I. GREEK PHILOSOPHY AS A REFORM AND THERAPY OF THE ORDINARY LANGUAGE; II. HERACLITUS’ EXPERIMENTS WITH LANGUAGE, GRAMMAR AND STYLE

Abstract

The first part of this investigation draws attention to one understudied, and yet philosophically important approach to language in Greek philosophy from archaic times to Aristotle: the reform of ordinary language, word-making and attempts to discover or to create an ideal language or a language “conforming to nature”. The following cases at point are discussed: the critique of the ordinary language as a product of doxastic imagination in Heraclitus and Parmenides associated with linguistic idealism and the theory of “linguistic error” of mortals in ancient times that resulted in the origin of polytheism and belief in the reality of the phenomenal world of many things misnamed by empty words. The elimination of the words for “birth and death”, “generation and destruction” as “deceptive” and their systematic replacement by new “correct” mechanistic terminology of “excretion from mixture, recombination and dissolution” of material particles in Ionian physics (Anaximander, Anaxagoras) and Empedocles. The theory of the “disease of language” as the root of mythology and anthropomorphic polytheism of poets in Sophists (Prodicus, the Derveni papyrus), Aristotle’s attempts to give names to “anonymous” moral qualities in Nicomachean Ethics. The idea of a “divine language” is to some extent anticipated in the Homeric topos of the “language of gods” which has Indo-European roots. A suggestion is made en passant that if the author of the “dream theory” in Plato's Theaetetus, quoted by Wittgenstein in Philosophical investigations, I.46 as an ancient antecedent of his simple “objects” in the Tractatus, is Heraclitus rather than Antisthenes (as we argue on the ground of the new reconstruction of grammatical analogy in Heraclitus’ logos-fragments), then a historical link can be established between Wittgenstein's linguistic idealism and Heraclitus’ analogies of “cosmic grammar” and “alphabet of nature”, although in Wittgenstein’s perception it was, of course, a theory of “Socrates” and Plato, not of Heraclitus. Part II is a case at point study of language and style in Heraclitus including following topics: oracular features, syntactic polysemy (hyperbaton), omission of the conjunction καί between opposites, omission of the verb ‘to be’ in the desсriptions of phenomenal change, omission of article with words referring to ‘appearances’ ((Greek Text) φανερά, (Greek Text) δοκέοντα), replacing a standard singularis (ποταμός) with pluralis (ποταμοί), because what we see is a series of rivers changing every moment, Fränkel’s “proportion” as a means of approaching the unknown, forms of chiasmus, chiastic (amoebean) structure of fragments as a mimesis of the natural cyclical processes (the ‘road up and down’).