Episode 13: The Obscure: On the Philosophy of Heraclitus

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 9 May 2018

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Heraclitus of Ephesus was one of the great pre-Socratic thinkers. Called the Obscure and the Weeping Philosopher, he left behind a collection of fragments so mysterious and pregnant with meaning that they continue to puzzle scholars to this day. In this episode, Phil and JF use a random number generator to select a number of fragments and speculate about their content. By the end, they will also have disclosed the bizarre contents of JF's tenth-grade "hippie bag," outed Oscar Wilde as a Zen Buddhist, and taken a walking tour of a city that exists only in Phil's dreams. REFERENCES Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? Northrop Frye, The Great Code Northrop Frye, Words with Power I Ching: The Book of Changes Oxford World Classics, The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists Wikisource page for Heraclitus James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld Dogen Zenji, Genjokoan Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body Gilles Deleuze on Spinoza Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols Neil Gaiman, Seasons of Mist (the fourth arc of the Sandman series) Deleuze on Dreams Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:21.8	For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to this one.
0:52.2	Yeah?
0:53.0	Yeah. I just, I love Heraclytus.
0:55.7	I love talking about Heraclytus.
0:57.9	It feels like there are no experts on Heraclitis, so.
1:01.8	Yeah, that's a good point.
1:03.4	There's something to be said for a philosopher of whom almost nothing remains.
1:07.6	Yeah.
1:08.3	And yet, who is so present in those fragments, you know. I do think something
1:13.7	very alive comes out of the fragments. In fact, I have this kind of like magical theory about
1:20.7	Heraclytus and about the way certain thinkers or poets get to us. Like Heraclytus exists only in fragments, but there's something appropriate about that.
1:33.3	Something about his philosophy makes it so that it can only kind of be expressed in fragments.
1:39.3	And maybe that's an effect, my impression is just an effect of the fragmentary nature of his work, but either way, that's all we've got.
1:46.0	So, like, there's something about his non-totalizing vision that makes it appropriate that all we would get are these, like, little missives from the, from the fog of time that would come to us through some kind of serendipitous process that preserves
2:02.9	them. Like, there's something cool about that. I get the same feeling when I look at the Bible,
2:08.4	you know, which was actually not a book, but a library of books collated, put together over time
2:13.5	by like semi-haphasardly by different groups of priests, you know, over centuries and centuries.
2:21.3	And yet when you look at it, it all fucking works, you know, like when I remember reading Northrop Fry's
2:27.3	the great code and words with power and just marveling at the connections he found embedded
2:32.9	in these texts. And you can get that from reading
	...

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