there were only so many ideas, vijñanani,
and impermanent forms which were but the combination of parts and elements:
no oneness, no identity anywhere; get beyond ideas and forms, you get
to self-extinction, to the Void, to Nothing. Yet one must posit a principle
of unity somewhere, if not at the base or in the secret being of things,
yet in their action. The Buddhists had to posit their universal principle
of Karma which, when you think of it, comes after all to a universal
energy as the cause of the world, a creator and preserver of unchanging
measures. Nietzsche denied Being, but had to speak of a universal Will-to-be;
which again, when you come to think of it, seems to be no more than
a translation of the Upanishadic tapo brahma, "Will-Energy is Brahman."
The later Sankhya denied the unity of conscious existences, but asserted
the unity of Nature, Prakriti, which is again at once the original principle
and substance of things and the creative energy, the phusis of the Greeks.
It is indeed wise to agree that all things are one; for vision drives
at that, the soul and the heart reach out to that, thought comes circling
round to it in the very act of denial.
Heraclitus saw what all must see who look at the world with any attention,
that there is something in all this motion and change and differentiation
which insists on stability, which goes back to sameness, which assures
unity, which triumphs into eternity. It has always the same measures;
it is, was and ever will be. We are the same in spite of all our differences;
we start from the same origin, proceed by the same universal laws, live,
differ and strive in the bosom of an eternal oneness, are seeking always
for that which binds all beings together and makes all things one. Each
sees it in his own way, lays stress on this or that aspect of it, loses
sight of or diminishes other aspects, gives it therefore a different
name - even as Heraclitus, attracted by its aspect of creative and destructive
Force, gave it the name of Fire. But when he generalises, he puts it
widely enough; it is the One that is All, it is the All that is One,
- Zeus, eternity, the Fire. He could have said with the Upanishad, "All
this is the Brahman", sarvam khalu idam brahma, though he could
not have gone on and said, "This Self is the Brahman", but
would have declared rather of Agni what a Vedantic formula says of Vayu,
tvam pratyaksham brahmasi, "Thou art manifest Brahman." But
we may admit the One in different ways. The Adwaitins affirmed the One,
the Being, but put away "all things" as Maya, or they recognised
the immanence of the Being in these becomings which are yet not-Self,
not That.
Vaishnava philosophy saw existence as eternally one in the Being, God,
eternally many by His nature or conscious-energy in the souls whom He
becomes or who exist in her. In Greece also Anaximander denied the multiple
reality of the Becoming. Empedocles affirmed that the All is eternally
one and many; all is one which becomes many and then again goes back
to oneness. But Heraclitus will not so cut the knot of the riddle. "No,"
he says in effect, "I hold to my idea of the eternal oneness of
all things; never do they cease to be one. It is all my everliving Fire
that takes various shapes and names, changes itself into all that is
and yet remains itself, not at all by any illusion or mere appearance
of becoming, but with a severe and positive reality." All things
then are in their reality and substance and law and reason of their
being the One; the One in its shapes, values, changings becomes really
all things. It changes and is yet immutable: for it does not increase
or diminish, nor does it lose for a moment its eternal nature and identity
which is that of the everliving Fire. Many values which reduce themselves
to the same standard and judge of all values; many forces which go back
to the same unalterable energy; many becomings which both represent
and amount to one identical Being.
Here Heraclitus brings in his formula of "One out of all and all
out of One", which is his account of the process of the cosmos
just as his formula "All things are one" is his account of
the eternal truth of the cosmos. One, he says, in the process of the
cosmos is always becoming all things from moment to moment, hence the
eternal flux of things; but all things also are eternally going back
to their principle of oneness; hence the unity of the cosmos, the sameness
behind the flux of becoming, the stability of measures, the conservation
of energy in all changes.
This he explains farther by his theory of change as in its character
a constant exchange. But is there then no end to this simultaneous upward
and downward motion of things? As the downward has so far prevailed
as to create the cosmos, will not the upward too prevail so as to dissolve
it back into the everliving Fire? Here we come to the question whether
Heraclitus did or did not hold the theory of a periodic conflagration
or pralaya. "Fire will come on all things and judge and convict
them." If he held it, then we have again another striking coincidence
of Heraclitus' thought with our familiar Indian notions, the periodic
pralaya, the Puranic conflagration of the world by the appearance of
the twelve suns, the Vedantic theory of the eternal cycles of manifestation
and withdrawal from manifestation. In fact, both the lines of thought
are essentially the same and had to arrive inevitably at the same conclusions.
