1

what is
most beautiful is
most simple to explain:
it is nothing more than what

we desire

2

what can not
come to be
cannot
be

but we
pray

to share what comes
of what is not
to be

expected.

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The claim that Heraclitus is “the first philosopher of the west” is (as Brann acknowledges) not new, and it often comes (as it does here) entangled with a dispute — sometimes historical, sometimes philosophical — involving Heraclitus and Parmenides. Both forms of the dispute are ultimately irresolvable.

The philosophical form generally turns on whether “being” or “becoming” takes precedence, and it is sometimes transposed into an historical claim. If being takes precedence, Parmenides may be taken as first and the fragments of Heraclitus understood as a reaction to his extreme monism. If becoming takes precedence, the piece of Parmenides to which we have access may be understood as a reaction to the philosophy that all is in flux embodied by Heraclitus. Brann endorses a variation on this latter theme (appropriately) in the middle of a question: “Did Heraclitus from eastern Ephesus incite Parmenides from western Elea to propose his seamless sphere of being in opposition to the former’s river of Becoming (as I think), or was Parmenides the first philosopher and Heraclitus the first opponent?” (5).

To the best of our knowledge, Heraclitus and Parmenides are contemporaries who lived on opposite edges of the Greek speaking world (Heraclitus in Asia Minor, Parmenides in southern Italy), teaching and writing at more or less the same time (both born around 535 BCE). Brann notes that, as far as we know, Heraclitus did not travel, choosing to remain in Ephesus his entire life, and Parmenides never traveled further east than Athens. There is little possibility of direct influence; and, with fragmentary records for both, exact dates are difficult to establish. When we read Parmenides and Heraclitus, it is most unlikely that we are sifting through shards of assertion and counter-assertion. It is far more likely that we are encountering what remains of two philosophical discourses undertaken independently in two places at more or less the same time. Both respond to earlier thinkers later identified as physikoi, investigators of the physical world (among whom Aristotle includes Heraclitus); and the reflective consideration of the results and the process of that investigation is one key reason for identifying both discourses as philosophical. Brann also notes that Pythagoras (born probably four decades before the other two) has a claim to be first. Both Parmenides and Heraclitus seem to have had Pythagoras as well as the physikoi in mind, and this has some impact on the way the interrelationship of mathematics, physical science, and philosophy has been understood in the West. Brann qualifies the philosophy of Pythagoras as mathematical and reserves the unqualified designation for a discipline that Parmenides and Heraclitus initiate between them.

That between is what is most interesting in Brann’s approach. Reading Heraclitus is a way to enter a conversation among texts that takes place in communities of critically engaged readers. By entering the conversation as she does, Brann enlarges the circle of that community — and this enlargement is at least as important as her particular insights into the fragments of Heraclitus to which she refers (which survive, we should keep in mind, thanks to critics more than to disciples).

Which leads to the second claim, that logos is the “most interesting” term of western philosophy.

Brann begins with an image of Heraclitus drawn from Raphael’s The School of Athens — a brooding, withdrawn figure the artist has placed off-center in the lower foreground. Every other figure in the painting is engaged in active communication. Heraclitus alone appears silent, withdrawn. Brann calls him an “engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world” and describes his writing — “the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism” — as “prose that could contend with poetry” (4). In this regard, it is perhaps appropriate that the one remaining fragment of Parmenides is a poem. What remains of Heraclitus is 131 fragments embedded in a variety of texts varying in purpose as well as in proximity. There is remarkable diversity in how Heraclitus has been read, and there is no consensus on how the bits and pieces that have been gathered from diverse sources fit together. Brann is confident that Heraclitus did not write in fragments or set out to be obscure. But he does appear to have delighted in paradox and (as Raphael’s painting suggests) a terse indirection that has always given readers pause. The one thing that is not in dispute about the meaning is that “logos is Heraclitus’s key word” (6). How appropriate that this key word is virtually untranslatable.

