1 “If all things were to turn to smoke, it’d be the nostrils would tell them apart” or Heraclitus on the pleasures of smoking Catherine Osborne, University of East Anglia Draft 2, May 2007 Introduction I shall start by asking what Aristotle knew (or thought) about Heraclitus: what were the key features of Heraclitus's philosophy as far as Aristotle was concerned? In this section of the paper I suggest that there are some patterns to Aristotle's references to Heraclitus: besides the classic doctrines (flux, ekpyrosis and the unity of opposites) on the one hand, and the opening of Heraclitus's book on the other, Aristotle knows and reports a few slightly less obvious sayings, one of which is in my title. Once we have assembled a summary of what Aristotle recalls, we can ask some further questions. Is there any systematic connection between the bits that Aristotle reports? Do they hang together? Ought we to see here some relic of an Aristotelian understanding of what made Heraclitus tick? If we juxtapose these themes and Aristotle's comments on them, I suggest, we can generate some suggestive motifs, in particular a rather curious fascination with smoking, and the pleasures of inhaling. Finally, just for fun, it seems worth exploring the idea that smells (and the way the world would be if smells were the only differences to be discerned) are somehow important in understanding what Heraclitus was doing. 1. Aristotle's Heraclitus Aristotle is one of our earliest sources of evidence for Heraclitus's thought. 2 It is common practice in researching an ancient thinker, and in particular one such as Heraclitus whose thought seems to be composed of a chaotic jumble of small and unconnected sayings, to collect as much evidence from all the ancient and not so ancient testimonies together, and try to assemble it into some kind of reconstruction that bears as few traces as possible of the intervening process of transmission. But there is another scholarly and philosophical project which, to my mind, ought to be taken more seriously than it is: namely the practice of taking notice of the way that a thinker was understood by each of his successors, in the light of that person's own preoccupations. Perhaps it is particularly enlightening to do so in relation to the earliest interpreters, for in that way we get a sense of how the work was reported in the centuries immediately after the work had been current. Such investigation of the ancient sources is a philosophical project in its own right, because, as always, doing the history of philosophy is doing philosophy, and when Aristotle reads his predecessors he is doing philosophy. So if we do this for Heraclitus, looking at what Aristotle has to report on him, we find here not just a way of reading Heraclitus in the fourth century BC, but in particular we can ask about the aspects of Heraclitus which Aristotle in particular took to heart. Does this tell us about Aristotle or about Heraclitus? Perhaps both. So in what follows I intend to survey under a number of headings the main topics that seem to have figured in Aristotle's mind as "What Heraclitus was about". It may be interesting to see, because it may not look exactly like what we ourselves have in mind as "What Heraclitus was about". And it also throws up one particular theme, to which I will turn in the later part of the paper, which is about smoke and smelling things. That theme also seems to be worth thinking about, for philosophical reasons and not just historical ones. 2. Aristotle's Heraclitus (i) Surveys of cosmology and metaphysics Heraclitus is, for Aristotle, one among the predecessors whose views should be included in a survey of the existing opinions on a topic before embarking on his own discussions and solutions of the problems. 3 One of the classic passages of this sort is in the first book of the Physics. Heraclitus does not appear by name there, except as someone committed to the identity of opposites (i.e. not as a predecessor in physics but as a warning against a logical error).1 But in the comparable review in Metaphysics A Heraclitus does appear by name, as someone who held (along with Hippasus of Metapontum) that the first principle of things was fire.2 If we read back from this evidence into the anonymous summaries of earlier views in the Physics it seems safe to suggest that in the Physics too, where Aristotle classifies thinkers according to how many first principles they named, Aristotle thought of Heraclitus as one among the collection of thinkers who held that there was one first principle that was subject to change. 3 At Physics 184b16-18, for instance, the natural philosophers (phusikoi) are said to hold that there was one changeable first principle. No names are given, and Aristotle proceeds to say "some saying that the first principle was air, some that it was water", as though he was thinking of Thales and Anaximenes above all.4 But later, at the start of chapter 4 of book 1, when Aristotle returns to discussing the early physicists (after a digression on Eleatic monism) he suggests that people who chose one element as the substratum made it "either one of the three or something else which is thicker than fire but thinner than air." Here the suggestion that the one substrate might be "one of the three" extends the earlier list of two candidates, air or water, to include a third, which we should probably suppose is fire, given what Aristotle says elsewhere.5 And, by extrapolation from the Metaphysics, we must surely be right to suppose that he envisages Heraclitus and Hippasus as examples of thinkers who chose fire as their first principle. 1 Aristotle Phys A 2 185b19 2 Metaph. 984a7 3 The scheme in the Physics is to classify the predecessors by the number of first principles that they invoke in order to explain the world. The aim is to make the Presocratics into monists or pluralists, and to divide pluralists into those with a finite number of principles and those with infinite numbers of original elements. 4 Neither Anaximenes nor Diogenes is named in the Physics, but in the Metaphysics they appear together as the proponents of air as first principle. 5 At Metaph 989a6-9 Aristotle says that none of the early physicists took earth as the one element, and at 984a5-9, having listed proponents of water, air and fire he says that Empedocles added a fourth to these three options. This suggests that he thinks of the early thinkers as choosing from a range of three items, air, fire and water. 4 All of this is a long-winded way of saying what we already knew implicitly, that when Aristotle is thinking about the physics and ontology of the Presocratics he classifies Heraclitus as a physicist who posited one non-permanent first principle, and that first principle is fire. This might not be how we like to think of Heraclitus—as first and foremost a cosmologist with fire as a material first principle. But there is no particular reason to think that this was how Aristotle thought of Heraclitus either. Aristotle does, once or twice, put Heraclitus into the list of thinkers with something to say on the physical origins of things, but we needn't suppose that he thought that he was summarising what was most important about Heraclitus's thought when he did that. Aristotle was just doing what was necessary in the context, to provide the pre-history of his own immediate project— the development of an account of causation in the Physics, or the development of the enquiry into what is real in the Metaphysics. Of course, if we insist on reading Aristotle only for his summaries of early physics and metaphysics in these two respective surveys, then we shall come out thinking that Aristotle thought that Heraclitus was a physicist. In fact, even within those two texts there is ample evidence that Aristotle did not think of Heraclitus only in relation to his fire doctrine. Few of Aristotle's comments on Heraclitus actually occur in these systematic reviews of the existing literature. In a whole range of other contexts, in these and other texts, Aristotle draws on Heraclitus for illustrations of possible positions or as a stimulating dialectical interlocutor. Let us turn now to look at the more isolated reminiscences that come to Aristotle's mind in other contexts. 