criticizes his predecessors and contemporaries for their failure to
see the unity in experience. He claims to announce an everlasting Word
(Logos) according to which all things are one, in some sense.
Opposites are necessary for life, but they are unified in a system of
balanced exchanges. The world itself consists of a law-like
interchange of elements, symbolized by fire. Thus the world is not to
be identified with any particular substance, but rather with an
ongoing process governed by a law of change. The underlying law of
nature also manifests itself as a moral law for human beings.
Heraclitus is the first Western philosopher to go beyond physical
theory in search of metaphysical foundations and moral applications.
1. Life and Times
Heraclitus lived in Ephesus, an important city on the Ionian coast of
Asia Minor, not far from Miletus, the birthplace of philosophy. We
know nothing about his life other than what can be gleaned from his
own statements, for all ancient biographies of him consist of nothing
more than inferences or imaginary constructions based on his sayings.
Although Plato thought he wrote after Parmenides, it is more likely he
wrote before Parmenides. For he criticizes by name important thinkers
and writers with whom he disagrees, and he does not mention
Parmenides. On the other hand, Parmenides in his poem arguably echoes
the words of Heraclitus. Heraclitus criticizes the mythographers
Homer and Hesiod, as well as the philosophers Pythagoras and
Xenophanes and the historian Hecataeus. All of these figures
flourished in the 6th century BCE or earlier, suggesting a date for
Heraclitus in the late 6th century. Although he does not speak in
detail of his political views in the extant fragments, Heraclitus
seems to reflect an aristocratic disdain for the masses and favor the
rule of a few wise men, for instance when he recommends that his
fellow-citizens hang themselves because they have banished their most
prominent leader (DK22B121 in the Diels-Kranz collection of
Presocratic sources).
2. Theory of Knowledge
Heraclitus sees the great majority of human beings as lacking understanding:
Of this Word's being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both
before they hear and once they have heard it. For although all things
happen according to this Word they are like the unexperienced
experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each
thing according to its nature and declare how it is. Other men are
unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful
of what they do when they are asleep. (DK22B1)Most people sleep-walk
through life, not understanding what is going on about them. Yet
experience of words and deeds can enlighten those who are receptive to
their meaning. (The opening sentence is ambiguous: does the 'forever'
go with the preceding or the following words? Heraclitus prefigures
the semantic complexity of his message.)
On the one hand, Heraclitus commends sense experience: "The things of
which there is sight, hearing, experience, I prefer" (DK22B55). On the
other hand, "Poor witnesses for men are their eyes and ears if they
have barbarian souls" (DK22B107). A barbarian is one who does not
speak the Greek language. Thus while sense experience seems necessary
for understanding, if we do not know the right language, we cannot
interpret the information the senses provide. Heraclitus does not give
a detailed and systematic account of the respective roles of
experience and reason in knowledge. But we can learn something from
his manner of expression.
Describing the practice of religious prophets, Heraclitus says, "The
Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither reveals nor conceals, but gives
a sign" (DK22B93). Similarly, Heraclitus does not reveal or conceal,
but produces complex expressions that have encoded in them multiple
messages for those who can interpret them. He uses puns, paradoxes,
antitheses, parallels, and various rhetorical and literary devices to
construct expressions that have meanings beyond the obvious. This
practice, together with his emphasis on the Word (Logos) as an
ordering principle of the world, suggests that he sees his own
expressions as imitations of the world with its structural and
semantic complexity. To read Heraclitus the reader must solve verbal
puzzles, and to learn to solve these puzzles is to learn to read the
signs of the world. Heraclitus stresses the inductive rather than the
deductive method of grasping the world, a world that is rationally
structured, if we can but discern its shape.
For those who can discern it, the Word has an overriding message to
impart: "Listening not to me but to the Word it is wise to agree that
all things are one" (DK22B50). It is perhaps Heraclitus's chief
project to explain in what sense all things are one.