Brann devotes a short chapter to the word logos — which she maintains is “not only Heraclitus’s key word, but that of the Western philosophical tradition” (9) — before turning to the close reading that makes up most of the book. Although the word is virtually untranslatable, Brann takes up one of its key dimensions when she asserts that the Western philosophical tradition “acts as a tradition because its moments are bound together and driven apart by dialogue: the back-and-forth of the logos” (9). At the heart of the Western philosophical tradition is a dialogical back-and-forth of which “the first great episode” is that “between Heraclitus and Parmenides, no matter who spoke first or whether they literally spoke to each other” (9). Dialogue is a key dimension, but logos spans a range of activities that includes “collecting and laying down, tale-telling and relating, counting and account-giving, arguing, and, so, speaking, saying, and above all, the thinking, the reasoning, that is behind uttering — and finally also writing” (10). Brann traces the etymology of the word to legein, which first meant to collect and — by extension — to count up, to tell, to recount, to give an account. That origin led to a range of meanings associated with speech as “the vehicle for human rationality” (10). For Brann, “the sense most significant here is that of ‘addressing,’ of entering into relations: The logos brings terms into relations to each other, particularly the ratio-relation that connects two terms in mutually determining juxtaposition, especially in respect to their common measurability; logos names a relation of magnitudes” (11). Brann connects this equally with Pythagoras, who was bringing this meaning into use in mathematics, and with Homer, for whom metaphor is the “pervasive element.” Metaphor, she writes, “says poetically what analogy says prosaically” (11). After Heraclitus, it comes to mean “The Word that is from and with God, thus, The Son” — and Brann maintains that Heraclitus is “a remote precursor” of this Christian use.

This multiplicity of meanings leads Brann to transcribe the word rather than translating it (a strategy reminiscent of Chad Hansen’s approach to dao, the Chinese word with which the Daodejing begins and that, interestingly, translates logos in the prologue to John’s Gospel). Both its divine origin and its connective function inform Brann’s reading (including her organization) of the fragments. What is at stake in reading logos is what it does and how pervasively it does it. Brann cites a standard translation of “the fragment most clearly relevant” to her effort to “circumscribe” Heraclitus’s meaning: “Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one” (15). Her rendering of this (with her italics) is “For those hearing not me but the Saying, to say the same is the Wise Thing: Everything [is] One” (16). She is not entirely satisfied with “the Saying” as a translation for tou logou here, but she settles on it because it conveys that logos is both “humanly receivable utterance” and that it obligates us to homo-logein, to “say the same.” It is most interesting that logos not only does something to us but also obligates us to do something together. Brann says “to hear it is to get it” (17), but I would add that to get it is to do it. Brann attends carefully to the omission of the copula in Heraclitus: there is, more often than not, no is. In this fragment, the announcement is hen panta, which she understands as One:Everything or “one:all” (17). Using the colon for the absent “is” marks this as both a metaphor and “a relation of magnitudes,” and that is the crux of Brann’s reading. She modifies her translation to “Listening not to me but to The Speaker, there is a Wise Thing to agree with — One:Everything.” I find the potentially hypostatizing use of uppercase troubling. But the connection of passion and action in which logos moving both makes us and makes us move is, I think, exactly right. (And, again, the echo with Hansen marks a fascinating point of connection between Heraclitus and Laozi.)

That connection becomes even more intriguing with Brann’s discussion of “the Wise Thing” (as she translates to sophon, or, without the definite article, sophon), which concludes with the observation that “this Wise Thing is both separated from all things and is also at work within everything as well as on itself” (20). This Wise Thing may be addressed by name as Zeus, but doing so is “something of a transgression. It isn’t a god and doesn’t want to be personalized.” Brann summarizes what she believes comes through clearly: “Our logos and our logoi, the sense we receive and the words we in turn say, should be informed by our having heard the Logos. This great Logos has a wisdom, or rather it is the Wise Thing, and this Wise Thing has a maxim, or rather it is that practical principle which guides everything through everything…” (21).

The pervasiveness of this “Wise Thing” parallels its accessibility: it is common. Aristotle locates the fragment Brann considers to be most relevant to this question at the beginning of Heraclitus’s composition: “Men become (or are born) unapprehending (or unmindful, axynetoi) of the Logos that ever is, both before they have heard it and having first heard it” (21-22). Brann points to the punning on xynos (the Ionian equivalent of Attic koinos, common) in a series of fragments associated with this first one, then (after drawing a comparison with Shakespeare) notes that puns are “made-to-order verbal representations of the ‘one:everything,’ or at least the ‘one-many’ principle, ‘homonyming’ is a way to homologein, to say ‘One relates many.’” Like the oracle at Delphi, Heraclitus excels in “fixed equivocation: clear meanings, but two at once” (23). Like the oracle, Heraclitus “neither speaks nor hides but signifies.” Puns “insinuate diverse meanings into one word-sound,” and paradoxes “force opposing facts into one verbal assertion” (23). For Heraclitus, Brann says, it is a scandal that “the world’s governor speaks to us out of the cosmos and about it, that its wise plan is patent within it, that the message is utterly common both in the sense of being everywhere, being always the same, and being for us — and yet people go off on their own” (24). Brann locates the “first motive of philosophy” in the sense “that truth lies most patent in what is most ordinary and is for that very reason least apprehended” (25).