3. Aristotle's Heraclitus (ii): the isolated reminiscences Because these occasions for mentioning Heraclitus do not belong to any systematic review of Presocratic Philosophy we can assume that on these occasions, where Aristotle quotes Heraclitus out of the blue, Heraclitus came to Aristotle's mind "from memory" so to speak. That is, Aristotle did not go to Heraclitus's book to look up what Heraclitus said on the subject. Rather, when discussing some theme, it occurred to Aristotle to mention some feature of Heraclitus's thought, or to quote from his text, because Heraclitus meant something to him —because that feature of Heraclitus's thought sprang to mind, as something relevant to the issue under discussion. It seems to me, therefore, that if we look at what Aristotle says about Heraclitus on those other occasions we can arguably get a sense of 5 what Aristotle thought were the striking or original themes in Heraclitus. We can see what Heraclitus meant to Aristotle, what he took him to stand for, or what he found memorable in his work. Fire It is true that fire does figure in one other context, besides the reviews of early cosmological principles. In book 3 of the Physics, 205a1-5, Aristotle mentions the idea that periodically everything becomes fire and he attributes this idea to Heraclitus. From the context, it is clear that he means that the entirety of things becomes fire simultaneously, not that each thing severally derives from and returns to fire intermittently or on occasion. This is confirmed by another allusion to periodicity at De caelo 279b14, where Aristotle couples Empedocles and Heraclitus together as thinkers who held that the universe oscillates eternally between two states. It is not explicitly said that for Heraclitus the state into which the cosmos is destroyed is fire, but that is the natural conclusion if we juxtapose the De caelo allusion with the more explicit wording of the Physics. So we have one, or at most two, references to the idea of a periodic destruction into fire. But it still remains true that the physical and cosmological themes are not the ones that figure most prominently in Aristotle's intermittent allusions to Heraclitus. Let us turn to look, then, at what are the principal themes for Aristotle. Everything flows Most obvious here is Aristotle's frequent mention of the twin ideas of flux (pavnta rJei'), and the river fragment, particularly in the version "you can't step twice into the same river". This theme comes up for mention at least four times in the Metaphysics6, at least three times in the Physics,7 once in the De anima,8 once in the De caelo,9 and once in the Topics.10 In the Metaphysics A passage what Aristotle remembers is not so much Heraclitus as Cratylus. He records Cratylus objecting to Heraclitus on the grounds that he should not have said 6 Metaph. A6 987a32; G5 1010a7-15; G8 1012b26; M4 1078b13. 7 Phys. E4 228a8; Q3 253b9; Q8 265a2. 8 De anima A2 405a28. 9 De caelo G1 298b29. 10 Topics A11 104b21. 6 you can't step twice, because in fact you can't step once. The quotation of Heraclitus's supposed words are therefore embedded in what is effectively a quotation or paraphrase of Cratylus.11 Arguably some of Aristotle's other allusions to this theme are likely to be allusions to the Cratylus version too, particularly the ones that mention Plato's supposed debt to the Heraclitean legacy of flux.12 So we may conclude that Aristotle does indeed think of Heraclitus as a flux person, and he does think of him as the author of the river fragment, but clearly he associates that particular take on Heraclitus with Cratylus in particular (and also with the dialectical response to it that is represented by the Platonic world of the Forms). For him this is part of a history that belongs not just to metaphysics, but also to the quest for reliable objects for language to talk about. Contradicting oneself A second recurrent theme in Aristotle's allusions to Heraclitus is to the idea of contradiction, and what we would call the "unity of opposites" material. Notwithstanding the mention of fire as a material principle in Book A of the Metaphysics, it is actually the contradiction theme that is most prominent in later books of that work. Heraclitus's reputation for having tried to assert contradictory theses at the same time is discussed twice in Book G of the Metaphysics and twice in book K. In the first of these, probably the most famous, we are told that "It is impossible for anyone to believe the same thing to be and not to be, in the way that some people think that Heraclitus said."13 Again, as with the River fragment and its transmission via Cratylus, we might detect here in the phrase "in the way that some people think that Heraclitus said", an allusion to a history of interpretation and debate on this matter, in which some earlier interpreters before Aristotle had taken Heraclitus to assert (and believe) contradictory propositions. So we might suppose that Aristotle was reading Heraclitus through the eyes of a previous commentator, as he was with Cratylus and the river fragment. On the other hand, the phrase "in the way that some people think…" might simply be explained by the fact that Aristotle wishes to dissociate himself from this straightforward reading of Heraclitus's propositions. He goes on to say that people don't necessarily believe everything that they say, which implies that he thinks that 11 Metaph. 1010a7-15 12 Particularly Metaphysics M 1078b13. 13 Metaph 1005b23-5 7 Heraclitus did utter (or write) some contradictory propositions, but that he, Aristotle, is sceptical of whether Heraclitus actually sincerely held the views that would be expressed by those propositions— since he, Aristotle, actually thinks that it is not just psychologically impossible, but logically impossible, to believe a contradiction.14 This would allow us to read the tinev" (some people) to refer to any standard reading of Heraclitus that tries to take him at his word. The propositions that Heraclitus is said to have uttered that are supposed to be contradictory seem to be captured by the phrase ei\nai kai; mh; ei\nai (be and not be) in Aristotle's account.15 Later this is modified to the idea that contradictions (ajntikeivmenai favsei")16 cannot be true together, but this is only after Aristotle has shifted the terminology to show that we should be talking about the truth and falsity of assertions and denials, rather than the idea of some thing "being" and "not being". But it looks as though the primitive, pre-Aristotelian, motif is conceived in de re form, as the idea that x is and is not, or perhaps that x is F and not-F,17 both at the same time. Transformed into de dictu form, this means that the assertion "x is F" and its contradictory denial "x is not F" will both be true. The idea that every statement is true (because nothing is made false by the truth of its contradictory statement) is the position on which Aristotle hangs Heraclitus's name in Metaphysics K.18 One might speculate (and people have speculated) about what Heraclitean material Aristotle has in mind in these discussions of Heraclitus as a purveyor of the truth of contradictions. If we are right that the unanalysed version, before Aristotle reworked it as a de dictu claim about the truth of propositions, included the phrase ei\nai kai; mh; ei\nai (be and not be) then one option is that it alludes to the phrase "we are and we are not" which attaches to the river fragment in the version relayed by Heraclitus Homericus ("We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are 14 The argument is not just that one would be unable to be sincere for psychological reasons, but rather that holding opposite beliefs is being qualified in contradictory ways, and by the law of noncontradiction it is impossible for one and the same (mind) to be qualified in two contradictory ways. Cf. also Physics 185a7. 15 Metaph 1005b24; 1012a25; cf 1012b6; 1062b2. 16 1062a22, 33; 1063b16. 17 Saying the man is a man is no more true than saying he is not a man or is a horse, 1062a 23-5; The thing turns out to be white and not white, 1063b22. 18 The converse position, that all statements are false, is attributed to Anaxagoras. The pair of these positions are discussed together at Metaphysics G 1012a25 and Metaphysics K 1063b24-5. 