Ludic Philosophy and Heraclitus’ Playing Children
p. 125-145
Résumés
Le fragment 52 D.-K. de Héraclite évoquant l’idée que le temps éternel est un enfant qui joue, ne cesse d’interpeller philosophes, archéologues et philologues. Il est d’ordinaire analysé dans le cadre de réflexions sur la notion du temps dans l’Antiquité, mais il concerne aussi l’histoire des jeux. La compréhension de cette phrase dépend en premier lieu de la réponse à la question : que fait précisément cet enfant qui joue (παίζων) avec des pions (πεσσεύων), et quelle est l’importance de cette précision ? On constate, non sans étonnement, que même dans les études récentes cette question cruciale n’est pas discutée ou d’une manière assez superficielle par manque d’attention pour l’histoire des jeux de l’Antiquité. L’objectif de cette étude est de montrer que la ludographie peut contribuer à l’interprétation de cette phrase.
Heraclitus’ fragment 52 D.-K., evoking the idea that eternal time is a child playing, still challenges philosophers, archaeologists, and philologists. It is usually part of discussions about the notion of time in antiquity, but it also concerns the history of games. The understanding of this sentence depends primarily on the answer to the question: what kind of play is this child doing exactly (παίζων), and what is the importance of the additional information that he plays with pawns (πεσσεύων)? It is surprising to note that even in recent studies this crucial issue is not discussed at all or in a superficial way due to lack of attention for the history of ancient games. The aim of this study is to show that ludography can contribute to the interpretation of this sentence.
Texte intégral
Introduction : Eugen Fink and Heraclitus
1In his Play as Symbol of the World, originally published in 1960, Eugen Fink’s phenomenological analysis of the ludic concludes with the statement that “to make the play of the world the theme of speculative thinking is a task that still remains to be accomplished, which perhaps can only be fully ventured when the metaphysical tradition, which conceals play and is hostile to it, has been worked off”.1 Revealingly, Fink’s perception of the extent of the metaphysical occlusion of play, beyond simple concealment, is evidenced by his own handwritten addition of the phrase “is hostile to it” to the original typescript. Yet from where does this hostility derive, this failure to treat the ludic seriously, in spite of what Fink acknowledges as its prevalence across cultures as “a human possibility of a special, imaginatively exhilarated comportment”?2 For Fink, in contrast, the analysis of the ludic holds out the possibility of assessing the nature of the relationship between the finite human and the world totality in ways that resist the subject-object and associated ontological dichotomies of metaphysical analysis. He writes :
And it is perhaps more difficult to perceive that this relation between the human being and the world, as it is documented in human play, does not present a relation between two separate things, but rather, as a relation, precedes the differentiation of what is enclosed together with it. The human being is not initially, and does not then become in retrospect, occasionally open and related to the world, but rather it belongs to his singular and strange Being (Dasein) to be opened up to the totality of the world with understanding.3
2Play, for Fink, is a mode of comporting oneself to the expansive openness of the whole, a modality of existence, an ekstasis, that enables one to step outside of oneself, to escape what he elsewhere calls the “psychic interiority” of the human being.4 This form of connection between the human player and the world totality is also marked as a distinct mode of interpretation, thereby conjoining ontology with hermeneutics.5 It is in play that the human “interprets the whole of the world”,6 in ways that fundamentally differ from the analytic frames of “work, struggle, love, and the cult of the dead”.7 Furthermore, Fink’s conception of the symbolic relationship between the World (understood not as a monumental object, but as a power, or “space-time”, which gives emergence and demise to all living things) and the human player argues that this relationship is bi-directional : the World needs the player, as a unique form of Dasein, in order for its own disclosing to become visible in the finite and intra-worldly.8 And although this “shining back” of the World remains tied to the realm of appearance (Schein), it is precisely the combination of actuality and non-actuality in the play-world, at once “less” and “more” than regular things and possessed of its own distinct space-time, that allows the World to take on an intra-worldly relation in turn.9
3Throughout Fink’s analysis, and notably at the beginning, the fragments of Heraclitus assume a prominent position. Indeed, his quotation of Heraclitus 30 D.-K. :
κόσμον (τόνδε), τὸν αὐτὸν ἁπάντων, οὔτε τις θεῶν, οὔτε ἀνθρώπων ἐποίησεν, ἀλλ΄ ἦν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστιν καὶ ἔσται πῦρ ἀείζωον, ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα
This kosmos, the same for all, did neither a god nor man create, but it always was and is and will be ever-living fire, kindling in measures and extinguishing in measures.10
4sets the stage for the concept of the world as that which prevails as play. Fink asks whether the productive capabilities of gods and men can only exist in derivative relation to this kosmic poeisis. He characterizes the clearing and separating action of fire as that of an individuating world arranging-power that can be framed as a form of play. And having drawn an equivalence between fire’s gleaming dispensation of beings and the unconcealing potential of Heraclitus’ underlying logos, Fink asserts that fire must also be thought in relation to time, and he thus turns to fragment 52 D.-K. The “playing child” of 52 D.-K. is a “symbolic metaphor”11 for the ludic productions of the world ; simultaneously, the child also manifests the proper mode of being — ecstatic, irrupted, open — required of the humans and gods of 30 D.-K. to pyr and aiōn. In Fink’s argument, then, Heraclitus’ playing child is brought into sharp focus as symbol for the ludic whole, only to be concealed again almost instantly by its metaphoric standing in for humans and gods at large. The apparent ease of this symbolism collapses into a series of rhetorical postures of hesitation for Fink : “But where and when does this play happen ? Can one point to it in some place or at some point in time… Does this play, then of which Heraclitus speaks, not exist at all ? Is it an arbitrary dream of thought, a phatasmagoria of speculative thought ? Perhaps a beautiful poetic sentiment and nothing more ?”12 Could, Fink wonders, Heraclitus have chosen any metaphor other than play to attempt to bridge this chasm between the finite and the infinite, the material and that without body ?
5By the end of Fink’s argument, he has confirmed the limitations of Heraclitus’ metaphor as he sees it. The world as totality must not be understood anthropo-morphically as the play of a personal power or as somehow possessed of the personality of a total player : personhood denotes relationality, to oneself and to others, and the world totality resists such demarcations. Rather, the play of the world is to be understood as a power of universal individuation, as the space-time of emergence and demise, of a bringing to presence and a concealing in absence. Evoking Heraclitus fragment 57 D.-K., Fink asserts that the play of the world “must be conceived as the relation of the world-night to the world-day”,13 and concomitantly that “we must decisively transform our thinking of the play-structures of human play”.14 The human player, defined by finitude, touches infinity in the groundlessness of their play, while they themselves remain a player who, insofar as they are worldly, is “played”.
6Although Fink’s inquiry ends with the claim that the problem of play, and the nature of both player and world, remains unsolved, his approach can be developed with a consistent focus upon the children who play throughout Heraclitus’ world.15 The child’s mediation between the finite and the infinite in the activity of play is, after all, flagged by their representation as αἰών in 52 D.-K., whose meaning is in the process of being transformed from the generational and mortal finitude of Homer to the infinite ideality of Plato.16 Furthermore, other fragments claim that children’s openness to the world in play acts as a form of knowledge, one that can unsettle traditional (Homeric) structures of thought (56 D.-K.). In contrast to Fink’s reading, the child at play in Heraclitus does not stand as synecdoche for the ludic potential of adults or divinities ; rather, children at play represent a form of being and thinking at odds with, and defined in opposition to, Heraclitus’ adult audience. By paying attention to the experiential ambiguity of their interaction with the material stuffs of the world we can trace how Heraclitus’ children come to stand, in fact, as a model of the philosopher, revealing the meanings hidden between word and world.17
7Heraclitus’ focus upon the child’s embodied interaction with the world is also matched by emphasis upon their vulnerability and finitude, by the ways in which they too are ‘played’ (20 D.-K.) :
γενόμενοι ζώειν ἐθέλουσι μόρους τ᾽ἔχειν, καὶ παῖδας καταλείπουσι μόρους γενέσθαι.
