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The University of Chicago Listening to Logos: a Prose

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The University of Chicago Listening to Logos: a Prose THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LISTENING TO LOGOS: A PROSE POETICS IN HERACLITUS A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES JOHN U. NEF COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL THOUGHT AND THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT OF CLASSICS IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY BY LUKE HARRY PARKER CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 2019 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract....................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................... iv Introduction................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 1: Heraclitus’ Rejection of Personal Authority............................................................. 23 Chapter 2: ΚΟΣΜΟΣ without Cosmogony: Heraclitus against Narrativity............................. 67 Chapter 3: Language & ΛΟΓΟΣ.............................................................................................. 115 Chapter 4: ΦΑΤΙΣ ΑΥΤΟΙΣΙΝ ΜΑΡΤΥΡΕΙ: Bearing Witness in Heraclitus……………. 154 Conclusion................................................................................................................................. 198 Bibliography.............................................................................................................................. 202 ii ABSTRACT I argue here for a poetics in prose at work in Heraclitus, one that makes the text an occasion for an exemplary experience of the kosmos as a form of active and intelligible organization. This project works in two directions. First, I contextualize Heraclitus’ unique form of expression by showing how it breaks from existing practices – common to both poetry and prose – of personal authority and narrativity. Second, I engage closely with Heraclitus’ writing to show how it makes the intelligible activity of the kosmos available in the local encounter with the text, partly through an analogy between the kosmos and the meaningful operations of human language. Ultimately, this poetics in the text is part and parcel of seeing philosophical understanding itself as a form of activity. Little has been made of Heraclitus’ several references to the role of the witness in archaic Greek law, but I show how these illuminate his ethical ideal of perceptive participation in the intelligible activity of the kosmos. The texts of Heraclitus thus turn out to be an important corpus for both the development of Greek philosophy and the history of Greek literature. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful first of all to the members of my committee. Glenn Most, chair in the Committee on Social Thought, directed this dissertation with astute criticism and unflagging support. Mark Payne, chair in Classics, guided the project and myself with wide-ranging intellect and generosity of spirit. Gabriel Lear offered characteristically incisive and insightful dialogue together with a rich perspective on the history of Greek philosophy. I extend thanks also to Liz Asmis, who read, heard, and commented on major portions of this project, always to my great benefit. Engaging with all of their responses to my work has been a great privilege and an education in pursuing the highest standards of scholarship. The lively intellectual community at the University of Chicago, particularly in the Department of Classics and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, has been a source of inspiration and support; I am grateful to many friends gained there. I cannot imagine having pursued this work, let alone completed it, without the love of my companion, Jacqueline. I dedicate this project to my parents and my teachers. iv INTRODUCTION The poetics of early Greek philosophy is as thorny and belabored a problem as any in the study of antiquity. The sheer diversity of figures and texts, the near-universal troubles in our knowledge of both, and our relatively new appreciation for the complexity of the contemporary shift from oral to literary culture all present significant factual hurdles to our understanding of the issue. Conceptual problems arise when we recognize first that exactly none of these figures understood themselves to be working at the inauguration of what would become a unified intellectual tradition, and secondly that they got on just fine without anything like the notions of ‘philosophy’ and ‘poetics’ that the modern scholar retrojects onto them in an effort to understand the thought and form of their texts. Heraclitus only compounds the difficulties here: among early Greek philosophers, his prose form is as idiosyncratic as it is enigmatic. In antiquity, many found his dense pronouncements compelling and profound. Others condemned them as viciously ambiguous and verging on self-contradiction: a flawed effort to seem profound. Heraclitus’ composition found influence and imitators, spawned extensive commentaries, and came to be seen by fans and detractors alike as bedrock for the Greek philosophical tradition. One of the detractors, Lucretius, offers a poetic epithet that neatly expresses the paradox in the tradition around Heraclitus: “clarus ob obscuram linguam.” (De Rerum Natura, 1.639). He was and remains “famous for obscure utterance,” with modern readers taking up positions of enthusiast, interpreter, and reviler not unlike those among his ancient audience. 