8 not").19 If this is right, then we can link the passages in which Aristotle discusses the flux doctrine and those in which he discusses contradiction; that is we can trace them back to similar material in Heraclitus, and particularly the River Fragments. So far, then, we have one thread of material appearing in Aristotle, namely the material that supports the idea that everything changes and that every statement is true. The connection between these two doctrines was, of course, already implicit in Plato.20 It is plausible to think that the notion that Heraclitus indulges in contradiction harks back not just to the river fragments but to other material that we associate with what we call the "unity of opposites". Two passages suggest that Aristotle was also familiar with this material and linked it to the contradiction theme just investigated. One is in Book 8 of the Topics chapter 5 where Aristotle says that some interlocutors whom one engages in dialectical discussion may try to claim, for instance, that good and bad are one and the same. 21 These people, Aristotle says, will deny that it is impossible for opposites to apply to the same thing. However, he goes on, it is not that they actually hold these views but they are just saying what they think Heraclitus said. Here it is clear that we are to imagine encountering someone who makes "unity of opposites" kind of statements, "good and bad are one and the same", and this implicitly leads them to deny the law of non-contradiction. Aristotle's view is that, as with Heraclitus himself, they 19 potamoi'" toi'" aujtoi'" ejmbaivnomevn te kai; oujk ejmbaivnomen, ei\mevn te kai; oujk ei\men. Heraclitus Quaestiones Homericae 24. This fragment (or this version, if there was just one river fragment) is often considered not to be genuine (e.g. Miroslav Marcovich Heraclitus, editio maior (Merida: Los Andes University Press, 1967) 206, 11), and it is not even discussed in Charles Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). But the fact that Aristotle seems to allude several times to a claim expressible as ei\nai kai; mh; ei\nai suggests that there is some grounds for reinstating this phrase as plausibly Heraclitean and antedating Aenesidemus and other possible late sources of this wording.. 20 The discussion in Plato's Theaetetus attributes flux to Heraclitus in order to provide a metaphysics that supports the idea that every judgement is true and incorrigible. The epistemological side of the bargain is there provided by Protagoras. Protagoras also appears in Aristotle's discussion at Metaphysics K 6. 21 Topics 159b30-35. 9 are not seriously committed to the truth of this position, but that it is a borrowed position which, in any case, cannot be seriously held.22 The other passage is in Book 1 of the Physics. Aristotle is discussing the Eleatics' monism, and wonders whether they mean that everything is one in the sense that something that has two names is one and the same, as lwvpion and iJmavtion refer to one and the same garment. If that is what Parmenides meant, says Aristotle, then we shall be saddled with a situation like what we find in Heraclitus, where what it is to be good is the same as what it is to be bad, or what it is to be not good, and then the same thing is good and bad, man and horse and so on.23 Whether or not we take Aristotle to be a subtle and intelligent interpreter of the unity of opposites theme, we have to recognise an allusion to Heraclitean material we know from other sources, particularly in the repeated reference to taujtovn, "the same". It is also worth observing that in both these passages Aristotle has chosen "good" and "bad" as his example of the things that Heraclitus identifies as one and the same. Clearly that is, as it were, Aristotle's residual memory of what Heraclitus's unity of opposites material was about. The implication is that he was thinking of material with a predominantly ethical, or at least evaluative, feel. Harmony of opposites Another set of material relating to the harmony of opposites is also relevant here. In the Nicomachean Ethics 1155b4 Aristotle is exploring suggestions from Euripides and Heraclitus about the role of opposition in harmony. He attributes a number of thoughts to Heraclitus, some of which may be roughly verbatim: 24 …and Heraclitus [used] the expressions 'to; ajntvixoun sumfevron' and 'ejk tw'n diaferovntwn kallivsthn aJrmonivan' and 'pavnta kat∆ e[rin givnesqai'. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1155b4-6 Here the theme is clearly harmony, and in particular the idea that the ideal harmony is composed of things at war with each other. This theme is distinct from the unity of opposites, because it denies that the opposed items are identical. On the contrary it maintains that they are different, and that their difference is crucial to their harmonious co-existence. Aristotle cites the expressions in an 22 Cf Aristotle's diagnosis of Heraclitus's insincerity, Metaphysics 1005 b23-5, discussed 23 Aristotle Physics 185b19-25. 24 Marcovich presents them only as a reminiscence of B80; DK identifies B8 here. above. 10 ethical context, and there is confirmation that he thought of them as having some ethical or political import in the fact that a similar theme occurs in the Eudemian Ethics 1235a25 where again Aristotle is discussing the idea that opposites attract, and cites Heraclitus as follows: And Heraclitus condemns the poet who says "Would that strife were eliminated from among both gods and men" (Iliad 18.107); for there would be no harmony if there were not high pitch and low pitch, nor would there be animals without female and male being opposites. Eudemian Ethics 1235a25-29 It is unclear, as usual, how much of this extract purports to report Heraclitus's own thoughts, but it appears that Aristotle means to suggest that Heraclitus directly and explicitly attacked Homer for expressing the desire that strife should be eliminated. The "for … " clause appears to supply what Aristotle understands to be Heraclitus's reasoning or something like it. The reasoning offered is not ethical or psychological—the examples are musical and biological—but Aristotle is using the idea in an ethical context and he evidently treats it as a thesis that has bearing on ethical and political strife. The opening words of Heraclitus's book Aristotle records the opening sentence of Heraclitus's book, part of fragment 1 at Rhetoric 1407b14: For it is an effort to construe Heraclitus's writings because it is unclear whether a word goes with what comes after or with what comes before, e.g at the beginning of his book. He says "Of this logos which is always people are ignorant". It's unclear which word to construe "always" with. As with the other texts, it is likely that Aristotle is here quoting the line from memory. Perhaps he recalls Heraclitus's words because his own grammar teacher used them as an illustration of the importance of good sentence construction. Perhaps it comes to mind because Aristotle had read Heraclitus's book and memorised its opening words. In modern discussion of Heraclitus, Fragment 1, which is cited at much greater length by Sextus Empiricus, is a key source for what we call the "Logos doctrine" in Heraclitus. That is, modern scholarship makes much of the idea that there is a "logos", a formula or account which structures the way the world works and which is implicitly presented in the words that Heraclitus writes. Aristotle, however, passes over this aspect entirely in silence: nothing in any of his discussions of Heraclitus suggests that he knows of such a thing. Of course the silence does not itself prove that he did not have any interest in such a theme, but it might seem surprising (if he knew of it) that he does not 11 mention it either in connection with the unity of opposites or in connection with the physics of fire and change. At any rate, when he recites the opening sentence of fragment 1 in the Rhetoric, Aristotle's interest is only in the grammatical construction of the sentence, and he declines to comment on the content. 