Heraclitus-4
Heraclitus' account of the cosmos is an evolution and involution out
of his one eternal principle of Fire, - at once the one substance and
the one force, - which he expresses in his figurative language as the
upward and downward road. "The road up and down" he says "is
one and the same." Out of Fire, the radiant and energetic principle,
air, water and earth proceed, - that is the procession of energy on
its downward road; there is equally in the very tension of this process
a force of potential return which would lead things backward to their
source in the reverse order. In the balance of these two upward and
downward forces resides the whole cosmic action; everything is a poise
of contrary energies. The movement of life is like the back-returning
of the bow, to which he compares it, an energy of traction and tension
restraining an energy of release, every force of action compensated
by a corresponding force of reaction. By the resistance of one to the
other all the harmonies of existence are created.
We have the same idea of an evolution of successive conditions of energy
out of a primal substance-force in the Indian theory of Sankhya. There
indeed the system proposed is more complete and satisfying. It starts
with the original or root energy, mula prakriti, which as the first
substance, pradhana, evolves by development and change into five successive
principles. Ether, not fire, is the first principle, ignored by the
Greeks, but rediscovered by modern Science [Now again rejected, though
that does not seem to be indubitable or final.]; there follow air, fire,
the igneous, radiant and electric energy, water, earth, the fluid and
solid. The Sankhya, like Anaximenes, puts Air first of the four principles
admitted by the Greeks, though it does not like him make it the original
substance, and it thus differs from the order of Heraclitus. But it
gives to the principle of fire the function of creating all forms, -
as Agni in the Veda is the great builder of the worlds, - and here at
least it meets his thought; for it is as the energetic principle behind
all formation and mutation that Heraclitus must have chosen Fire as
his symbol and material representative of the One. We may remember in
this connection how far modern Science has gone to justify these old
thinkers by the importance it gives to electricity and radio-active
forces - Heraclitus' fire and thunderbolt, the Indian triple Agni -
in the formation of atoms and in the transmutation of energy.
But the Greeks failed to go forward to that final discrimination which
India attributed to Kapila, the supreme analytical thinker, - the discrimination
between Prakriti and her cosmic principles, her twenty-four tattwas
forming the subjective and objective aspects of Nature, and between
Prakriti and Purusha, Conscious-Soul and Nature-Energy. Therefore while
in the Sankhya ether, fire and the rest are only principles of the objective
evolution of Prakriti, evolutionary aspects of the original phusis,
the early Greeks could not get back beyond these aspects of Nature to
the idea of a pure energy, nor could they at all account for her subjective
side. The Fire of Heraclitus has to do duty at once for the original
substance of all Matter and for God and Eternity. This preoccupation
with Nature-Energy and the failure to fathom its relations with Soul
has persisted in modern scientific thought, and we find there too the
same attempt to identify some primary principle of Nature, ether or
electricity, with the original Force.
However that may be, the theory of the creation of the world by some
kind of evolutionary change out of the original substance or energy,
by pari\,nama, is common to the early Greek and the Indian systems,
however they may differ about the nature of the original phusis. The
distinction of Heraclitus among the early Greek sages is his conception
of the upward and downward road, one and the same in the descent and
the return. It corresponds to the Indian idea of nivritti and pravritti,
the double movement of the Soul and Nature, - pravritti, the moving
out and forward, nivritti, the moving back and in. The Indian thinkers
were preoccupied with this double principle so far as it touches the
action of the individual soul entering into the procession of Nature
and drawing back from it; but still they saw a similar, a periodic movement
forward and back of Nature itself which leads to an ever-repeated cycle
of creation and dissolution; they held the idea of a periodic pralaya.
Heraclitus' theory would seem to demand a similar conclusion. Otherwise
we must suppose that the downward tendency, once in action, has always
the upper hand over the upward or that cosmos is eternally proceeding
out of the original substance and eternally returning to it, but never
actually returns. The Many are then eternal not only in power of manifestation,
but in actual fact of manifestation.
It is possible that Heraclitus may so have thought, but it is not the
logical conclusion of his theory; it contradicts the evident suggestion
of his metaphor about the road which implies a starting-point and a
point of return; and we have too the distinct statement of the Stoics
that he believed in the theory of conflagration, - an assertion which
they are hardly likely to have made if this were not generally accepted
as his teaching. The modern arguments against enumerated by Mr. Ranade
are founded upon misconceptions. Heraclitus' affirmation is not simply
that the One is always Many, the Many always One, but in his own words,
"out of all the One and out of One all." Plato's phrasing
of the thought, "the reality is both many and one and in its division
it is always being brought together," states the same idea in different
language. It means a constant current and back-current of change, the
upward and downward road, and we may suppose that as the One by downward
change becomes completely the All in the descending process, yet remains
eternally the one everliving Fire, so the All by upward change may resort
completely to the One and yet essentially exist, since it can again
return into various being by the repetition of the downward movement.
All difficulty disappears if we remember that what is implied is a process
of evolution and involution, - so too the Indian word for creation,
srishti, means a release or bringing forth of what is held in, latent,
- and that the conflagration destroys existing forms, but not the principle
of multiplicity. There will be then no inconsistency at all in Heraclitus'
theory of a periodic conflagration; it is rather, that being the highest
expression of change, the complete logic of his system.