1 Like all of the texts written by the earliest figures we locate in the tradition of Greek philosophy, Heraclitus’ composition is lost to us in its original format. Quotations, paraphrases, and discussions of his text by later authors do survive, so that now we speak about “texts” of Heraclitus rather than the single “text” that probably circulated in antiquity. Over the last two centuries especially, these texts have been compiled repeatedly and in different configurations so that modern readers might gain access to Heraclitus, even as the authenticity of certain texts and the best strategies for presenting them all are still debated. Even so, about 125 “texts” probably originate with Heraclitus. Many are just a handful of words, as in DK B54/LM D50:1 ἁρμονίη ἀφανὴς φανερῆς κρείττων, “Unapparent fitting-together is stronger than the apparent.” Others approach what we would call paragraphs. Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus both tell us that the following comes from the beginning of the original text, probably after an initial sentence in which Heraclitus identifies himself as the author:2 τοῦ δὲ λόγου τοῦδ' ἐόντος ἀεὶ ἀξύνετοι γίνονται ἄνθρωποι καὶ πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον· γινομένων γὰρ πάντων κατὰ τὸν λόγον τόνδε ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώμενοι καὶ ἐπέων καὶ ἔργων τοιούτων, ὁκοίων ἐγὼ διηγεῦμαι κατὰ φύσιν διαιρέων ἕκαστον καὶ φράζων ὅκως ἔχει. τοὺς δὲ ἄλλους ἀνθρώπους λανθάνει ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ποιοῦσιν, ὅκωσπερ ὁκόσα εὕδοντες ἐπιλανθάνονται. (B1/D1) Of this account that is always humans are uncomprehending, both before they hear and after they hear the first time. For though all things come to be according to this account, they are like the untried when they try words and works of the sort that I set out, dividing up each according to its nature and indicating how it is. And other people do not notice what they do awake, just as what they do asleep escapes them. 1 Texts of Heraclitus are cited according to the recent Loeb edition of Laks and Most (2016) as well as the longstanding edition of Diels-Kranz. Here “LM D#” references the texts deemed authentic in the former; “DK B#” those in the latter. “DK A#” refers to texts those editors classified as testimonia rather than citations, while “LM P#” and “LM R#” refer to texts in Laks-Most on the “Person” and “Reception” of the author. Texts will be cited hereafter as, e.g., B1/D1. All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted, but are often informed in particular by those in Kahn 1979 and in the 2016 Loeb edition of Laks and Most. 2 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, 7.132; Aristotle, Rhetoric 1407b14, apud Laks and Most 2016 Vol III, 137. 2 Together these two texts of Heraclitus, B1/D1 and B54/D50, begin to show us the character of his prose. Though they differ in length and grammatical complexity, both statements are striking for their repetition of sounds and syllables, as in the “nonapparent apparent” (ἀφανὴς φανερῆς) wordplay of B54/D50, or the repetitions in B1/D1: “… both before they hear and after they hear the first time … they are like the untried when they try…” (πρόσθεν ἢ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον . ἀπείροισιν ἐοίκασι, πειρώμενοι…). This sensory impact of such language is all the more immediate for one reading aloud, as the contemporaries of Heraclitus probably did, and this in order to discover word breaks and punctuation in a text that presented itself with neither. For Heraclitus’ audience, in the midst of a relatively recent turn towards widespread writing and literacy in Greek culture, pronunciation was essential to the process of recognizing words and constructing sentences in a thicket of letters.3 In this context, Heraclitus’ attention to the sensory aspects of language – as we see in his emphasis on hearing – draws on the persisting paradigm of oral communication, but perhaps also on the novel set of relationships between vision, sound, and sense in reading. Rich language and wordplay might focus attention on the sonic aspects of language, but these texts also show us Heraclitus’ interest in
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