If all things became smoke
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εἰ πάντα τὰ ὄντα καπνὸς γένοιτο, ῥῖνες ἂν διαγνοῖεν
If all things that exist became smoke, the nostrils would tell them apart.
Preserved by Aristotle in On Sense (De Sensu), in his discussion of smell. Heraclitus imagines the visible world reduced to smoke and asks what would still tell one thing from another.
If everything turned to smoke, Heraclitus says, the nose would still tell one thing from another. The line is preserved by Aristotle in his treatment of smell, and it is easy to read as a throwaway — but it fits a serious thought. For Heraclitus the soul is a dry exhalation, close kin to fire and smoke, and the senses are how the fiery soul reads a fiery world. Reduce the visible world to vapour and you have not abolished knowledge; you have simply handed the work to a subtler sense.
The undercurrent is the standing of smell. Sight and hearing are the senses Heraclitus prizes (B55 honours what can be seen and heard), yet here it is the nostrils that do the discriminating — <em>diagignōskein</em>, to tell apart, the same root as the knowing men so conspicuously lack. In B98 the souls in Hades 'smell'; scent is the sense that still works where light fails and bodies are gone. To picture the world as smoke is to picture a world with the visible burned off, and to insist that even then it stays legible: different things remain different, and something in us can still read the difference.
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