Heraclitus-5
If it is the law of Change that determines the evolution and involution
of the one downward and upward road, the same law prevails all along
the path, through all its steps and returns, in all the million transactions
of the wayside. There is everywhere the law of exchange and interchange,
amoibe. The unity and the multiplicity have at every moment this active
relation to each other. The One is constantly exchanging itself for
the many; that gold has been given, you have instead these commodities,
but in fact they are only so much value of the gold.
The many are constantly exchanging themselves for the One; these commodities
are given, disappear, are destroyed, we say, but in their place there
is the gold, the original substance-energy to the value of the commodities.
You see the sun and you think it is the same sun always, but really
it is a new sun that rises each day; for it is the Fire's constant giving
of itself in exchange for the elemental commodities that compose the
sun which preserves its form, its energy, its movement, all its measures.
Science shows us that this is true of all things, of the human body,
for instance; it is always the same, but it preserves its apparent identity
only by a constant change. There is a constant destruction, yet there
is no destruction. Energy distributes itself, but never really dissipates
itself; change and unalterable conservation of energy in the change
are the law, not destruction. If this world of multiplicity is destroyed
in the end by Fire, yet there is no end and it is not destroyed, but
only exchanged for the Fire. Moreover, there is exchange between all
these becomings which are only so many active values of the Being, commodities
that are a fixed value and measure of the universal gold. Fire takes
of its substance from one form and gives to another, changes one apparent
value of its substance into another apparent value, but the substance-energy
remains the same and the new value is the equivalent of the old, - as
when it turns fuel into smoke and cinders and ashes. Modern Science
with a more accurate knowledge of what actually happens in this change,
yet confirms Heraclitus' conclusion. It is the law of the conservation
of energy.
Practically, the active secret of life is there; all life physical or
mental or merely dynamic maintains itself by constant change and interchange.
Still, Heraclitus' account is so far not altogether satisfactory. The
measure, the value of the energy exchanged remains unaltered even when
the form is altered, but why should also the cosmic commodities we have
for the universal gold be fixed and in a way unchanging? What is the
explanation, how comes about this eternity of principles and elements
and kinds of combination and this persistence and recurrence of the
same forms which we observe in the cosmos? Why in this constant cosmic
flux should everything after all remain the same? Why should the sun,
though always new, be yet for all practical purposes the same sun? Why
should the stream be, as Heraclitus himself admits, the same stream
although it is ever other and other waters that are flowing? It was
in this connection that Plato brought in his eternal, ideal plane of
fixed ideas, by which he seems to have meant at once an originating
real-idea and an original ideal schema for all things. An idealistic
philosophy of the Indian type might say that this force, the Shakti
which you call Fire, is a consciousness which preserves by its energy
its original scheme of ideas and corresponding forms of things. But
Heraclitus gives us another account, not quite satisfactory, yet profound
and full of suggestive truth; it is contained in his striking phrases
about war and justice and tension and the Furies pursuing the transgressor
of measures. He is the first thinker to see the world entirely in the
terms of Power.
What is the nature of this exchange? It is strife, eris, it is war,
polemos! What is the rule and result of the war? It is justice. How
acts that justice? By a just tension and compensation of forces which
produce the harmony of things and therefore, we presume, their stability.
"War is the father of all and the king of all"; "All
things becoming according to strife"; "To know that strife
is justice"; these are his master apophthegms in this matter. At
first we do not see why exchange should be strife; it would seem rather
to be commerce. Strife there is, but why should there not also be peaceful
and willing interchange? Heraclitus will have none of it; no peace!
he would agree with the modern Teuton that commerce itself is a department
of War. It is true there is a commerce, gold for commodities, commodities
for gold, but the commerce itself and all its circumstances are governed
by a forceful, more, a violent compulsion of the universal Fire. That
is what he means by the Furies pursuing the sun; "for fear of Him"
says the Upanishad "the wind blows . . . and death runs."
And between all beings there is a constant trial of strength; by that
warfare they come into being, by that their measures are maintained.
We see that he is right; he has caught the initial aspect of cosmic
Nature. Everything here is a clash of forces and by that clash and struggle
and clinging and wrestling things not only come into being, but are
maintained in being. Karma? Laws? But different laws meet and compete
and by their tension the balance of the world is maintained. Karma?
It is the forcible justice of an eternal compelling Power and it is
the Furies pursuing us if we transgress our measures.
War, contends Heraclitus, is not mere injustice, chaotic violence; it
is justice, although a violent justice, the only kind possible. Again,
from that point of view, we see that he is right. By the energy expended
and its value shall the fruits be determined, and where two forces meet,
expenditure of energy means a trial of strength. Shall not then the
rewards be to the strong according to his strength and to the weak according
to his weakness? So it is at least in the world, the primal law, although
subject to the help of the weak by the strong which need not after all
be an injustice or a violation of measures, in spite of Nietzsche and
Heraclitus.
