Heraclitus And The Empty Chair

"One and the same thing within us, I am living and dead,
and awake and sleeping and young and old:
these, reversing themselves, are those, 

and those, in turn, reversing themselves are these."
(Heraclitus, fr. 95)

 

Heraclitus

These days I have made the decision to go and find the book of Heraclitus. As my dear Italian Literature teacher at the university told me at the time, “Dear Stefano, some books, some readings, need their time.” I've always found it a wise statement.

The books always remain the same. It’s us who change over time, and what seemed incomprehensible then can become clear now. On the contrary, what we were passionate about in the past can be boring or enigmatic in our present. Because we change. Every moment of our existence.

Certain readings are like large wheels of cheese resting for years in the cellars of our soul. There comes a time when we can go down to taste them. They have reached their maturity.

Reading Heraclitus is simple. Understanding this is a feat.

It's no coincidence that Aristotle called him “the Dark One”. Socrates also had difficulty understanding what he meant in the fragments of him “as deep as the waters of the island of Delos.”

The philosopher of Ephesus was not an easy man, and very little is known of his existence. Although he was descended from a family of noble origin, he was not at all interested in fame or power, or wealth.

Human desires lead to ambition and envy, but he – like a Zen monk – preferred a simple life: a vegetarian diet, rejection of material goods, and solitary life in the temple of Artemis.

He purposely wrote in an obscure way, so that only the deserving few would understand his thought of him.

 

There are various versions of his death, it is known for sure that he fell ill with dropsy, a sort of edema, or the accumulation of serous fluid in a body cavity. Just him, what a joke!

Sick by an excess of water, he who saw in Fire the principle of all things.

“This cosmos did not do any of the gods or men, but it always was, and be, and will be, ever-living Fire, which with measure flares up and, with measure, it is extinguished” (fr. 2).

“Wise is the fire” (fr. 7).

“Fire will come and take possession of all things” (fr. 8).

 

But no, not fire that burns the humidity that makes human beings soft and ignorant. But edema. So, he will be forced to ask the doctors of the time if they were able “to ensure that the flood would cause drought; and since they didn't understand him, he buried himself in a stable under the heat of animal dung, hoping that the mood would evaporate.”

There are five different versions of his death, but the common denominator is the same: he died buried by cow dung. Maybe at sixty.

A tragi-comic end for one of the most important thinkers of human knowledge.

Known to all for those famous fragments on the river and flowing water (which were not even his) Heraclitus is commonly gone down in history as the “philosopher of becoming” linked to the motto “everything flows” (pánta rhêi, in Greek πάντα ῥεῖ), which is probably to be attributed to his disciple Cratilo who will develop the master's thought, taking it to extremes. Furthermore, the lexical formula “panta rei” will be coined and used for the first time by Simplicio.

The origin of this statement is linked to the Heraclitans aphorism n. 91:

“You cannot descend twice into the same river and you cannot touch a mortal substance twice in the same state, but because of the impetuosity and the speed of change it disperses and collects, comes and goes.”

 

On this theme, he wrote other fragments, from 28 to 31.

The theme is always the same, that of the continuous birth of the objects of experience without any possible permanence: everything we perceive is and is not at the same time, like the waters of the river that always flow differently in the river that remains the same.

The river, as well as the sun, and like any object we perceive are never the same. Their unchanging identity is only deceptive in appearance. Like objects, we also – objects in the world – are and are not.

For this vision of reality, Heraclitus has always been close to Eastern philosophies, especially Buddhist ones.

Moreover, the relations between India and Greece were certain thanks to the commercial exchanges between India and Babylon, as well as the proximity between Babylon and Persia, therefore Heraclitus did not ignore the sacred texts of the Vedas and Upanishads.

There have been many scholars, including the philosopher Heidegger, who have considered Heraclitus the most “oriental” of our ancient philosophers.

 

I certainly don't want to give a philosophy lesson.

I thought that only after reading the texts of the Indian tradition did Heraclitus' words become more intelligible.

At the time of my university studies, I felt like I was reading hieroglyphs.

The brain at twenty is more agile and receptive but the experience of forty is something else entirely.

It is easy to fall fascinated by that flowing water, always remaining a river but always being different from itself. Just like us who bathe our feet in those waters.

We too change every moment of our life. Each key I press to write marks the becoming of Stefano who is and is no longer at the same instant.

 

But why right now?

It seems nonsense, but all this reflection – and the desire to go and buy Heraclitus' book – arose after encountering an old photograph.

