The Art and Thought of Heraclitus by Charles H. Kahn

Author:Charles H. Kahn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

XCIII

XCIII (D. 88) The same ... : living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping, and young and old. For these transposed are those, and those transposed again are these.297

As a basis for the interpretation for XCIII, I recall the two complementary principles enunciated above: (1) the reversibility of the process of death, by analogy with the alternation of sleeping and waking and with the return of the seasons of the year, and (2) the generalization of the notion of death, conceived as any change of state in which something old gives way before something radically new. The first thesis, implied by XCII, is here stated explicitly. The corresponding generalization or relativization of the concept of death, which seems implicit in both XCII and XCIII, is more directly documented by CII (D. 36), if we take the reference to the ‘death’ of water and earth quite literally. Both the literal interpretation of CII and the generalized notion of death are entailed by the panpsychism I have attributed to Heraclitus on the basis of XXXI (D. 113) and XXXV (D. 45). (By the usual hermeneutical circle, this attribution is now confirmed by its application to XCII, XCIII, and CII.) And of course some unity between life and death, including some positive evaluation of the negative term, follows from Heraclitus’ central conception of the harmoniē or fitting together of opposites, as was seen in the discussion of LXXVIII (D. 51) and LXXIX (D. 48). What remains to be shown is how these various doctrines are connected in a coherent view of life-beyond-death for the human being or for the psyche.

It is natural to begin by a comparison with the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration, for this must have served as point of departure for Heraclitus’ own view of the afterlife. The Pythagorean doctrine satisfies my principle of reversibility by positing a process of rebirth (in a new body) as the converse of dying (when the psyche leaves its previous body). It also involves a relativization of the notion of death, insofar as birth and death are both interpreted as a change of state for the psyche rather than as radical coming-to-be and passing-away. To this extent, there is a genuine affinity between Heraclitus’ thought and the mystic view of the soul, which justifies the affinity of language already noted. But the Pythagorean doctrine implies a basic disparity between the destiny of the deathless psyche and that of the mortal body, and hence a fundamental dualism between the realms of the animate (or deathless) and inanimate (or mortal). It is precisely here that Heraclitus’ view diverges in virtue of his monism, which in this context means his panpsychism, and his extension of the notion of death to any radical change of state. The statement of CII (D. 36), that the psyche which dies is reborn as water and the water which dies is reborn as earth, can be seen as a generalization of the doctrine of transmigration for the whole cycle of elemental transformations, in which every stage is simultaneously a death and a rebirth.

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