And is there not after all sometimes a tremendous strength behind weakness,
the very strength of the pressure on the oppressed which brings its
terrible reaction, the back return of the bow, Zeus, the eternal Fire,
observing his measures? Not only between being and being, force and
force is there war, but within each there is an eternal opposition,
a tension of contraries, and it is this tension which creates the balance
necessary to harmony. Harmony then there is, for cosmos itself is in
its result a harmony; but it is so because in its process it is war,
tension, opposition, a balance of eternal contraries. Real peace there
cannot be, unless by peace you mean a stable tension, a balance of power
between hostile forces, a sort of mutual neutralisation of excesses.
Peace cannot create, cannot maintain anything, and Homer's prayer that
war might perish from among Gods and men is a monstrous absurdity, for
that would mean the end of the world. A periodic end there may be, not
by peace or reconciliation, but by conflagration, by an attack of Fire,
to pur epelthon, a fiery judgment and conviction. Force created the
world, Force is the world, Force by its violence maintains the world,
Force shall end the world, - and eternally re-create it.
Heraclitus-6
Heraclitus is the first and the most consistent teacher of the law of
relativity; it is the logical result of his primary philosophical concepts.
Since all is one in its being and many in its becoming, it follows that
everything must be one in its essence. Night and day, life and death,
good and evil can only be different aspects of the same absolute reality.
Life and death are in fact one, and we may say from different points
of view that all death is only a process and change of life or that
all life is only an activity of death. Really both are one energy whose
activity presents to us a duality of aspects. From one point of view
we are not, for our existence is only a constant mutation of energy;
from another we are, because the being in us is always the same and
sustains our secret identity. So too, we can only speak of a thing as
good or evil, just or unjust, beautiful or ugly from a purely relative
point of view, because we adopt a particular standpoint or have in view
some practical end or temporarily valid relation. He gives the example
of "the sea, water purest and impurest", their fine element
to the fish, abominable and undrinkable to man. And does not this apply
to all things? - they are the same always in reality and assume their
qualities and properties because of our standing-point in the universe
of becoming, the nature of our seeing and the texture of our minds.
All things circle back to the eternal unity and in their beginning and
end are the same; it is only in the arc of becoming that they vary in
themselves and from each other, and there they have no absoluteness
to each other. Night and day are the same; it is only the nature of
our vision and our standing-point on the earth and our relations of
earth and sun that create the difference. What is day to us, is to others
night.
Because of this insistence on the relativity of good and evil, Heraclitus
is thought to have enunciated some kind of supermoralism; but it is
well to see carefully to what this supermoralism of Heraclitus really
amounts. Heraclitus does not deny the existence of an absolute; but
for him the absolute is to be found in the One, in the Divine, - not
the gods, but the one supreme Divinity, the Fire. It has been objected
that he attributes relativity to God, because he says that the first
principle is willing and yet not willing to be called by the name of
Zeus. But surely this is to misunderstand him altogether. The name Zeus
expresses only the relative human idea of the Godhead; therefore while
God accepts the name, He is not bound or limited by it. All our concepts
of Him are partial and relative; "He is named according to the
pleasure of each." This is nothing more nor less than the truth
proclaimed by the Vedas, "One existent the sages call by many names."
Brahman is willing to be called Vishnu, and yet he is not willing, because
he is also Brahma and Maheshwara and all the gods and the world and
all principles and all that is, and yet not any of these things, neti
neti. As men approach him, so he accepts them. But the One to Heraclitus
as to the Vedantin is absolute.
This is quite clear from all his sayings; day and night, good and evil
are one, because they are the One in their essence and in the One the
distinctions we make between them disappear. There is a Word, a Reason
in all things, a Logos, and that Reason is one; only men by the relativeness
of their mentality turn it each into his personal thought and way of
looking at things and live according to this variable relativity. It
follows that there is an absolute, a divine way of looking at things.
"To God all things are good and just, but men hold some things
to be good, others unjust." There is then an absolute good, an
absolute beauty, an absolute justice of which all things are the relative
expression. There is a divine order in the world; each thing fulfils
its nature according to its place in the order and in its place and
symmetry in the one Reason of things is good, just and beautiful precisely
because it fulfils that Reason according to the eternal measures. To
take an example, the world war may be regarded as an evil by some, a
sheer horror of carnage, to others because of the new possibilities
it opens to mankind, it may seem a good. It is at once good and evil.
But that is the relative view; in its entirety, in its fulfilment in
each and all of its circumstances of a divine purpose, a divine justice,
a divine force executing itself in the large reason of things, it is
from the absolute point of view good and just - to God, not to man.
Does it follow that the relative view-point has no validity at all?
