sehepunkte 26 (2026), Nr. 9

Victoria Wohl: The Poetry of Being and the Prose of the World in Early Greek Philosophy

Victoria Wohl's book on the writings of five "Presocratic" authors - Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Democritus - develops the Sather Classical Lectures she gave in Berkeley, CA, in 2023. In tenor, it has a remarkable verbal wit and cleverness suitable for the spoken genre, full of fresh aperçus and insight, though in apparatus, bibliography, concentration, and argumentative focus it amounts to a robust and very smart scholarly monograph. Its purpose is to work out "the productive aporia between logos and onta," - that is, language and the reality it putatively represents and belongs to - "at the heart of early Greek ontology" (191). In each chapter, Wohl treats of the way the poetry or prose of a single philosopher's writing - especially its vocabulary, micro-structure, and form - make or withdraw claims of metaphysical relevance. The approach is thus textual rather than historical, analytical rather than explanatory. In style (though this is tightly bound to the substance), Wohl writes in a register aligned with literary theory and continental philosophy, with heat, expository vigor, and discovery, full of bold and unexpected observations. Some readers may find, as I did, that the presentational aspect is a bit unrelenting and stressful; but that's purely a matter of taste and familiarity. The book, given its linguistic and scholarly chops, should be taken as the model for those who wish to write on ancient Greek philosophy with the insights of phenomenology, post-structuralism, or other recent hermeneutical approaches. A different if related challenge to reading the book, albeit baked into the approach, was the recurrence for me of the following question: "But could Parmenides [or whoever] have actually meant to say that? - Were those thoughts ones that his setting or program or insight would actually have prompted?" But my impression is that Wohl would not have seen it as her duty, in this relatively short book, to answer that question; we must first know what the text is saying, which is work enough, before we can ask what accounts for its so saying that. Accordingly, though I have to keep reconsidering what knowledge I expected to get from the book, and did get from it, Wohl's book is unquestionably a brilliant and fresh take on canonical fifth-century philosophical texts.

The Parmenides chapter (21-55) opens with the overbubbling paradox of describing the simplicity of being with the complexity of language (22). I ran into the trouble of thinking that, nevertheless, we can describe wet things in dry media and brief things at length. I think the trouble was exacerbated by Wohl's not particularly entering the debates about the referent of to eon, what "being" or "reality" he means to specify (for instance, the properties of whatever is called "real," or whatever must necessarily rather than merely contingently exist, etc., rather than simply whatever there is). What proved more compelling, to my eyes, is the reflection on Parmenides' language of "bonds," as a metaphor for necessitation (42-7).

The Heraclitus chapter (56-88) emphasizes two orders of time: the cosmic aei and the human aeon. They are not just incommensurable; the former would seem to swamp the latter. Yet some of Heraclitus' writings contain what Wohl calls a "stutter" or "syncopation" (80), and these hiatuses amount to the pause that refreshes, so to speak - the occasion for human (mortal) life. (On a personal note, a decade ago I gave a conference paper on "Two Orders of Time in Heraclitus" but forwent submitting it to the ensuing volume on the grounds that I hadn't convinced myself of its truth; Wohl's chapter - with much greater sophistication and justification than I could have marshalled, though also with a different conclusion - assures me finally that my idea was a plausible one; I'm glad she's written this one.)

The Empedocles chapter (89-123) focuses on the "autobiographical" aspect of Empedocles' poem(s), and argues that his "philosophy explodes each component of the word - self (autos), life (bios) and writing (graphê)" (89). As Wohl puts it, the chapter "embraces the incoherences in Empedocles' work and persona as the inevitable byproduct of his ambitious experiment in rhizomatic thinking" (92). Selfhood is problematized by, among other facts (not least the daimôn of Purifications), the fact of elemental mixing: each personal iteration "is just a temporary reorganization of the components of the other, its identity porous and provisional at best" (100). A life can hardly be individuated or fixed in the Empedoclean cosmos; life is instead "simply the 'meshwork' of [...] interwoven lines of flight" (106). And the writing of it "is itself in motion"; Empedocles also deviously reintroduces the authorial "I" whose possibility we had come to doubt (115-16).

The Anaxagoras chapter (124-57) describes the cosmologist's universe as a scene of political revolution. The world begins in undifferentiated mud, with "all elements [...] reciprocally intermeshed and 'everything is in everything'"; but then "into this egalitarian ur-community order is introduced by the quasi-tyrannical Nous [...] who holds kratos over the elements and distributes them into a perceptible universe" (128). Yet the pre-Nous world does not provide a specifically political ideal, since there are no valid cases of exclusion that would give opportunity for the calling out and appealing to rights that politics amounts to (137). On the other hand, Anaxagoras' prose, which Wohl describes as paratactical, emphasizes each thing's "refusal of subordination"; "the relations between the things become open to interpretation and contestation [...] they become political" (154, 156). Wohl also shows the limitations on Nous - and thereby enunciates an Anaxagorean critique of this mode of sovereignty - and the ways in which Nous nevertheless appears to serve as Anaxagoras' authorial avatar.

The Democritus chapter (158-90) pursues "δέν" studies, the outré and elusive antonym to ouden ascribed to the atomist in reference to his (evidently contrastive) body-as-opposed-to-void. The Real, and its speakability, come into question, as does the nature of the atom: as material, form, or something in between. A powerful section on materialist self-knowledge and an ethics of contentment - both centered on absence and lack - aims to invigorate what Wohl calls an otherwise "exceptionally banal" (175) set of moral maxims. The chapter finishes with an inquiry into the meaning of Democritus' extensive neologizing, with which he "forge[s] a metadiscourse that is transparent, universal, and real" (186). At times one wonders, however, whether Wohl's inferences from her assertion that Democritus' δέν goes "unspoken" - "he invents this word, but he cannot put it to work within his totalizing world-system" - reach a bit far, since it is attested for him in Aristotle's fragmentary Democritus, Galen, and Plutarch, and the greatest percentage of his physical writings is lost.

The book's conclusion (191-8) provides a helpful summary and ends provocatively by asking whether our Presocratics count, on a Badiouian definition, as "antiphilosophers" (197-8).