4. Smoke So far, then we have seen evidence that Aristotle identifies Heraclitus with conflagration, flux, contradiction, ambiguous expressions, the prevalence of opposition and the unity of opposites. This is hardly very exciting. It's rather just what we might expect. But it's the rest of the material, scattered elsewhere in Aristotle's work, that seems to me to be interesting: that is, the strange and random bits of Heraclitus that Aristotle sometimes remembers that do not have any obvious connection with any of these five great Heraclitean themes. Here is what he recalls: (i) It's hard to fight against the temper, for it puts the soul at stake;25 (ii) Heraclitus said that soul, which is a vapour, is the source from which everything else is put together;26 (iii) Some people, including Heraclitus, think that the sun is some kind of fire sustained by vapours and is new every day;27 (v) some people, including Heraclitus, think that smell is a smoky inhalation whence Heraclitus said that if everything were to become smoke, it would be the nostrils that would tell them apart;28 (iv) The pleasure of a horse and a dog and a man are all different, and donkeys would choose sweepings rather than gold;29 When we juxtapose these ideas in this way there seem to be some common threads: there are several things about souls, and several things about vapours and inhaling the vapours. And this seems to be not unrelated to fire and burning, in the case of the sun, and there's clearly a connection between burning and the smoky outputs that we'd have to discriminate if everything became smoke. Add to that the thought that the pleasure of each thing might have something to do with what nourishes it, and what smells it likes, and we have quite a smelly theme going for us here. So that is 25 Eudemian Ethics 1223b22; Nicomachean Ethics 1105a7; Politics 1315a29; quoting Heraclitus fragment 85. 26 De anima 405a26 27 Meteor. 354b33, quoting Heraclitus fragment 6. 28 De sensu 443a23-4, quoting Heraclitus fragment 7. 29 Nicomachean Ethics 1176a6-8 quoting Heraclitus fragment 9. 12 what I wanted to explore, taking a cue from Aristotle. What is all this about the pleasures of inhaling smoke? The first thing to do, perhaps, is to explore the quotation that is the title of this paper, fragment 7. "If all things were to turn to smoke, it'd be the nostrils that would tell them apart."30 What is going on here? Aristotle is interested only in the idea that a lot of earlier thinkers took smell to be a smoky vapour. In fact it looks as though the quotation from Heraclitus has got slightly misplaced, indeed as though it ought to have been a mere footnote in his lectures, since the sequence of the text runs much better without it.31 But aside from the questions of how to reconstruct Aristotle's lecture notes at this point, there is not much to be gained from exploring his analysis of Heraclitus here, since it is geared simply to illustrating the idea that smell is the smoky type of exhalation (a dry one) as opposed to steamy kinds of exhalation, which are the moist ones.32 But we can still ask what Heraclitus's point was when he originally produced this saying. How we take this fragment will depend upon whether we read the conditional as counterfactual or not. When Heraclitus envisages that everything might turn to smoke, is he referring to a situation that does occur periodically, or something that might occur sometime, or is he entertaining a thought experiment? Let's take the first alternative first, since it has something going for it (but, philosophically, rather less than the second alternative I think). Suppose Heraclitus is referring to a time when (or place where) all things turn to smoke, and this is a perfectly routine event. There are two occasions to which this might refer: one is the idea of a periodic conflagration, in which everything is consumed 30 eij pavnta ta; o[nta kapno;" gevnoito, rJi'ne" a]n diagnoi'en. (De sensu 443a23-4). 31 The phrases immediately before and after the quotation in the manuscript are almost identical, and clearly one is a doublet of the other. The editors have proposed transferring the one from before the quotation to after it, and amalgamating it with the second. But surely the most plausible explanation is that the quotation from Heraclitus interrupts the flow of the sentence, and is, as it were, a footnote, not integrated into the text. 32 This is not to say that the context is misleading or faulty (contra Harold Cherniss Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935) 322, G S Kirk Heraclitus: the cosmic fragments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954) 233, Marcovich Heraclitus, editio maior 419). 13 by fire— a doctrine which, as we have already seen, Aristotle attributed to Heraclitus.33 The other is what we experience after death, in Hades. One prima facie problem with supposing that the saying refers to the period when everything is consumed by fire, since at that time presumably there would be no animals with nostrils to serve as the perceiving subjects. We shall consider later whether this worry also applies to the alternative counterfactual reading, but for now let us note that it is at least paradoxical to speak of a time when everything has become smoke and when, in consequence, the discernment is done by nostrils.34 More disturbingly, the idea that things turn to smoke seems to be distinct from the idea that everything is consumed by fire, for smoke seems to be the after-effect of a fire. So are we referring to a distinct period, not the period of total fire, but a subsequent period of universal smoke? A third worry might be the thought that when everything turns to fire, that eliminates all differences,35 so it seems that once the conflagration has occurred, there are no differences to be discerned; so surely the nostrils would not do any distinguishing of things, since there are no different things to be identified. These are problems that seem to count against taking the conditional to refer to an actual occasion when things turn to smoke, at the conflagration. The second option, then, is to take the thought to refer to another actual occasion, namely how things are for souls in Hades. Is it the case that our experience of things is very different after death? Do we, perhaps, live by our noses there? Well, there is some evidence to support that idea (besides the fact that we are told in another of Heraclitus's sayings that what awaits us when we die is 33 Physics 205a1-5. 34 How paradoxical is this thought? I suspect it depends rather on what the "nostrils" (rJi'ne") are. This might mean the fleshy part that we think of as the nose, but I suspect it is rather trying to refer to the specific sense organ that detects smell (perhaps even to a passage or channel through which vapours can pass). Could one have the nasal passage without there being the nose round it? Or suppose we imagine that the sensory mechanism is itself composed of vapour or of some stuff capable of carrying smell (typical of a like-by-like theory of sensation such as was common in the early Greek period) then again it might seem not obvious that there is no smelling to be done in a world where all there is is smoke (for some smokey bits might be reacting to others). 35 All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, like goods for gold and gold for goods, fragment 90. 14 far different from what we suppose).36 Plutarch in De facie in orbe lunae 943E links the idea that souls are nourished by exhalations with the idea that souls operate by the sense of smell in Hades..37 As in Aristotle, then, we have here a link between exhalations and the sense of smell, but this time we also have Plutarch's specification that the place (or time) where smell is the operative sense for functioning is "in Hades". Where is Hades and what are the conditions like there? As Kahn points out, a standard etymology for Hades is "sightless" (aji>dhv"),38 so the idea that we might not be using the sense of sight there is a familiar one. But we also need to take note of the myth within which Plutarch himself cites this Heraclitean view, which (as Kahn again observes)39 locates Hades as an airy region between the earth and the moon, from which the purest souls beam upwards towards the sun in the form of a ray of light. Kahn speculates that Plutarch's version retains more than a little of Heraclitus's model, and that we should understand that these souls that have to use the sense of smell in Hades are the ordinary, less than fully dry souls, which inhabit the intermediate region that is called Hades. They are "nourished by exhalations", on this view, in the sense that, being insubstantial, they require nothing more solid than some kind of vapours to keep them going. Arguably, we need not ascribe the Platonic/Plutarchian idea that Hades is in the upper sky, to Heraclitus, as Kahn does, or to Aristotle. Two other options strike me as compatible with the material we have here. One is that Hades was an underworld for Heraclitus, as traditionally: that it was a place beneath the earth which is dark and murky, perhaps even foggy, and occupied by intangible and soundless shades which are themselves composed of vapours.40 In those conditions, the only sense that could pick up any detail in Hades would be the sense of smell (there being nothing to see, feel or hear down there). Another option is that the souls of the dead occupy the same region as the living, only that things seem different to them, because they use only the sense of smell and are nourished only by vapours. This would mean that they and we live in different worlds, just insofar as we 36 37 Clement Stromateis 4.144.3, quoting fragment 27. o{ti ai{ yucai; ojsmw'ntai kaq∆ ”Aidhn, Plutarch De facie in orbe lunae 943E citing Heraclitus fragment 98. 