Having been born they wish to live and to possess their fate, and they leave behind children to become their dooms.18
8This association between the child and death will conversely serve to elevate the importance of their play as a mode of thinking about the becomings of the totality.19 Similarly, the denotation of the child’s play in 52 D.-K. as related to “kingship” (παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη) serves to link this play with the dynastic poiesis and revelation of the beings of the world. Indeed, as Diogenes Laertius’ biographical gloss on fragment 121 D.-K. suggests,20 children at play — here in the sacred centre of Ephesus, replete with the mantic significations of the material of their play, the astragaloi formed from the bones of sacrificial sheep — can also stand as an alternative form of political engagement :
ἀξιούμενος δὲ καὶ νόμους θεῖναι πρὸς αὐτῶν ὑπερεῖδε διὰ τὸ ἤδη κεκρατῆσθαι τῇ πονηρᾷ πολιτείᾳ τὴν πόλιν. ἀναχωρήσας δ᾽εἰς τὸ ἱερὸν τῆς Ἀρτέμιδος μετὰ τῶν παίδων ἠστραγάλιζε. περιστάντων δ᾽αὐτὸν τῶν Ἐφεσίων, “τί, ὦ κάκιστοι, θαυμάζετε ;” εἶπεν. “ἢ οὐ κρεῖττον τοῦτο ποιεῖν ἢ μεθ᾽ὑμῶν πολιτεύεσθαι ;
And when he was requested by them to make laws, he scorned the request because the polis was already in the grip of a bad constitution. He would retire to the temple of Artemis and play at knuckle bones with the children ; and when the Ephesians stood round him and looked on, ‘Why, you rascals’, he said, ‘are you astonished ?’ Is it not better to do this than to take part in your civil life?21
9Heraclitus’ children, as I shall argue, come to light through a phenomenological framing of their immediate lived experience of the world, situated irredeemably within it, and distinguished by their particular attunement to their environment. Their perceptual immersion into the things of the world serves to reveal the animate nature of Heraclitus’ cosmos itself. This illumination is always hinged to a concealing, and in doing so marks the child at play’s deep relationship to the rhythms of the world totality, to that recursive movement between world night and world day.
1. Macro and Micro-Cosmic Graspings : 30 D.-K. and 26 D.-K.
10The connection Fink draws between the cosmic fire-play of 30 D.-K. and the regal time-play of the child of 52 D.-K. invites a closer analysis of the terms within each fragment, and the way that they constitute a semantic network across Heraclitus’ work.22 In particular, the ontological and hermeneutic connotations of the verb háptomai (ἅπτομαι) in 30 D.-K. bring to the fore the physicality of cognition in Heraclitus’ irredeemably materialist cosmos ; a cognitive model that will be best instantiated through the play of children.23 In this hermeneutic sense, the “grasping” of the ever-living fire (ἁπτόμενον μέτρα καὶ ἀποσβεννύμενον μέτρα) in its ordered kindling and extinguishing of the world prompted Fink to classify the action of fire “less on the model of an elementary original stuff than on the model of a clearing understanding”.24
11The verb ἅπτομαι recurs in an intra-worldly context, here determining the possibilities, and failures, of human cognition as illumination in Heraclitus 26 D.-K. :
ἄνθρωπος ἐν εὐφρόνῃ φάος ἅπτεται ἑαυτῷ [ἀποθανὼν], ἀποσϐεσθείς ὄψεις, ζῶν δὲ ἅπτεται τεθνεῶτος εὕδων, [ἀποσϐεσθείς ὄψεις], ἐγρηγορὼς ἅπτεται εὕδοντος.
Man strikes a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched. Living he touches the dead in his sleep ; waking, he touches the sleeper.25
12The tricolon of ἅπτομαι moves from the literal kindling of fire to the ontological proximity to death in sleep, and finally to the persistence of this underlying finitude within the experience of consciousness. On one reading, this fragment might be said to denote the individual’s retreat into isolation at night when one has been sundered from the collectively experienced light of daytime.26 Yet although “sight is quenched” (ἀποσϐεσθείς ὄψεις), the haptic sense is still operational. The pairing of ἅπτομαι and ἀποσβέννυμι directly invokes the measured alternations of the cosmic fire of 30 D.-K., and in doing so prompts us to look more closely into the darkness of night, with its chthonic overtones, to find insights waiting to be seized. As Fink’s colleague Martin Heidegger has forcefully claimed in his interpretation of 16 D.-K. (τὸ μὴ δῦνόν ποτε πῶς ἄν τις λάθοι ;), there is no hiding place from that which never sets, from that which never goes into concealment, and which, in fact, denotes the corresponding realm of disclosure and “upsurgence” granted to physis.27
13The kindling of nocturnal insight can be said, therefore, to manifest that thinking of the connection between the world night and day Fink advocated, and the cosmic space-time of emergence and demise. Further, it is only at night-time that the individual can grasp hold of the finitude and absence from which beings come to light, an absence which the brilliance of the terrestrial day has largely hidden. Of course, Heraclitus frequently despairs at the ability of his adult audience to think this continuity between death, sleep, and wakefulness, as in 1 D.-K. :
τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται.
For other men fail to notice what they do while awake, just as others are forgetful of what they do when asleep.28
14where epistemological failure is marked by the preference for isolated self-reflection, rather than thinking the essential co-presencing of things in the shared logos of the world :
τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν.
Although the logos is common, the majority live as if their thinking is a personal possession.29
15Nevertheless, the fragment avers in the form of its typically Heraclitean syntax — with the original noun, here ἄνθρωπος, standing as the concept to be defined (just like the κόσμος of 30 D.-K., the θάλασσα of 61 D.-K., and the πυρός of 90 D.-K.) — that this continuity between death and wakefulness, between night and day, and between illumination and concealment, determines the ontological and hermeneutic capabilities of the human as micro-cosm of the cosmic fire.
16The value of this nocturnal haptic connection in 26 D.-K. can also be gleaned from the skeptic Sextus Empiricus’ later account of Heraclitean epistemology, in particular from his understanding of the relationship between the individual and the cosmic whole of reason. Sextus’ commentary is clearly biased by Stoic intermediaries since it posits central roles for such Stoic concepts as ‘the surrounding element’ (τὸ περιέχον) and ‘breath’ (πνεῦμα) — terms that do not appear in any of Heraclitus’ fragments. Nevertheless, in Sextus’ version, the language of 30 D.-K. is again exploited, here to denote the separation and quenching (χωρισθέντες δὲ σβέννυνται) of the intellectual faculties when the individual is sundered from divine reason during sleep.30 And although Sextus appears to draw the same link 26 D.-K. does between sleep and the isolation of the individual once the avenues of perception are closed off,31 two metaphors are used to indicate a remainder of the thinking self that is left over at nighttime.
