>Homer deserves to be expelled from the competition and beaten with a staff — and Archilochus too!What did heraclitus mean by this?
>>25360530need more context
>>25360530fragments more like shitposts
>>25360545There is No context. This book(which survives in fragments) is just heraclitus's surviving quotes. We don't have much of heraclitus's writings that survived.
>>25360559then it is a mystery if there are no line that come before or after this one. it very well could be that the competition is who has the best logos, since some people might say Homer I guess? no idea who the other guy is though
>>25360530I get the sense philosophers where kinda beefing with the poets back then for who got the primary claim to wisdom, and were often fighting against poets in their role of the maintainers and of religious wisdom, as opposed to natural/rational investigation. Some other fragments from Heraclitus where hes beefing with poets (and perhaps to give some wider context for >>25360569 ):DK B40:>Much learning does not teach understanding, otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, Xenophanes andHecataeus.DK B56>Men are deceived in their knowledge of things that are manifest, even as Homer was who was the wisest of all the Greeks. For he was even deceived by boys killing lice when they said to him: "What we have seen and grasped, these we leave behind; whereas what we have not seen and grasped, these we carry away."DK B104: >For what thought or wisdom have they? They follow the poets and take the crowd as their teacher, knowing not that "the many are bad and few good."DK B105: >[Heraclitus] said that Homer was an astronomer.DK B106: >Heraclitus attacked Hesiod for making some days good and other days bad, because he did not recognize that the nature of every day is one.Some not explicitly about poets but about the general state of received/traditional knowledge, including that of the poets:DK B70:>Human opinions are children's toys.DK B74:>We should not act and speak like 'children of our parents': (i.e., in the way that has been handed down to us.)DK B101>Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears (i.e hearsay).
>>25360530Part of the point of presocratics is they were bridging philosophy from the homeric worldviews. Archilochus is a poet so is Homer. Heraclitus is part of the Thalian branches of thinking.
>>253605301. Heraclitus believed in Logos which is a sort of divine cosmic ordering. Good and bad exist within this cosmic framework. Homer in comparison was a primitive who spoke of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses. Heraclitus would view this metaphysics as backwards and primitive. Gods and goddesses arbitrating good and bad vs a non-anthropomorphized Logos.2. Heraclitus thought Strife was necessary as a counter to pleasure and that both good and bad were necessities. He disliked Homer for speaking of bringing an end to strife.3. Homer spoke of mythic Elysium and Olympus as places of Gods and the afterlife whereas Heraclitus was skeptical of those - “ There await men, after they are dead, things which they do not expect or imagine."4. Heraclitus saw beauty and truth as things outside of human cognition. Helen of Paris isn’t beautiful and Aphrodite/ beauty, Athena/ wisdom as personifications of their qualities and attributes in a human like manner (ie Aphrodite as literally a really pretty woman rather than an abstract concept) would be offensive to him.
>>25360979>>Eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears (i.e hearsay).This one clearly is more about positivism and sense perception as compared with the idealism of the Eleatics and poets for instance. Sense perception as all that you need to interpret reality rather than thinking as being of the Eleatics or the primitive metaphysical dualism of Homer - “the Sun is as big as a human foot”
Another aspect perhaps is the mystery cults based on Orphic and Homeric texts which existed at the time (“Dionysus, in whose honor they rave in bacchic frenzy, and Hades are the same.") Heraclitus saw Logos as something that is not honored with drinking and feasting like the pagan celebrations of the Homeric gods. That is why he is frequently called a pre-ChristianThis image is from Hegel’s lecture on Heraclitus. “Death of the gods is life and life of the gods is death” - ie seeing the world as Logos is life and living for drinking and carousing is actually the death to the gods they nominally are worshiping.