38 Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus 257 citing Plato Cratylus 403a6. 39 On this material see particularly Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus 258. 40 See Aristotle de anima 405a28. 15 pick up different distinctions in what is otherwise a common world, just as the sleepers enter a different world when they fall asleep. These, then, are two options for taking the conditional "if all things were to turn to smoke" to refer to a situation which does sometimes obtain, namely either at the conflagration or in Hades. Of the two I think the second is preferable and enjoys more support from the other Heraclitean material that we know. However, the other alternative remains to be investigated, whereby the conditional is read as counterfactual, as a thought experiment to test our intuitions or to bring us to see some truth about our grasp of the world. This reading was preferred by Reinhardt.41 On this reading we are to imagine all things turning to smoke (though of course this is never a situation that would obtain, or at least not one we expect is likely to obtain) and if that were the case then the sense we would need to employ would be the sense of smell. As above, we might worry whether this thought experiment makes sense, for how could there be a perceiving subject if all that exists are the smokey objects? Yet the worry seems less severe for this reading, for we do not need to imagine that this situation is really one which could occur (I mean we need not imagine that there really is such a situation and in that situation some hypothetical nostrils exist and do make discriminations between things). For even if it were logically impossible that both (i) everything was turned to smoke and (ii) there were some non-smokey perceiving nostrils, it might still be true that were it to be the case (per impossibile) that all perceptible objects were smoke, then the distinctions between then would be picked up (if picked up at all) by nostrils. Or, less counterfactually, in case all things did turn to smoke, then it would be nostrils that would be needed. And, of course, the other provisos mentioned above about what "nostrils" might be also apply here. Kahn tries to discredit Reinhardt's counterfactual reading on the basis of two things. First he implies that Reinhardt was motivated by the desire to eliminate the conflagration from genuine Heraclitean teaching. For that reason, Kahn suggests, Reinhardt played down the relation of fragment 7 with fragment 66 in which Heraclitus says "Fire will come upon all things, discriminate them and 41 Karl Reinhardt Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1916/1959) 180 n.2; 16 catch them" (pavnta to; pu'r ejpelqo;n krinei' kai; katalhvyetai).42 Secondly Kahn suggests that the grammar does not permit the counterfactual reading.43 Aristotle's report of fragment 7 is in reported speech in historic sequence. If this were reported speech in English, the historic sequence would make the verbs more remote: "If all thing turn to smoke, we shall need nostrils" would become, in oratio oblique, "he said that if all things were to turn to smoke we should need nostrils." But in Greek this rule does not apply: typically the reported speech retains the tense and mood of the direct speech. So unless I'm much mistaken Heraclitus would have used the aorist optative in his original conditional, and he'd have said exactly what Aristotle says he said, and what he says leaves it at best an open question as to whether things will at some point become smoke, and perfectly compatible with the idea that the conditional will never, and could never, be fulfilled.44 Suppose, then, with Reinhardt, that this is a counterfactual thought experiment. Why might Heraclitus engage in that thought? Because, I suggest, he wanted to point out something about the way we experience the world. Perhaps he wants to say that what we experience, and how we experience it, depends upon the faculties that we have; or rather, to be more precise, even if we have all the same faculties, what features we pick out as distinctive depends upon what kind of features serve a useful role in enabling us to get around successfully. The thought expressed in fragment 7 is that all the features that we take to be key features, when we are operating in a world where there are important differences of colour, tactile qualities and sounds, all these cease to be distinctive or useful at all in a world where there are only various kinds of smoky smells. Then all that we'd need would be 42 This quotation comes from Hippolytus, Refutatio 9.10, who takes it to be about ekpyrosis, although if the verbs are taken in their epistemological sense it permits of other interpretations. In any case the verbs are not the same as in fragment 7. See Catherine Osborne Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1987) 171-3. 43 "But the conditional of CXII is potential, not counterfactual. Things do become smoke; and the possibility of everything going up in smoke is paralleled by the thought of fire 'catching up' with all things in CXXI (D66)." Kahn The Art and Thought of Heraclitus 257. 44 I am grateful to James Diggle for an expert opinion that confirmed my intuition on this. For similar counterfactual constructions in Heraclitus see also fr. 99: "if there were no sun it would be night because of the other stars" (eij mh; hJlio" h\n, e{neka tw'n a[llwn a[strwn eujfrovnh a]n h\n) ; and fr 15 "if it were not for Dionysus that they were making the procession… it would be shameless" (eij mh; ga;r Dionuvswi pomph;n ejpoiou'nto ... ajnaidevstata ei[rgast∆ a[n.) 17 a nose, and we'd name things by their smells, not by their visual appearance (because, in this hypothetical smoky world, their visual appearance would be a uniform fog). We can now link this thought with two other fragments that we know well, though not from Aristotle. One is fragment 67, about incense.45 The other is fragment 55, about how Heraclitus has a preference for things revealed by sight and hearing. What should we do with these? Let us take the second one first: o{swn o[yi" ajkoh; mavqhsi", tau'ta ejgw; protimevw. Fragment 5546 In the present tense, Heraclitus confesses that he gives priority, or ascribes higher value to, things of which sight and hearing provide his understanding.47 At least with respect to sight, this thought rings true, as contemporary philosophers and psychologists have sometimes observed. Out of all our five senses, sight does seem to have a kind of epistemological priority—not that we necessarily do rely more on sight but that we tend to think that sight is the main way of "seeing things" and we tend to conceptualise all understanding in terms of vision. In fragment 55 Heraclitus mentions not just seeing but hearing as well, though in another saying, fragment 101a, he seems to say that eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears.48 Arguably Heraclitus means that things do indeed tend to carry more weight for him if he has seen them or heard an eye witness account, but he may be acknowledging— 45 A link between 7 and 67 is seen by Marcovich Heraclitus, editio maior 419 and others, but I disagree with them on what the point of it is. 46 From Hippolytus Refutatio 9.9.5 and 9.10.1 47 The fragment is ambiguous and there are several ways of understanding it. If the three nouns are co-ordinate there is a list of three sources of evidence whose objects Heraclitus prefers (sight, hearing, learning); mavqhsi" is often associated with learning from spoken words, i.e. by teaching, so it would specify an additional kind of aural input. But alternatively "learning" may be the predicate, to yield "things of which sight or hearing is the learning". A third option, suggested to me in discussion by Ken Gemes, is that we should take the claim to mean "The things of which there is sight and hearing, these I value most as a source of learning" (where learning is implicitly contrasted with some other kind of discrimination, e.g. evaluative judgements, for which other resources are more valuable). However, given the word order and the nominative cases, it is hard to extract this meaning from the fragment. 