Vividness and Spatial Scenes: Four Examples from Heraclitus’ Fragments

Abstract

Heraclitus’ fragments employ a powerful literary technique which is used to convey information without giving it directly: the texts appeal to sensation and bodily experience to evoke spatial scenes and so become intuitively comprehensible and display a surprisingly vivid quality. The means to bring this effect about can be analysed and explained with approaches from cognitive studies. This article presents three criteria to analyse vividness in spatial scenes and applies them to four fragments of Heraclitus in order to show how the text makes use of perceptual structures and exploits them to convey information without the recipient noticing it.