Heraclitus is misleading; he seems so accessible. Any fool can approach the fragments and derive meaning out of them… but reading the man properly… is this even possible with apparently so little to go on?
If he lacks intelligibility in a vacuum what context can we safely place him in?
Or is he finally a locked door?
Yes. You just have to read everything left of him very well - in Greek. But even then you can’t be sure to understand him, of course.
When he says that “Homer should be turned out of the lists and whipped, and Archilochus likewise”, he is really saying that Homer is worth it [axios] to be thrown out of the lists and whipped (and Archilochus likewise). I interpret this to mean that Heraclitus did not criticise, but share the “public” (Greek male citizens’) opinion that Homer and Archilochus were the greatest Greek poets, and that he thought newcomers should not be measured according to the standards they set, as those standards were nigh-on impossible to meet.
“[i]n statues, on cameos, etc., Homer and Archilochus [stand] side by side as ancestors and torchbearers of Greek poetry, in the certainty that only these two are to be regarded as truly original minds, from whom a stream of fire flowed onto the entire later Greek world.”
[Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, chapter 5.]
Yes, that is an interesting and (as far as I know) uncommon interpretation. Unfortunately I don’t read Greek and probably never will…
I’d like to suggest that in reading Heraclitus the real value is not so much in whether we can arrive at a ‘correct’ interpretation (how would we ever really know?) but in how hard we try to get there. However, not to read the fragments lightly and develop some half-baked notion of what it all means, which I think is the real danger in my suggestion…
I guess I mean that the very personal process that comes from reading well is in the end more important than what we can definitely say is a correct interpretation.