§10. The Lyre and the Logos

Logos is already a complex word before Heraclitus used it in the fifth century bce. Its connotations fall into several groups:⁸⁶

Language: linguistic formulations, speech, description, discourse, state­ment, argument

Thought: mental processes, thinking, reasoning, explanation

Knowledge: the root of logic and all - logies

Reality: principle, formula, natural law

Heraclitus stands at the beginning of a tendency to link and emphasize all of these connotations together.

It is wise, listening not to me, but to the logos, to admit that all things are one. (Fr. 50)87

Here logos means argument, proof, account. In another fragment a new sense appears:

All things come to pass in accordance with this logos. (Fr. 1)

Now logos names a principle governing the becoming of things, comparable to the Ionian arche, a connotation that another fragment reprises:

Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the logos by which all things are steered through all things. (Fr. 41)

Then a new idea appears:

You will not find the boundaries of the soul by traveling in any direction, so deep is its logos. (Fr. 45)

The logos in nature, the arche or principle that makes all things one, is in us too, the principle of the soul. It makes the soul deep, and makes human beings profound, or at least it should, though most people fall short and com­prehend nothing. What would the logos tell us if we harkened to it?

This cosmos, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out. (Fr. 30)

It is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things.

The fire of Heraclitus is not stuff, like earth or water. It is active, a process, becoming, changing, not the moved but its motion. Fiery becoming is the deepest character of nature. “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you” (fr. 12). That does not preclude stability, but makes it the result of many factors and relative to size and time­scale. A chair is stable to a human being, fragile to an elephant, enticing to an octopus (if we sunk it), and mostly empty space to a photon. All these perspectives are equally logical.

Stability, permanence, identity, form—these qualities do not belong to things separately in themselves like an endowment. They are a product of relations among things, relations in which we ourselves are terms. Stability is not changelessness but synchronous change, an idea Heraclitus expresses by a fine image, comparing the cosmos to a lyre and a bow. “Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre” (fr. 51). The power of the bow lies not in a single part nor all the parts juxtaposed but rather, like the music of the harp, in the attunement of parts. A harp is musical and a bow martial only by the right relation of the strings and frame. We are to think of nature that way. What a thing is depends on the relations that sustain its stability.

The cosmos is natural, original becoming. Fire, a continuous becoming, different every moment, epitomizes what later tradition calls natura naturans, the power of which natural phenomena (natura naturata) are expressions. What comes to be lasts with its attunement, its adaptation to a cosmic environment. As it grows chaotic, other adaptations on other levels live on. If anything is eternal, it is this continuous becoming and the uninter­rupted continuity of change.

Probably no more than a generation separates Heraclitus from the younger Protagoras, who inherits a now supercharged concept of logos. Heraclitus implies that a better understanding of the logos would make people better, and with Protagoras the experiment begins. The product of his research is the first metalanguage, that is, the first terms with which to describe, analyze, and criticize the use of language. Protagoras was first to articulate the con­cept of verb tenses, to divide locutions by mode or voice, to notice and com­ment on gendered endings, and to initiate the analysis and criticism of epic poetry. The criticism of poets in Xenophanes and Heraclitus had the form, They say— but I say. Protagoras is different. He challenges the sagacity of the Muse, enters competition against rhapsodes, denounces their claim to know­ledge of the gods, and intensifies the emerging distinction between muthos and logos, myth and a reasoned account.⁸⁸

Protagoras compares his meta-l ogos to the medical techne. His regi­mentation of language, his dialectic and discipline, which we try to un­derstand with concepts available only much later—critical, rational, logical, psychological—is to the soul as medicine is to the body, a pos­sibility Democritus had already suggested.

What Plato seemed to find so wrong in Protagoras is his refutation of things in themselves. I assume that Plato thinks what he makes Socrates say in Cratylus. “It is clear that things have some fixed being or essence (ousia) of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature.” The Measure Statement of Protagoras precludes that. “Of all things, the measure is the human being (anthropos), of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” The interpretation of the statement has been long debated. I think it says that empirical, sense-perceptible evidence is all the evidence there is. Things and their attributes can be discussed logically, rationally, only with arguments controlled by experi­ence, variable and relative as it is. Thus understood, Protagoras precludes the contention that there is a true world totally different from what ordi­nary people take the world to be.⁹⁰

What is and what people say are conditioned by the logos they share. It is incoherent to suggest an ultimate discrepancy between what is and what appears or even what people say (Donald Davidson rediscovered this argument in the twentieth century). People in different circumstances measure things in incommensurable ways. To live wisely, we accept that. We understand not merely that all things are changing, but that all things are changeable, and that includes the logos, which can grow stronger or weaker just by changing the view we take of things.

Plato made the argument, often repeated, that the Measure Statement is self-refuting. Protagoras says that truth is whatever appears true to somebody, but that does not appear true to Theaetetus. So either what Protagoras said is false, since it seems false to somebody, or he contradicts himself with the unqualified, perspective-free, absolute truth that there is no unqualified, perspective-free, absolute truth. A refutation this elegant can only be a misprision, as this one is, assuming what has to be proved and begging the question. Protagoras places between brackets the idea of a “being in itself” that radically transcends people’s perceptions, the very idea Plato’s argument glibly presupposes. Protagoras makes being depend on relations and blurs the line Plato wants to make sharp between being and appearing.

Plato construes the Measure Statement absolutely, as simply valid without a frame of reference, making self-refutation a foregone conclu­sion, but also disregarding Protagoras’s argument that nothing is reason­able without a frame of reference. The Measure Statement being true for me and false for Theaetetus is not fatally absurd. His experience is dif­ferent, why should we not disagree? Protagoras was the friend of Solon and Athenian democracy, and the Measure Statement is an epistemological scruple for urban democrats. I do not need you to agree, I will not compel you to agree, or persecute you for treason to the Truth. Because that sort of truth—absolute and therefore antidemocratic—is poetry, myth, the very thing Plato professes it to be pure of. There is no such “Truth,” not even what I am saying now!