Nietzsche’s Heraclitus: Historical Figure and Personal-Philosophical Archetype

Nietzsche and the Heraclitean Fragments

But if we read the Heraclitean fragments for their potential Nietzschean utility, we find not only a rich stock of philosophically sympathetic material, some of which Nietzsche neglected, but also some work that can be read as incompatible with his anti-metaphysics. In remarks that align closely with Nietzsche’s dismissive stance toward the crowd and common knowledge, Heraclitus writes that “other men are oblivious of what they do awake” (B1); “they hear like the deaf” (B34); and “[m]ost men do not think things in the way they encounter them, nor do they recognize what they experience, but believe their own opinions” (B2).^[12] However, whether these remarks cohere with Nietzsche’s own versions of Heraclitus depends upon whether the latter faults the crowd for failing to recognize the truth of substantive metaphysical claims about God and the world or, which is more likely, for failing to understand the paradoxical unities of logos in flux, war, and the self-concealment of nature (“nature loves to hide [physis kryptesthai … philei]” (B123)). But if some claims can be read as realist, there is evidence, albeit open to interpretation, that Heraclitus was a perspectivist like Nietzsche, for many fragments reduce knowledge and reality to perception, e. g., the sun the width of a foot (B3); if all things were smoke, the nose could distinguish them (B7); “asses prefer straw to gold” (B9); and pigs prefer mud to water (B13). Roughly a third of the “authentic” Heraclitean fragments are epistemically negative or restrictive, while many others are paradoxical. Heraclitus’s form of dialectical oppositions arguably refuses any stable reconciliation, and very few fragments make affirmative claims about knowledge or the world. The same holds for the soul, which is the subject of numerous fragments, including B12, B36, B45, B68, B77, B85, B98, B107, B115, and B117–8. Despite Heraclitus’s valorization of the pursuit of the soul (he writes, “I have sought myself” (B8), which Nietzsche cites with great feeling), he similarly denies that we can ever plumb its depths (B45). Indeed, many other remarks refer to thinking, knowing, and understanding without ever identifying or claiming knowledge of any soul substance.

Yet, Nietzsche’s secular, perspectivist Heraclitus seems at odds with various apparently dogmatic ontological and religious fragments. Nietzsche claims that Heraclitus rejected Pythagoras, the mystery cults, and the raving lust of the Dionysian festivals. He even asserts that “the self-reverence of Heraclitus has nothing at all religious” (The Pre-Platonic Philosophers [= PPP], KGW II 4.263–4). Yet, Heraclitus refers to the divine in fragments B5, B11, B15, B24, B30–2, B63, B67, B78–9, B86, and B114, and not always with clear skepticism. He also makes some apparently dogmatic epistemic and ontological statements incompatible with perspectivism such as that his account holds forever (B1) and that the world is common to all but unmade by Gods or human beings, an ever-living fire, with no origin or end (B30). Yet, the fragments, bereft of context as they are, nearly always collapse the nominally metaphysical concepts of the soul, immortality, eternal truths, and Gods into ignorance, flux, paradox, or perspective. Indeed, it is arguable that the fragments, as assertions limited to the physical, cloaked in obscure metaphorical guise, and characterized by anti-dogmatic metaphors, tactics, and modes of expression, share Nietzsche’s anti-metaphysics on multiple fronts. Thus, regardless of whether they successfully constitute non-metaphysical forms of thinking, there is significant reason to ally Nietzsche and Heraclitus in a common anti-metaphysical project.

But early and late Nietzsche approach Heraclitus in different ways. In contrast to the narrower scope, non-philological methodology, and transformative appropriations of Nietzsche’s 1880s Heraclitus, the early Nietzsche registers the full range of the doxographical tradition of Heraclitus, sometimes even identifying Heraclitean views that oppose his own work. He resists his early affiliation in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by allying Heraclitus with the Apollinian against the Dionysian.^[13] He registers the lawful character of the world order in Heraclitus^[14] against the Stoics (PPP, KGW II 4.278n24). And he critically ascribes to Heraclitus “faith in the eternity of truth. […] Exhibition of his doctrine as anthropomorphism” (Nachlass 1872/73, 19[180], KSA 7.475). By contrast, the later Nietzsche identifies an almost wholly Nietzschean Heraclitus whose words are almost always interpreted in ways that accord with Nietzsche’s own doctrines. This later Nietzsche stresses the anti-metaphysical and temporal nature of Heraclitean truth, disappearing with his death or the end of his era, against Heraclitus’s statement that “this account holds forever” (B1). Thus, there is some daylight between Nietzsche’s early and later Heraclitus, as well as between his later work and the fragments’ epistemological and metaphysical possibilities. To present Heraclitus in his sole surviving fragmentary work as an anti-metaphysical thinker, a “physicist [Physiker]” (PHG 6, KSA 1.828), as he does both early^[15] and late, requires selecting out from it some resistant strains in his poem. All interpretations do this. What Nietzsche’s later Heraclitus does in particular is to efface discordant elements that might be regarded metaphysically, lest they undercut his image of Heraclitus as his anti-metaphysical precursor. Nietzsche’s early notes and writings on Heraclitus outside of The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (1869–76) also stray at times from the fragments, relying heavily on ancient biographies that he knew to be fictional and even inventing passages in the voice of Heraclitus. However, his early readings of Heraclitus are heavily steeped in the tradition and even the invented passages read primarily like paraphrases of the fragments.

Thus, Nietzsche’s portraits of Heraclitus can be divided roughly into a scholarly Heraclitus articulated in connection with the ancient and modern literature, which best describes his work in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, and a distinctive vision of Heraclitus appropriated for his own philosophical purposes from the fragments, doxographical tradition, and nineteenth-century German scholarship. The scholarly reading is restricted primarily to the early to mid-1870s, while the distinctive Nietzschean Heraclitus begins to emerge in those early notes and writings but sees its full development only in the 1880s. Yet, there is much in both readings that is arguably appropriate to Heraclitus. From a limited set of the fragments, we can reconstruct Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus as a philosopher of change, eternal recurrence, and the overman (PPP, KGW II 4.263). Nietzsche’s claims to a Heraclitean philosophy of ceaseless flux draw support from such fragments as “every day a new sun” (B6), “you cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you” (B91), and “the world unmade by Gods or men, an ever-living fire” (B30; cf. PHG 6, KSA 1.828–9). We see the eternal recurrence emerge from the Stoic interpretation of Heraclitean fire as eternally destroying and creating,^[16] but the eternal recurrence also emerges, as we shall see, as a consequence of his association of Heraclitean fire, strife, and constant flux with his doctrine of forces, force-centers, and the will to power. Nietzsche writes of the “fire spirit out of which and to which all things are moved in double circles as in the doctrine of the great Heraclitus” (BT 19, KSA 1.128). He takes his own view of the world as strife or the chance play of the child Aion from Heraclitus’s claims that “time is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child’s” (B52), that “war is the father of all and the king of all” (B53), and that “war is common to all and strife is justice, and […] all things come into being and pass away through strife” (B80). Nietzsche’s views of the overman in its relation to the human being can be traced back to Heraclitus’s claims that “the human is called an infant by the spirit [daimonos] and a child before the human” (B79) and that “the wisest human is like an ape in wisdom, beauty, and all other things compared to God” (B83). Thus, Nietzsche writes, “[a]ccording to Heraclitus: the wisest human is an ape in opposition to the genius [Genie] (God)” (Nachlass 1873, 27[67], KSA 7.607). The fragments we have seen above already provide clear precedents for Nietzsche’s ideas of the world as uncreated, flux, strife, fire, chance, and the overman. Many other Heraclitean fragments support the paradoxical oppositional unities of Nietzsche’s reading (PPP, KGW II 4.272–3; PHG 10, KSA 1.842). Heraclitus writes, “that which separates unites with itself. It is a harmony of oppositions, as in the case of the bow and of the lyre” (B51); “[g]ood and evil are the same” (B51); “[i]mmortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living in their death and dying in their life” (B62). Hence, there is substantial support in the fragments not only for his identification of many of his key doctrinal elements with Heraclitus, but also for his Hegelianizing reading of Heraclitus. But to accurately contextualize and characterize Nietzsche’s readings of Heraclitus, we must go through each period of his reception in detail in relation to his sources.

Nietzsche’s Early Heraclitus

Nietzsche’s early readings of Heraclitus, as evident in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, are steeped in the Greek fragments, the doxographical tradition, and philological scholarship. Accordingly, his early accounts of Heraclitus are for the most part either fair interpretations of the extant fragments, clear translations of a select group of fragments into his own language, or improvisations based in part on a narrow subset of the spurious remarks set down in the doxographical tradition. Nietzsche’s later departures from this tradition serve to articulate an anti-metaphysical Heraclitus that he found in the Heraclitean fragments, which he takes to prefigure and later parrot his doctrines of becoming, the child, strife, chance, and eternal recurrence.

