Lassalle.
(Lassalle, in two ponderous volumes )noted above
(page 1), Vjiade the first and most elaborate attempt
to reconstruct the system of the Ephesian philosopher.)
His work exhibits immense labor and study, and
(extended research in the discovery of new fragments
and of ancient testimony^together with some acuteness
in their use. ^assalle has a very distinct view of the
philosophy of Heraclitus. But it is not an original
view. It is, in fact, nothing but an expansion of the
short account of Heraclitus in Hegel's History of Phil-
osophy, although Lassalle makes no mention of him,y
except to quote upon his title-page Hegel's well-known
motto, ^* Es ist kein Satz des Heraklit, den ich nicht
in meine Logik aufgenommen." ^egel's conception
of Heraclitus is, in a word, as follows : Heraclitus'
♦ Absolute was the unity of being and non-being. His
whole system was an expansion of the speculative
thought of the principle of pure becoming. He appre-
hended, and was the first to apprehend, the Absolute
Historical and Critical. 5
as a process, as the unity of opposites, as dialectic itself. His great contribution was the speculative transition from the being of the Eleatics to the idea of becoming?) Now how does Hegel support this position ? There is in his Logic but one passage referring to Hera- plitus. There he says, *^ Glancing at the principle of the Eleatics, Heraclitus then goes on to say, ^ Being no more is than non -being ' (oudeu fiaXXov to 8v too fxi] oi^roc iau), a statement expressing the negative nature of abstract being and its identity with non-being'' (Wallace, The Logic of Hegel, p. 144 ; cp. Science of Logic, Hegel's Werke, Vol. 3, p. 80). Hegel omits, in the Logic, to give the reference to the above quotation, but in his History of Philosophy (Werke, Vol. 13, p. 332) he quotes the same passage with the reference. It is to Aristotle, Metaph. i. 4. We turn to the same and find that it is a passage which Aristotle quotes from the Atomists, Democritus and Leucippus, and that it has not the slightest referenc e to Heraclitus, who, indeed, is not mentioned in tlie same chapter. This is rather discouraging, but the account in the History of Philosophy, to which we now turn, is scarcely less so. There Hegel begins his exposition of Heraclitus as follows :
**1. Das allgemeine Princip. Dieser kiihne Qeist
(Heraclitus) hat zuerst das tiefe Wort gesagt, * Das
Seyn ist nicht mehr als das Nichtseyn,' es ist ebenso
wenig, Oder, * Seyn und Nichts sey dasselbe,' das
Wesen sey die Veranderung " (Gesch. d. Phil. Vol. 13,
p. 332).
Now it happens that Heraclitus said nothing of the
kind. As references Hegel gives Aristotle, Meta-
phys. i. 4; iv. 7; iv. 3. The first passage, as we have
already seen, is from the Atomists. The second turns
out upon examination to be simply the expression,
6 HBRACLITUS.
** All things are and are not" {nduza elvat xai fjtrj ehat)y
and the third is a statement of Aristotle that some
people supposed Heraclitus to have said that the same
thing could both be and not be the same. Moreover,
neither of these passages is Heraclitic in form, and
they are not even mentioned in Bywater's edition.
The only expression of Heraclitus that resembles in
form the above passage from Aristotle is that of frag.
^ 81, " Into the same river we step and we do not step.
^ ^ We Are and we. a re not." The over-interpretation by OO is which this simple passage, expressing incessant phys- . V '- ical change^ is transformed into the logical principle
--1 ^^ . ■ / of Hegel, "Das Seyn ist nicht mehr als das Nicht- ^ "^ seyn," "Sgyi V und Nirhtn nny flnnnMb fi," is audacious --at least. Furthermore, we may say here in passing, that neither the expressions zb 8v, (jltj ov, nor even rb ^vi^'l xq-vofjiei^ov, occur in any genuine saying of Heraclitus; - V.V. .4 although if they did occur, it would be easy to show cVv-t-. /that they could not mean at all what Hegel meant by (VlVu.f'1/f ^^^^Sy non-being, and becoming. Even the Eleatic '^j Being was not at all the same with that of Hegel, but ^ was finite, spherical, and something very much like that which we should call material. But Heraclitus, who indeed preceded Parmenides, said nothing of being nor of non-being, nor did he speak of becoming in the abstract, although the trustful reader of Hegel, Lassalle, or Ferrier, might well suppose he spoke of nothing else. That which these writers mistook for becoming was, as we shall see later, only physical change. With the loss of this comer-stone, the Hera- clitic support of the Hegelian Logic fails, and Hegel's boast that there was no sentence, of Heraclitus that his Logic had not taken up becomes rather ludicrous, especially if one will read through the remains of
jVo-i <'
Historical and Critical. 7
Heraclitus' work on Nature and search for his rich and varied thoughts in the Logic of Hegel.
Returning now to Lassalle, the above principles are carried out more in detail as follows : The chief point in the philosophy of Heraclitus is that here first the formal notion of the speculative idea in general was grasped. With him first emerged the conception of pure thought defecated of the sensuous. His ground principle was the dialectical opposition of being and - non-being. The kernel and whole depth of his phil- osophy may be expressed in the one sentence, ** Only non-being is" (Lassalle, Vol. 1, p. 35). The unity of being and non-being is a unity of process (processi- rende Einheit). It is the unity of opposites, the idea of ^ becoming, the divine law, the yviofirj of the determining God (Id. Vol. 1, p. 24). Fire, strife, peace, time, neces- sity, harmony, the way up and down, the flux, justice, fate. Logos, are all different terms for this one idea (Id. Vol. 1, p. 57). Hence arises Heraclitus' obscurity. It is not a mere grammatical obscurity, as Schleier- macher, following Aristotle (Rhet. iii. 5, p. 1407, b. 14) thought; nor is it a willful obscurity, but it arises from the very nature of his great thought, which could not be enunciated in exact terms, but could only be suggested by such words as fire, time, etc., and so he labored on with one new symbol after another, vainly trying to express himself.
