La lumière de l'Obscur

Jean Bouchart d'Orval

Les Éditions du Relié

1997

(excerpt in English)

Of all those whose talks I have heard, none has gone so far as to recognize that that which is wise transcends all things.
(Fragment 1)

Man still happily contents himself with a pale light thrown upon a life that has not yet delivered its enigma to him. His initial quest often becomes a magma of categories and concepts, ultimately ending up in insignificance. Very few have succeeded in shaking off this torpor, especially in the West.

If Heraclitus, even in his time, seems to have heard many talks about wisdom, how many more have we heard over the last many centuries and millennia! The finding remains roughly the same everywhere: almost all talks, spoken or written, have fallen far short in front of the blazing light Heraclitus is speaking about. Everywhere men are busy pursuing mirages. With very few exceptions, even those who are called philosophers, have left the depressing enclosure in which Plato and Aristotle had confined them. If Heraclitus may have stigmatized the spiritual poverty of his contemporaries, but he would be overworked today.

But it is never too late for a good clean-up. This is what the first fragment accomplishes, beginning with “Of all those…” Heraclitus beckons man to being more audacious in his life, because that is what he has been cruelly lacking. Should we again be happy with living like the sleeping and stupidly waiting for the inevitable destruction of the body? Far from being the opposite to audacity, wisdom is the supreme audacity. Audacity does not consist of throwing provocative slogans and falling into philosophical sensationalism, but rather in questioning what has not been questioned but is still continuing to set the tone in our personal life and our clumsy way of questioning the universe.

Discrimination is yet to come. The beckoning reached us 2550 years ago, not only in Greece, but also elsewhere, including China and India, and it still holds. It was renewed in Israel 2000 years ago. This beckoning is renewed with each generation. That which beckons us is very patient and always finds appropriate messengers. Heraclitus speaks about a knowledge that is in fact a recognition (ginóskein), a little bit like when one enters in a dark room and lets one's vision open up. He beckons to the maturity of the vision. How does this maturity come about? That is what Heraclitus gets into later. Here he leaves us a perfume of what wisdom is.

The neutral sophón designates the sage in the sense of that which is wise and not in the restricted meaning of a wise person. It is not the person who is wise, but rather That which is wise. That is why in fragment 3 Heraclitus speaks of “those who listen not to me but to the logos”. The person cannot be wise; it is only a concept, a convention, and not the reality. When we are not alert (living like the sleeping), we forget reality and we live in a personal, or individual, manner. In fragment 21, Heraclitus notices that “each of the sleeping takes refuge in an individual world”. That which is wise is what “governs all things” (fragment 4) and which is not itself a thing.

Like most words, the word “wise” has acquired, after being used so much, a mundane and vulgar meaning: it has undergone a terrible erosion. Today, we call wise anybody who tries to look wise, someone who uses the jargon of wisdom but who is still a person. Or we mix up wisdom and old age, which is nonsense. Even in antiquity the meaning of wise has been trivialized. Most of the time we apply this word to phenomenal life and that always refers to the individual. To do good applies to a person (a “good” person), that is to a particular center of perception. The behavior of a wise one, (a human being who refers to That which is wise, doesn’t consists in doing what is good and avoiding what is evil —these categories have no meaning for him— but rather in allowing the profound vision, the intrinsic light, “the logos of the soul which grows by itself” (fragment 8). One should not conclude that such a person will do anything with anybody anytime, nor, as we shall see later, brush aside the rules of just life that all serious traditions have recommended to man.

That is why Heraclitus asserts that “that which is wise transcends all things.” Its radical nature is therefore underlined, because as long man tries to find it on the level of “all things”, frustration and sorrow await him. “All things” designates everything that is an object of perception, all the elements of the phenomenal world. In other words: everything that ahs a beginning, a middle and an end! The gathering speech of That which is wise can only be transcendent. Ah! Another word that does not mean much these days. Transcendent doesn’t mean disconnected of all things, separated from all things; it means that it is not something and it cannot be grasped. When all we know about water is ice, liquid water and water vapor, we cannot have an idea of what water is in itself and not as one of its forms. But water in itself is not separated or foreign to the waves, to the clouds or to the ice floe. In the same way, could That which is wise and “governs all things”, “the One, the only Wise” (fragment 7), be separated even for split second from its own forms, which are “all things”?

From the onset, Heraclitus stresses the special status of That which is wise. That which is wise has no opposite, which is not the case for “all things”: “ All things happen through opposition and necessity” (fragment 109) and that is “harmony through opposite tensions” (fragment 108). The harmony of That which is wise is transcending: this is Heraclitus message. “The hidden harmony is superior to the visible one” (fragment 112). The light Heraclitus beckons to is the light of the Obscure, not light as opposed to the obscure. That is “the true light that enlightens every man”, as heralded John in the prologue of his Gospel.

The word used by Heraclitus (kechorisménon) is in fact the past participant of the perfect tense of the verb choréo, which means “to withdraw”, and the word chóra means “space”. The idea of distance, of withdrawal is there. That strangely echoes the Sanskrit word kaivalya, used by Patanjali to designate the state of final liberation, or total awakening: that word also means “isolated”. The realized being perceives reality without mixing (samyoga) it, that is identifying it, with any form of the phenomenal world. The discrimination has come and it is the cessation (nirodha) of confusion (literal translation of samyoga), the abolition of ignorance (avidyâ) ¹. Heraclitus has perfectly grasped the radical aspect of That which is wise. His reader should not expect a collection of vague platitudes and mushy generalities. Fragment 42 sends an explicit warning: “Lets not agree so easily on the greatest subjects.” Heraclitus speaks with the authority of That which knows.

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(1) The reader unfamiliar with these terms can consult the Patanjali Yoga Darshana, especially sutras IV-35, II-17, I-2 et II-2, in Patanjali, Jean Bouchart d’Orval, Éditions du Relié, Avignon, 1999.