But Heraclitus’s influence on Nietzsche’s later work is hardly reflected in the quantity and date of his many direct references to Heraclitus,^[17] the vast majority of which are in his early professional writings and notes from 1870–73, especially, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Untimely Meditations (1873–76), Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873), and The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (1869–76). In Human, All too Human (1878–80), Dawn (1881), Idylls from Messina (1882), The Gay Science (1882–87), and Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), works written from 1878 to 1885, there is only one explicit reference to Heraclitus (HH II, VM 223), and there are just a few references in most of Nietzsche’s remaining works of 1886–89, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Ecce Homo (1888), and Twilight of the Idols (1889). The vast majority of Nietzsche’s direct references to Heraclitus are extremely brief, with the exception of Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. These closely related early 1870s texts exhibit a scholarly criticality, detail, comprehensiveness, and cognizance of textual and biographical problems within the philological and ancient literatures that is largely absent from his later work.

Nietzsche’s early and late references play two distinct roles in his life and work. The early detailed references build up his own conception of what philosophy and the philosopher are and can be without explicitly identifying with them. The late references link Heraclitus’s philosophy and personal qualities directly to Nietzsche’s philosophy in order to identify a precursor to validate his noble, anti-democratic, future-oriented worldview and to provide an alternative account of intuitive knowledge and a world order characterized by constant strife and becoming.^[18] These later accounts appropriate the “Dionysian” Heraclitus’s name for his doctrines despite terminological differences and without the early explicit scholarly foundations. Hence, contra Cox, the differences between his early and late references to Heraclitus go well beyond lesser detail.^[19] Yet, there are clear traces of the later doctrines within his early readings of Heraclitus. This is not always evident both because he rarely refers to Heraclitean sources in the 1880s, and because his later work involves appropriative interpretations that to some extent alter, neglect, or minimize strands of Heraclitus’s work he had once recognized as in conflict with his projects. Indeed, even in the early work outside of The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, he sometimes manufactures quotations and places them in the mouth of Heraclitus. He also uses Heraclitus’s biography only where it may sustain his own values, so we hear nothing of dung and dropsy,^[20] but much of nobility and solitude.

Nietzsche’s early scholarly engagement with the Heraclitean tradition is fundamental to his developed 1880s philosophical doctrines and personal ideals of the noble intuitive artist and Übermensch, united in self and philosophy, anti-democratic and anti-nationalist. The tendency of some commentators to focus on the personal character of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus derives in part from the fact that he so often refers to Heraclitus the person, especially in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which has long been more accessible than The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Nietzsche’s most extensive account of Heraclitus. Yet, the latter text, which discusses Heraclitus’s biography only briefly, provides a far clearer window into Nietzsche’s relation to the Heraclitean tradition through its engagement with scholarly debates and its use of the Greek fragments. Still, the brief biography presented in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers similarly expresses the philosophy. Heraclitus emerges as the pure type of the stoic-Socratic godlike wise man, the lone founder of truth, hostile to poetry and the Dionysian (PPP, KGW II 4.265). As a pure type, Heraclitus embodies the identification of the philosopher’s life and thought. A noble who surrendered his hereditary title of basileus, (sacerdotal?) king (PPP, KGW II 4.261), Heraclitus is characterized by his hybris, his pride, his desire to set himself apart from the crowd, and his grounding of knowledge on self-examination (esp. PHG 8, KSA 1.833–5). Heraclitus’s independence from the crowd allows him alone to see in the activity of children a metaphor for the events of the cosmos as a whole. Nietzsche regards this proud solitude as the mark of the self-overcoming of the human in “the entirely different form of a superhuman [übermenschlichen] self-veneration in […] Heraclitus […], no bridge leads to other human beings” (PPP, KGW II 4.263). Nietzsche subsequently echoes this vision of Heraclitus’s politics in his own politics (GM III 8, KSA 5.353), for it supports his later explicitly anti-democratic, pan-European views^[21] even as it forms an image of the overman and philosopher of the future. For Nietzsche, Heraclitus’s politics thus combines the political and the epistemic. “[E]very move of his life shows what already emerges from his political comportment,” namely “the highest form of pride in the sure belief in the truth grasped by him alone” (PPP, KGW II 4.262). Heraclitus despises human beings because they live in this lawful world without ever recognizing it as such. Wisdom consists in recognizing and identifying oneself with the truth of the unity of the ever-unchanging logos (PPP, KGW II 4.262–3, 266–7). In Heraclitus, then, according to Nietzsche, there can be no isolation of character from epistemology or ontology. What one knows is how one is or becomes.^[22]

Nietzsche understands Heraclitus’s intuitive identification of himself with truth as a form of artistic or aesthetic, rather than natural scientific, knowledge (PPP, KGW II 4.270). This early aesthetic reading of Heraclitus,^[23] which Jackson P. Hershbell and Stephen A. Nimis dispute as an invention,^[24] provides a key to Nietzsche’s career-long subsumption of science and epistemology under art, which is so evident in The Birth of Tragedy. He writes that philosophy “is an art in its ends and in its production. But the means, the exhibition in concepts, it has in common with science. It is a form of poetry [Dichtkunst]” (Nachlass 1872/73, 19[62], KSA 7.439). Philosophy traffics in concepts, like the sciences, but it is an art both in process and aims. “The philosopher of the future? he must become the higher tribune of an artistic culture” (Nachlass 1872/73, 19[73], KSA 7.443). Thus, Nietzsche links Heraclitus to the truth aesthetically, intuitively, and creatively. The point is that the quest for knowledge in the end be subsumed to intuitive, creative purposes.^[25] Hence, Nietzsche is indifferent to whether such truths are compelled by nous in the intuitive Heraclitus or generated by experiment.

In the natural scientist Karl Ernst von Baer, Nietzsche finds the contemporary natural scientific confirmation of Heraclitean truth and reality. He interrupts his account of Heraclitus to discuss at length von Baer’s work in which “the panta rhei is a chief proposition. A rigid persisting is nowhere, already because one comes always at last to forces whose effect includes in itself at the same time a lust for force”; knowledge is relative to the speed of perception, and accordingly we have “different subjective basic measures of time” (PPP, KGW II 4.267–70). For the early Nietzsche, then, natural science validates the Heraclitean truths of perspective-dependence, strife, and constant flux by showing that the appearance of permanence is an illusion dependent on a particular natural speed of perception of the world of forces.^[26]

The real issue for the aesthetic worldview is not that the philosopher constructs a vision of the world out of nothing intuitively, but that intuitive or scientific findings must be subordinated to the interests of life. Unless it is regarded aesthetically for life from a Heraclitean perspective, knowledge becomes as sterile as the “footnote philology” of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.^[27] Thus, Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus suggests why his own stance toward truth seems equivocal at times, namely that intuitive, aesthetic, and perspectival approaches are to be preferred to dogmatic approaches to truth, which are unsustainable in a world of Heraclitean flux.

What Heraclitus intuits or artistically constructs, without invoking any rational form of justification, both prefigures and to some degree elucidates Nietzsche’s mature doctrines. In The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Nietzsche identifies four chief thoughts in Heraclitus – becoming, justice, strife, and fire – which he interprets in ways that anticipate or support his own later accounts of constant flux, the innocence of becoming, amor fati, beyond good and evil, the cosmos as a battle of forces, which is to say, will to power, and eternal recurrence. Heraclitus’s first thought is becoming, conceived as ever-present flux from the greatest to the infinitely small. “Heraclitus’s intuitive perception: there is no thing of which one could say ‘it is.’ He denies being [das Seiende]. He knows only becoming, the flowing. The belief in persistence he treats as error a[nd] stupidity” (PPP, KGW II 4.270). Because there is no limit to flux, the concept of becoming as flux entails the impossibility of being (PPP, KGW II 4.270). “Even here too, if we want to step into the river [Fluss] of our apparently ownmost and most personal essence, Heraclitus’s proposition applies: one never steps twice into the same river” (HH II, VM 223). No fixed identities of substance or quality can exist in this river of flux (German Fluss means both river and flux). “If all is in becoming, hardly any predicate can adhere to a thing, but rather is just in any case in the stream of becoming” (PPP, KGW II 4.272). This early understanding of Heraclitus’s basic thought matches Nietzsche’s later equation of becoming with constant flux in all things whatsoever, including predicative or qualitative identity, his affirmation of becoming, and his rejection of metaphysical being, persistence, and atemporal universality. The other three basic Heraclitean conceptions – justice, strife, and fire – relate closely to Nietzsche’s thoughts of beyond good and evil, amor fati, will to power, and the eternal recurrence. Nietzsche understands Heraclitean becoming as the justice of an innocent, non-teleological conception of the world defined by the ceaseless struggle of involuntary, non-rational forces, which necessarily bring the world through an infinite number of recurring cycles of creation and destruction. Strife defines the nature of becoming as world justice, as “the permanent effecting of a unitary lawful, rational δικε,” the “immanent lawfulness in the decision of the contest” (PPP, KGW II 4.272); or, as “Origen VI 52 Cels. says directly: ‘one must know that war is common and that δικε is strife a[nd] that all occurs according to strife’” (PPP, KGW II 4.272).