48 The fragment is from Polybius 12.27, who quotes it in relation to the thought that there are two senses, sight and hearing, that are the main source of our understanding and engagement with the world, but that sight is rated higher by Heraclitus. 18 even regretting— the fact that he, like the rest of us, is tempted, not always rightly, to put a higher value on what he has himself seen or heard. In the world as we know it, we tend to place a great emphasis on things we see and hear. But, if we return to fragment 7, Heraclitus reminds us that this would not be so if the distinctions that those senses currently deliver were of no use or of no interest. For instance, if all things turned to smoke, sight and hearing would be useless, for it would be a foggy and silent world. In those circumstances, we'd get around by discerning differences in the smells. That would be the only thing that mattered. So our current privileging of the information delivered by sight and hearing has something to do with the way the world we live in appears to us, or which distinctions seem to matter. But it might not be so in circumstances in which all the important differences were differences of smell alone. And now we might ask, is it really that the smells are less important to our lives? Or is it just that with the senses we have got, we allow visual and audible information to take precedence, in such a way that we miss out on the things that the nostrils would discern, were they given a chance to take control? Is fragment 55 supposed to be an observation about the real nature of our existing world, and the objective importance of visual and audible stimuli? Or is it an observation about how the world one lives in is constructed by the perceiver, and depends upon the senses that one uses to discern things? A smell-oriented perceiver, for instance, would inhabit a rather different world, even while encountering the same underlying things. Perhaps, indeed, there might be other perceivers who go through this world and put a priority on things of which smell is the source of information. Such a perceiver might pay very little regard to the things that seem to matter to us, unless those are things that we distinguished by their scent. Now we have a sense that Fragment 7 might be saying something about how different the world would be if the only distinctions that mattered were distinctions of smell. We got here by reading the conditional counterfactually: if (as is not the case for us) all things were to become smoke, then smell would be the faculty that took priority. Perhaps that thought is not so counterfactual after all, however. For there might perhaps be subjects—not ourselves, but some other perceivers— for whom this world is just a world of scents, if none of the other differences figure in their lives. Such subjects, for instance, might include the dead, the dead who occupy Hades and who live by their sense 19 of smell alone. Perhaps then, this world might itself be Hades, only the dead perceive it with their noses alone, and for them it is a world in which there is nothing but foggy vapours. But let us go back to the incense fragment, fragment 67. Here it is, as reported by Hippolytus, and supplemented and translated in the way that has become conventional: oJ qeo;" hJmevrh eujfrovnh, ceimw;n qevro", povlemo" eijrhvnh, kovro" limov" (tajnantiva a{panta, ou|to" oJ nou'"). ajlloiou'tai de; o{kwsper <pu'r> oJkovtan summigh/' quwvmasin, ojnomavzetai kaq∆ hJdonh;n eJkavstou. God is day night, winter summer, war peace, hunger satiety (all the opposites, that's the idea). But it changes in the way that <fire>, when it's mixed with spices, is named according to the savour of each. Hippolytus Refutatio 9.10.8 The idea seems to be that fire (if "fire" is the correct supplement here) is named differently according to the spices that are applied to it. But is it really talking about fire, or is it not rather about smoke? In the burning of incense, the smells that we discern will be smoky exhalations; so it's with the smoke, surely, that the spices get mixed, even though they are thrown onto the fire. And, of course, in the case of such smoke, the organs to do the job of discerning which incense is which will be the nostrils. So just as in the hypothetical case suggested by fragment 7, where everything turned to smoke, so here too in the incense example, discrimination is a matter of picking out differences of smell, and giving them names. Here in fragment 67, the smoke is an analogy, in the olfactory field, for other differences which we pick up by various other senses. The differences listed at the beginning of fragment 67, between day and night, winter and summer and so on, are distinctions to which we give names—because they matter to us, no doubt—, but they are (says Heraclitus) only the same sort of differences as the differences in smells yielded by throwing different kinds of incense on the fire. Perhaps we have a tendency to think that the differences picked out by sight and the other senses carry more weight? "It is named according to the savour of each" says Heraclitus, in the translation given above. But what are the names that we give to these olfactory experiences? One option is that we name them according to what fragrance they give ("pine", "frankincense", "friar's balsam"…). Another option is that we name them according to whether they are to our taste or not ("nice", "nasty", "putrid", "fragrant", "pungent", "mild"…). It has become traditional (from Kirk at least)49 to take hJdonhv to mean fragrance or savour, referring to the objective smell of the smoke, where eJkavstou means "of each spice". According to this interpretation we understand that (independently of our judgement) there is 49 Kirk Heraclitus: the cosmic fragments 197. 20 such a savour, a different one for each spice. On the basis of those objective differences, which we discern by the nose, we name what is really the same "fire" differently according to the different smells it has when combined with one or other spice. On this reading it's not entirely clear in what sense it is "really" the same fire, given that it has these objective differences, which are correctly discerned by our senses, and described by the names we assign to each spice. Presumably the thought is that there is a continuity under one description (it is all fire, or it is all smoke) and a discontinuity under the other description (some is pine-scented, some is scented with frankincense and so on). But, it might seem, variations in what it smells like are not substantial differences, and so also the variations between night and day, or winter and summer, though they are objective differences are not substantial differences either. However, I think we should re-examine and perhaps reject that traditional rendering of the fragment. It will be helpful to glance at another of Aristotle's memorable quotes from Heraclitus from the list I gave above: fragment 9, about the donkeys and their preference for the sweepings from the threshing floor. Here is what Aristotle says: dokei' d'∆ei\nai eJkavstw/ zw/vw/ kai; hJdonh; oijkeiva, w{sper kai; e[rgon: hJ ga;r kata; th;n ejnevrgeian. kai; ejf∆ eJkavstw/ de; qewrou'nti tou't∆ a]n faneivh: eJtevra ga;r i{ppou hJdonh; kai; kuno;" kai; ajnqrwvpou, kaqavper ÔHravkleitov" fhsin o[nou" suvrmat∆ a]n eJlevsqai ma'llon h] crusovn: h{dion ga;r crusou' trofh; o[noi". For it seems that for each animal there is a pleasure of its own, as also a function <for each>. Namely the one in accordance with its activity. And this would be apparent to each one who reflects. For there is a different pleasure of a horse and a dog and a man, as Heraclitus says "donkeys would choose sweepings rather than gold"; for food is more pleasant than gold for donkeys. