VI. Heraclitus and the Metaphysical Tradition (1967)
Heinrich Blücher
Recording of May 10, 1967
Transcribed and partially edited by Alexander Bazelow and Fran M.
Hassan
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If we were to buttonhole him as Socrates surely would have, and said to him "Heraclitus, you say you know what truth is; will you please explain it to me? You have claimed to grasp an absolute principle, and wish to create a system of deduction from a principle which you in fact do not have, which is only in your dreams." And in his spirit, which today is our own, we might ask of him further, "Yes Heraclitus, that is all very nice. You have paved the way for science, have answered the question what and the question how, but what about the question why? You did not answer the question why, and you have cursed all science and all of the scientific striving of man in that we will never be able to answer the question "why"; what is the meaning of it?" The world can be full of "sense", what Heraclitus describes makes perfect "sense", but there is no meaning to it. It leads nowhere; it leads only to the enlargement of itself. In order to answer the question "why" we must be able to put more "into" the world than logic. Logic makes only sense; logic has no meaning. (13) Logic is nothing but the capacity of man to relate facts to one another in a deductive chain. It was this that Heraclitus was primarily interested in. The cosmos must be ordered, and once this has been achieved the principle of order must be found, and that is the logos. But what about human beings. Are we to think of ourselves as mere objects that have a self increasing logos, or are some of us sometimes irrational? This type of speculation enables us to make a living. It does not enable us to make a life. Heraclitus's thought is, in that sense, a strict metaphysics of science. He is interested in nothing but the "rays", the infinite "rays" of knowledge, as far as he can go. When he speaks to us of his principle, and he tells us we can call it logos, or we can call it Zeus, he is making only agnostic statements, but when he tries to speak of the logos as God, then he answers the question "why." Why is all of this going on, Heraclitus, why all of this movement, all of this endless change? He says,
"time (Zeus) is like the world child." (14)
World child! We hear it again with Friedrich Nietzsche,
"Dionysus is like the world child"
Or perhaps as Hegel might have said, "he" is like the World Spirit. Zeus is like the world child.
He is playing!
And that is the answer to the question "why". He is playing, for his own amusement, and no other reason, or account, or meaning is required, because according to Heraclitus we are supposed to enjoy this permanent increase of knowledge, and therein lies his greatness. We are even supposed to enjoy strife. Nietzsche, who repayed his debt to Heraclitus only by honoring him as a great philosopher, did not really "recognize" him for the very simple reason that he was stealing from him. (15) That is very often the case with philosophers, they are unreliable. They have perhaps read something by someone else, and they present it in another form, and then say it is "my idea". A scientist is never permitted to do that; he would be recognized immediately as a charlatan, but apparently, philosophers can afford that.
Nietzsche said, as if he wanted to perfect Heraclitus, that the meaning of existence, of life, of all things, (the true giver of the "law")* was the "will to power". The idea that various actions have various effects, that what is strong must overcome what is weak, that we must measure the effects of all actions in terms of quantities of power, is merely an objective observation of what really takes place in the modern world. Nietzsche was not a scientist. He was only the prophet of modern science. All the philosophers that came after him, the pragmatists, the "neo-empiricists", all the functionalists who describe "how" things work, and who are interested primarily in operational modes of thought; all of this Nietzsche prophesied. It is all scientific talk, and all very good, step by step knowledge enlarges itself, and metaphysically, the last philosopher who encouraged them as much as Heraclitus encouraged his contemporaries, was Nietzsche. The will to power for him is the God of the world, and this he symbolizes with Dionysus. He is the last and most consequential Heraclitean we have ever seen.