This conception of the world as constantly forged and destroyed through the struggle of forces in fire is at the heart of Nietzsche’s direct ascriptions to Heraclitus of eternal recurrence and, eventually, the will to power. Nietzsche’s view of Heraclitean becoming as strife, fire, and “this eternal breaking of the waves [Wellenschlage] and rhythm of things” (PHG 5, KSA 1.822) is akin to his later conception of the world as will to power eternally recurring, eternally destroying and creating “forces and force-waves” (Nachlass 1885, 38[12], KSA 11.610–1).^[28] Fire is a physical force that holds sway throughout the cosmos, applying to world and thought alike, for it is simultaneously the transformative, non-teleological element continually building and destroying the world and a model of immanent worldly wisdom (PHG 6, KSA 1.827–9). Nietzsche’s account of Heraclitean fire in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers also prefigures his later conception of the will to power in describing both worldly and internal mental forces. Fire is an immanent reflective power that simultaneously builds the world eternally as a game and constitutes wisdom. Fire identifies itself with this entire process as an “immanent dike or gnome, holding sway in opposites a[nd] the fire force observing that entire polemos.” Fire is like a creative artist, immanent to one’s work and governed by the just order of strife and play (PPP, KGW II 4.279).

The problem is that the term for world destruction, ekpurosis, the great conflagration of all things, is recognized by Nietzsche as a later Stoic invention, and he is quite critical of the Stoics’s flattening and moralization of Heraclitus, even though it was the Stoics and Pythagoreans, not Heraclitus, who directly taught a very similar anthropomorphic version of eternal recurrence as “the doctrine of the unceasing circular course of all things up to the smallest details, i. e., […] the strict, exceptionless recurrence of all the occurrences within the world.”^[29] Indeed, Nietzsche virtually repeats versions of eternal recurrence taught by Stoics such as Chrysippus, Zeno, and Nemesios, as well as the Pythagorean Eudemos (in Simplicius), which he echoes in UM II, HL 2 and various parts of Zarathustra.^[30] Yet, he ascribes eternal recurrence to Heraclitus, rather than to Pythagoreans or Stoics such as Chrysippus, Zeno, or Nemesios, when, according to Mihailo Djurić, he

had no unique ground to point to [Heraclitus] in particular as a possible teacher of the eternal return [for] Heraclitus has nowhere stated the reversibility of the course of time, or clearly the absolute identity of all finite temporal contents […] [or] that the flux of constant becoming inverts itself, that the world occurrence is determined in advance up to the smallest details.^[31]

All of this is literally true. No Heraclitean fragments directly express the particular characteristics of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same. But what Djurić fails to see is that Nietzsche attributes his doctrine of eternal recurrence to Heraclitus not only to preserve his identification of his philosophy with Heraclitus, but also as what he regarded as a necessary consequence of the Heraclitean physical principles of chance play, fire, strife, flux or becoming, and justice as regularity. If we couple the Heraclitean affirmation of the cosmos as the chance play of a child with the unceasing strife of fire in constant transformation (forces, force-centers, in Nietzschean terminology), and the regular measures of justice, we get the elements of Nietzsche’s affirmation of the “most scientific of all possible hypotheses,” the universe as constantly running randomly through all possible force-combinations and thus eternally recurring. In this sense, Heraclitus can be regarded as Nietzsche’s predecessor in the teaching of eternal recurrence.

The child, as the innocent, playful artist of the cosmos, is both the anthropomorphic figure for fire (PPP, KGW II 4.278) and the operative metaphor for the philosopher, just as in Zarathustra. In “the play of noisy children” (PHG 8, KSA 1.834), Heraclitus considered “what a mortal had never considered on such an occasion – the play of the great world child Zeus and the eternal joke of a world destruction and a world origination [Weltentstehung]” (CV 1, KSA 1.758). Citing a phrase from Jacob Bernays, Nietzsche says that

Zeus becomes in his world-forming activity compared with a child (as is said of Apollo in Iliad O 361) [who] builds a[nd] destroys sand heaps on the beach of the sea cf. Rhein Mus. 7/274 p. 109 Bernays. “The stream of becoming, flowing unbroken, never comes to stand still a[nd] again opposed to the stream of annihilation” (PPP, KGW II 4.273–4).

Nietzsche interprets this image of the cosmos as flux, chance, and a chaotic principle of eternal recurrence, cyclically creating and destroying the world in fire, a “basic intuition” that he claims Heraclitus borrowed from Anaximander (PPP, KGW II 4.274–6). The surviving fragments of Heraclitus may not clearly express eternal recurrence of the same, as opposed to merely repeated creation and destruction of all things. However, Diogenes Laertius provides Nietzsche with a clear ascription of eternal recurrence to Heraclitus in the claim that the cosmos “is alternately born from fire and again resolved into fire in fixed cycles to all eternity.”^[32] Nietzsche assigns this role of creation and destruction to the child and to fire, both of which he identifies as aion: “The eternally living fire, aion, plays, builds up and destroys” (PPP, KGW II 4.278); “[t]hat playing world child builds a[nd] continually destroys, but from time to time it begins the game anew” (PPP, KGW II 4.280).

This image of the child also expresses the non-teleological innocence of becoming definitive of Heraclitean justice, and thus anticipates his 1880s attempts to think of nature beyond good and evil. “Heraclitus has no reason to have to prove (like Leibniz did) that this world is even the best of all; it suffices for him that it is the beautiful, innocent play of Aion”; “it is a game; don’t take it so seriously [pathetisch]” (PHG 7, KSA 1.832; cf. PPP, KGW II 4.281). There is nothing inherently moral or immoral about nature, on this metaphor. The problem is to see the cosmos as neither covering over suffering, nor positing adikia, injustice, in nature.

[T]here is a becoming a[nd] passing without any moral reckoning only in the play of the child (or in art) […] There should remain no drops of adikia in the world. […] the polemos […] is only to be grasped as an artistic phenomenon. […] The moral tendency of the whole as teleology is just as much excluded: for the world child does not act according to ends, but rather only according to an immanent dike. It can act only purposively and lawfully [zweckmäßig und gesetzmäßig], but it does not will this a[nd] that (PPP, KGW II 4.278).

Thus, on Nietzsche’s account, Heraclitus regards the entire world process aesthetically beyond morality or teleology as mere play or strife without injustice or willed agency or intention (PPP, KGW II 4.279–80). “H. does not know an ethics, with imperatives” (PPP, KGW II 4.280). The world order or cosmos, which is necessity and play, defines justice, dike (B80). Hence, the single individual is also free of adikia (PPP, KGW II 4.276). “Heracl. accepted the entire fullness of contradictions a[nd] suffering” (PPP, KGW II 4.278). The totality is conceived as justice without moralization or the catharsis and ekpurosis of Anaximander (B66, a Stoic invention, according to Nietzsche),^[33] since there is no adikia to be purified (PPP, KGW II 4.276–7). Thus, fire and the godlike child in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks and The Pre-Platonic Philosophers prefigure the third metamorphosis in Zarathustra (the child). They also assert the amor fati of Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil in that they charge us to affirm fate (heimarmene) as it is, in taking godlike pleasure (euarestesis) in life and the eternal process of the world, even in suffering and war (PPP, KGW II 4.281–2).

Nietzsche’s Heraclitus, Ancient Doxography, and Nineteenth-Century German Philology

Many of the foci, idiosyncrasies, and deviations in these readings, including Nietzsche’s transformative language, his treatment of Heraclitus’s life, and perhaps even his understanding of Heraclitus as a secular, anti-metaphysical thinker, trace back to the ancient doxographic tradition and nineteenth-century German philology. Hence, we can better understand the scope and origin of his interpretations of the life and fragments of Heraclitus by situating them within these traditions. This historical context corroborates the view of Heidegger and Cox that Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is in many ways quite orthodox for its time.^[34] Examination of the literature will also tell us the extent to which Nietzsche’s differences from current Heraclitus scholarship derive from his often careless, second- or third-hand historical methods and his reliance on inauthentic doxographical texts,^[35] his personal appropriation of Heraclitus for his own purposes, and changes in the standard versions of Heraclitus since his time.^[36] I will argue on the basis of my genealogy that much of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is a knowing, selective appropriation and translation of Heraclitus by reference to Plato, Diogenes Laertius, and the nineteenth-century German philological tradition.

Nietzsche relies on many different sources of Heraclitean fragments in Greek, Latin, German, and French.^[37] His writings, especially The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, together with the Campioni collection of his book purchases and readings, and the Crescenzi collection of his library borrowings in Basel,^[38] show that he read and quoted, often in Greek, the original ancient source material for the Heraclitean fragments and commentaries on them, including some by Plato,^[39] Aristotle,^[40] Theophrastus, Diogenes Laertius,^[41] Seneca,^[42] and many others in the doxographic tradition, as well as nineteenth-century German philology. This explains the wide overlap of his views of Heraclitus with so many ancient and modern sources. But we must not neglect their differences, in contrast to many recent genealogies of Nietzsche’s work, for these differences are considerable with respect to any particular influence, and telling with regard to how he constructed his own distinctive visions of Heraclitus from out of common source material.