Not for a moment. On the contrary, it must be the expression, proper
to each mentality according to the necessity of its nature and standpoint,
of the divine Law.
Heraclitus says that plainly; "Fed are all human laws by one, the
divine." That sentence ought to be quite sufficient to protect
Heraclitus against the charge of antinomianism. True, no human law is
the absolute expression of the divine justice, but it draws its validity,
its sanction from that and is valid for its purpose, in its place, in
its proper time, has its relative necessity. Even though men's notions
of good and justice vary in the mutations of the becoming, yet human
good and justice persist in the stream of things, preserve a measure.
Heraclitus admits relative standards, but as a thinker he is obliged
to go beyond them. All is at once one and many, an absolute and a relative,
and all the relations of the many are relativities, yet are fed by,
go back to, persist by that in them which is absolute.
Heraclitus-7
The ideas of Heraclitus on which I have so far laid stress, are general,
philosophical, metaphysical; they glance at those first truths of existence,
devanam prathama vratani, [The first laws of working of the Gods.] for
which philosophy first seeks because they are the key to all other truths.
But what is their practical effect on human life and aspiration? For
that is in the end the real value of philosophy for man, to give him
light on the nature of his being, the principles of his psychology,
his relations with the world and with God, the fixed lines or the great
possibilities of his destiny. It is the weakness of most European philosophy
- not the ancient - that it lives too much in the clouds and seeks after
pure metaphysical truth too exclusively for its own sake; therefore
it has been a little barren because much too indirect in its bearing
on life. It is the great distinction of Nietzsche among later European
thinkers to have brought back something of the old dynamism and practical
force into philosophy, although in the stress of this tendency he may
have neglected unduly the dialectical and metaphysical side of philosophical
thinking. No doubt, in seeking Truth we must seek it for its own sake
first and not start with any preconceived practical aim and prepossession
which would distort our disinterested view of things; but when Truth
has been found, its bearing on life becomes of capital importance and
is the solid justification of the labour spent in our research. Indian
philosophy has always understood its double function; it has sought
the Truth not only as an intellectual pleasure or the natural dharma
of the reason, but in order to know how man may live by the Truth or
strive after it; hence its intimate influence on the religion, the social
ideas, the daily life of the people, its immense dynamic power on the
mind and actions of Indian humanity. The Greek thinkers, Pythagoras,
Socrates, Plato, the Stoics and Epicureans, had also this practical
aim and dynamic force, but it acted only on the cultured few. That was
because Greek philosophy, losing its ancient affiliation to the Mystics,
separated itself from the popular religion; but as ordinarily Philosophy
alone can give light to Religion and save it from crudeness, ignorance
and superstition, so Religion alone can give, except for a few, spiritual
passion and effective power to Philosophy and save it from becoming
unsubstantial, abstract and sterile. It is a misfortune for both when
the divine sisters part company.
But when we seek among Heraclitus' sayings for the human application
of his great fundamental thoughts, we are disappointed. He gives us
little direct guidance and on the whole leaves us to draw our own profit
from the packed opulence of his first ideas. What may be called his
aristocratic view of life, we might regard possibly as a moral result
of his philosophical conception of Power as the nature of the original
principle. He tells us that the many are bad, the few good and that
one is to him equal to thousands, if he be the best. Power of knowledge,
power of character, - character, he says, is man's divine force, - power
and excellence generally are the things that prevail in human life and
are supremely valuable, and these things in their high and pure degree
are rare among men, they are the difficult attainment of the few. From
that, true enough so far as it goes, we might deduce a social and political
philosophy. But the democrat might well answer that if there is an eminent
and concentrated virtue, knowledge and force in the one or the few,
so too there is a diffused virtue, knowledge and force in the many which
acting collectively may outweigh and exceed isolated or rare excellences.
If the king, the sage, the best are Vishnu himself, as old Indian thought
also affirmed, to a degree to which the ordinary man, prakrito janah,
cannot pretend, so also are "the five", the group, the people.
The Divine is samashti as well as vyashti, manifested in the collectivity
as well as in the individual, and the justice on which Heraclitus insists
demands that both should have their effect and their value; they depend
indeed and draw on each other for the effectuation of their excellences.
Other sayings of Heraclitus are interesting enough, as when he affirms
the divine element in human laws, - and that is also a profound and
fruitful sentence.
His views on the popular religion are interesting, but move on the surface
and do not carry us very far even on the surface. He rejects with a
violent contempt the current degradation of the old mystic formulas
and turns from them to the true mysteries, those of Nature and of our
being, that Nature which, as he says, loves to be hidden, is full of
mysteries, ever occult. It is a sign that the lore of the early Mystics
had been lost, the spiritual sense had departed out of their symbols,
even as in Vedic India; but there took place in Greece no new and powerful
movement which could, as in India, replace them by new symbols, new
and more philosophic restatements of their hidden truths, new disciplines,
schools of Yoga. Attempts, such as that of Pythagoras, were made; but
Greece at large followed the turn given by Heraclitus, developed the
cult of the reason and left the remnants of the old occult religion
to become a solemn superstition and a conventional pomp.