17The first is that of a “root” (ῥίζης) which alone is preserved, ostensibly, through the connection of breath that holds the individual in dormant relation to the surrounding atmosphere of divine reason.32 Yet in the metaphor of the root, with its active qualities of growth, we discern the trace of Heidegger’s “ever-rising” within the realm of concealment, and the benefit of thinking the apparent absence from which all emergence rises. For Sextus’ root does not wither passively, but is marked by its active “throwing off” (ἀποβάλλει) of the “power of memory” (μνημονικὴν δύναμιν), a power which might stand pejoratively for the sort of inherited and unquestioned wisdom of which Heraclitus is elsewhere so disdainful. The root is also that which bides its time before “peeping out” (προκύψας) in the light of day to graft new paths of perception for the individual once it “puts on the apparel of reason” (λογικὴν ἐνδύεται δύναμιν). Sextus’ root, dwelling in the shelter of night, thus upsurges into a new relation with the enveloping light of the whole in daytime.33 Far from marking a pejorative cognitive isolation, the root preserves and forges a mode of connection between the finite and the totality.34
18In clarifying the nature of this relationship, Sextus’ second metaphor makes the finite into a “group of coals” (οἱ ἄνθρακες) that are kindled through proximity to fire and quenched once separated (ὅνπερ οὖν τρόπον οἱ ἄνθρακες πλησιάσαντες τῶι πυρὶ κατ᾽ἀλλοίωσιν διάπυροι γίνονται, χωρισθέντες δὲ σβέννυνται).35 The symbolism of the singular root, with its respiratory connection to the whole, is reframed by the ensemble of coals that share their heat with and through each other (κατ᾽ἀλλοίωσιν). Just as we could assess the preservation of the root as a form of latent cognition that thought the connection between night and day, so we can suggest that the collective coals do the same through their physical contact with each other. Sextus’ two metaphors, then, even as they attempt to portray an intellectual isolation at nighttime, also serve to invoke the haptic illumination to which the corresponding verb ἅπτομαι pointed in the cosmic and microcosmic contexts of Heraclitus 30 D.-K. and 26 D.-K.
2. Childish Graspings : 56 D.-K.
19The association between concealment, growth, and shared intellection as a mode for interpreting the cosmic whole is evident in fragment 56 D.-K. Significantly, the performers of this haptic cognition are children at play, their bodies immersed in the material environment in ways that undercut the authority of traditional adult knowledge :
ἐξηπάτηνται οἱ ἄνθρωποι πρὸς τὴν γνῶσιν τῶν φανερῶν παραπλησίως Ὁμηρῳ, ὃς ἐγένετο τῶν Ἑλλήνων σοφώτερος πάντων. ἐκεῖνόν τε γὰρ παῖδες φθεῖρας κατακτείνοντες ἐξηπάτησαν εἰπόντες. ὅσα εἴδομεν καὶ κατελάβομεν, ταῦτα ἀπολείπομεν, ὅσα δὲ οὔτε εἴδομεν οὔτ᾽ ἐλάβομεν, ταῦτα φέρομεν.
Men are deceived in the recognition of what is obvious, like Homer who was the wisest of all the Greeks. For he was deceived by children killing lice, who said : what we see and catch we leave behind ; what we neither see, not catch, we take away.36
20Later accounts of Homer’s failure to interpret the riddle posed by children emphasized his blindness, offering a rationalisation perhaps of his epistemological myopia.37 Yet on closer inspection the “recognition” (τὴν γνῶσιν) of “what is obvious” (τῶν φανερῶν) is that which is already invisible to the eye. The riddle devolves on the lice that the children can not see, which they unwittingly carry away with them. In doing so, this fragment invokes the deeper and more hidden arrangements of Heraclitus’ world, the structuring concealments that allow the illumination of finite beings as indicated in 54 D.-K. (“The hidden harmony is stronger than the apparent one”).38 Furthermore, the sites upon which the riddle plays out are the bodies of the children themselves : they provide the hinge between the seen, captured and abandoned lice, and those that are unseen and removed, that is, those that remain literally embodied. The riddle also gestures towards the collaborative endeavour of the children at play, as hands and fingers search out the lice upon each other’s bodies, plucking lice from hair and folds of clothing. In contrast, Homer’s isolation is marked by his position as outsider, unable physically to grasp the difference between the apparent and the hidden, nor to rationalize it through penetrating the paradoxes of the riddle’s language.
21Yet what is this insect-vectored philosophical insight that roams over the children, concealing itself and emerging in turn ? Heraclitus’ nuanced language gestures in one direction, as observed by Bollack/Wismann — the shared root between “lice” (φθεῖρας) and the verb “to kill” (φθείρω) denotes that the children are “killing the killers”.39 It also follows, therefore, that the unperceived lice represent the children’s continual embodiment of the killers, a deathly remainder hidden within the crevices of language and being. This, then, is one ontological import of the riddle to which Homer’s epistemic isolation renders him deficient. In fact, Heraclitus’ criticism of Homer is as much a criticism of the tradition itself, the cultural esteem in which Homer is held, and the way he persists unchanging in the cultural imaginary, resistant to death and the passage of time.40 The children are figured as permeable to that dialectic between emergence and demise, exposed to and emboldened by their lived experience of the thingness of the world, whereas Homer, like Heraclitus’ adult audience, is seen to occupy a different ontological register as a result of sensory privation, a lack of intellectual synthesis and a consequent retreat to a world of seeming and psychic interiority.41
22An important feature of Heraclitus’ children at play is that they remain upon this threshold between the concealed and the apparent, and draw their philosophical wisdom from this same liminality. Their orientation to the world represents a philosophical model of openness, attuned to rhythms of the natural world and the animate environment of which they are part, and through which they are constituted. Writing of participatory perception, whereby the individual and environment come to think through each other, Maurice Merleau Ponty describes how the sensible world can “beckon”, “invade” and even “take possession” of the individual.42 In the play of Heraclitus’ children, perception becomes a question of witholding, concealing, and disclosing in reciprocal relationship with the things themselves. The immediacy of their physical experience of the lice suggests a reciprocal encroachment, a “coition, so to speak, of my body with things” as Merleau Ponty puts it.43 We might say, then, that the lice themselves have an active role in the transitive process of participation : the children’s grasping of meaning is one with the experience of their own tactility, as they are touched in turn by a non-human other.
23A phenomenological approach to 56 D.-K. need not, though, constrain the significance of the children’s riddle to the level of the physical encounter with the world at the expense of the complex linguistic pun contained within it. Language is intimately tied up with Heraclitus’ conception of the cosmos and the shared logos that underwrites everything.44 These two levels of the riddle can be seen as causally related, rather than just complimentary. Merleau-Ponty has argued that language as communicative meaning has a gestural origin, made incarnate through spontaneous bodily reactions and responses to the sensorial world. Language, in this view, is seen as fundamentally bodily rather than mental in origin, and as having arisen in reciprocal encounter with the world. The subsequent abstraction of conceptual meaning, for Merleau-Ponty, never escapes this gestural and affective origin : “the meaning of words must be finally induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of abstraction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech”.45 Solving the riddle, then, is more than an act of linguistic unravelling from which a stable self can be constituted that is somehow immune to the immersive syntax of the Heraclitean kosmos.46 The children sing the language of the world, just as it sings, and itches, through them.
24Finally, the choice of the verb καταλαμβάνω to denote the children’s act of catching the lice they discover and then leaving them behind (ὅσα εἴδομεν καὶ κατελάβομεν, ταῦτα ἀπολείπομεν) also invokes the hermeneutic behaviour of the cosmic fire from another fragment, 66 D.-K. :
πάντα τὸ πῦρ ἐπελθὸν κρινεῖ καὶ καταλήψεται.