The earliest but hardly the most credible extant source on Heraclitus is Plato. As Jessica Berry, Jennifer Daigle, and Daniel W. Graham argue, Nietzsche’s vision of radical Heraclitean flux owes a clear debt to Plato’s Cratylus and several other dialogues.^[43] Nietzsche devotes two and a half pages of lecture notes to Plato’s Cratylus in Introduction to the Study of Platonic Dialogues (1871–76). The dialogue’s appeal to “the professor of languages” is clear from its etymological approach to motion (Cratylus, 426a, 460). In his notes, Nietzsche copies nearly verbatim a telling passage from Friedrich Ueberweg’s Ueber die Platonische Weltseele (1854) that asserts that “Plato at first encountered the Heraclitean doctrine (through Cratylus), according to which everything sensible is in constant flux, accordingly admits no knowing” (Introduction to the Study of Platonic Dialogues, KGW II 4.148–9).^[44] Although Nietzsche’s transcription omits the parenthetical expression “(through Cratylus),” this statement accurately characterizes the view of both the Cratylus and Nietzsche’s Heraclitus that the cosmos is the constant flux of a stream into which one can never step twice (e. g., Plato, Cratylus, 402a, 439; 411bc, 447; 412a–413e, 448–49; 436e, 470), destroying knowledge (Cratylus, 439–40c, 473–4). Indeed, in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Nietzsche explicitly states that the Heracliteans “are called ειδότες ουδεν [knowing nothing], similar to how Plato at the end of the Cratylus explains that with the eternal flux no constancy of knowledge, thus no knowing is possible” (PPP, KGW II 4.292). Plato’s view totalizes Heraclitean flux, defining justice by an ever-moving, warring fire that touches all things (Cratylus, 412a–413e, 448–9). Plato’s reliance on Cratylus explains his neglect of Heraclitean law, for Aristotle and Nietzsche argue that Cratylus radicalized Heraclitus’s thought to the point of silence and nonsense (UM II, HL 1, KSA 1.250). Graham, G. S. Kirk, and Matthew Colvin, similarly rejecting the Cratylean interpretation of Heraclitean flux, argue that there is no radical, general, total flux in Heraclitus, because the only authentic river fragment, in their view, asserts the river’s substantive identity over time, “the same river.”^[45] On this reading, it was Plato (or Plutarch, B91), not Heraclitus, who wrote, “you cannot step into the same river twice,” and it was the Neoplatonist Simplicius, not Heraclitus, who wrote “panta rhei,” everything changes. If this conservative interpretation is correct even of B12, which I doubt, that would mean that Nietzsche’s emphasis on Heraclitean flux is inaccurate. However, Nietzsche’s interpretation of radical Heraclitean flux is no outlier; it accords with the dominant nineteenth-century German Heraclitus, as we shall see. Moreover, Nietzsche’s interpretation is fully cognizant of Heraclitean law. Indeed, it defines Heraclitean law precisely as radical flux. The “uncanny intuitions” undergirding Heraclitus’s account are “the eternal motion, the negation of every persistence a[nd] persisting in the world and the inner unitary lawfulness of that motion” (PPP, KGW II 4.267). Therefore, Nietzsche need not deny the paradoxical Heraclitean unities and laws of flux and strife. “Heraclitus discovered […] what wonderful order, regularity, and certainty manifests itself in every becoming” (PHG 9, KSA 1.837).

But the Platonic accounts of Heraclitus, which can also be seen inter alia in the Parmenides, Theaetetus, Phaedo, and Symposium, in no way comprehend the totality of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus. His reading extends far beyond and transvalues the Platonic account of Heraclitus, for the Cratylus is only one of Nietzsche’s many Heraclitean sources. If Plato was the source of Nietzsche’s radical conception of Heraclitean flux and relativism, Diogenes Laertius, the subject of three works Nietzsche published in 1869–70 on the text and ancient sources of Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers, was the main source for his life of Heraclitus. Nietzsche’s initial use of Diogenes’s apocryphal biography of Heraclitus is critical and appropriative. Aware that the Heraclitean biographies were invented,^[46] Nietzsche relates only those anecdotes that serve his narrative politically and philosophically. Ignoring crass stories of Heraclitus, he explores the allied physical-political-epistemic character of Heraclitus’s noble upbringing, his refusal of his hereditary title of basileus (king), his rejection of the people for banishing his friend, Hermodorus, and his retirement from public life to observe the play of children.

Crucially, Nietzsche’s early Laertiana also evidence his roots in nineteenth-century German philology, which belie easy dichotomies between Nietzsche’s philosophy and objective, formalistic exact philology. Christian Benne argues that Nietzsche’s Laertiana exhibit the four characteristics of the Bonn School of classical philology exemplified by Nietzsche’s teachers, Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn,^[47] namely, “the connection of the critique of texts with prosodic, metrical, epigraphic, and literary historical studies; source research [Quellenforschung]; the establishing of texts; and their critical interpretation for the ends of securing the texts, and thereby passing them down [Überlieferung].”^[48] Indeed, Nietzsche’s late philological works combine the Bonn School’s critical, stylistic, genealogical focus with its empirical, anti-metaphysical, antitheological stamp, anticipating his philosophy of the future.

Nietzsche’s views of the ancient Heraclitean textual tradition were also shaped in substance by the nineteenth-century commentators and translators that he read and cited, including Hegel,^[49] Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jacob Bernays,^[50] Ferdinand Lassalle, Max Heinze, Friedrich Ueberweg,^[51] Hermann Diels, Georg Curtius,^[52] Eugen Dühring,^[53] and Eduard Zeller. Schleiermacher’s collection of Heraclitean fragments, which Nietzsche cites (PPP, KGW II 4.276) and which begins with a comment about “the unreliable stories of [Heraclitus’s] life,”^[54] formed a starting point for nineteenth-century German Heraclitus scholars.

The influence of Hegel and Schleiermacher on nineteenth-century German philology was such that few, if any, could evade the charge of Hegelianizing Heraclitus that Ueberweg, Bernays, and Fishman,^[55] among others, level against Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Lassalle. We might even expect Hegelianizing charges because the Heraclitean fragments are themselves rife with oppositional transformation and unity. Indeed, Hegel reverses the patrimony, saying that “there is no proposition of Heraclitus that I did not adopt in my Logic.”^[56] Even Bernays, a critic of the Hegelian Heraclitus, reads Heraclitus as a dialectical philosopher interested in the Aufhebung of opposites.^[57] Nietzsche’s Heraclitus also seems dialectical in defining becoming as oppositional unity. Yet, his reading of Heraclitus assumes no caricatured Hegelian static unity. In Heraclitus, “the opposed predicates move themselves after themselves […] intertwined like in a knot. […] Effectively both forces are always at the same time, because their eternal striving admits neither victory nor suppression in a duration” (PPP, KGW II 4.272–3). Hence, Nietzsche’s dynamic notion of “[t]he play of antinomies of Heraclitus” (PHG 10, KSA 1.842) obviates a static, unitary reconciliation of opposites. As we have seen above, for Nietzsche, Heraclitus’s observed “law in becoming and of the play in necessity” (PHG 8, KSA 1.835) is nothing other than change; “the strife of the many itself is the one justice” (PHG 6, KSA 1.827).

The striking affinities between Nietzsche’s Heraclitus and those of Bernays, Ueberweg, Zeller, Heinze, and Dühring demonstrate how conventional his reading was and indicate the origins of some of his seemingly idiosyncratic positions. Nietzsche was deeply familiar with all of these commentators. In The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, he cites his 1863–64 Schulpforta tutor, Max Heinze, on Heraclitus.^[58] He writes two semi-critical letters about Bernays in 1868;^[59] reviews his Heraklitische Briefe in 1869, criticizing the Stoic and Judeo-Christian impact on “the personal notes” and “heretical misunderstandings” of Heraclitus;^[60] and cites Bernays’s Heraclitea (1848) and his Theophrastos’ Schrift “Ueber Frömmigkeit” (1866) in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers (e. g., KGW II 4.262, 264). Nietzsche owned and read the third edition (1869) of Zeller’s Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, and he cites the long section on Heraclitus (PPP, KGW II 4.277).^[61] He copies and extensively cites and disagrees with Ueberweg. Finally, he owned and read several of Dühring’s books, and there is a surprising proximity between Nietzsche’s early Heraclitus, his doctrine of will to power, and Dühring’s Heraclitus.

