Positive Liberty

A good deal of The Open Society and Its Enemies consists, problematically, of close readings from fragmentary ancient texts. For example, Karl Popper declares — a little too confidently for my taste — that Heraclitus “was the first conscious enemy of the open society.”

Now, within the framework of Popper’s argument, I think I can actually see this: Heraclitus observed that all things change, that nothing is constant, and that even polarities — opposites like strong and weak, hot and cold, and good and evil — had their intermediate states, through which all things seemed to be shifting. Only the judgment of the moment prevails, and that, only for a moment. The law of change is inexorable, and human designs are futile.

Heraclitus, then, would rob us of our ability to understand or shape the world around us in any respect at all. Political quietism is only the least of the implications here, and Popper finds not only quietism (Heraclitus declined his own birthright as part of the ruling family of Ephesus), but also contempt for democracy and equality: “This hostility towards democracy breaks through everywhere in the fragments,” Popper notes.

To which I’d say: Hold it right there. The fragments? That’s right, all that we have of Heraclitus now comes to us from secondary sources. Indeed, so little is known of him that he is nicknamed “the Obscure,” and what little is left of his writing is thin gruel indeed:

Though the logos is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

Every beast is driven to pasture with a blow.

How can one hide from that which never sets?

For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul.

The path of writing is crooked and straight.

In other words, I’ve read better fortune cookies than this. Not often, but I have. “Pigs delight in the mire more than in clean water,” he is supposed to have said; one modern commenter opines that only the second through fifth words are authentic. My personal favorite — Souls smell in Hades — admits of two readings, but what Heraclitus means — the grammarians assure us — is that souls retain their ability to distinguish odors.

Pity, I know.

There survive only a few dozen passages like this, and nothing more. It seems that Heraclitus — who is reputed to have written an entire book — may not be getting a fair hearing. It’s as though we set out to critique Marx, but, living in some horrific post-apocalyptic age, we were totally ignorant of what he actually wrote, and all we had were the following fragments:

All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice… the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

If I negate powdered wigs, I am still left with unpowdered wigs.

All that is solid melts into air…

You would be right to find a tinge of the pre-Socratic to these phrases, but it’s not because Marx declined to explain himself or because he only wrote riddles. No, Marx was very clear about what he believed. But if you select the most memorable and figurative passages from any writer, while neglecting all of that writer’s analytic content, then — of course — everything will seem “obscure.”

In the case of Heraclitus, the selection was clearly performed for us by Diogenes and the other ancient redactors, each of whom may or may not have understood what Heraclitus actually meant. (Some almost certainly did, but, beyond a certain point, I think it’s safe to say that the rest did not.)

(In the case of Hegel, whom Popper takes on in the second volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies, everything is already obscure to begin with, and the full text needs no redaction to reach pre-Socratic opacity. No, I admit I have never been able to find the sense in Hegel’s writings. But, given what Popper has done with Heraclitus, I have high hopes of finding a sense in Hegel’s writings, and therefore to seem smarter than I actually am. I’m still dreading having to read The Phenomenology of Spirit, though.)

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