Fire coming on will distinguish and capture all things.47
25The physicality of the act of seizure in καταλήψεται colours those knowing grasps of the children in 56 D.-K. as forms of knowledge, as a mode of disclosing the beings of the world, in relation to, or in derivation from, the power of the cosmic totality. Furthermore, the primary meaning of κρινεῖ as “separating out” reinforces Fink’s understanding of the world-clearing [weltlichtenden] activity of the Heraclitean fire.48 The only other occurence of καταλαμβάνω in Heraclitus’ corpus, in the same form as 66 D.-K., suggests that what is at stake here is the question of the truth of being, which can be occluded through the fabrication of, and witnessing to, deceit :
Δίκη καταλήψεται ψευδῶν τέκτονας καὶ μάρτυρας
Justice will catch up with all makers of and witnesses to falsehoods.49
3. Assembling Knowledge : 51 D.-K., 10 D.-K.
26The importance of this physical notion of construction in relation to language and revelation is picked up elsewhere in Heraclitus :
οὐ ξυνιᾶσιν ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει. παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης.
They do not recognise how what differs agrees with itself. For it is a back-turning arrangement, just like that of bow and lyre.50
27As Edmund Hussey has noted, the verbal form ξυνιᾶσιν carries a material referent in its etymology, which he glosses as “a bringing together” such that one “literally assembles understanding”.51 This act of assembling meaning from the encounter with the world, and of speaking this movement from divergence to convergence in unison, can bring us back to the collective of children at play, speaking together to unsettle the isolated Homer in 56 D.-K. Consensus, the “speaking as one” of ὁμολογέει, is constructed from the incorporation of what appears different, or rather, difference must be thought before sameness, is constitutive of it, and consequently threatens to destabilize any perception of similitude”.52 So, too, can this act of assemblage invoke the nature of language itself, where signs can relate to one another only through a principle of divergence of meaning, through a “system of differences”.53 The structure of language is implicit in every term, the web of differences that tie everything together present behind every point, yet full knowledge of this structure, fluid as it is, can never be grasped. As Merleau Ponty writes of the child’s first forays into language “the whole of spoken language surrounding the child snaps him up like a whirlwind, tempts him by its internal articulations”.54
28The recursive back-turning construction of παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη in the second clause of 51 D.-K. thus speaks to the structure of language as much as it does the material objects of bow and lyre. Furthermore, as several scholars have noted, the bow and lyre are not poised in balanced tension, or at least do not remain that way for any perceptible period of time.55 What matters is the potential forces concealed within their structures that await actualisation, as strings unleash arrows and the music of enchantment. So elsewhere does Heraclitus assert the detachment of the signifier from the signs of language, revealing the bow as principle both of emergence and demise.56 Knowledge of this system of differences — the alternate form for bow, βιός, distinguished only by the position of its accent from the word for life βίος — allows entry into the field of language. It is by dwelling in the divergence of the sign that the children can, like the Delphic oracle of 93 D.-K. articulate the dialectical structure of the relationship between concealment and disclosure.57
29This haptic interface between children at play and the things of Heraclitus’ animate world, one that intuits a deeper relationality between the finite intra-worldly being and the rhythms of the cosmic totality as it kindles and extinguishes in turn, is further reinforced by the language of 10 D.-K. :
συλλάψιες. ὅλα καὶ οὐκ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα.
Graspings. Whole and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.58
30In a similar way to the verbs ἅπτομαι (30 D.-K.; 26 D.-K.) and κρινεῖ and καταλήψεται (66 D.-K.), the noun συλλάψιες, from the verbal form συλλαμβάνω, has both a physical and a metaphorical meaning that can clarify Heraclitus’ understanding of the ontological and hermeneutic processes of the cosmos. Etymologically, the verb denotes a “taking together” with connotations of an arrangement of things and sounds, just as is also evident in the semantic range of Heraclitus’ key term ἁρμονίη. 10 D.-K. thus invokes the movement of the cosmic fire as the power of individuation, of that which allows things to flourish and then to wither back into the ground of earth, just as it also models the cognitive potential of those finite beings within the microcosm as they attempt to grasp meaning from the dialectical play of opposites.59 This interpretive act, as one of a coordinated bringing together of elements, also reminds us of the implications of the verb ξυνιᾶσιν in 51 D.-K. As we have seen in 56 D.-K., it is the literal taking hold of things in the case of children that performs a form of knowledge, and one that allows them to grasp the rhythms and structuring processes of the cosmic whole.60 For Charles Kahn, retreating to the perception of a deliberate ambiguity on Heraclitus’ part, this range of συλλάψιες allows it to mean both the physical act of taking together and the cognitive act of understanding.61 Whereas we might rather draw a causal connection, as we have seen with the embodied grasping of knowledge in the performance of children’s games, such that the haptic grasp is part of the process of cognition, indeed, an essential part.
31Fink’s formulation of how play reveals the “world-open” character of human existence reminds us that the ludic ekstasis of the player in relating with understanding to the whole is contingent upon their being one of the players in the cosmic production, a vehicle through which the whole can resonate within the intra-worldly. The participle pairing of συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον in 10 D.-K. can be read in this vein, marking a reciprocal “converging” and “differentiation” that can function in the middle voice to mark out human play as a hermeneutic mimesis of cosmic rhythms ; while in the passive voice, as that which is “brought-together” and “carried apart”, it can denote the vulnerability of the human player, subject to the indeterminate graspings of the cosmic fire. Interestingly, such an association between the child as both interpretive player and as one of the pieces moved by the cosmic totality as it prevails in play, is made by Lucian in his satirical Philosophies for Sale :
Τί γὰρ ὁ αἰών ἐστι ;
Παῖς παίζων, πεσσεύων, διαφερόμενος, συμφερόμενος
And what is eternity/lifetime ? A child playing a game, playing pessoi, in discord, in concord.62
32Lucian’s own version of 52 D.-K. is remarkable for the work he makes αἰών do in order to encompass the many avenues of flux within Heraclitus’ kosmos : its exchanges (ἀμειβόμενα) represent the physical alterations of location and magnitude (μέγα μικρόν, ἄνω κάτω), the emotional categories of enjoyment and displeasure (τέρψις ἀτερψίη), and the epistemological antinomies of insight and ignorance (γνῶσις ἀγνωσίη). In Lucian’s reading, the child at play represents a space-time of assembling and differentiating that conjoins the ontological to the hermeneutic, just as it renders them exposed to those same processes.
4. Finitude and Child’s Play : 88 D.-K., 25 D.-K., 20 D.-K.
33The implication of this open relationality between finite player and world totality does not, though, for Fink render the activity of human play as essentially derivative, or circumscribed by limited possibilites. In its constituent mixture of the actual and the non-actual, it holds open the chance of freedom and renewal : “in play the human being ‘transcends’ himself… as it were, leaps free from himself, and plunges from every fixed situation into the possibilities that stream forth in the primordial ground of life — he can always begin anew and cast off the burden of his life history” (p. 207). This fluctuation between the actual and the unreal is neatly encapsulated in the figure of the playing child of 52 D.-K. and their association with the ambivalence of αἰών. To read the meaning (and political significance) of the activity of πεσσεύων as contrained by any putative board — whether of the democratic polis or oligarchic pente grammai variants as Leslie Kurke does63—is to allow the spatiality of the game to limit its possible outcomes, and by implication to overlook the lived experience of the players themselves, that is to say, their temporal standing in relation to the cosmic totality.64
34Indeed, Charles Kahn has argued that the πεσσεύων of 52 D.-K. be explicated in resonance with the related participle form μεταπεσόντα of 88 D.-K. to demarcate a set range of “positions”, as it were, for the child’s metaphorical embodiment of the moves of αἰών :
ταὐτό τ᾽ ἔνι ζῶν καὶ τεθνηκὸς καὶ τὸ ἐγρηγορὸς καὶ τὸ καθεῦδον καὶ νέον καὶ γηραιόν. τάδε γὰρ μεταπεσόντα ἐκεῖνά ἐστι κἀκεῖνα πάλιν μεταπεσόντα ταῦτα.
