The unity of opposites: hidden harmony of tension, strict identity, or dialectical reciprocity?

Heraclitus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The unity is hidden, and it is better than the open one. The bow holds itself together by the very tension that would tear it apart; the lyre sounds because the strings pull against the frame; this is palintropos harmonie, the back-turning joining, the harmony of opposite tensions. The way up and the way down are one and the same — the road has its meaning in being walked in either direction, and the two directions are not two roads but one.

The sea is drinkable for fish and deadly for men: the same water, the opposed predicates, both true. Day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-hunger: the god varies as fire varies (XXIII, D.67). These are not paradoxes for paradox's sake; they are the structure of what is. The opposites are not identical in the strong sense, that A is the same as not-A — that is the Aristotelian misreading aimed at the bow-and-lyre.

Nor are they synthesized into a third term in the Hegelian sense, where thesis and antithesis give way to a higher unity — Hegel saw the dialectic and missed the harmony. The opposites are joined by the logos, held in the tension that constitutes them as opposed-and-joined. The hidden harmony is the joining itself.12

Sources

  1. Mund. 5 396b20-22 (et al.) συνάψιεςὶ ὅλα Kai οὐχ Sha, συμφερόμενον Kal? δια- φερόμενον, συνᾷδον διᾷδον, Kai? ἐκ πάντων ev καὶ ἐξ ἑνὸς πάντα. 1 συνάψιες. A°CEGT: συλλάψιες (superscriptum v) Lp: συλ- λήψιες P: συλλάψει és Stob. 1.40.5 2xai del. Zeller 3 καὶ om, F F12 D48 (B67) (Ps.-?) Hippol. Ref. 9.10.8 6 Beds ἡμέρη εὐφρόνη," χειμὼν θέρος, πόλεμος εἰ- ρήνη, κόρος λιμός: ἀλλοιοῦται 82 ὅκωσπερ "πῦρ", ókórav?
    Early Greek Philosophy Vol III, Heraclitus chapter, pp. 47–50
  2. Kal κέντρον 75 pav ὑπὲρ γῆν, τὸ δ ̓ ὑπόγειον, Kal τὸ bev ἀνατολικόν, 7d 88 δυτικόν, Kai τὰ pev ἀριστερά, 7a 88 δεξιά, UE Te Kal ἡμέρα: Kal διὰ τοῦτο παλίν- τονος ἡ dppovia Kal τοξεύει! bid τῶν ἐναντίων. 1 παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου Kai λύρης Heraclitus D49 Iamblichus (R91) R91 (cf. Nachtrag I, p. 494.15) lambl. An. in Stob. 1.49.39 (I, p.
    Early Greek Philosophy Vol III, Heraclitus chapter, pp. 197–199

Where the argument is made

  • Fragment LXXVIII (D.51): 'they do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself: harmony (palintropos harmonie) of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.' Fragment LXXX (D.54): 'the hidden harmony is better than the open.' Fragment CIII (D.60): 'the way up and the way down are one and the same.' Fragment LXX (D.61): 'the sea: water purest and foulest
  • for fish drinkable and life-giving, for men undrinkable and deadly.' Fragment XCIV (D.62): 'immortals mortal, mortals immortal, living the others' death, dead in the others' life.' Fragment LXXXII (D.80): 'one must know that war is shared and conflict is justice (dike) and all things come to pass through conflict and by necessity.' Fragment XXIX (D.53): 'war is father of all and king of all
  • and some he has shown as gods, others as men
  • some he has made slaves, others free.' Fragment CXXIV (D.10): 'graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.'

How the argument was received

The unity of opposites is the doctrine most directly attacked by Aristotle (Metaphysics 1005b23-26): the claim that A and not-A are the same is read as the most blatant violation of the principle of non-contradiction. The Aristotelian diagnosis of paradox has shaped much of the subsequent reception. Hegel by contrast embraced the doctrine, reading it as anticipating dialectical synthesis: "there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic." Hippolytus preserved the bow-and-lyre fragment (D.51) in service of a Christian-trinitarian point. Modern logical-analytic readers (Vlastos 1955, Kirk 1954) have tried to reconstruct the doctrine in terms compatible with non- contradiction by distinguishing strict identity from structural unity. Kahn (1979) reads the doctrine as hidden harmony of tension and treats the bow-and-lyre as the master figure.