From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 105
wrong name: ‘One, alone, the wise, likes and dislikes to be spoken of by the name
of Zeus’ (B32). 116
Although the meaning of this saying is obscure, it implies that the name
applied to the one, or the wise, does matter (it likes or dislikes certain names,
presumably because they do or do not have the right significance), but there will
not be one name that is consistently right. It would be an error to suppose that the
god must only be Zeus and must always go by that name. In certain
circumstances that may be the wrong name. Just as in the case of Dionysus the
variety of appropriate ritual did not distinguish two separate gods, so the correct
use of a name other than Zeus will not tell against a single sole being, the wise.
Heraclitus does not explicitly discuss how language acquires significance in
context, in the way that a modern philosopher of language might be expected to.
But his handling of the language, and the claims he makes about significance in
the more general sphere of human practices and social custom, indicate his
commitment to the idea that language does not have meaning independently of
the particular context in which it is used; indeed the same words in the same
context may carry a plurality of meanings when read in a number of different
ways, or by different readers with different points of view. Meaning is not fixed
by the individual words, but is nevertheless governed by a system or rationale
which explains how it can be open to various or opposed meanings, yet not
become a meaningless flux of indeterminate sense.
The lord who has the oracle at Delphi neither speaks, nor conceals, but
signifies.
(B93) 117
The ‘lord’ in question is the god Apollo; his oracle was such that the Pythia, a
priestess in a state of ecstatic possession, conveyed the god’s response to the
petitioner. The god did not speak directly to the applicant, nor did he keep his
answer wholly to himself or deliberately mislead; but the response he gave by
way of the Pythia was not always easy to interpret. It might indicate the truth,
but only if you could grasp the significance. One of the stories Herodotus tells is
of Croesus who consulted the Delphic Oracle for advice on whether to pursue his
empire-building strategy. 118 ‘If you cross the river Halys you will destroy a great
empire’ was the response he got. The response is ambiguous because the
meaning of ‘a great empire’ is not fixed until we find a context within which it
makes unequivocal sense. The petitioner is likely to assume that the god’s
response functions in the same context as the question that was asked. In a
conversation, in shared human language, we should gather the sense from the
context within which the words were uttered, but the god’s response comes
detached from any context. Hence Croesus can disastrously misunderstand the
response by taking the empire in question to be not his own but that of his
opponent.