Brann credits Heraclitus with being “the first Westerner to ponder how thought and world come to jibe” (28), and he comes to this by way of his critical reading of Pythagoras. What he takes from Pythagoras is “a quantified version of metaphor,” which Brann locates in the Pythagorean discovery of “a metaphorical structure in musical sound” (31). It is via Pythagoras that Heraclitus (“surreptitiously, antagonistically,” Brann says) arrives at relation as a new meaning for logos — a meaning she sees as being implicit in “the great Logos, the Saying whose sentence collects the world into a universal unity and expresses it to those who give heed” (41). Brann conjectures that, “in pondering what makes the multifarious world one,” Heraclitus “began to think about relationality itself and to consider that a Logos might fill the bill who was all at once the relater of all relations, beyond and within them, a maker of the world-order and himself that order, a world-governor, and also the world — a doer, a sayer, and perhaps himself a listener” (42). Heraclitus arrives at cosmos at least in part by way of a critical reading of Pythagoras, and this leads him to posit “fire” as arche in a way that bears resemblance to the approach of his Milesian predecessors, the physikoi. But his fire, Brann says, “is nothing like their stuff.” It is instead “that pervasive quasi-material that allows all the elements to enter into quantitative ratio-relations with each other, for it renders them measurable” (44). This makes Heraclitus not only the first philosopher of the West but also the first physicist.

Brann ends her reading of Heraclitus by repeating that “the notion that Heraclitus believed in ultimate universal flux, like a philosophical whirling dervish, is untenable” (104). As an aside, she adds that it is a mistake, in any case, to speak of this as a “belief.” Heraclitus “thinks, and he thinks he knows — as Aristotle disapprovingly noted.” Heraclitus’s “account of the being of the cosmos is not by way of Being but of Logos — a mindful collector, as well as a cosmic collection of opposing pluralities into a tensely connected unity.” For Parmenides “the copula, the expression of Being, swallows everything so that it alone remains, while for Heraclitus it disappears from between the terms so that they alone show up” (105). Both, Brann concludes, are “about the same search,” one as ontologist, the other as logologist; and, between them, they set out the terms of the inquiry: “Logos and Being and its one paramount and never-resolved perplexity: One and/or Many” (106).

After her close reading, Brann offers a provocative account of the “afterlife” of the logos that makes its way from Plato through Plotinus and Nietzsche to Madison — an intriguing trajectory to say the least — and ends by collecting the features of the term that, as she says, she has circum- and trans-scribed rather than translating. “At the human level,” she says, there is “the more or less thoughtful utterance of our mind and its mindfulness” (123). At its best, this does not express “the private thought of the speaker” but “listens and conveys the Saying of the Logos.” This Logos “governs and pilots the cosmos, the ordered world” by a wise design it does not have but is. As “cosmic fire,” it ranges through the physical elements as a “second nature” that dissolves them like an analyzing intelligence. Doing so, it “instills and discerns measures in the elements. By means of these number-measures, the different elements are put into fixed ratios with each other, which govern their transmutations into one another. Those constituents of the cosmos that are directly opposed to each other, be it as contraries or as contradictories, are also related, namely in a taut bond of connecting tensions. The Logos might well be said to be ultimately responsible for all these quantitative and qualitative ratios by which the cosmos is held together in transformative or agonistic intimacy” (124). In the end, Brann associates Heraclitus’s Logos with “soul”: “looking without and listening within, he came on the Wise Design that keeps everything antagonistically together and learned to articulate, in pungently precise Greek, his — and everyone’s — Logos” (139).

Not everyone will find that quasi-religious conclusion convincing; but Brann’s close reading is particularly instructive for its progression from reading the world to articulating it in a community of critical readers — turning the soul, Socrates might say (the way a lathe turns wood) — informing and forming a human community at home in a world of tension and conflict in which cosmos is implicit, however we might choose to address it.

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calm and steady heart of truth
what seems to be
but may be

nothing of the kind, all
on the way.
listen.

either it is and it must not
not be, or it is and it
must not be.

but you cannot know
what is not. no
one can tell.

one can never tell, but listen to me:
what can be thought can be.
and what is distant can be

present to mind. where I begin is
neither here nor there. it is all
the same to me

because I will be there again.
I think one must say
being is because

it is. but nothing is not.
think about it.
don’t think

about nothing.
dazed and confused,
mortals of two minds are

carried away.
to be or not to be,
that is not the question.

it will never be proven that what is not is.
don’t even think about it. It is
what it is, what it is

it never was, never
will be, for it is
now, whole.

it must be all or not at all.
it is what it is.
that is all.