With Heraclitus then, began one of the two metaphysical trends which have from antiquity ruled the mind of western man. The first trend, a religious one, begins with the Hebrew prophets, and continues, via Christianity, through scholasticism, through the Reformation, and finally is transformed into the strictest rational theology where it holds claim to the belief that man is evolving toward an ever-increasing knowledge about God. The second trend, starting with Heraclitus, passes through Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, up to Hegel, where both trends cross, and finally to Nietzsche and Marx. Both have a strange ideal, and it is really the ideal of the scientist. The theologians say they want to know God, and that is acceptable in so far as it is an expression of a belief that is revealing itself. (But they do not stop there.)* They say they want to know his will, and they want to follow his will, that is, they want to know an absolute. And the scientific metaphysicians also want to know an absolute, and that absolute is called Being. (16) All that "is", the whole of "Being" can be studied metaphysically as ontology so in a way theology and ontology are sisters under the skin. They both claim that it is possible to know an absolute principle, either "Being" from a scientific point of view, or from a theological point of view, the living God, as Pascal was to emphasize. The God of the philosophers, of Spinoza, is not a "living" God, any more than the God of Heraclitus is. One cannot establish any sympathy, or human relationship, with such a God. One could not pray to the logos, because it would be of no use. One can only follow the logos. It was the Hebrews who established the principle of an absolute transcendent God, whom with Aristotle, would become the Unmoved Mover. Here the two metaphysical tendencies cross, then for centuries they will part again allowing a clear development of religious and scientific metaphysics, and then finally, today, we see once again an attempt to reconcile them. Theologians will say today that scientists are so useful and that they must learn to live with them in society, because everything has become functionalized. They do not even talk about God any more. They talk about a great many things but not about God. If you talk to any of them, even a serious one like Paul Tillich, and say "But Paul, don't make competition for me. You talk about symbols and ideas and you tell me how everything is symbolic and an idea of something, and in all of this I am competent, but you, I expect that you should believe in God!" And so in a way the scientists and theologians are trying to unite their methods. As to metaphysics, I see a strange similarity of method in deducing the divinity of God in a theological way, and in the deductive methods of the scientist. That such a similarity exists is no accident. When the scientists came to maturity in the Renaissance, and wanted to create a real method of scientific inquiry, the first such attempt since the Greeks, they claimed to represent an absolutely new phenomenon based on a new approach to the world, the scientific approach. No theologian countered them by pointing out that the methods they used had been created by the theologians, that "they" were the first rationalists, and it was "they" who developed logic and mathematics up to that time. Descartes, who claimed to be in opposition to the medieval philosophers without knowing how many of their arguments he used, had even studied theology first. Theology is an abstract science with only one assumption: the existence of God. It is like mathematics (17); if one accepts an initial few assumptions, one can, by deduction, create a mathematical system. If one accepts another few initial assumptions, one can have another mathematical system (18), closed in itself, completely logical, and indestructible. Theology created the model of this method of deduction. If one assumes the "assumption" of God, then everything else follows deductively as a matter of course. What we have shown is that scientific and theological "metaphysics" have something in common, however "science" itself is quite another matter, where every science "must" refrain from making assumptions of an absolute nature. Scientists, like Karl Marx, who claim to know an absolute and begin to make deductions from that absolute have only contributed to the superstition of our time, just as theologians have contributed to the superstition of our time, and of our life situation. So we really have two twins here, and they 're almost Siamese twins, despite their quarrels. There were big quarrels between science and religion; they almost killed each other by using the same kind of argumentation for different purposes. And we know science survived, and theology is very much on the defensive now, so we must help it a little, because it has suffered such a fall.
In order to do that we must find a unity of methods, and so we have to turn to that "not" overall, or highest human capacity, but to a kind of clearing house between all of the faculties we have been talking about: art, science, religion, and we can include politics. There is a small clearing house between them which is called philosophy. It is very small, because it is based on man's freedom, and man's freedom is unfortunately, very small, but it is there and it is the most important pre-condition of its existence. To turn to philosophy proper is not to turn to any single metaphysics of science or religion. The true philosopher has one obligation, and true philosophers are very rare. He has to forfeit every right to claim that he knows an absolute. The scientist perhaps can do that, because he substitutes hypothesis for absolute principles, and if it does not give him the results he needs then he can change it. But an absolute metaphysical assumption is a different thing, except perhaps in art, where metaphysical assumptions are beautiful, and there is only one remedy that can cure people of such generalizations and assumptions; a strict and critical philosophy by which we can de-mask those who dream that they know when they do not know.
So lastly we turn to Socrates. In the development of the philosophy of the west during different historical periods different men have been called "the philosopher". Some called Plato "the philosopher." During the middle ages Thomas Aquinas called Aristotle "the philosopher", and later* (Hegel was known as "the philosopher").
I have taken Socrates as "the philosopher". There is no one in agreement with me any longer, except one man, and that is Plato. Plato also thought Socrates was "the philosopher" and by that he meant the model of a philosopher, and I can trust Plato here. He was still cleverer than we are, although I heard that Dewey before he died said that he had been cleverer than Plato. No one is cleverer than Plato. Plato is one of the most astonishing minds that ever appeared on earth, He is like Shakespeare, like Homer, he is inexhaustible. He is almost a monster, and I mean a beautiful monster. He has scientific gifts, poetic gifts, philosophic gifts, and metaphysical gifts. He was all of these in one man, and we learn about Socrates from him, because he is the only man that really has knowledge of him. Socrates was very different from Plato. He did not have such a rich mind. He could not do everything, but only one thing, and that was to turn away from every kind of occupation except one, and stay in the City, to inquire into human beings and into himself. From him stems pure philosophy, according to the inscription on the temple of Delphi, "know thyself." It is this that is the occupation of philosophy, which also tries to answer the question why, and what for, the theological question, which no one but true philosophers can try to answer, and no other method can explain.