Fragment 31

Jones’s literal translation of this fragment is: ‘If there were no sun, there would be night, in spite of the other stars.’ Because the sense of the Greek seems incomplete, I introduce the questions into my translation, to suggest possible connections with the logic of reversal in fragments 35, 36, and elsewhere.

This passage identifies Fragment 31 as a statement about solar primacy and cosmic reversal, noting its incompleteness and its translator’s effort to link it to Heraclitus’s wider dialectical logic.

Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, 2001thesis

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Jones’s literal translation of this fragment is: ‘If there were no sun, there would be night, in spite of the other stars.’ Because the sense of the Greek seems incomplete, I introduce the questions into my translation, to suggest possible connections with the logic of reversal in fragments 35, 36, and elsewhere.

A parallel attestation of the translator’s note on Heraclitus Fragment 31, confirming both the literal content and the interpretive problem of the fragment’s incompleteness.

Ephesus, Heraclitus of, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, 2001thesis

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Just as our psyche, which is air, controls us, so breath and air encompass the whole world-order’ (B 2). How much of the fragment contains authentic wording of Anaximenes is debated but for our purposes the fragment gives us important information about psyche.

Sullivan treats the Anaximenes fragment (B 2, catalogued as 31 in the Aetius source chain) as foundational evidence that psyche, constituted as air, governs both the individual and the cosmos — a pre-Socratic parallel to Heraclitean solar governance.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995supporting

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her ‘noema is not so softly disposed to the anger of a child’ (Fragment 35); and in her complaint, ‘I know not what to do; my noemata are in two parts . . .’ (Fragment 52).

Jaynes’s citation of Sappho’s numbered fragments, including the cluster around Fragment 31, documents the progressive internalization of noema as a split, self-aware thought-entity — a key staging post in his argument for the emergence of consciousness.

Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting

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everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the Whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment.

Abrams invokes the Romantic diagnosis of fragmentation — the reduction of the whole human being to a partial, specialized fragment — which resonates thematically with the incompleteness attributed to Fragment 31 as a textual and cosmological problem.

M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 1971aside

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