Family resemblances between Nietzsche’s Heraclitus and this group of nineteenth-century German philologists and historians indicate how little his early Heraclitus is distinctive to Nietzsche. Bernays similarly writes of Heraclitus’s retreat to the Temple of Artemis.^[62] Dühring writes of his noble contempt for the crowd,^[63] who, as Heinze writes, lack understanding of the logos.^[64] Zeller and Bernays similarly write of Heraclitus’s critique of democracy and the herd.^[65] Nietzsche follows Heinze in analyzing Plato’s Cratylus and Theaetetus in connection with Heraclitean flux,^[66] while he joins Ueberweg, Zeller, and Dühring in writing of the related radical conception of the “constant flux of all things.”^[67] Dühring writes that this flux transcends mere qualitative change to constitute “the basic condition of all life and all existence [Existenz]” as “force and counter-force … an antagonistic play of forces,”^[68] which is a physical, rather than metaphysical account. We also find in Nietzsche’s sources a critique of the senses for asserting persistence;^[69] the periodic recurrence of the construction and destruction or conflagration of all things;^[70] the harmony of opposites in the bow and lyre, and war as the father of all;^[71] the identity of war or strife, logos, and justice;^[72] and an eternal cycle (Kreislauf) of recurrence,^[73] with micro- and macrocycles^[74] and the Great Year.^[75] In language similar to both Bernays and Nietzsche, Zeller writes of “the world-forming force of a child that places here and there [hin- und hersetzt] the playing stones, builds up and smashes [einwirft] heaps of sand” (a phrase appropriated by Nietzsche in BT 24^[76] but cited in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers).^[77] Heinze and Dühring also prefigure Nietzsche in writing of the lawful character of the Heraclitean cosmos,^[78] and Bernays shares Nietzsche’s ascription to Heraclitus of a non-teleological vision of the cosmos^[79] as well as the link of physics and ethics.^[80] In this partial list there is hardly any major element missing from Nietzsche’s Heraclitus, aside from his later transformative terminology and his early artistic, aesthetic focus on pride and life identifying with truth. Indeed, the similarities are so great because Nietzsche constructed his views by reference to the Heraclitean texts and German scholarly tradition.

Nietzsche’s questionable equation of Heraclitean flux to becoming is rife throughout the tradition. We see in Plutarch, Zeller, Heinze, and Bernays the same phrase, “the flux [or stream, Fluss] of becoming,” that Nietzsche uses in UM II, HL 1.^[81] Thus, there is a clear heritage for the attribution of becoming to Heraclitus. Ueberweg criticizes this reading of Heraclitean becoming in Lassalle as a “Hegelianizing” distortion on grounds that Heraclitean flux emerged not “from the abstract concept of becoming as a unity of being and not being,” which arose only later from “the Parmenidean and Platonic critiques of Heraclitus,” but from a physical, hylozoic, incorporated intuition.^[82] However, Nietzsche’s understanding of becoming is itself physical and dynamic.^[83] In Heraclitus, “[a]ll becoming arises from the war of the opposed […], the war is not thereby at an end; the struggle endures for eternity” (PHG 5, KSA 1.825). Now, the objection that Heraclitus himself says nothing about becoming as such is reasonable, but limited in force, because Heraclitus defines change by things passing into, which is to say, becoming, their opposites, life-death, waking-sleeping. This is crucial, since Nietzsche makes becoming Heraclitus’s primary doctrine, ventriloquizing from the mouth of Heraclitus the statement, “‘I see nothing other than becoming […], the sea of becoming and passing […]. You use names of things as if they had a fixed duration: but the stream itself in which you step for the second time, is not the same as in the first time’” (PHG 5, KSA 1.823). As we have seen, in attributing the stream of becoming to Heraclitus, Nietzsche steps into the same stream as Heinze, Zeller, Bernays, and Plutarch before him. His view falls within a long tradition of Heraclitus interpretation.

Yet, at the same time, there is no particular Heraclitus scholar from whom we can derive the totality of Nietzsche’s early Heraclitus. One reason is that their topics overlap incompletely, as with Dühring. Other differences may be due to Nietzsche’s other influences, such as Boscovich,^[84] Schopenhauer,^[85] and von Baer. Nietzsche’s secular anti-metaphysics also differentiates his view from overtly metaphysical accounts of Heraclitus. For instance, whereas Zeller, like Nietzsche, stresses the Heraclitean notions of Zeus’s eternal law of becoming,^[86] Ueberweg goes further in ascribing to Heraclitus a belief in “the all-knowing, all-directing divine spirit [or reason, added in the 3rd edition]”^[87] and deriving Heraclitus’s hatred of the many from their polytheism and their failure to follow universal law or logos or to accept the one, eternal, originary fire spirit.^[88] Other major nineteenth-century German scholars are less metaphysical but often place greater limits on change and greater stress than Nietzsche on universal law, reason, and the divine. Nietzsche’s differences with his tutor, Heinze, are particularly sharp. He would criticize as metaphysical Heinze’s notions that Heraclitus is a pantheist, fire “a material substrate,” Heraclitean change merely qualitative,^[89] opposition “the essence of world movement,” and “the authentic content of Heraclitean logos” “matter” or “ousia”; Nietzsche would also disagree with Heinze that there is not only a general law of all motion (panta rhei) but also “norm, rule, lawful order, […] not blind chance [Zufall],” and even “determinate relationships” and determinate laws governing motion.^[90] In The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, Nietzsche explicitly rejects Heinze’s position that Heraclitus cannot ethically enjoin any actions or differentiate between good and bad, or those with or without the logos,^[91] for he claims that Heraclitus’s ethics is immanent in the world process in the “immanent lawfulness” of justice (PPP, KGW II 4.281). For this reason, Nietzsche writes, “[i]t is entirely erroneous to heap up objections against Heraclitus that he has no ethics: like Heinze p. 49 ff.” (PPP, KGW II 4.281). Hence, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus cannot be traced back to any individual nineteenth-century German Heraclitus scholar, even though it falls heavily within that same paradigm.

Heraclitus in Nietzsche’s Mature Philosophy

In Ecce Homo and other late works and notes of the 1880s, Nietzsche identifies himself, his basic doctrines, and his formative influences with Heraclitus more than with any other philosopher. However, his casual, non-scholarly ascription of his major doctrines to Heraclitus, despite their quite distinct terminology, gives the appearance that his late Heraclitus is merely a mask for his own personal views. Yet, detailed, comparative study of Nietzsche’s early and late writings on Heraclitus, in conjunction with source analysis, shows that his late work actually translates into his own terms views he derived from Heraclitus, the Heraclitean doxographical tradition, and nineteenth-century German Heraclitus scholarship.

Nietzsche directly identifies his philosophy with Heraclitus only in the 1880s as his explicit references sharply decrease. In 1885, he writes that he sees “[p]hilosophy, just as I alone still let it count, rather than the most universal form of history, as [the] attempt to describe Heraclitean becoming in some way and to abbreviate in signs (to translate and to mummify in a way as it were from apparent being)” (Nachlass 1885, 36[26], KSA 11.562). Philosophy for Nietzsche, then, is this inherently paradoxical attempt to describe and translate Heraclitean becoming into fixed signs that can only inadequately gesture at their living meanings, as he concludes Beyond Good and Evil. In On the Genealogy of Morality, he defines humanity as a bridge to a future (overman) defined by the chance play of the Heraclitean child (GM II 16, KSA 5.323–4). In Twilight of the Idols, he understands the key idiosyncrasy of philosophers as their anti-historical hatred of becoming (TI, Reason 1), the key Heraclitean concept for him, and the key idiosyncrasy of the theologians as their infection of the innocence of becoming (TI, Errors 7), which he characterizes by the chance play of Heraclitus in his early work (PHG 7, KSA 1.832; PPP, KGW II 4.281, 278). In Ecce Homo, he goes further, identifying Heraclitus with much of the substance of his work, his physics, epistemology, and ethics, including the notions of the world as becoming, flux, strife, chance, eternal return,^[92] and the great child playing with dice.

The affirmation of passing and destroying, what is decisive [das Entscheidende] in a Dionysian philosophy, the yes-saying to opposition and war, becoming, with radical rejection even of the concept “being” itself – therein must I recognize among all conditions the most related to me that has been thought up to now. The doctrine of the “eternal return,” which means the unconditioned and infinitely repeated revolution of all things – this doctrine of Zarathustra’s could also at last have been taught already by Heraclitus. At least the Stoics, who have inherited almost all their fundamental representations [Vorstellungen] from Heraclitus, have traces of this (EH, BT 3).

Here we see Nietzsche identifying himself, in various guises, with all four of the major Heraclitean ideas that he identifies in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, becoming or flux, strife or war, justice as the affirmation of becoming, opposition, and war, and fire as the agent and nature of the world’s creation and destruction. He also attributes to Heraclitus his stance toward morality. “[T]hat the world is a divine game and beyond good and evil – I have the Vedantic philos[ophy] and Heraclitus as forerunners” (Nachlass 1884, 26[193], KSA 11.201). Thus, Nietzsche explicitly equates his own and Zarathustra’s major doctrines with the key Heraclitean teachings of the affirmation of all things (beyond good and evil), including passing, destroying, opposition, war, becoming, and, with some hedging, the eternal recurrence of all things.