The same in one living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping, and young and old. For these transposed are those, and those transposed again are these.65
35For Kahn, the first three paired opposites of 88 D.-K. are said to “define the structure of human experience as an alternating pattern of being kindled and going out” and thus the play of the child should not be considered as “random” or “child-like”, but rather as a representation of “definite rules” such that the “pessoi game thus imitates the alternating measures of cosmic fire”.66 Kahn’s emphasis, as with Kurke, is to view these opposites as spatial states, laid out as corresponding, and inevitable, moves through which the human player is to be played. In contrast, by focusing upon the embodied actuality of the child (ren) at play and their haptic interpretation of the world, we can restore them their creative openness to the rhythms of the world. Such a materialist focus upon the thinking body of the child also helps illustrates the dual sense of αἰών, as finite marker of generational existence and as poietic power of world-creation, to which they are constitutively linked. The manifestation of the opposites in 88 D.-K., after all, is not a straight-forward linear movement, passively marking the transition from living to dead and childhood to senility ; rather, the middle pairing, awake and asleep, disrupts this pattern and speaks to that recursive process constitutive of meaning indicated by the παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη of 51 D.-K. Just as Heraclitus criticizes traditional religion for separating the forces of Dionysus and Hades in 15 D.-K., and not recognizing the unity between erotic ecstasy and deathly possession, so here do the transpositions of these states of consciousness devolve not upon a distinct boundary, but rather mark a cohesive force that permeates, and thereby connects, them.67 And it is the child playing pessoi who most clearly grasps the transformational equivalance and potentialities of these opposites that exist similarly in everything (ταὐτό τ᾽ ἔνι).
36Elsewhere Heraclitus explicitly comments upon the child’s conspicuous proximity to death, as if this proximity might be that which enables them to grasp the nature of the world totality :
γενόμενοι ζώειν ἐθέλουσι μόρους τ᾽ἔχειν, καὶ παῖδας καταλείπουσι μόρους γενέσθαι.
Having been born they wish to live and to possess their fate, and they leave behind children to become their dooms.68
37The children of the next generation are left behind with the inheritance of death once their parents have lived and consumed what is their lot. Heraclitus exploits the multivalency of the term moros (μόρος) meaning “death”, “fate” and “portion” to express this condition which Kahn’s translation neatly brings out, where the adult attitude toward its positive aspects, “being born to life” (γενόμενοι ζώειν), “to enjoy it” in Marcovich’s rendering, is placed in chiastic opposition to “being born to death” (μόρους γενέσθαι) for children.69 Heraclitus’ carefully composed fragment, with this epanalepsis of forms of gignomai bracketing the polysemy of moros, draws attention to the passage of time, and the legacy it leaves behind it, while also appearing to enclose this ontological insight within the tight syntax of its form. It is the presence of children, however, in both the second and, by implication, the first clause, that gives it an added resonance. For the verb καταλείπουσι in 20 D.-K. takes us back to the riddle of 56 D.-K. and the lice that, once seen and captured, were abandoned (ἀπολείπομεν) by the children. Moreover, just as the visible extraction of lice belied their continuing presence, burrowed within garments and bodies, so in 20 D.-K. does the apparent externalisation of fate through the figure of children rebound upon adults who have not thought through the full implications of moros and the finitude within being.
38Another Heraclitean meditation, 25 D.-K., suggests that the moros with which one plays, and is ultimately played, is dependent upon the quality of one’s life :
μόροι μέζονες μέζονας μοίρας λαγχάνουσι.
Greaters deaths are assigned greater destinies.70
39Yet both the prevailing Homeric interpretation of this fragment in which a glorious death in battle affords great renown or the mystical interpretation by which a soul expiring in a fiery state is granted a blessed afterlife, fall short of capturing the recursive nature of the insight within its tautologous form.71 The fragment certainly implies some causality, such that the verb λαγχάνω must be translated in its Homeric sense of receiving one’s due portion, rather than just as a random assignment of spoils. Nevertheless, we might read the child of 20 D.-K., in its becoming unto moros, back into this fragment and suggest that the child’s association with finitude grants it the power to achieve better outcomes and fates (μοίρας). The verb λαγχάνω, in the sense of “falling to one’s lot” could thus evoke the ludic associations of the participle μεταπεσόντα of 88 D.-K. with its primary sense of “fall out otherwise”. It is the nature of the child to play in the realm of death, with its constituent processes of concealment and revelation, that appears to grant it a peculiar power.
5. Kingly Revelations : 53 D.-K., 80 D.-K.
40The extent of this power is clarified by the resonance of the term ἡ βασιληιη from the second half of 52 D.-K. across the rest of Heraclitus’ oeuvre. In this way, the kingly potential of the child at play can be linked with the macrocosmic demarcations of the Πόλεμος of 53 D.-K., also described as ‘king of all’ :
Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους.
War is the father of all, the king of all, and some he has shown as gods, others men, some he has made slaves, others free.72
41The child, bracketed and defined by its constitutive relationship to the finitude of moros, escapes this limitation in the infinite deixis of a timeplay that categorises the immortals and mortals of this world, liable as they are in turn to reverse into one another.73 The passive vulnerability of the μεταπεσόντα of 88 D.-K. is here changed into the active power of revelation, a disclosing and bringing to light of the nature of beings. While similarly, as a form of poiesis, the kingly child at play could be said to function on an epistemological level, revealing its audience as possessed of either an enslaved74 or a free approach to the world. The former is typified by a preference for perceiving stability over change, for refusing to accept the formative strife that allows for macro and microcosmic attunement, just as Aristotle’s gloss on Heraclitus’ criticism of Homer in 56 D.-K. implies :
καὶ Ἡράκλειτος ἐπιτιμᾲ τῷ ποιήσαντι “ὡς ἔρις ἔκ τε θεῶν καὶ ἀνθρώπων ἀπόλοιτο”. οὐ γὰρ ἂν εἶναι ἁρμονιάν μὴ ὂντος ὀξέος καὶ βαρέος, οὐδε τὰ ζῷα ἄνευ θήλεος καὶ ἄρρενος ἐναντίων ὄντων.
Homer was wrong when he said “Would that conflict might vanish from among gods and men !” (Iliad, XVIII.107). For there would be no attunement (harmoniē) without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, since they are opposites.75
42Aristotle’s take on the productive discord of eris likely imports some Pythagorean opposites into Heraclitus’ usual antinomies.76 Nevertheless, it does gesture towards the failings of those who do not think the importance of change and interconnection beneath apparent stability and discrete categories. It is the commonality of polemos and the justice of the transformations provoked by eris that eludes their grasp, as seen in 80 D.-K. :
εἰδέναι δὲ χρὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐόντα ξυνόν, καὶ δίκην ἔριν, καὶ γινόμενα πάντα κατ΄ ἔριν καὶ χρεών.