Doubly interesting is his condemnation of animal sacrifice; it is, he
says, a vain attempt at purification by defilement of oneself with blood,
as if we were to cleanse mud-stained feet with mud. Here we see the
same trend of revolt against an ancient and universal religious practice
as that which destroyed in India the sacrificial system of the Vedic
religion, - although Buddha's great impulse of compassion was absent
from the mind of Heraclitus: pity could never have become a powerful
motive among the old Mediterranean races. But the language of Heraclitus
shows us that the ancient system of sacrifice in Greece and in India
was not a mere barbaric propitiation of savage deities, as modern inquiry
has falsely concluded; it had a psychological significance, purification
of the soul as well as propitiation of higher and helpful powers, and
was therefore in all probability mystic and symbolical; for purification
was, as we know, one of the master ideas of the ancient Mysteries. In
India of the Gita, in the development of Judaism by the prophets and
by Jesus, while the old physical symbols were discouraged and especially
the blood-rite, the psychological idea of sacrifice was saved, emphasised
and equipped with subtler symbols, such as the Christian Eucharist and
the offerings of the devout in the Shaiva or Vaishnava temples. But
Greece with its rational bent and its insufficient religious sense was
unable to save its religion; it tended towards that sharp division between
philosophy and science on one side and religion on the other which has
been so peculiar a characteristic of the European mind. Here too Heraclitus
was, as in so many other directions, a forerunner, an indicator of the
natural bent of occidental thought.
Equally striking is his condemnation of idol-worship, one of the earliest
in human history, - "he who prays to an image is chattering to
a stone wall." The intolerant violence of this protestant rationalism
and positivism makes Heraclitus again a precursor of a whole movement
of the human mind. It is not indeed a religious protest such as that
of Mahomed against the naturalistic, Pagan and idolatrous polytheism
of the Arabs or of the Protestants against the aesthetic and emotional
saint-worship of the Catholic Church, its Mariolatry and use of images
and elaborate ritual; its motive is philosophic, rational, psychological.
Heraclitus was not indeed a pure rationalist. He believes in the Gods,
but as psychological presences, cosmic powers, and he is too impatient
of the grossness of the physical image, its hold on the senses, its
obscuration of the psychological significance of the godheads to see
that it is not to the stone, but to the divine person figured in the
stone that the prayer is offered. It is noticeable that in his conception
of the gods he is kin to the old Vedic seers, though not at all a religious
mystic in his temperament. The Vedic religion seems to have excluded
physical images and it was the protestant movements of Jainism and Buddhism
which either introduced or at least popularised and made general the
worship of images in India. Here too Heraclitus prepares the way for
the destruction of the old religion, the reign of pure philosophy and
reason and the void which was filled up by Christianity; for man cannot
live by reason alone. When it was too late, some attempt was made to
re-spiritualise the old religion, and there was the remarkable effort
of Julian and Libanius to set up a regenerated Paganism against triumphant
Christianity; but the attempt was too unsubstantial, too purely philosophic,
empty of the dynamic power of the religious spirit. Europe had killed
its old creeds beyond revival and had to turn for its religion to Asia.
Thus, for the general life of man Heraclitus has nothing to give us
beyond his hint of an aristocratic principle in society and politics,
- and we may note that this aristocratic bent was very strong in almost
all the subsequent Greek philosophers.
In religion his influence tended to the destruction of the old creed
without effectively putting anything more profound in its place; though
not himself a pure rationalist, he prepared the way for philosophic
rationalism. But even without religion philosophy by itself can give
us at least some light on the spiritual destiny of man, some hope of
the infinite, some ideal perfection after which we can strive. Plato
who was influenced by Heraclitus, tried to do this for us; his thought
sought after God, tried to seize the ideal, had its hope of a perfect
human society.
We know how the Neo-platonists developed his ideas under the influence
of the East and how they affected Christianity. The Stoics, still more
directly the intellectual descendants of Heraclitus, arrived at very
remarkable and fruitful ideas of human possibility and a powerful psychological
discipline, - as we should say in India, a Yoga, - by which they hoped
to realise their ideal. But what has Heraclitus himself to give us?
Nothing directly; we have to gather for ourselves whatever we can from
his first principles and his cryptic sentences.
Heraclitus was regarded in ancient times as a pessimistic thinker and
we have one or two sayings of his from which we can, if we like, deduce
the old vain gospel of the vanity of things. Time, he says, is playing
draughts like a child, amusing itself with counters, building castles
on the sea-shore only to throw them down again. If that is the last
word, then all human effort and aspiration are vain.