It is notable that Nietzsche here identifies Heraclitus with the affirmation of passing and destroying and the yes-saying to opposition, given the crucial role he assigns to opposition in his middle and late critiques of metaphysics. At the beginning of both Human, All too Human and Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche attributes the problems of metaphysical philosophy to its claim to the absolute diremption of opposites. In Human, All too Human, he writes that “[t]he philosophical problems now again assume in almost all pieces the same form of the question as two thousand years ago: how can something arise from its opposite, for example, the rational from the irrational, […] logic from illogic, disinterested looking from desiring wanting, life for others from egoism, truth from errors” (HH I 1). The solution of metaphysical philosophy was to deny that the one might derive from the other and to assert instead a “wondrous origin” in the essence of the thing in itself for the higher valued element, reason, logic, truth (HH I 1). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche asks the same question from out of the voice of a metaphysical philosopher unable to comprehend that something might arise from its opposite:

“How could something arise from out of its opposite? For example the truth from error? Or the will to truth from the will to deception? […] Such a genesis [Entstehung] is impossible […], the things of highest value must have another, proper origin [Ursprung], – from out of this passing, seductive, deceiving, trivial world […], they are underivable! Much more in the lap of being, in the unchanging, in the hidden God, in the ‘thing in itself’ – there must their ground lie, and nowhere else!” – This type of judging forms the typical prejudice in which the metaphysicians of all times can be recognized; this type of valuations stands in the background of all their logical procedures […]. The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in oppositions of value (BGE 2).

To deny the relations of opposites is to posit a two-worlds solution in which one power, force, or reality lies in this world and is characterized by the qualities of this world, namely, flux and change, whereas the other power, force or reality lies in another world absolutely different from this one, fixed, static, and one. The one does not emerge from the other, and the two lack any common origin. Thus, for Nietzsche, this faith in an oppositional or two-valued logic with its concomitant privileging of changeless Platonic-Parmenidean being is at the heart of metaphysics.

For this reason, Nietzsche’s mature aim of overcoming metaphysics requires that he articulate a thinking that can take account both of the flux and becoming of the world and the stasis of Parmenidean being by including and thus transforming the latter within the world of flux. Hence, his critique of the oppositions of being and becoming is at the heart of his response to the core metaphysical view that the highest, the most abstract, concepts, being, the unconditioned, the good, the true, “could not have become” (TI, Reason 4). As this dichotomy between being and becoming, stasis and flux, implies, Nietzsche’s response to metaphysical opposition is Heraclitean. For Nietzsche in the early works, the paramount example of opposition in metaphysics, as Peter Heller, Britta Glatzeder,^[93] and Matthew Meyer^[94] have discussed extensively, is the distinction between Heraclitean becoming and Parmenidean being. We can find clear support and precedent for Nietzsche’s claim in Ecce Homo to derive his affirmation of the relation of opposites from Heraclitus in fragments such as B51, in which what separates from itself unites with itself in a harmony of oppositions, like the bow and lyre or good and evil, and B62, in which mortals are immortal and immortals mortal, living in death and dying in life.^[95] Thus, Meyer has argued that in the passages from Human, All to Human and Beyond Good and Evil above Nietzsche is relying on a “Heraclitean unity of opposites doctrine.”^[96] But while I would agree that Nietzsche is thinking of Heraclitus’s rejection of static opposition, we should not describe this doctrine in any simple sense as the unity of opposites. As we have seen, Nietzsche’s early readings of Heraclitus emphasize the significance and affirmation of flux, war, becoming, destroying, and paradoxical, fluid conceptions of opposition (PPP, KGW II 4.272–3; PHG 10, KSA 1.842). In his 1880s accounts, then, he characterizes opposition itself by ceaseless flux, rather than being and stasis. This is evident in his 1881 notes, where he denies the reality of opposition and describes the world’s flux in terms of the becoming of inherently linked oppositions of life and death. He writes, “Oh the false opposites! War and ‘peace’! Reason and passion! Subject object! There is not the same!” (Nachlass 1881, 11[140], KSA 9.493). For Nietzsche, as for Heraclitus, the thinking of becoming both rules out and transforms what we regard as opposites. Our error is that “[w]e cannot think becoming otherwise than the transition from one persisting ‘dead’ condition into another persisting ‘dead’ condition. Oh, we name the ‘dead’ the motionless! As if there were something motionless! The living is no opposite of death, but rather a special case” (11[150], KSA 9.499). In this idea that the thinking of flux requires a conception of becoming that annuls oppositions by thinking them as organically related, we see the Heraclitean problematization of the opposition between life and death (mortals are immortal and immortals mortal), and indeed, of all oppositions. The proper response to metaphysics is to do away with the absolute character of any opposition such as the true and false world by deriving opposites from each other (TI, “True World”). On Nietzsche’s reading, that by which we assert the apparent character of this world is precisely the grounds for its reality, only artistically selected, strengthened, and corrected; “appearance” is in no sense to be divided from “reality” on a two worlds model (TI, Reason 6). This is not to identify or unify opposites with each other, for the one, as a special case or derivative, insidiously related to the other, is not only in constant flux with respect to it, annulling any comparison of static identities, but a sum of forces that grows organically, historically, physically, and psychologically from its posited other or common root. Thus, there is neither radical alterity, nor absolute identification in opposition, but genealogical relation and organic-historical differentiation in time and circumstances. For Nietzsche, therefore, the overcoming of the basic oppositional logic of metaphysics involves the Heraclitean undoing of opposition.

Nietzsche’s discussions of eternal recurrence and the will to power similarly rely on Heraclitean themes of war, recurrence, play, and the child. Although he hedges on eternal recurrence, linking it more strongly to the Stoics and saying only that it “could” have been taught by Heraclitus, he had already linked Heraclitus closely to eternal recurrence in the early work and Heraclitean themes are rife in his 1880s notes and writings on eternal recurrence.^[97] Thus, for instance, the famous 1881 note in which he champions the eternal recurrence of the same emphasizes our consequent new attitude toward work and suffering as the innocence and play of the child, whose battles (Kämpfe) are regarded in terms of forces.^[98] In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche does not explicitly identify a Heraclitean precursor for the will to power. However, Cox is justified in claiming that the “[w]ill to power is an assertion of the Heraclitean ‘war is the father of all’,”^[99] for Nietzsche directly links will to power and its early cousins^[100] to war (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[9], KSA 12.295), defined by the contest of forces (BGE 36; GM II 12, KSA 5.316), and argues that all things, organic and inorganic, are governed by a will to power (Nachlass 1885, 34[247], KSA 11.504). Thus, in a series of notes and published texts in the 1880s, he recognizes in all things this Heraclitean strife, defined as a contest of forces or will to power. “Force forms itself continually in the smallest organism and must then release itself” (Nachlass 1881, 11[139], KSA 9.493); “above all, something living wants to release its force – life itself is will to power” (BGE 13); “all effecting force [can be] determined as: will to power” (BGE 36). In affirming this conception of life as a contest of forces or will to power, then, he is identifying himself with the Heraclitean yes-saying to opposition and war (EH, BT 3). Thereby he affirms the notion that all differences and oppositions ultimately derive from the common root of the Heraclitean struggle of forces that defines the will to power.

Now we can connect the two concepts of the will to power and eternal recurrence in Nietzsche’s reception of Heraclitus, because Nietzsche conceives of the two concepts as inextricable. It is because the world is nothing but a play of forces, will to power, that the world recurs eternally the same ever again in the circle of the great year. “If all possibilities were not already exhausted in the order and relation of forces, no infinity would have yet elapsed. But because this must be, thus there is no new possibility anymore and all must already have been there innumerable times” (Nachlass 1881, 11[152], KSA 9.500). The cycle of forces of eternal return

is nothing that has become; it is the originary law, just as the quantity of force is an originary law without exception and transgression. All becoming is within the cycle and the quantity of force; thus not to employ the becoming and passing cycles through false analogy, for example[,] the stars or the ebb and flow of day and night[,] seasons for the characteristic of the eternal cycle (11[157], KSA 9.502).

Because the quantity of forces can never change, the constant flux of becoming is compatible with, and indeed, requires, its eternal recurrence.

The world of forces abides no diminution: for otherwise it would have become weak and been destroyed in the infinite time. The world of forces abides no standstill: for otherwise it would have been reached, and the clock of existence stood still. The world of forces thus never comes to an equilibrium; it never has a moment [Augenblick] of rest; its force and its movement are equally great at each time. Whatever condition this world can only even reach, it must have reached it and not once, but innumerable times. Thus this moment: it was already there once and many times and will just as much return, all forces distributed exactly so, as now: and just as much it stands with the moment that gave birth to this and which is the child of the now (11[148], KSA 9.498).

In this sense, Nietzsche’s doctrine of forces and will to power entails eternal recurrence, and therefore is inseparable from it.