It is necessary to realize that war is common and strife is justice and that everything comes to pass in accordance with strife.77
43This paternal and communal polemos, acting as catalyst for transformation and thereby undergirding the stability of the kosmos, rules out any notion of teleology or design in the Heraclitean worldview. Indeed, for Nietzsche this idea of universal war as principle of cosmodicy represented “the first quintessentially Hellenic idea”.78 Fink’s own conception of the “groundlessness, senselessness, and aimlessness” of the world-totality owes much to Nietzsche’s and Heraclitus’ thought, yet he also suggests that such a nihilistic cosmology need not deprive human life of all meaning.79 Rather, as he asserts, “its groundlessness encompasses the pervasive groundedness of all innerworldly processes and events… It encompasses with its universal aimlessness the paths upon which aims and goals are striven after… It holds spaces and times open for the grounded, purposive, meaningful, and valueladen Being of things”.80 It is within this space and time that Heraclitus’ children play, where the apparent levity and carefree nature of play enables them to understand the cosmic totality, just as it shines back, is “refracted”, into their intra-worldliness. Indeed, the regal power of Heraclitus’ child at play comes close to Fink’s formulation of throwing off the burden of history and fleeing the enclosed self in a leap into “the possibilities that stream forth in the primordial ground of life”.81
44The repetition of the adjective ξυνός from 80 D.-K. in two other fragments of Heraclitus reinforces this point about the openness of the child at play to the animate world around them, and to the individuating power of the world-totality. The first (2 D.-K.) ascribes such commonality and prevalance to the underlying and constitutive logos of the world :
τοῦ λόγου δ΄ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν. Although the logos is common, the majority live as if their thinking is a personal possession.82
45This passage is preserved in our citational sources as part of that programmatic fragment (1 D.-K.) in which the forever existing logos is subject to eternal misapprehension by Heraclitus’ sleepwalking audience who cannot grasp the physis of each thing even as Heraclitus excises it from the whole.83 To turn away from the pervasive logos is here marked as an act of self-enclosure, an attempt to bracket the self off from the world through an act of private phronesis. Elsewhere, through the use of its negative form ἀξύνετοι, Heraclitus suggests that such epistemological isolation has ontological implications, rendering the adult audience absent from true participation in the world in which they dwell :
ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες κωφοῖσιν ἐοίκασι. φάτις αὐτοῖσι μαρτυρεῖ παρεόντας ἀπιεῖναι.
Not connected, they hear like the deaf. This saying gives witness to them : absent though present.84
46The other occurence of the adjective ξυνός in 113 D.-K. offers, instead, an alternative model of cognition, of phronesis, that alludes to the openness, collectivity and reciprocal entanglement with the things of the world we have seen in the play of children :
ξυνόν ἐστι πᾶσι τὸ φρονέειν.
Thinking is shared by all.85
47This common substrate between polemos, logos, and phronesis finds its center in the regal child of 52 D.-K., who at once grasps the groundlessness of the prevailing whole as they too play upon the border between the concealed and the emergent.
Conclusion : 17 D.-K.
48We might return, by way of conclusion, to Fink’s claim at the beginning of Play as Symbol of the World that “if from the slightest things a path always leads to philosophy, one may expect that a reflection on play, on this folly of children, could even ultimately one day unsettle the self-assured knowledge of adults”.86 Through focussing on how children are those who play in Heraclitus we have observed his drawing of an alternative philosophical model of being and permeability to the world in distinct opposition to the narcoleptic failings of an adult audience. Even from the most unpromising of philosophical materials, from pieces of pessoi in 52 D.-K., or from the lice in 56 D.-K., does Heraclitus allude to the deeper meanings that children can intuitively grasp, and the model of living that the dynamism of their play implicitly represents. In the hands of Heraclitus’ knowing children, then, even the most worthless adult opinions can be repurposed into a ludic form of wisdom with creative possibilities.87
Notes de bas de page
1 Fink (2016), p. 215. Passages from Fink’s original Spiel als Weltsymbol (Fink (1960) are taken from the recent English language edition produced and translated by I. Moore and C. Turner (2016).
2 Fink (2016), p. 42.
3 Fink (2016), p. 208.
4 Fink (2016), p. 45.
5 As Krell (1972), p. 64 succinctly notes, “play is both a cosmic symbol and a symbol of the cosmos.”
6 Fink (2016), p. 46.
7 Fink (2016), p. 202.
8 Fink’s extended analysis of the ritual origin of play suggests that in this realm play, in contrast, is concerned with relations among beings — priests, sacred vessels and gods — and does not account for the connection between things and the cosmic totality (Fink 2016, p. 130-131).
9 Homan (2013), p. 289 writes that for Fink “play is a curious mix of reality and unreality. A new world is created through play, a strange oasis from everyday life is experienced. Play interrupts everyday life, yet it enables us to engage in that life meaningfully.”
10 Transl. Kahn (1979).
11 Fink (2016), p. 51.
12 Fink (2016), p. 51-52.
13 Fink (2016), p. 215.
14 Fink (2016), p. 214.
15 Fink’s own concealment of the children within Heraclitus’ oeuvre is matched by the philological tradition itself. The predominant English language critical collection of Pre-Socratic texts, that of Kirk, Raven and Schofield (1983), p. 181-212, do not mention the fragments involving children at all in their section on Heraclitus. Recent editions by Kahn (1979), Robinson (1987) and Graham (2010) make little comment on the prevalence of children, though Kahn’s reading will be discussed in more depth below. It is to Nietzsche, rather, that one must turn to find Heraclitus’ children plucked from the margins and put centre ground. Nietzsche does pick out the child at play as an emblematic sign of the Heraclitean worldview (Nietzsche 2006, p. 70), but does so like Fink as metaphor, treating the child at play not as a philosophical guide, but as a transcendental aesthetic image of his storm of becoming and the meaninglessness of world.
16 Αἰών has been described by one scholar as having undergone a ‘renversement historique’ (Couloubaritsis [1989], p. 112) when Plato’s Timaeus turned αἰών and χρόνος on their head, making the latter the degraded mimetic image of the former’s eternity, a concept which suffuses Plotinus’ Enneads, and is clearly picked up by Hippolytus of Rome in his framing of Heraclitus 52 D.-K. As Aristotle’s definition in his On Heavens (297a 22-28) makes clear, however, αἰών is defined by the boundaries of something’s φύσις, and depending on what is described can encompass a mortal lifetime, hence its more generic use by Empedocles to signify a human generation in 129 D.-K., as well as stretching out to describe the immensity of the heavenly bodies, those which always exist (ἀεί εἴναι), in 16 D.-K.
17 Heraclitus’ valuation of children will stand in stark contrast to Plato, who strongly contrasts the idea of children at play with the activity of philosophy (Republic, 539b), although he does admit that play can reveal the nature of a child, and hence their potential suitability for philosophical streaming (Republic, 537a). Similarly, Aristotle (Physics, 247b-248a) asserts that the unstable mind of a child at play forecloses the ability of the understanding (διάνοια) to come to a stand-still and perform the appropriate reflection that occasions true knowledge (ἐπιστήμη).
18 Transl. Kahn (1979).
19 So did Martin Heidegger, Eugen Fink’s colleague and collaborator on his Heraclitus Seminar of 1962, ask in Satz vom Grund whether we must “think Being and Ground, Being as the abyss, out of the essence of play ; precisely that play into which we mortals, and we alone, are brought, in so far as we dwell in nearness to death” (Heidegger [1975], p. 23).
