02 - The One and Many in Heraclitus and the Heng Xian

The investigation of "that of which everything consists, from which everything comes, and to which everything shall finally dissolve" (Arist. Met. 983b), the quest for a principle (ἀρχή), that remains stable amidst change, that orders the world and allows for its comprehension, can be considered as the dominating feature of pre-Socratic intellectual speculation. In Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BC), in particular, this research assumes most distinctively the connotation of an "henology" (Reale in Marcovic et al. 2007), a form of knowledge, that is, aimed at reconducting the apparently disordered mass of the phenomena to a fundamental underlying unity, a one, "emerging out of all things and from which all things emerge" (10DK).

This intellectual trust, which can be seen as prodromic to the development of the complex metaphysical system later appearing in Classical Athens, is, however, not unique to Ancient Greek philosophy: forms of it, in fact, can be ascertained when analyzing works of early Chinese thought. Archeological discoveries of the past two decades, moreover, have greatly enhanced our possibility to penetrate philosophical systems of Warring States China (VI-III century BC), providing a wealth of new material that is only gradually beginning to be investigated. One of these newly-discovered works is the Hengxian 恆先, translatable as "Constant Principle", an "argument-based" (classification as Meyer 2012) anonymous text of vaguely Daoist resemblance that structures a thorough reflection on the metaphysical and physical origin and nature of things, as well as their behavior in the kosmos.

In the present paper, therefore, I shall argue that Heraclitus and the Hengxian share distinctively analogue philosophical systems: both postulating a fundamental principle, λόγος in Heraclitus, hengxian in the Chinese text, that allows and accounts for the reconciliation of the evident diverse multiplicity of the world under the eternal mark of unity. I begin my discussion with a philologically-informed close reading of selected Greek fragments, as well as of the entire Chinese text, supporting my analysis with pre-existing studies of the two authors. I then turn to a critical comparison of two thinkers' notions of coincidentia oppositorum, analyzing how couples of opposites arise and operate within their philosophical systems. In the third part, I focus on the bipartition, shared by the two philosophical structures, between metaphysical and physical doctrines, respectively dominated by the concepts of λόγος and hengxian 恆先 the former, and πῦρ and qi 氣 (of difficult translation, "spirit, ether") the latter (cf. Marcovic 1967). I end my examination with a comparison of the expository style of the two texts and their explicit, almost iconoclastic, refutation of received traditional knowledge in favor of rigorous intellectual investigation.

As a re-contextualization of Classical learning is more and more called for in the West as well as in China, this paper aims at contributing both to the establishment of a common language between two hitherto utterly segregated worlds of thought and to the investigation of common traits of human speculation on reality, shown to be emerging similarly yet independently around the same time at the two antipodes of the globe. 

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Presenters

Didier Natalizi Baldi, Harvard University

  SCS-60