So King Pelias said, but Jason, looking to the king from his father's stricken eyes, saw that he had been led by the king into the acceptance of the voyage so that he might fare far from Iolcus, and perhaps lose his life in striving to gain the wonder that King Æetes kept guarded.
Since my last entry I have been giving some thought as to whether I have done Nietzsche injustice. In one sense I certainly have. Being too hasty in associating him with Heracleitus I neglected to draw out the full richness his image of philosophical polyphony. For his aim is not at all to dwell on just the two figures of Parmenides and Heracleitus, as Aristotelians are wont to do, but on three others as well: Thales, Anaximander and Anaxagoras.
Now this specific choice of five voices is significant. Those familiar with music of the late North German Baroque, as Nietzsche himself was (let's not forget that he was a composer of some ability in his student years, and that this was in the wake of the great Bach revival) know that fugues typically involve three to five voices, with the five-voice fugue marking the upper limit of the composer's technical ability, the performer's technical ability (if a keyboard work), and the ear's ability to process it all. The five voice fugue is the richest species of the genre.
Many marvel, for instance, at the five-voice fugato Mozart throws into the concluding movement of his Jupiter Symphony, No. 41, that in the final specimen of the classical symphony he had spent a career perfecting he should weave in a summary example of the very style it had displaced. (Not that this was Mozart's only fugue at all: the overture to the Magic Flute, the Kyrie of the Great Mass in C minor, and the Kyrie of the Requiem immediately come to mind.)
And so here with Nietzsche's selection of Pre-Socratic philosophers we have five voices woven together in a maximally rich philosophical fugue, five thinkers whose apparent independence of motion bespeak an underlying harmony, and to pursue the fugue image yet further, a general telos underlying that harmony: through its alternating sequence of subject statements and episodes, the ideal fugue builds to form a coherent whole.
Without too much effort, then, we can thus unpack Nietzsche's choice of polyphony to further show how much Nietzsche's sensibilities align with those of Heracleitus: not only do opposite tensions give rise to harmony, but together they manifest the One. DK fragment 10 thus completes fragment 51:
συνάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα.
Couples are things whole and not whole, what is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and discordant. The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.
There are two points I'd like to make concerning all of this.
First, as I have indicated, there appears to be some deception going on here on Nietzsche's part. He presents existing schools of thought in what appears to be a new synthesis but which on closer observation resolves into one of the old schools of thought. This also happens, if I recall correctly, in a passage of Beyond Good and Evil, where he proposes to replace the free-will/determinism dichotomy with the opposition of strength of will and weakness of will: those who would subscribe to determinism do so because they are weak-willed. A dramatic move, assimilating the ontological into the psychological. But nothing has changed, really. The opposition of freedom and determinism holds just as before, with Nietzsche casting his vote for the former. Another false sublation.
The second point: how do you reconcile (a) that these various systems harmonize with (b) the suggestion that one is superior? It is doubtful that Heracleitus (or Nietzsche for that matter) would have ever set pen to paper if he really felt that all instances of conflict, including philosophical conflict, ultimately harmonize. Why bother uttering anything at all if it's all the same in the end? But he does, and moreover he singles out Xenophanes (check out DK fragment 40) as a thinker of the lesser variety, as one blinded by too much learning: polymathy eclipses nous, or real understanding. Clearly then it's better to put aside polymathy and behold the logos in which all oppositions unite. But then polymathy and logos themselves form opposite poles, requiring a yet higher unification, a super-logos, which then in turn stands opposite both polymathy and logos. And so on forever, in the manner of the Third Man problem of separate platonic universals.
Or is the fact that I fail to understand this only evidence that I myself have yet to ascend the summit of the flux-inclined philosopher?
Now this specific choice of five voices is significant. Those familiar with music of the late North German Baroque, as Nietzsche himself was (let's not forget that he was a composer of some ability in his student years, and that this was in the wake of the great Bach revival) know that fugues typically involve three to five voices, with the five-voice fugue marking the upper limit of the composer's technical ability, the performer's technical ability (if a keyboard work), and the ear's ability to process it all. The five voice fugue is the richest species of the genre.
Many marvel, for instance, at the five-voice fugato Mozart throws into the concluding movement of his Jupiter Symphony, No. 41, that in the final specimen of the classical symphony he had spent a career perfecting he should weave in a summary example of the very style it had displaced. (Not that this was Mozart's only fugue at all: the overture to the Magic Flute, the Kyrie of the Great Mass in C minor, and the Kyrie of the Requiem immediately come to mind.)
And so here with Nietzsche's selection of Pre-Socratic philosophers we have five voices woven together in a maximally rich philosophical fugue, five thinkers whose apparent independence of motion bespeak an underlying harmony, and to pursue the fugue image yet further, a general telos underlying that harmony: through its alternating sequence of subject statements and episodes, the ideal fugue builds to form a coherent whole.
Without too much effort, then, we can thus unpack Nietzsche's choice of polyphony to further show how much Nietzsche's sensibilities align with those of Heracleitus: not only do opposite tensions give rise to harmony, but together they manifest the One. DK fragment 10 thus completes fragment 51:
συνάψιες ὅλα καὶ οὐχ ὅλα, συμφερόμενον διαφερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, καὶ ἐκ πάντων ἓν καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα.
Couples are things whole and not whole, what is drawn together and what is drawn asunder, the harmonious and discordant. The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.
There are two points I'd like to make concerning all of this.
First, as I have indicated, there appears to be some deception going on here on Nietzsche's part. He presents existing schools of thought in what appears to be a new synthesis but which on closer observation resolves into one of the old schools of thought. This also happens, if I recall correctly, in a passage of Beyond Good and Evil, where he proposes to replace the free-will/determinism dichotomy with the opposition of strength of will and weakness of will: those who would subscribe to determinism do so because they are weak-willed. A dramatic move, assimilating the ontological into the psychological. But nothing has changed, really. The opposition of freedom and determinism holds just as before, with Nietzsche casting his vote for the former. Another false sublation.
The second point: how do you reconcile (a) that these various systems harmonize with (b) the suggestion that one is superior? It is doubtful that Heracleitus (or Nietzsche for that matter) would have ever set pen to paper if he really felt that all instances of conflict, including philosophical conflict, ultimately harmonize. Why bother uttering anything at all if it's all the same in the end? But he does, and moreover he singles out Xenophanes (check out DK fragment 40) as a thinker of the lesser variety, as one blinded by too much learning: polymathy eclipses nous, or real understanding. Clearly then it's better to put aside polymathy and behold the logos in which all oppositions unite. But then polymathy and logos themselves form opposite poles, requiring a yet higher unification, a super-logos, which then in turn stands opposite both polymathy and logos. And so on forever, in the manner of the Third Man problem of separate platonic universals.
Or is the fact that I fail to understand this only evidence that I myself have yet to ascend the summit of the flux-inclined philosopher?