20 Heraclitus 12 D.-K. (transl. Kahn 1979) : “The Ephesians deserve to be hanged one and all and to leave behind the city to the boys, since it was they who expelled Hermodorus, who was the best of them, claiming ‘Let no one be the best among us, otherwise, let him be so elsewhere and among others.’” (ἄξιον Ἐφεσίοις ἡβηδὸν ἀπάγξασθαι (πᾶσι καὶ τοῖς ἀνήβοις τὴν πόλιν καταλιπεῖν), οἵτινες Ἑρμόδωρον ἄνδρα ἑωυτῶν ὀνήιστον ἐξέβαλον φάντες· ἡμέων μηδὲ εἷς ὀνήιστος ἔστω, εἰ δὲ μή, ἄλλη τε καὶ μετ ΄ἄλλων). For a possible pun with the game polis, see V. Dasen and U. Schädler in this volume.
21 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, IX, 2-3 (transl. R.D. Hicks, Loeb).
22 In doing so, I borrow the literary approach advocated by Kahn (1979), where the concepts of “linguistic density” and “resonance” are applied to explore the connections across Heraclitus’ fragments, and to trace their invocations as a deliberate strategy of composition.
23 The role of the haptic in cognition, as well as in the formation of identity, has received considerable scholarly attention in the last decade, with one neuroscientist (Linden [2015] suggesting that the importance of the haptic sense is matched by its conceptual resistance both to being understood as a unified and locatable capacity, and to being defined in relation to the other more easily identifiable sensory apparatus. This distinctiveness of touch was also noted in antiquity : Aristotle claimed in his On the Soul (2.9.421) that reflection upon the sensory data of the haptic marked the key difference between animal and human cognition. Similarly, we find in Plato (Symposium, 212a ; Phaedrus, 253a) the distinguishing role of the compound form ἐφάπτομαι in the cognitive process. Such a connection is evident, too, in the metaphors of everyday language in English that preserve the associations between touch, knowledge, and being, such that we ‘handle’ truths, ‘grasp’ something’s nature, or even ‘lose touch with’ reality.
24 Fink (2016), p. 57.
25 Transl. Kahn (1979).
26 So Kahn (1979), p. 215 argues : “At nightfall we have lost contact with the daylight, the fire that is shared. So each one is obliged to strike a light for himself.”
27 Heidegger (1975), p. 112.
28 Transl. Kahn (1979).
29 Transl. Kahn (1979).
30 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, 7.129.
31 Sextus Empiricus, ibid. : ἐν γὰρ τοῖς ὕπνοις μυσάντων τῶν αἰσθητικῶν πόρων χωρίζεται.
32 In claiming that this connection is preserved through a ‘drawing off via respiration’ (δι᾽ἀναπνοῆς σπάσαντες), Sextus gestures toward the concept of ‘exhalation’ (anathymiasis) that is ascribed to Heraclitus by Theophrastus to explain the transformations of the physical elements of fire, earth and water. On the question of anathymiasis and its possible place in the authentic doctrines of Heraclitus see Kahn (1979), p. 256-260, and in particular for a good summary of the debate with a conclusion in favor of its presence, albeit in a non-Stoic sense, in the fragments see Dilcher (1995), p. 172-183.
33 This return to the realm of daylight rationality is marked by the use of the verb συμβάλλειν whereby the root “coincides” with the surrounding divine element (τῶι περιέχοντι συμβαλὼν). Fink (2016), p. 120, re-vitalised this same primary etymological meaning of συμβάλλειν to define the relationship between the fragmentary finite being and that which completes it as one of “coincidence”. In coincidence with the whole, the individual, as a fragment of Being itself, is made “transparent” and raised “into the great radiance of the universe” as “the light of the world falls on an innerworldly thing”.
34 The concept of the root as that which preserves a connection between the individual intelligence and a broader divine intelligence at nightime is evident in Plato’s Timaeus (82c-d), where the appetitive part of the human, in particular the organ of the liver, is able to grasp insight during dreams and fits of madness.
35 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, 7.130.
36 Heraclitus, 56 D.-K. (transl. Kahn [1979]).
37 As Levine (2002), p. 147-150 has argued, the motivation behind Homer’s usurpation and ridiculing at the hands of children owes much to Homer’s own pejorative use of children in similes as a shorthand for foolishness and immaturity. Nevertheless, given that, as Kirk (1956) noted, Heraclitus’ tale is the earliest account of Homer’s being fooled by riddling children, albeit without the actual death, we do just as well to read from the perspective of Heraclitus’ other fragments as well, where children are not at all passive victims or models of idiocy, but rather embody deeper political and philosophical truths.
38 Ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείσσων. This fragment is another preserved by Hippolytus and is presented in parallel with 55 D.-K. a means to exemplify Heraclitus’ paradoxicality. This perhaps leads H. Diels to the argument that the apparent harmony, perceptible by the senses, referred to phenomena such as the diurnal cycle and the seasons, whereas the hidden was accessible by rational reflection (a quasi Stoic sense of logos). However, as Kirk (1957), p. 223, summarises this bifurcation of epistemological avenues is unlikely and reflects a division not operational until Plato’s time.
39 Bollack and Wismann (1972), p. 195 : “Le mot de poux, en grec, signifiant destructeurs (phteir-, sur phteirein) les garçons tuent ce qui tue. Les deux termes sont juxtaposés.”
40 As seen in Heraclitus’ advocacy for the violent expulsion of Homer (and Archilochus) in 42 D.-K. Moreover, the range of Heraclitus’ targets in 57 D.-K. (Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Hecateus, and Hesiod) has been taken to indicate the breadth of his own ambition. On the associations of these thinkers, see Morgan (2000), p. 53 and Long (1996), p. 22.
41 Heraclitus, 17 D.-K. neatly expounds Heraclitus’ epistemological position : οὐ γὰρ φρονέουσι τοιαῦτα (οἱ) πολλοί, ὁκόσοι ἐγκυρεῦσιν, οὐδὲ μαθόντες γινώσκουσιν, ἑωυτοῖσι δὲ δοκέουσι. “Most do not think through however many things they encounter, not do they perceive what they have experienced, but rather believe in their own opinions.”
42 Merleau Ponty (1962), p. 214, 317, and 212. In the latter example, M. Merleau-Ponty intriguingly reverses the association of sleep with an inward turn away from the totality, such that sleep is rather said to take possession of the individual only when one “receives from outside the confirmation for which I was waiting… as if my mouth were connected to some great lung outside myself which alternately calls forth and forces back my breath”.
43 Merleau Ponty (1962), p. 320.
44 For recent work, see Morgan (2000), p. 53-58, who comments on Heraclitus’ contribution to a critical discourse about the possibilities of verbal representation and the problematics of language and experience. Nussbaum (1972), Dilcher (1995) and Graham (2008) show a similar interest in Heraclitus’ handle on verbal signification. Hussey (1999), p. 110 pushes to the extreme of this position in claiming that for Heraclitus “reality must be something that can be lived and understood from the inside ; and that the structure of language is the structure of thought, and therefore of the reality that thought describes.”
45 Merleau Ponty (1962), p. 184.
46 So Graham (2008), p. 182 suggests that in “parsing the grammar of the world” and reading the message written in nature, Heraclitean man can assume a stable subjectivity beyond the flux, thinking his psyche out of the overlapping rush of the river (12 D.-K.), like the exhalation theory (anathymiasis) that Cleanthes deputes, anachronistically, to Heraclitus in extrapolating upon the same fragment.
