2.5 Listening to the Logos 93
2.5.2 Back-turning Harmony 97
Though Heidegger gives no explanation for why he chooses the grape gathering metaphor to propound his theory that “saying is a letting-lie-together-before which gathers and is gathered” (Heidegger 1984:64), his reference to the harvest is indicative of an enduring relationship between agriculture and song. Singing
has accompanied cultivation ever since early farming practices.92 Greek farmers sang work songs while toiling in the vineyards and grain fields (Gioia 2006:35).93 This supports both Heidegger’s metaphor and my assertion that Fragment B50 has musical undertones.Heidegger’s assertion that the logos is the “laying that gathers” (Heidegger 1984:66) could have a musical connotation, as the work song that labourers sing together.
In jazz vocabulary, to ‘lay down’ means to play music. Nicholas P. Dempsey discusses how musicians using this phrase treat music as “a thing they could act upon,” manipulate, place or move (Dempsey 2008:76).95 ‘Laying it down’, as
92 Ted Gioia’s research on work songs reveals that agricultural work songs are “the oldest surviving secular songs from ancient Egypt” Gioia (2006:38).
93 One example of a Greek agricultural work song is the Lityerses, a reaping and threshing song (Gioia 2006:36). In the Iliad, Book 18 (561-572), Homer describes the shield of Achilles, which depicts a vineyard with grape gatherers working while a youth plays the harp (or lyre) and sings. They are depicted toiling, singing, dancing and whistling to the music (Chapman 2000:311):
In time of vintage: youths and maids, that bore not yet the flame Of manly Hymen, baskets bore of grapes and mellow fruit. A lad that sweetly touch’d a harp, to which his voice did suit, Center’d the circles of that youth, all whose skill could not do
The wanton’s pleasure to their minds, that danced, sung, whistled too.
95 Dempsey, Nicholas P., 2008. The coordination of Action: Non-Verbal Cooperation in Jazz Jam Sessions, ProQuest: The University of Chicago.
Dissertation. This Dissertation investigates how people coordinate group
activities that do not appear to have any coordination. He bases this investigation on jazz jam sessions and interviews in which people listen to and comment upon recordings of their own performances.
Dempsey explains, has a colloquial nature. The phrase is sometimes used to describe laying down the rhythm or the harmony in a piece of music or music session. He uses the example of playing with a bassist. “Playing with a soloing bass player obligates him to ‘lay down the harmony’” (Dempsey 2008:79). “Behind a bass player’s solo, one might sometimes want to ‘lay down the change’” (Dempsey 2008:78).96 The musical, lyrical root meaning of legein, points to a musical lineage that has not been explored in previous interpretations of Heraclitus.
In a call and response scenario, two distinguishable phrases are uttered. One phrase is a call coming from a speaker and one phrase is a response to the call by listeners. I propose that in Fragment B50, the call is the logos. This is not to say that logos cannot mean word, speech or assertion, but that in Fragment B50, the
logos operates as a call. In this call and response scenario, homologein refers to
the responding logos by the listeners, saying together: ‘all is one’. Heraclitus
96 The modern use of ‘lay down’ is significant because American and Cuban jazz employ African-derived music techniques such as polyphony and antiphony. The persistence of the phrase ‘to lay down’ in the modern practice of African derived antiphony, when taken into consideration with research into the influence of ancient African thought on pre-Socratic philosophers, Charles Hersch, author of Subversive Sounds (2007), writes about the African origins of antiphony in jazz. Hersch describes African art as being both “inherently dialogic” and “inseparable from the community interactions of which it is a part” (2007:137). Olela (1984), Odhiambo (1997), Gyekye (1987), Mudimbe (1994), Diop (1987), Bernal, G.G.M. James (2008) and Onyewuenyi (2005) assert that ancient Greek philosophy’s traceability to Africa, particularly Egypt. Egyptian thought and an ancient African worldview influenced the early Greek philosophers. Ancient Egypt is also intimated in Plato and Aristotle (Odhiambo 1997:30;33).