As this relationship of will to power and eternal recurrence to Heraclitean strife implies, in Nietzsche’s late work, Heraclitus also represents Nietzsche’s fundamental project of the overcoming of metaphysics. The general formula operative here is that the physics of becoming destroys the metaphysics of being. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche expands on this idea even as he offers a rare criticism of Heraclitus:

I exempt with high reverence the name of Heraclitus. When the other philosopher-folk rejected the testimony of the senses, because they showed manifold and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had duration and unity […]. Heraclitus also did the senses injustice. They lie neither in the way that the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed, – they don’t lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that inserts the lie first, for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of duration […], “Reason” is the cause that we falsify the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing, change, they do not lie […]. But Heraclitus thereby will hold eternal right that being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only one: the “true world” is only lied into it (TI, Reason 2).

This view that the Heraclitean world of flux destroys the possibility of any static metaphysical categories of identity and being, which he also expresses in his early work (PHG 9, KSA 1.836–9), is basic to his worldview throughout his career. As he writes in 1872/73 under the title What should philosophy [be] now?, Nietzsche looks to Heraclitus to demonstrate the “impossibility of metaphysics” (Nachlass 1872/73, 23[7], KSA 7.540). On his account, Heraclitus aids this project by denying both a metaphysical, static escape from flux and a physical-metaphysical, soul-body division. Heraclitus “denied the twoness of entirely diverse worlds […], he no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical [world], a realm of determined qualities from a realm of indefinable indeterminacy” (PHG 5, KSA 1.822; PPP, KGW II 4.280). Hence, Nietzsche describes Heraclitus’s anti-metaphysics in terms identical to his own.

Nietzsche encapsulates this Heraclitean alternative to metaphysics in the non-teleological, non-moral character of the cosmic play or strife of the child. Despite lumping Heraclitus in with philosophical moralizers in asserting “the ethical-legal character of all becoming” in the regularity of appearances (Nachlass 1886/87, 7[4], KSA 12.259),^[101] Nietzsche regards the Heraclitean world as a divine game beyond good and evil. He first posits this view in the 1870s in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. He describes the Heraclitean god (Zeus) or child playing randomly with the cosmos in an image of the innocence of becoming, beyond the moral judgments of good and evil. Nietzsche’s famous August 1881 note retains this key Heraclitean image, describing the proper response to the eternal recurrence of the same as the innocence and play of the child, in contrast to the “seriousness of existence,” so that we see life aesthetically as becoming and embodying knowing and truth. The world is to be seen as “a play of children, to which the eye of the sage looks” (Nachlass 1881, 11[141], KSA 9.494–5). The return of the same is innocent in the sense of the child, as “necessity and innocence. […] The play of life” (11[144], KSA 9.496–7). The Heraclitean play of the cosmos is in this sense beyond morality in appealing to the necessity of chance, and this applies even to the individual, for “[w]e do nothing more in our intentional actions than play the play [game, Spiel] of necessity” (D 130).

From 1885 to 1888, Heraclitus exemplifies Nietzsche’s philosophy of the future and defines his philosophical doctrines. Nietzsche writes, “[t]he mode of thinking of Heraclitus and Empedocles has arisen again” (Nachlass 1885, 34[73], KSA 11.442).

Today we near again all those fundamental forms of world interpretation which the Greek spirit in Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, Democritus, and Anaxagoras, invented – we become from day to day more Greek, at first, economically, in concepts and estimations of value, as it were as Hellenizing ghosts: but one day hopefully also with our body! (41[4], KSA 11.679).

The philosophy of the future is this reborn, embodied pre-Platonic Greek spirit. “[E]very advance of epistemological and moralistic knowledge has restored the sophists […], our contemporary mode of thinking is to a high degree Heraclitean, Democritean, and Protagorean” (Nachlass 1888, 14[116], KSA 13.293).

Thus, on his own account, Nietzsche’s kinship with Heraclitus defines his wider philosophical project as well as the doctrines such as eternal recurrence, beyond good and evil, and the world as becoming, chance, and war basic to his claim to overcome metaphysics. Nietzsche’s 1880s Heraclitus references emphasize this-worldly conceptions close to his own philosophy, flux, war, becoming, the eternal recurrence, a cosmology beyond good and evil, a reading of his wholeness, purity, solitude, and self-containment as a critique of the masses, a model of the sovereign individual, and an undermining of the splendid isolation of thought from becoming and action.

Nietzsche’s Heraclitus as Triad of Personal, Philosophical, and Historical

This understanding of Nietzsche’s relationship to Heraclitus and historical scholarship can now serve as the basis for an assessment of the extent to which his Heraclitus is personal, philosophical, or historical. What is clear is that the nexus of improvisation and historical scholarship we have seen in his accounts of Heraclitus problematizes the traditional poles defining their relationship. Nietzsche scholars such as David Allison, Giorgio Colli, Sarah Kofman, Artur Przbyslawski, and Günther Wohlfahrt^[102] emphasize the personal over the philosophical nature of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus, arguing that Nietzsche attributes to Heraclitus his own philosophy and way of life. On this reading, the Heraclitus of Nietzsche’s works is of primarily personal interest for Nietzsche as an exemplar for how to live, and accordingly, Nietzsche focuses on the personal details of Heraclitus’s life. Hence, they make the person’s character, namely, that of Nietzsche, Heraclitus, and Zarathustra, the primary issue. On this view, historical accuracy is a casualty in Nietzsche’s rendering of Heraclitus: neither Heraclitus, nor the historical Zarathustra actually held the views Nietzsche ascribes to them, such as the Übermensch (the child, Aion/time), the Great Year, eternal recurrence (the self-rolling wheel), and the ekpurosis or great conflagration of the world (esp. B52).^[103]

There is a certain plausibility to these personal readings of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus. He identifies Zarathustra (Zoroaster) explicitly with Heraclitus, including two early equations of Heraclitus and Zoroaster;^[104] in an early draft of the prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he gives Zarathustra Zoroaster’s biography (“Zarathustra, born at Lake Urmi, left his homeland in his thirtieth year, went to the province of Aria [Herat], and spent ten years of his solitude in the mountain Zend-Avesta”) (Nachlass 1881, 11[195], KSA 9.519); and he identifies himself with Heraclitus. Moreover, Zarathustra is deeply personal to him. In two letters, he writes, “unbelievably much [in Zarathustra] is personally lived through and suffered that is understandable only to me” (Nietzsche to Heinrich Köselitz, End of August 1883, no. 460, KSB 6.443); “behind all the polish and unusual words stands my deepest seriousness and my entire philosophy. It is a beginning to reveal myself [mich zu erkennen zu geben] – no more!” (Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, June 28, 1883, no. 427, KSB 6.386). Hence, David Allison has some reason to claim that Zarathustra was Nietzsche and that Zarathustra “was entirely personal.”^[105] Moreover, given Nietzsche’s late remarks about Heraclitus, Sarah Kofman is justified in arguing that “Nietzsche identifies himself with Heraclitus,” as “a pure type of philosopher (that is, a possibility of life and thought).”^[106] Similarly, Giorgio Colli is right to argue that Nietzsche’s interpretation of Heraclitus is personal in the sense not only that he expresses Nietzsche’s own ideas, but that he discloses who Nietzsche is and aspires to be.^[107] On the basis of such views, these writers argue that it is not really Heraclitus, but Nietzsche’s Heraclitus that is at issue: “Nietzsche is faithful not to Heraclitus himself but to his interpretation of Heraclitus from Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.”^[108]

But these readings are all half-truths. To agree that Heraclitus is deeply personal to Nietzsche’s life and ideas and distinctive to him in its totality is not to say that his Heraclitus is not also deeply grounded in the history of Heraclitus interpretation. Indeed, I have identified sources for many of his claims to doctrinal affinity in Nietzsche’s early, careful Heraclitus scholarship in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, nineteenth-century German philology, and Heraclitus himself.

Moreover, we cannot sustain the dichotomy between the personal and the philosophical in Nietzsche. Merely to emphasize Heraclitus’s life or philosophical positions in isolation presupposes a dichotomy between the personal and the philosophical that Nietzsche rejects and that is foreign to the Heraclitean textual tradition itself. Christian Benne, Enrico Müller, Pietro Gori, Matthew Meyer, Charles Bambach, Jessica Berry, Christoph Cox, and Anthony Jensen are correct to emphasize both personal and philosophical elements in their readings of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus, because Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is not only an aesthetic construction of great personal significance to him, but also a philosophical exemplar emerging out of the historical context of the doxographic and philological traditions. Nietzsche articulates important philosophical claims precisely through his biographical, personal, and psychological claims about Heraclitus. He rejects any sharp distinction between Heraclitus’s life and philosophy, because he sees the intertwining of philosophy and life as the signal virtue of the pre-Platonic philosophers. What allowed Heraclitus and the other pre-Platonic masters

to fulfill, to raise up, to elevate [erheben], and to purify those elements taken over [from other peoples such as the Persians and Egyptians was that] they invented the philosophical archetypes [die typischen Philosophen-Köpfe] […]. All those men are whole and hewn from one stone. Between their thinking and their character a strict necessity holds sway (PHG 1, KSA 1.807).