47 Transl. Kahn (1979).
48 Fink (2016), p. 51. On this aspect of κρινεῖ see also Gadamer (2002), p. 29-30.
49 Heraclitus, 28 D.-K. (transl. Kahn [1979]).
50 Transl. KAhn (1979).
51 Hussey (1982), p. 56.
52 Through this notion of the assembling of meaning, and the uniting of what seems different into a new whole, Heraclitus models a hermeneutic not only for grasping the knowledge within the material of his kosmos, but also the affiliations and insights that play across the surface of his philosophical corpus, brought to light from collocations that at first seem dissonant.
53 In just such a way did Merleau-Ponty (1964), p. 39) respond to Saussure’s notion of langue.
54 Merleau-Ponty (1964), p. 42.
55 Vlastos (1995), p. 132. Hussey (1999), p. 97 also argues that the functioning of the unity of Heraclitus’ kosmos demands an acknowledgement of temporal process, whereby it is only through time that diametrically opposed opposites reveal their imbrication.
56 Heraclitus, 48 D.-K : “The name of the bow is life, its work death.” (τῷ οὖν τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος, ἔργον δὲ θάνατος).
57 Ὁ ἄναξ οὗ τὸ μαντεῖόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς, οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει. “The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign.”
58 Transl. Kahn (1979).
59 For Hussey (1982), p. 45 the seeming equivalence between fire and psyche and their cyclical and balanced movements into water, earth and back to air/fire (cf. 31, 36 D.-K ;) betokened not just an identity of structure between the macro and microcosms, but an identity of meaning.
60 Aristotle’s subsequent use of συλλάψιες to indicate pregnancy could also be read through a Heraclitean lens to indicate how the body is very much involved in the gestation and birth of new knowledge. Yet before Aristotle the central meaning of συλλάψιες, as Kahn (1979), p. 256 points out in his commentary, is the physically violent act of ‘seizing’ or ‘arresting’, as in for example Herodotus, Histories, II, 121 ; VI, 26.
61 Kahn (1979), p. 256.
62 Lucian, Philosophies for Sale, 14. Lucian’s familiarity with Heraclitus was well known in antiquity, witness Galen’s commentary on a Hippocratic text which relates the anecdote of Lucian concocting a collection of Heraclitean sayings and passing them off as his own. For a similar positive reading, see V. Dasen in this volume. On this, see Schlapbach (2010), and in this volume F. Massa on the reading of Heraclitus in Imperial time and Late Antiquity.
63 Kurke (1999a), p. 265, uses the typography given by Aristotle, Pol. 1330b 17-21 to explain that the board of polis had no distinctive features making all pieces structurally equal, while that of pente grammai differed in its possession of a central holy line representing hierarchized sacred space. Contra Schädler (2009a) and in this volume, as no written evidence confirms it. In a related way, Seaford (2004), p. 239, positions the game-playing within established codes for economic transaction, writing. With reference to Palamedes’ reputed invention of pessoi and role as a civilising hero, see M. Vespa in this volume.
64 Hussey (1999), p. 107, takes the lack of mention of an opponent in 52 D.-K. to imply that the child is playing himself and thus by both winning and losing represents the Heraclitean theme of the conflict of opposites and shows “that strife and justice can coexist, independently, without becoming denatured”. Nevertheless, he still reverts to a model of fixed and established rules.
65 Heraclitus, 88 D.-K ; Kahn (1979), p. 227.
66 Kahn (1979), p. 227 uses the etymological meaning of the verb μεταπέσειν as “fall out otherwise” to suggest an allusion to dice ; though we might equally suggest that it emphasizes unpre-dictability in general, rather than a constrained set of options.
67 Thus we come close to Fink (2016), p. 77 and his own seeming gloss of 88 D.-K.: “Play comes to be a ‘cosmic metaphor’ for the total appearance and disappearance of existing things in the time-space of the world. The frothing intoxicated tide of life, which elevates living beings in delight in reproducing is secretly one with the dark surge that drags the living down into death. Life and death, birth and dying, womb and tomb are twinned.”
68 Heraclitus, 20 D.-K. (transl. Kahn [1979]).
69 Marcovich (1967), p. 522.
70 Transl. Kahn (1979).
71 For the former view see Diels et Kranz (1952), wih reference to 24 D.-K. “Gods and men honour those who die in battle.” (ἀρηιφάτους θεοὶ τιμῶσι καὶ ἄνθρωποι). For the latter see Nussbaum (1972), who relies heavily on 63 D.-K.: “To rise up and become guards of the living and the dead.” (ἔνθα δ’ ἐόντι ἐπανίστασθαι καὶ φύλακας γίνεσθαι ἐγερτὶ ζώντων καὶ νεκρῶν).
72 Transl. Kahn (1979).
73 Cf. 62 D.-K.: “Immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of these, dying the life of those.” (ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες).
74 As it is for the riddled Homer of 56 D.-K.
75 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1235a 25 = A 22 D.-K. (transl. H. Rackham, Loeb).
76 The second opposite Aristotle quotes, that of male and female animals, does not fit with the pattern of opposites elsewhere in Heraclitus’ thought that imply transition and change, rather than the traditional Pythagorean static opposites like male and female, as Dilcher (1995), p. 108 has noted.
77 Transl. Kahn (1979).
78 Nietzsche (2006), p. 64.
79 Fink (2016), p. 213.
80 Fink (2016,) p. 212.
81 Fink (2016), p. 206-207.
82 Transl. Kahn (1979).
83 Kahn (1979), p. 102 rightly glosses the logos here as ‘not simply language but rational discourse, calculation and choice : rationality expressed in speech, in thought and in action’ and serves as a counterweight to the more linguistic readings of Nussbaum (1972) and Dilcher (1995).
84 Heraclitus 34 D.-K. (transl. Kahn (1979).
85 Heraclitus 113 D.-K. (transl. Kahn (1979).
86 Fink (2016), p. 43.
87 See then in this light 70 D.-K.: “Heraclitus thought that human opinions are the playthings of children.” (Ἡράκλειτος παίδων ἀθύρματα νενόμικεν εἶναι τὰ ἀνθρώπινα δοξάσματα). See also V. Dasen in this volume.
Auteur
rellis@humnet.ucla.edu
University of California, Los Angeles
University of California, Los Angeles, 2014-Present Continuing Lecturer. Ancient philosophy with emphases in the Archaic and Classical periods, in particular Pre-Socratic thought ; Greek and Roman tragedy ; Ancient and Modern theories of Mind ; The History of Ideas. Books : Plato’s Symposium : A Critical Introduction, London, Routledge, 2017 ; with H. Dawson (eds.), John Locke’s ‘Disputations on the Law of Nature’, Oxford, OUP (Fortcoming - Under Contract).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Penser (avec) la culture vidéoludique
Discours, pratiques, pédagogie
Selim Krichane, Isaac Pante et Yannick Rochat (éd.)
2022
Jouer dans l’Antiquité classique/Play and Games in Classical Antiquity
Définition, Transmission, Réception/Definition, Transmission, Reception
Véronique Dasen et Marco Vespa (éd.)
2021
Lire les magazines de jeux vidéo
Couverture(s) de la presse spécialisée française
Sélim Ammouche, Alexis Blanchet, Björn-Olav Dozo et al. (éd.)
2022
Temporalités et imaginaires du jeu
Rémi Cayatte, Audrey Tuaillon Demésy et Laurent Di Filippo (éd.)
2023