Unity of Opposites

The Heraclitean doctrine that the structure of being is the held tension of contraries. “People fail to understand how being at variance it agrees with itself: there is a back-stretched connection (harmoniē) as in the bow and the lyre” (B51, Sullivan 1995, p. 112). The bow is not a bow until the straight stick and the flexible cord are drawn against each other; the lyre is not a lyre until its opposed strings are tightened into tone. Unity is not the absence of opposition. Unity is opposition held.

Heraclitus extends this to justice itself: “it is necessary to understand that war is common, and justice is strife, and that all things come into being according to strife” (B80). Polemos (war, strife) is not a breakdown of cosmic order but the form order takes. “War, as father of all things, and king” (B53). And in his most paradoxical formula: “immortals mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of the other and dying the life of the other” (B62, cited in Seaford 2004).

Seaford traces this formula to the mystery-cult substrate: Heraclitus “seems to take to (or beyond) its limit, and to systematise, the abstraction (from myth) of the mystic unity of opposites” (Seaford 2004). The doctrine is thus already, at its Heraclitean origin, initiatory — a teaching about what one sees on the far side of a passage through death. The depth tradition that inherits it — alchemy’s coniunctio, Jung’s enantiodromia and transcendent function, Hillman’s insistence on holding tension without premature synthesis — is continuing this Heraclitean grammar without deviation.

Relationships

• logos
• fire-heraclitus
• enantiodromia
• coniunctio

Primary sources

• fragments-heraclitus (Heraclitus, c. 500 BCE)
• Sullivan, Psychological and Ethical Ideas (1995)
• Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind (2004)