But on what primary philosophical conception does this discouraging
sentence depend? Everything turns on that; for in itself this is no
more than an assertion of a self-evident fact, the mutability of things
and the recurrent transiency of forms.
But if the principles which express themselves in forms are eternal
or if there is a Spirit in things which finds its account in the mutations
and evolutions of Time and if that Spirit dwells in the human being
as the immortal and infinite power of his soul, then no conclusion of
the vanity of the world or the vanity of human existence arises. If
indeed the original and eternal principle of Fire is a purely physical
substance or force, then, truly, since all the great play and effort
of consciousness in us must sink and dissolve into that, there can be
no permanent spiritual value in our being, much less in our works. But
we have seen that Heraclitus' Fire cannot be a purely physical or inconscient
principle. Does he then mean that all our existence is merely a continual
changeable Becoming, a play or Lila with no purpose in it except the
playing and no end except the conviction of the vanity of all cosmic
activity by its relapse into the indistinguishable unity of the original
principle or substance? For even if that principle, the One to which
the many return, be not merely physical or not really physical at all,
but spiritual, we may still, like the Mayavadins, affirm the vanity
of the world and of our human existence, precisely because the one is
not eternal and the other has no eventual aim except its own self-abolition
after the conviction of the vanity and unreality of all its temporal
interests and purposes. Is the conviction of the world by the one absolute
Fire such a conviction of the vanity of all the temporal and relative
values of the Many? That is one sense in which we can understand the
thought of Heraclitus. His idea of all things as born of war and existing
by strife might, if it stood by itself, lead us to adopt, even if he
himself did not clearly arrive at, that conclusion. For if all is a
continual struggle of forces, its best aspect only a violent justice
and the highest harmony only a tension of opposites without any hope
of a divine reconciliation, its end a conviction and destruction by
eternal Fire, all our ideal hopes and aspirations are out of place;
they have no foundation in the truth of things. But there is another
side to the thought of Heraclitus. He says indeed that all things come
into being "according to strife", by the clash of forces,
are governed by the determining justice of war. He says farther that
all is utterly determined, fated. But what then determines? The justice
of a clash of forces is not fate; forces in conflict determine indeed,
but from moment to moment, according to a constantly changing balance
always modifiable by the arising of new forces. If there is predetermination,
an inevitable fate in things, then there must be some power behind the
conflict which determines them, fixes their measures. What is that power?
Heraclitus tells us; all indeed comes into being according to strife,
but also all things come into being according to Reason, kat' erin but
also kata ton logon. What is this Logos? It is not an inconscient reason
in things, for his Fire is not merely an inconscient force, it is Zeus
and eternity.
Fire, Zeus is Force, but it is also an Intelligence; let us say then
that it is an intelligent Force which is the origin and master of things.
Nor can this Logos be identical in its nature with the human reason;
for that is an individual and therefore relative and partial judgment
and intelligence which can only seize on relative truth, not on the
true truth of things, but the Logos is one and universal, an absolute
reason therefore combining and managing all the relativities of the
many.
Was not then Philo justified in deducing from this idea of an intelligent
Force originating and governing the world, Zeus and Fire, his interpretation
of the Logos as "the divine dynamic, the energy and the self-revelation
of God"? Heraclitus might not so have phrased it, might not have
seen all that his thought contained, but it does contain this sense
when his different sayings are fathomed and put together in their consequences.
We get very near the Indian conception of Brahman, the cause, origin
and substance of all things, an absolute Existence whose nature is consciousness
(Chit) manifesting itself as Force (Tapas, Shakti) and moving in the
world of his own being as the Seer and Thinker, kavir manishi, an immanent
Knowledge-Will in all, vijñanamaya purusha, who is the Lord or
Godhead, ish, ishvara, deva, and has ordained all things according to
their nature from years sempiternal, - Heraclitus' "measures"
which the Sun is forced to observe, his "things are utterly determined."
This Knowledge-Will is the Logos. The Stoics spoke of it as a seed Logos,
spermatikos, reproduced in conscious beings as a number of seed Logoi;
and this at once reminds us of the Vedantic prajña purusha, the
supreme Intelligence who is the Lord and dwells in the sleep-state holding
all things in a seed of dense consciousness which works out through
the perceptions of the subtle Purusha, the mental Being. Vijnana is
indeed a consciousness which sees things, not as the human reason sees
them in parts and pieces, in separated and aggregated relations, but
in the original reason of their existence and law of their existence,
their primal and total truth; therefore it is the seed Logos, the originative
and determinant conscious force working as supreme Intelligence and
Will. The Vedic seers called it the Truth-consciousness and believed
that men also could become truth-conscious, enter into the divine Reason
and Will and by the Truth become immortals, anthropoi athanatoi.
Does the thought of Heraclitus admit of any such hope as the Vedic seers
held and hymned with so triumphant a confidence? or does it even give
ground for any aspiration to some kind of a divine supermanhood such
as his disciples the Stoics so sternly laboured for or as that of which
Nietzsche, the modern Heraclitus, drew a too crude and violent figure?