The photo of my mother's paternal grandparents when I wrote about her childhood. An image of husband and wife in Sardinia in the late nineteenth century; standing, with an empty chair in front of them.

That image haunts me. As soon as I can, I go back to observe it.

It makes me think about the concept of time.

 

My mother's paternal grandparents. Sardinia, around the end of 1800.

I believe, like Ferdinando Scianna, that Photography is a reflection on time, not just on the visible. More than what we see, after all, Photography speaks to us of time.

And the time of Photography flows differently than we usually understand it.

 

“The time of a painting is the time inside the painter, who can decide to portray an event that has already happened in the past.

The novelty of photography is that it is not just a slice of the visible, it is also a slice of time.” (Ferdinando Scianna)

 

I often go back to thinking about the idea of time. I think it's an obsession of mine in recent years, perhaps because I begin to feel its rushing flow like the river of Heraclitus.

And the passion for photography has sharpened it.

 

The beautiful book cited several times in this blog, by Riccardo Panattoni, “Blackout of the image – Essay on photography and the anachronisms of the gaze” are useful. In this essay too, as in many of Scianna's writings, the theme of time is preponderant.

Indeed, as Panattoni writes in the introduction to the essay, the charm of photography lies precisely in the epiphany of the images inside our eye, as well as inside the mirrors of the camera:

“The image, emerging from the depths of this inscrutable place, is the silent result of what we have not been able to see. For this reason, probably, the images carry within them something that enchants. In fact, photographs are not a place of knowledge, of course, they can also be this, they can show us, for example, places we have never been to, people we have never met, details that have escaped us, but what they show is how an image is imbued with the temporality that characterizes the constitutive relationship between memory, oblivion, and gaze.”

 

Before photography was invented, human beings had only the memory of the gaze. Then the photographs became the survival of the memory of what we know or what we have never seen.

Even if people and objects disappear over time, they leave our memory (which has always been the other part of the time, as the philosopher Bergson teaches) and therefore from our gaze, just look at them in photography and they come back to exist.

Panattoni writes that the photographs are very similar to the statues, closer to light sculptures than to the classic writing of light (as the meaning of its name implies).

“Just as the sculptures show the effectiveness of an event, but taken within an inescapable solitude, they remain forever separated from the flow of time even though they are time itself.”

Here we go back to Heraclitus. Explained in this essay thanks to the mystery of time in photography due to the double exposure of the light that each photograph maintains in itself: that of the light that was in the moment of the shot and that that appears again when we look at that image.

 

It seems to be in front of the river of the Greek philosopher. Watching its flowing waters. Just as my eyes stare at that empty chair, and I wonder is it empty or is it I who can no longer see who is sitting there?

A son, his elderly father, her elderly mother...

 

What is the meaning of that empty chair? In photography, everything is defined, imprisoned in the signs that the light has carved on the paper.

The stern expressions of the man and woman, their hands still on the edge of the chair. They are as evident as the river.

Then there is the water that flows inside.

Our eyes that look at that image enter it, as in its waters of time, and “into the same rivers we enter and do not enter, we are, and we are not.” (fr. 31)

 

Then, everything could be a paradox. A joke of time.

A collapse of the gaze that is unable to see the mysterious time of photography, which is also the time of our existences.

As if the two standing figures were the classical, linear time, still in their late-nineteenth-century past, and that empty chair was the symbol of the other time, the one closest to the Asian idea of circular time, of the time that is, and it is not. Which denies itself by showing itself to us.

Someone is sitting in that chair. It is we who are unable to see it.

 

As Scianna writes, “photographs change themselves over time.”

I also think, like the Sicilian photographer, that it is a falsehood that photographs can stop time, as is often written.

The time that flows in the images is completely different from how we feel it.

 

No, I'm not crazy.

This is just a reflection, a little provocative, but which lives in the enigmatic words of Heraclitus.

It's a way of thinking about time. How difficult it is to grasp or describe it.

Sometimes the things that seem the most complicated are the simplest: they are right in front of our eyes.

This is the greatest legacy of Hindu-Buddhist philosophy.

The most complicated mysteries of our lives often boil down to a few words...

Then even an empty chair becomes understandable.

 

And “the sun is new every day” (fr. 27)

Heraclitus: "Dell'Origine" (Feltrinelli, 2017)
Riccardo Panattoni: "Blackout of the image - Essay on photography and the anachronisms of the gaze" (Mondadori, 2013)

Italian version