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1176a 3-8. For Aristotle, Heraclitus's saying illustrates the thought "there is a different pleasure for each of the animals," and his term for pleasure is, of course, hJdonhv. We might express his thought as follows: for donkeys sweepings are lovely, but for humans they are worthless. 50 They are named according to the pleasure of each (where "according to the pleasure of each" here means the preference of each species, not the savour of the object). 50 There is some difficulty with the interpretation of the fragment because we don't quite know what the word suvrmata, here translated as "sweepings" means. Understanding it to refer to the sweepings from the threshing floor makes a lot of sense: these include a lot of chaff and other debris from the corn, providing a little nourishment for donkeys, but they are worthless (despite their golden colour) to humans. Aristotle goes on to explain the phrase by saying that donkeys prefer food, but I think that Michael of Ephesus, who thinks the term surmata means green fodder has probably missed the point that the golden sweepings are at issue. 21 It seems to me that Aristotle's thought here, about the preference of each species, is arguably the same thought as the one expressed by Heraclitus in the incense fragment, or, at least, it may be that Heraclitus was making a similar point about the preferences that observers bring to their classification of the world, whether they are preferences that are common to the species or particular to the individual. In Heraclitus's incense fragment too, we might take the motif of "hJdonh; eJkavstou" to mean the preference of each observer, rather than the savour of each spice Taken that way the incense fragment would be saying that the various smells are labelled with names that reflect the perceiver's perspective on it, that is, according to the pleasure of each observer, hJdonh; eJkavstou. Of course, if you are a smoker, then tobacco smoke smells good. If you have quit smoking, it is rancid and disgusting. So we label the smells of this world as fragrant or putrid, according to our individual preferences. So our classification of things is not just a matter of picking out in a descriptive way what their objective nature is, but also reflects what we bring in the way of evaluative preferences. The latter preferences make us classify things in terms of our interests, and so we inhabit a world that is both common to all and particular to us. It is tempting to understand this to mean that there is one objective world which has no real distinctions, but that the variations detected are subjective ones, not real ones given in nature. But that is not sufficiently subtle. Rather, we should say, there are indeed differences out there to discern, represented by the idea of "different spices" being added to the fire. And our senses are sensitive to those differences. But the idea of "the pleasure of each" adds to this model the idea that we perceive with an interested gaze: that the world is not the same for all because we come with distinct preferences and interests, which cause us to identify and dwell upon distinctions that matter to us. Classifying the things of the world is not a merely descriptive activity. It incorporates an implicitly evaluative outlook, that makes some of the objective distinctions strike us as more significant than others, and our naming practices reflect this fact. "It is named according to the pleasure of each". To return to fragment 7, then, if everything were to become smoke, all the visual and audible differences would disappear. We'd just go around sniffing, and we'd find what we liked and what we didn't like. That's how we would think of the world, and we would name the things in the world in ways that reflected our interests and our preferences. Those labels would be how we would think of the world, and, of course, the evaluative ones would come in opposites. But the distinctions would acquire significance for us, because of what we brought to them, namely a sense of smell and a 22 preference for some smells over others. So too, we might suggest, in the world revealed to us by the eyes and ears, there are distinctions that acquire significance for us and mark out differences that are important in our world: day and night for instance. But surely these differences are meaningful to us just because of what we bring to them, namely a sensitivity to light and darkness, and a preference for one over the other. If that were not so, there would be no reason to divide the times in terms of day and night. Perhaps that is what Heraclitus is trying to say when he says, in fragment 67, that God (if "God" is correct there) is just called by different names on the basis of what we bring to our understanding of the world. 5. Summary and conclusion It seems to me, then, that Aristotle has a sequence of reminiscences of Heraclitus that cluster round a theme. Smoke and vapours figure here, and are used in fragment 7 to conjure up the idea of a world where all the distinctions that matter are identifiable only by the sense of smell, a world where there are no visual or audible criteria for distinguishing one thing from another, or preferring one to another. This leads to two rather separate motifs. One is the idea that the world may appear radically different depending on the physical make-up of the creature who is observing it, such that one might give a quite different list of what things there are in the world, if one saw the world in terms of its smells rather than in terms of textures, or colours, or heat or light and darkness. There would be no day or night, or winter or summer, unless, perhaps, they differed in smell. This is one part of the idea that our account of the world depends upon what we bring to the experience, in this case what we bring in the way of sense modalities capable of discerning differences. A similar story applies to our preferences, which may not be merely a result of which sense modalities you operate by, since the donkey's preference for the golden sweepings rather than gold coins is not, presumably, due to seeing or tasting anything different, or lacking any sense that could pick out the visual or tactile properties of gold. Rather it has to do with the way of life that is characteristic of donkeys, in which the practices that make gold important to us simply do not and cannot figure. One is reminded here of Wittgenstein's remark that if a lion could talk we could not understand him.51 For the divergence in 51 Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations Part II xi, 223. 