The Heraclitic fire is a " metaphysical abstraction " — a pure process, " whose existence is pure self-annuU- "^ ing (sich aufheben), whose being is pure self -consump- tion (sich selbst verzehren) " (Lassalle, Vol. 1, p. 18).
Most clearly, however, is the great thought of Hera-
clitus shown in " the way up and down," which does
not involve change of place, but only a logical process.
8 HERACLITUS.
It is " nothing else '' than the change from being into
non-being and the reverse. The way ^Wn is transi-
tion into being ; the way up is the return into the pure
and free negativity of non-being, motion in the undis-
turbed ideal harmony (Id. Vol. 2, p. 241 jBf.).
God, in his adequate form, is " nothing else " than
pure negativity, the pure unity of process of opposites.
Nature is only the corporeal manifestation of the law
of the identity of opposites. It owes its existence to
privation (ddcxcaX that is, to the injustice which pure
becoming suffers when it becomes being (Id. Vol. 1,
p. 138).
The duadij/jua<7e<: of Heraclitus is not any vapor or sen- sible exhalation, but is " nothing else " than the way up, or the ix7r6pa)<7i<:, that is, the cessation of the sen- sible and the particular and the assumption of the real universal becoming. ^Auadufjuw/iiuae, Lassalle says, should be translated " processirend " (Id. Vol. 1, p. 144).
The Heraclitic flux is the same as the way up and
down. It is the dialectic of spacial being ; it is the
unity of being and non-being as spacial ; it is the here
which is not here. The Ttepd^ou of Heraclitus is not
anything physical or spacial, but ** the universal real
process of becoming," which works through the Logos
or law of thought (Id. Vol. 1, p. 306).
The Heraclitic Logos is the pure intelligible logical
law of the identity in process (die processirende Iden-
titat) of being and non-being. It is "nothing else"
than the law of opposites and the change into the same
(Id. Vol. 1, p. 327 ; Vol. 2, p. 265).
The substance of the soul is identical with the sub-
stance of nature. It is pure becoming which has in-
corporated itself, embraced the way down. The dry
or fiery soul is better than the moist because moisture
Historical and Critical. 9
is " nothing else " than a symbol of the downward
way. The soul that is moist has descended out of its
pure self -annulling movement or negativity in process,
into the sphere of the particular 'and determinate
(Id. Vol. 1, pp. 180, 192).
Heraclitus, in his desperate labor to express this idea,
enters the sphere of religion. Dionysus and Hades
are the same, he says (see frag. 127). That is, says
Lassalle, Dionysus, the god of generation which repre-
sents the descent of pure non-being into being, is iden-
tical with Hades, the god of death ; and this fragment,
which is a polemic against Dionysus, is really a
polemic against being, which is inferior to non-being
(Id. Vol. 1, p. 208).
Knowledge consists in the recognition in each parti- cular thing of the two opposites which constitute its *nature (Id. Vol. 2, p. 272). Of ethics, the formal prin- ciple is self-realization or self -representation. It is the realization of what we are in ourselves or according to our inner nature. The ideal is separation from the sensible and particular and the realization of the uni- versar(Id. Vol. 2, p. 428 flf.).
^Such in brief outline is what Ferdinand Lassalle
finds in Heraclitus' book On Nature. As an exposition
of Heraclitus it is not worth the space we have given
it, or any space, in fact ; but as one of the most beau-
tiful illustrations of over-systemization, it is extremely
valuable. Any formal refutation of his conception of
Heraclitus is unnecessary, for almost the whole of it is
without any foundation whatever. The expositions
which are to follow, or even a slight reading of the
fragments themselves, will sufficiently show how thor-
oughly fantastic and arbitrary are his interpretations.
Lassalle seems to have been misled partly by HegePs
10 HERACLITUS.
misinterpretation of the passages from Aristotle/ not- iced above, V|tnd partly by the principle of opposition which nins through a nimaber of the sayings of Hera- clitus^an opposition which, as we shall see later, was wholly physical, and far more simple than the abstruse logical meaning given it by Lassalle. This German scholar had no power or no wish to put himself in the attitude of the Greek mind, which was as widely dif- ferent from his as possible. It was a mistake for this disciple of pure thought, bred in the stifling atmosphere of a nineteenth century Hegelian lecture-room, and powerless to transport himself out of it even in thought, to attempt to interpret the sentences of an ingenuous lover of Nature, who, five centuries before the Chris- tian era, lived and moved in the free air of Ephesus. In this we do not mean to say that the philosophy of Heraclitus was purely physical rather than metaphys-* ical, for we shall see that such was not the case, but primitive pre-Socratic metaphysics and the panlogism of Lassalle are as wide asunder as the poles. On this point, Benn, in the work already referred to, well says, " The Greek philosophers from Thales to Democritus did not even suspect the existence of those ethical and dialectical problems which long constituted the sole object of philosophical discussion " (Vol. 1, p. 4).
Those who wish to trace Lassalle's errors further
may compare, on his mistaken conception of the Hera-
clitic fire, Zeller, Vol. 1, p. 591, 3^ ; Grote : Plato, Vol.
1, p. 33, note. On ^^the way up and down," com-
pare Zeller, Vol. 1, p. 619, 1. On the flux, compare
Schuster, p. 201 ; Zeller, Vol. 1, p. 577, 1.
The characterization of Lassalle's book as a whole
* The references to Zeller in the following pages are to the fourth German edition of Die Philosophic der Griechen.