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the words are true
but most know
no

more on hearing
them for the first time
than on not hearing them

at all. it is
as I say

but they
have never been

experienced as I
have. they

no more know
what they

do when they
are awake

than when they
are asleep.

2

the words are common
property, but many
live as though

wisdom were their
private domain.

3

many pass by
without taking notice.

and if they do, they do not
understand. but they

believe

they

do

4

expect nothing
you will discover

nothing
unexpected

it leaves no tracks.

5

travel every path
you will not
cross
mind’s boundary.

6

listen
not to me
but to the words

7

all life is
a child playing

a child’s game,
the dominion of a child

8

the way
up and the way
down are the same

9

god is
day night
winter summer
war peace

gain loss we
measure our pain

changing gods
like fire mingling
with spices we burn
as incense. we

call gods
what we
taste

burning.

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10
And you shall know the nature of the upper air, and in the air all
the signs and the destructive power of the pure spotless sun’s
torch and where they came from,
and the wandering works of the round faced moon
and its nature, and behold too the heavens that surround us,
where they came from and how necessity bound them
to maintain the limits of the stars.

11
How the earth and the sun and the moon
and the air that is common and the Milky Way in the heavens
and outermost Olympus and the burning power of the stars
came to be.

12
For the narrower rings are filled with unmixed fire,
and those next to them with night, and between them is their share of flames
and in the center of these is the divinity who governs all.
For she is the beginning of all misery and painful birth,
sending the female to mate with the male
and the male with the female.

13
First of all the gods she contrived Eros.

14
By night wandering around earth, shining with borrowed light.

15
Always gazing at sunbeams.

16
For as each time thought has a mixture of wandering organs,
so it is with humankind, for it is
that which thinks, namely the substance of human limbs
in each and every one, for it is fullness that makes thought.

17
On the right boys, on the left girls.

19
Thus according to opinion did things come to be and are now
and they will grow and come to an end;
to each of these things human beings have assigned a fixed name.

[my translations. Greek texts here.]

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[my translation. Greek text here.]

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2
Come, I will tell you, you must attend and listen to my story,
the only ways of inquiry that may be thought:
the one that it is and it is not possible for it not to be,
is the credible path (for it goes with truth),
the other that it is not and it is necessary that it not be,
I declare to you that this is a path that is entirely unknowable
for you cannot know that which is not (for that is not possible)
nor can you tell it.

3
…for that which can be thought can also be.

4
But look at how distant things are steadfastly present to the mind;
for it will not cut being off from possessing being
whether it is scattered everywhere in the cosmos
or gathered together.

5
It is all the same to me
where I begin, for I will come back there again.

6
It is necessary both to say and to think that being exists; for being is,
but nothing is not; I urge you to consider this.
First, from this latter form of inquiry I bar you,
but also from that way along which mortals wander
dazed, of two minds; for helplessness
in their hearts guides their wandering thoughts; so they are carried
away stupefied, as though they were blind, undiscerning crowds,
in whom to be and not to be are held to be
the same and not the same, and everything goes the way of opposition.

7
For it will never be proven that what is not is;
but restrain your thought from this way of inquiry.
And do not let the frequent repetition of custom force along this way
your unseeing eye, your ringing ear,
and your tongue, but judge by words the much-disputed proof
I have articulated.

[my translations. Greek texts here.]

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50
Listen not to me but to my words. It is wise to agree that all is one.

51
They do not know how what is at variance can agree with itself; it is a harmony of contraries like the bow and the lyre.

52
Life is a child playing checkers – the dominion of a child.

53
War is father of all, ruler of all, and some he has made gods and some men, some slaves and some free.

54
Harmony is more powerful unnoticed than noticed.

60
The way up and the way down are one and the same.

61
Sea water is the purest and the most impure. Fish drink it and it is salutary, but for humans it is undrinkable and destructive.

62
Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the other’s death, dying the other’s life.

67
God is day night, winter summer, war peace, surfeit want, changing form like fire mingling with incense, named according to the flavor of each.

[my translations. Greek texts here.]

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18
Without expectation, you will not discover the unexpected, which does not leave tracks and is difficult to find.

21
Death is all we see when awake, and sleep is all when sleeping.

41
Wisdom is one thing: to know the token by which all is guided through all.

45
Travel every path – you will not find the limits of the soul.

46
Opinion is a sacred disease, and seeing deceives.

[my translations. Greek texts here.]

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