In this sense, there is an inextricable bond among the philosophical and personal elements of Nietzsche’s Heraclitus. Because the focus on doctrinal statements silences what is personal in the philosophers, Nietzsche selects for discussion passages in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks “in which the personal in a philosopher reverberates the strongest, […] for in systems that are refuted, only the personal can still interest us, for this is the eternally irrefutable” (PHG, KSA 1.803). But because Nietzsche’s Heraclitus emerges from his study of ancient doxography and nineteenth-century German philology, he is simultaneously an historical figure.

This is not to say that Nietzsche simply sets down Heraclitus in himself. What we have seen is that even as Nietzsche’s mature Heraclitus emerges from genuine fragments, spurious anecdotes, and diverging philological readings of Heraclitus, and thus, is highly characterized impersonally by this tradition, it also differs from them in ways both personal and philosophical, specific to the lives and philosophies of Heraclitus and Nietzsche and his own syncretic product. Thus, his versions of Heraclitus, especially his biographical remarks and texts other than The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, are a congeries of inextricably intertwined historical biographies and sayings generating historical archetypes, nineteenth-century neo-Kantian historical scholarship, and personal invention, rather than a real historical personage. Nietzsche’s departures and omissions from Heraclitus derive not only from his sources, the most recent of which often regard Heraclitus through the lens of nineteenth-century neo-Kantian and Hegelian theories of perception, but also his tendency to artistically construct developed situations and ideas beyond the historical record and even to invent new fragments.^[109] While Nietzsche attributes to Heraclitus incidents with no historical foundation and sayings likely fabricated by others, there is still no consensus on Heraclitus’s life and work that would allow for the critique of the historical accuracy of Nietzsche’s reading.

Thus, a problem with the claim that Nietzsche’s reading of Heraclitus is personal is that Nietzsche uses, and goes beyond, histories of the philosophers that treat them not as singular historical individuals, but as archetypes chosen to illustrate their philosophy and the nature of philosophers. So, in a sense, these stories are already pre-formulated to unite philosophy and life by the authors such as Diogenes Laertius on whom Nietzsche draws. The pre-Platonic philosophers are the whole types uniting philosophy and life that Nietzsche so admires, then, because they were constructed as character types on the basis of their extant philosophy in the first place. But because we have no information on whether the fragments accurately reflect Heraclitus’s biography and there is no strong reason to believe any of the incidents attributed to Heraclitus, because they were fabricated from the fragments, we certainly cannot identify these incidents with the historical figure of Heraclitus or build our account of the significance of his philosophy on them. Nevertheless, the fact that Nietzsche identifies the apocryphal stories with the fragments, on the basis of which they were invented, means that even his Heraclitean characterologies to some degree reflect the philosophy of the fragments.

Nor does Nietzsche attach any importance to the stock objection to his focus on the life of the philosopher, namely, that it involves the ad hominem logical fallacy, substituting assessments of persons for arguments, because he thought that the lives of the philosophers, especially the pre-Platonic philosophers, understood normatively as ideal types, are inextricably intertwined with their philosophy (PHG 1, KSA 1.807). Thus, he is not making the broader claim here that utterances are necessarily bound up with the character of the person uttering them. He writes later of lesser philosophers and scientists whose work says little or nothing about them. Rather, his minimal contention is that the thought and character of the great philosophers are inextricably linked; their philosophy derives directly from their character, in force, style, and substance. Hence, we can judge their philosophy equally by reference to their writings and their lives. Philosophers that disengage their philosophy from their lives lack integrity; they live as if they did not really believe that what is true in theory also applies in practice. But the practical and contemplative lives ought to be regarded as inseparable (Nachlass 1875, 6[17], KSA 8.104). The universal claims of great philosophy and, thus, of science as founded on philosophy are masks for the person. Speaking of the pre-Platonic philosophers, Nietzsche says:

It is important to experience of such humans that they once have lived. Never would one be able to imagine, as an idle possibility, the pride of the wise Heraclitus, who can be our example. In him every striving for knowledge [Erkenntniß] appears unsatisfied and unsatisfying [unbefriedigt und unbefriedigend], according to his essence; for that reason if he is not taught by history, nobody will be able to believe in such regal self-respect, in such unlimited conviction [Überzeugtheit], to be the only happy liberator of truth. Such humans live in their own solar system (CV 1, KSA 1.757–8).

However, if the person of Heraclitus is a mere figment and imaginative-historical synthesis, then it seems that Nietzsche’s very project of interpretation is in question. What is left if the life is more important than the doctrine, and the life is invented?

What Nietzsche is driving at with his interpretations and imaginative syntheses of the life and thought of Heraclitus is intentionally artistic, both in his work and in his understanding of Heraclitus. Nietzsche’s Heraclitus intuitively identifies himself with truth and identifies the truth, though in a way that accords with natural science, so that Nietzsche’s construction of Heraclitus intuitively identifies with Heraclitus’s life and philosophy within the bounds of philology, as I have shown, but is selected from it in a way that stresses the creative-destructive nature of Heraclitean thought, most obviously in positing Heraclitus as intuitive and artistic. In retrieving Heraclitus as an Apollinian^[110] and later Dionysian world-builder and destroyer beyond morality (Nachlass 1872/73, 23[35], KSA 7.555), Nietzsche sustains a conception of truth without contradicting his rejection of a universal, objective epistemology by replacing the eternal objective correlates of philosophical knowledge with a playful, avowedly artistic^[111] construction of life and thought. Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is an artist in the sense that he is intuitive, rather than rationally bound, and that he regards the world order both descriptively and joyfully as an ever-changing play that exists beyond morality (PHG 7, KSA 1.832; cf. PPP, KGW II 4.281). “What is the philosopher? To answer for the ancient Greeks? […] Heraclitus. Illusion. Artistic in the Philosopher. Art” (Nachlass 1872/73, 19[89], KSA 7.449); “[t]he Philosopher. Observations on the Struggle of Art and Knowledge” (19[98], KSA 7.452). Thus, for Nietzsche, even at the beginning of his philosophical career, Heraclitus represents the philosopher of the future as artist. Heraclitus restricts the drive to know in “strengthening the mythical-mystical, the artistic” (23[14], KSA 7.544). Nietzsche valorizes an artistic approach to truth for its optimistic affirmation of life, in contrast to a nihilistic knowledge that fixes its objects in a final state and aims at nothing beyond itself. “[A]rt is more powerful than knowledge [Erkenntniß], because it wants life, and knowledge reaches as a final end only – annihilation. –” (CV 1, KSA 1.760). Art replaces epistemology by redefining truth as a function of life. For this reason, Nietzsche replaces an epistemological with an artistic Heraclitus, whose philosophy is judged by its embodiment in an artistically rendered version of his life.

To restore the centrality of life is, if anything, the primary focus of Nietzsche’s philosophical project. Nietzsche’s all-out war for the primacy of life against the requisite unselfing of one particularly objectivistic conception of footnote philology may be most obvious in The Birth of Tragedy and in his letters to his defender, Erwin Rohde, but there is a clear line from philology to philosophy of life in his contemporaneous work on ancient philosophy. As James Whitman describes it, The Birth of Tragedy itself emerges from the 1830s-era subjective magisterial philology that Friedrich Ritschl had practiced, a Romantic form of philology inspired but not practiced by August Boeckh that emphasized an artist’s intuitive synthesis of the sciences in relation to his or her own personal life.^[112] From 1869 to 1872, Nietzsche transitioned from the formal, Ritschl-approved task of compiling a scholarly edition of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers to the substantive consideration of the content and meaning of the lives and ideas of the philosophers that is the subject of The Pre-Platonic Philosophers and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, which Enrico Müller calls Nietzsche’s transition from philology to philosophy.^[113] In this transition, he was returning to and situating himself within this older tradition of philology in which life, art, and science were all intertwined. Nietzsche’s sin, for which he was met with two years of silence from philology journals, consisted in the dissonance between the positivist “exact philology” then dominant in Germany with this older intuitive tradition, with its neglect of precise details in favor of personality, general archetypes loosely connected to facts, and an overall vision of the spirit or Geist.^[114] Nietzsche affirmed something like this latter form in closing his transitional lecture, Homer and Classical Philology (1869), with a few words “of the most personal type,” namely, that “each and every philological activity should be enclosed within and hedged in by a philosophical worldview in which everything individual and isolated evaporates as something contemptible and only the whole and unitary remain in existence” (Homer and Classical Philology, KGW II 1.268–9). In writing about the personal lives of the philosophers, then, he circumscribes philology within a larger philosophical worldview, which is itself based closely on the Heraclitean tradition and scholarship. Though the philosophy he was then writing still lacked the key form, strategy, and style of his later work, as well as the historical method of genealogy he would later use as a corrective to its isolated treatment of individuals, it already shares its basically artistic Heraclitean content as the affirmation of the eternal recurrence of the flux and strife of living, to which he would eventually add his own artistic version of the “dark” Heraclitean style and fragmented forms, which he called aphorisms.