advises listeners to respond ‘all is one’ as the speaker completes his call. The listeners respond together in unity with the speaker.99
The last line of Fragment B50 expresses this harmony: Ev IIàvra, meaning ‘all is one’ or ‘all things are one’. The meaning of IIàvra, or panta, is all things or the universe, implying there is unity in this back and forth movement of calls and responses. Its “counter-concept,” Ev, or hen, is the One (Heidegger/Fink 1993:168-169). The One is the unity of opposites found in other Heraclitean fragments, particularly in Fragment B51. “They do not apprehend how being at variance it agrees with itself: there is a connexion working in both directions, as in the bow and the lyre” (Kirk 1962:203); “[People] do not understand how, what is diverse…is in agreement…with itself: a back-turning harmony…like that of the bow and lyre” (Briggman 2012:144) and “People do not understand how what is diverse (nevertheless) coincides with itself, just like the inverse harmony of a bow and lyre.”100 Robinson translates this as not an “inverse harmony,” but a “back-turning connection, like [that] of a bow or lyre” (Robinson 1991:37). The ‘back-turning harmony’ in this interpretation is translated from palintropos
harmonie. In Greek, palintropos or ‘back-turning’ also means contrary or
‘changing in the opposite direction’ (Vlastos 1995:137). Mention in Fragment B51 of the phrase, ‘back-turning harmony’ conjures the image of a lyre that is
99 This recalls a traditional African worldview, which is based on the idea of a “unified state of balance or harmony” (Smitherman 1977:104).
100 Hippolytus, S., The Refutation of All Heresies Book 9, OrthodoxEbooks, p.257.
played with a strung bow.101 This is contrary to most interpretations that see the bow as representing a weapon used to shoot arrows and the lyre as the strings of the lyre.102 When referring to ‘the bow and the lyre’ and a back-turning motion and harmony, Heraclitus may be speaking about the bowed lyre.With the bowed lyre, the bow moves in two opposite directions, thus exhibiting a back and forth movement indicative of the ‘unity of opposites’, the Heraclitean theme that knowing something’s opposite begets knowledge of the thing. In oppositions, ‘the former by their changing become the latter, and the latter in turn are changed and become the former’ (Jaspers 1966:18). “Any one thing following a given line of change will be found to turn in the opposite way sooner or later” (Vlastos 1995:137). Gregory Vlastos (1995:71;149) explains that opposites are the same thing but with “modifications.” In Vlastos’ ‘sameness of opposites’, the bow moves in the same way across the lyre in each different direction. This movement of change in direction of the bowing is what Vlastos would call a modification. The modification in Fragment B51 is the palintropos or back-
101 The lyre of Greece at Heraclitus’ time was plucked with the fingers (as seen with Apollo in Greek mythology). The instrument derived from similar instruments of North Africa, such as the rebab, meaning bowed instrument, or ‘played with a bow’. Andersson, Otto. 1930. The Bowed Harp, translated by Kathleen Schlesinger, London: New Temple Press, p.212. Apel, W. 1971. Harvard Dictionary of Music, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, p. 93.
102 These interpretations of Fragment B51 cite a two-way tension in the strings of the lyre, pulled taught by the lyre’s arms and in the string of a stretched bow. Kirk translates palintronos as ‘back-tension’-rather than palintropos. Tension is a theme in Kirk’s interpretations. However, as Vlastos observes, tension is not stated anywhere by Heraclitus in the fragments (Vlastos 1995:136:137). Kirk describes the unity in opposing tensions in these two objects as “The two-way tension that exists between the frame and the string in bow or lyre is said to resemble the way in which something which is being carried apart is simultaneously drawn together” (Kirk 1962: 215;216).
turning - a movement that is not one direction or its opposite, but the coming together of their change in direction.103
In this way, the dialogue in Fragment B50 can be thought of as a palintropos
harmonie, in which logos is a facet of two-way discourse or dialogue, and not a
monologue to be heard. This dialogue requires listening - attending to the call of the other. Considering Vlastos, listening in Fragment B50 is the modification that changes the direction of the call and the response. The call comes, is listened to, and then is responded to. The response is then listened to and the call comes again, and so on.
Thus, the logos in Fragment B50 is de-centred or a logos that was never a centre. Richard Kearney describes how Derrida demonstrates, through deconstruction, that presence does not represent anything. We see, Kearney says, that “there never was a centre” (Kearney 1986:116). Logocentric thinking, however, which can be traced back to interpretations of Heraclitus, deems logos as a centre or moment of presence.105 Logocentric thinking assumes that speaker and listener are present to each other in time and space, leaving no distance between them. Yet, dialogue is non-presence because it maintains temporal and spatial distance in the difference between speaker and listener. The dialogue of call and response - logos and homologein - in mutual interaction, assures that the two are separated
103 The notion of back-turning evokes Nancy’s renvoi - a return or referring back in his “sonorous presence,” which is a “complex of returns (renvois)” bound in resonance (Nancy 2007:12-16). I will explain Nancy’s theory of resonance in the following chapter.
105 The Stoics (beginning in the third century b.c.), Philo (c.25B.C. to A.D.50), in the Gospel of St. John (second half of the first century) and Christian theology (Jaspers 1966:24), Plato in Cratylus (390e-427d).
in time and space, and this difference makes immediate presence impossible. Both logos and homologein, though spoken, are non-present in dialogue, making
logos in dialogue no more consonant with logocentric thinking than is listening.