Common to All

Expect the Unexpected.

You can’t step into the same river twice.

Character is Destiny.

The thunder of Heraclitus’ voice booms through 2500 years and reaches us now in familiar phrases. As much as I’ve anchored the start of this newsletter in year-long memory, I’ve been poring over the fragments of Heraclitus for 25 years or more. Everything flows: this delving hasn’t stopped even ten years after the publication of my poetic-philosophical work, Heraclitean Pride¹ - a re-creation/recreation of Heraclitus’ lost book, putting into play whatever of his writings and life have come down to us.

What has come down to us: words - Logos long ago rumbling from the oracular philosopher’s throat - more lasting than monuments.

2500 years are nothing. Heraclitus himself thought towards 10,000 and more.

I’ll refrain from expounding more on those common phrases above and let them reverberate as we find them. Instead, I want to note a particular idea of reality enfolded in some lesser-known phrases of his: the following have crossed a millennia and a half to strike us where we live, in how we live, in our time of schism and schizoid relation to truth and facts.

“One must follow what is common, what is universal. Although the Logos is common, too many live only by their separate understanding.”

Implicit here is that there is something that can be and should be understood by all. True, it’s a problem that most people are satisfied by opinions, their own especially, and never open their - private - minds to the universal. Yet, the claim (as an assertion and as a demand) is that there is a truth available to all.

The idea of that which is common to all comes up a few times in Heraclitus.

“To speak with insight, one must hold firmly to what is common to all, as a city holds to its laws - more firmly! For human laws are nourished by one Law, the divine Law.”  

Heraclitus anticipates Antigone here and the divine is an up-spiraling involvement. I’ll keep my focus straight and simple, on earth, grounded. Heraclitus’ utterances signal that there is a way to knowing - to ascertainment - accessible to open minds.

This is an existential affirmation. In denial of nihilism. We must cling to what is common to all. There is something common to all, there is something we have in common, there is something. We must cling to what is. Nothing is impossible.

fragment of a fragment: “World, the same for all…”

Related to what is common to all, the same for all… the extended fragment describes the world as an ever-living fire, Heraclitean Fire. However it is, it is. There is commonality intrinsic to existence.

The truth can be believed, therefore. Substance for an internal shift in the individual - and for a turn of the times. More on that - Heraclitean Turning - next time. Soon!

Michelangelo as Heraclitus in Raphael’s “The School of Athens”

1. Magnus, Magus. Heraclitean Pride. Furniture Press Books, 2010. Available at Small Press Distribution

translations mine - here and in the book