23 practices and values mean that there is, in effect, no common description available, of what appears to be, in essence, a common world of physical objects. However, we should not stop with the idea that what we bring in the way of interests and preferences is all that matters; that is only part of the story, for what the world brings to us is clearly important too. The reason why the differences of smell in the smokey world are so important is not because we (in that hypothetical scenario) have just a sense of smell and no other senses. On the contrary we are to imagine that we might have all the senses we now have, but the world has changed so radically that the distinctions picked up by the other senses are not relevant, not worth observing. It has become smoke. In such circumstances, even if we have all our senses, some of them will cease to be of any use. This is not a change in our preferences but a change in which things matter, a change brought about by the fact that things which might have mattered now no longer matter, because they are not available to be appreciated. If I am right, these two motifs belong with a familiar Heraclitean theme, namely that what is objectively one common world may be quite different worlds for different inhabitants. It is worth imagining that this dislocation might be so radical that even the dead and the living may inhabit the same world but live past each other like ships in the night. So the smokey theme has a role in assisting our grasp of what death would be like, since the foggy underworld where souls are merely vapours and sight is a useless sense, may in fact just be this same world, perceived by those who are not in touch with the distinctions we currently take to be significant.52 52 It is not clear whether we should take the hypothetical scenario in which smell is the only useful sense to be contingently helpful in illustrating a general truth, or significantly different in some important way from a hypothetical scenario that did not have to do with smell but, say, taste. Is it essential that it mentions smell? In support of the idea that it is merely contingent, one might suggest that it serves an alienating role, precisely to rid us of our assumption that sight and hearing are the most important guides to what matters. In support of the idea that it is essential to Heraclitus's point, one might cite the evidence in favour of souls being made of vapour, especially after death, and being associated in some way with intelligence and also with operating by their sense of smell, as though the sense of smell was actually the one that goes straight to the intelligence that is the soul in its pure and dry state. 24 Appendix: The difficulty of controlling the temper. There is one further theme that should be explored before we sign off this exploration of Aristotle's Heraclitus. Several times Aristotle recalls Heraclitus fragment B85 when he is talking about anger and the difficulty of controlling the temper. Here is one such passage from the Eudemian Ethics: And it seems plausible that Heraclitus was thinking of the force of the temper when he said that controlling it is painful: for "it is hard to fight against the temper," he says, "for it stakes the soul…" Eudemian Ethics 1223b22-4 The same saying, or parts of it are recalled twice more in the ethical treatises, once in the Politics (1315a29) and once in the Nicomachean Ethics (1105a7). In the Politics passage, Aristotle is not interested in the first part of the saying, about the difficulty of controlling the temper, as he was in the Eudemian Ethics, but in the second half, about the price that one pays, the idea that one is profligate with one's life when overcome by the temper. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle is not interested in the temper at all, but rather he invokes the saying in connection with some reflections on pleasure. He gives a kind of adaptation or reworking of Heraclitus's thought about temper. What Aristotle wants to say, in his own voice, is that fighting against pleasure is even harder than fighting against the temper (whereupon he cites Heraclitus for the idea that fighting against the temper is hard).53 Fragment 85 is also known from Plutarch, who quotes it three times, but in a slightly longer version.54 To Aristotle's "it stakes the soul",55 Plutarch's version adds "whatever it wants it stakes the soul for".56 Still, the meaning of Aristotle's more condensed form seems to be exactly the same, given how Aristotle explains it in the Politics passage. I think that our first impulse is to read yuchv in fragment 85 as somewhat metaphorical, as though Heraclitus meant that an angry man stakes everything, including his life, to get vengeance against someone who has insulted him. However, it is worth noticing that this motif of buying or bartering for a price has a role elsewhere in Heraclitus's thought, when in fragment 90 he says that "all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, like goods for gold and gold for goods." Here, buying and selling goods for gold is a motif indicating a form of exchange in which value is preserved despite the fact that the commodities are exchanged: one kind of stuff (the goods) is obtained in return for 53 Nicomachean Ethics 1105a7. 54 Plutarch Coriolanus 22; De cohibenda ira 457 D; Amatorius 755D. 55 yuch'" ga;r wjnei'tai. 56 o{ ti ga;r a]n qevlhi, yuch'" wjnei'tai. 25 another kind of stuff (the gold). And while the price is measured in one of these materials, in this case the gold, still the value is the same in both. In fragment 90 the term for this exchange is ajmoibhv or ajntamoibhv: that is it refers to an exchange; the deal actually takes place. In fragment 85, by contrast, there is just the proposal to sell but no actual sale is enacted: anger offers the soul as the price it is willing to pay to get what it wants in return. If the bargain were concluded, then the exchange would presumably occur in accordance with whatever principles of exchange Heraclitus envisages: soul would be exchanged for something else, for whatever is supposed to be the other side of the bargain. So presumably we should understand that we are talking about laying down one's life for some cause. I suppose that is what it is to pay with one's soul for something that anger wants — though it's not clear who will actually obtain whatever it is that anger desires, if one pays with one's soul for it. Perhaps this is part of the paradox, for it won't be me that gets the revenge I desire, for instance. In this paradox, then, soul looks as if it is serving as some kind of marketable commodity. It is at the same time both one's life and also a certain kind of stuff that comes and goes in the exchanges of the cosmos. What kind of stuff? As we have seen, Aristotle refers in the De anima to the idea that soul is an exhalation or vapour.57 I suppose that it may be either a moist vapour or a dry exhalation depending on the condition it is in. This provides a physical analysis of the soul that is compatible with the idea that it is one of the stuffs in the cosmos that can be a involved in processes of chemical exchange, so that the picturesque metaphor of staking your soul as the price you will forfeit to get what you want when angry is similar to the thought that things are exchanged for fire in a manner analogous to purchasing goods at the market. But perhaps the metaphor should not be pressed unduly. Heraclitus is not the kind of philosopher who provides a strict non-metaphorical analysis of the physics of the world. His sayings generally function at more than one level. Nevertheless, regardless of whether soul might be a kind of vapour involved in physical or chemical processes of exchange and substitution, I do think that it is worth juxtaposing fragment 85 with the other ones about smells and vapours that we have collected from elsewhere in Aristotle's work. For is it not striking that the range of material from Heraclitus that comes readily to mind for Aristotle includes so many partially connected thoughts about soul, about smoke, about vapours and smells, and about pleasures? It is not just that Aristotle's intuitive picture of Heraclitus extends well beyond the cosmology and logic that we tend to remember finding 57 De anima 405a26; see also Eusebius Pr. Ev. 15.20, and Heraclitus fragment 36, 76, 118. 26 there. It is that there is something like a theme here, and that it is tempting to think that the theme is not just a result of accidental selection but was perhaps more central to Heraclitus's book, and to Aristotle's memory of that book, than we would normally suppose.58 Bibliography Cherniss, Harold Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratic Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935 Kahn, Charles The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 Kirk, G S Heraclitus: the cosmic fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954 Marcovich, Miroslav Heraclitus, editio maior. Merida: Los Andes University Press, 1967 Osborne, Catherine Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy. London: Duckworth, 1987 Reinhardt, Karl Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1916/1959 58 I am grateful to Enrique Hülsz for inviting me to write this paper and organising the conference in Mexico, and I should like to acknowledge a debt to many of the participants in that conference, and also to friends at the Welsh Philosophical Society 2007 for plentiful comments and advice which have enabled me to improve the argument and the focus of the paper.