His saying that man is kindled and extinguished as light disappears
into night, is commonplace and discouraging enough. But this may after
all be only true of the apparent man. Is it possible for man in his
becoming to raise his present fixed measures? to elevate his mental,
relative, individual reason into direct communion with or direct participation
in the divine and absolute reason? to inspire and raise the values of
his human force to the higher values of the divine force? to become
aware like the gods of an absolute good and an absolute beauty? to lift
this mortal to the nature of immortality? Against his melancholy image
of human transiency we have that remarkable and cryptic sentence, "the
gods are mortals, men immortals", which, taken literally, might
mean that the gods are powers that perish and replace each other and
the soul of man alone is immortal, but must at least mean that there
is in man behind his outward transiency an immortal spirit. We have
too his saying, "thou canst not find the limits of the soul",
and we have the profoundest of all Heraclitus' utterances, "the
kingdom is of the child." If man is in his real being an infinite
and immortal spirit, there is surely no reason why he should not awaken
to his immortality, arise towards the consciousness of the universal,
one and absolute, live in a higher self-realisation. "I have sought
for myself" says Heraclitus; and what was it that he found? But
there is one great gap and defect whether in his knowledge of things
or his knowledge of the self of man. We see in how many directions the
deep divining eye of Heraclitus anticipated the largest and profoundest
generalisations of Science and Philosophy and how even his more superficial
thoughts indicate later powerful tendencies of the occidental mind,
how too some of his ideas influenced such profound and fruitful thinkers
as Plato, the Stoics, the Neo-platonists. But in his defect also he
is a forerunner; it illustrates the great deficiency of later European
thought, such of it at least as has not been profoundly influenced by
Asiatic religions or Asiatic mysticism. I have tried to show how often
his thought touches and is almost identical with the Vedic and Vedantic.
But his knowledge of the truth of things stopped with the vision of
the universal reason and the universal force; he seems to have summed
up the principle of things in these two first terms, the aspect of consciousness,
the aspect of power, a supreme intelligence and a supreme energy. The
eye of Indian thought saw a third aspect of the Self and of Brahman;
besides the universal consciousness active in divine knowledge, besides
the universal force active in divine will, it saw the universal delight
active in divine love and joy. European thought, following the line
of Heraclitus' thinking, has fixed itself on reason and on force and
made them the principles towards whose perfection our being has to aspire.
Force is the first aspect of the world, war, the clash of energies;
the second aspect, reason, emerges out of the appearance of force in
which it is at first hidden and reveals itself as a certain justice,
a certain harmony, a certain determining intelligence and reason in
things; the third aspect is a deeper secret behind these two, universal
delight, love, beauty which taking up the other two can establish something
higher than justice, better than harmony, truer than reason, - unity
and bliss, the ecstasy of our fulfilled existence. Of this last secret
power Western thought has only seen two lower aspects, pleasure and
aesthetic beauty; it has missed the spiritual beauty and the spiritual
delight. For that reason Europe has never been able to develop a powerful
religion of its own; it has been obliged to turn to Asia. Science takes
possession of the measures and utilities of Force; rational philosophy
pursues reason to its last subtleties; but inspired philosophy and religion
can seize hold of the highest secret, uttamam rahasyam.
Heraclitus might have seen it if he had carried his vision a little
farther. Force by itself can only produce a balance of forces, the strife
that is justice; in that strife there takes place a constant exchange
and, once this need of exchange is seen, there arises the possibility
of modifying and replacing war by reason as the determinant principle
of the exchange. This is the second effort of man, of which Heraclitus
did not clearly see the possibility. From exchange we can rise to the
highest possible idea of interchange, a mutual dependency of self-giving
as the hidden secret of life; from that can grow the power of Love replacing
strife and exceeding the cold balance of reason. There is the gate of
the divine ecstasy.
Heraclitus could not see it, and yet his one saying about the kingdom
of the child touches, almost reaches the heart of the secret. For this
kingdom is evidently spiritual, it is the crown, the mastery to which
the perfected man arrives; and the perfect man is a divine child! He
is the soul which awakens to the divine play, accepts it without fear
or reserve, gives itself up in a spiritual purity to the Divine, allows
the careful and troubled force of man to be freed from care and grief
and become the joyous play of the divine Will, his relative and stumbling
reason to be replaced by that divine knowledge which to the Greek, the
rational man, is foolishness, and the laborious pleasure-seeking of
the bound mentality to lose itself in the spontaneity of the divine
Ananda; "for of such is the kingdom of heaven." The Paramhansa,
the liberated man, is in his soul balavat, even as if a child.
Sri Aurobindo
in SABCL, volume 16
"The Supramental Manifestation and other Writings" (p. 367-403)
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
|