3. The Doctrine of Flux and the Unity of Opposites
According to both Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus held extreme views
that led to logical incoherence. For he held that (1) everything is
constantly changing and (2) opposite things are identical, so that (3)
everything is and is not at the same time. In other words, Universal
Flux and the Identity of Opposites entail a denial of the Law of
Non-Contradiction. Plato indicates the source of the flux doctrine:
"Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things go and nothing stays, and
comparing existents to the flow of a river, he says you could not step
twice into the same river" (Cratylus 402a = DK22A6).
What Heraclitus actually says is the following:
On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters
flow. (DK22B12)There is an antithesis between 'same' and 'other.' The
sentence says that different waters flow in rivers staying the same.
In other words, though the waters are always changing, the rivers stay
the same. Indeed, it must be precisely because the waters are always
changing that there are rivers at all, rather than lakes or ponds. The
message is that rivers can stay the same over time even though, or
indeed because, the waters change. The point, then, is not that
everything is changing, but that the fact that some things change
makes possible the continued existence of other things. Perhaps more
generally, the change in elements or constituents supports the
constancy of higher-level structures.As for the alleged doctrine of
the Identity of Opposites, Heraclitus does believe in some kind of
unity of opposites. For instance, "God is day night, winter summer,
war peace, satiety hunger . . ." (DK22B67). But if we look closer, we
see that the unity in question is not identity:
As the same thing in us is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young
and old. For these things having changed around are those, and
conversely those having changed around are these. (DK22B88)The second
sentence in B88 gives the explanation for the first. If F is the same
as G because F turns into G, then the two are not identical. And
Heraclitus insists on the common-sense truth of change: "Cold things
warm up, the hot cools off, wet becomes dry, dry becomes wet"
(DK22B126). This sort of mutual change presupposes the non-identity of
the terms. What Heraclitus wishes to maintain is not the identity of
opposites but the fact that they replace each other in a series of
transformations: they are interchangeable or transformationally
equivalent.
Thus, Heraclitus does not hold Universal Flux, but recognizes a
lawlike flux of elements; and he does not hold the Identity of
Opposites, but the Transformational Equivalence of Opposites. The
views that he does hold do not, jointly or separately, entail a denial
of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Heraclitus does, to be sure, make
paradoxical statements, but his views are no more self-contradictory
than are the paradoxical claims of Socrates. They are, presumably,
meant to wake us up from our dogmatic slumbers.
4. Criticism of Ionian Philosophy
Heraclitus' theory can be understood as a response to the philosophy
of his Ionian predecessors. The philosophers of the city of Miletus
(near Ephesus), Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes, believed some
original material turns into all other things. The world as we know it
is the orderly articulation of different stuffs produced out of the
original stuff. For the Milesians, to explain the world and its
phenomena was just to show how everything came from the original
stuff, such as Thales' water or Anaximenes' air.
Heraclitus seems to follow this pattern of explanation when he refers
to the world as "everliving fire" (DK22B30, quoted in full in next
section) and makes statements such as "Thunderbolt steers all things,"
alluding to the directive power of fire (DK22B64). But fire is a
strange stuff to make the origin of all things, for it is the most
inconstant and changeable. It is, indeed, a symbol of change and
process. Heraclitus observes,
All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods
for gold and gold for goods. (DK22B90)We can measure all things
against fire as a standard; there is an equivalence between all things
and gold, but all things are not identical to gold. Similarly, fire
provides a standard of value for other stuffs, but it is not identical
to them. Fire plays an important role in Heraclitus' system, but it is
not the unique source of all things, because all stuffs are
equivalent.
Ultimately, fire may be more important as a symbol than as a stuff.
Fire is constantly changing-but so is every other stuff. One thing is
transformed into another in a cycle of changes. What is constant is
not some stuff, but the overall process of change itself. There is a
constant law of transformations, which is, perhaps, to be identified
with the Logos. Heraclitus may be saying that the Milesians correctly
saw that one stuff turns into another in a series, but they
incorrectly inferred from this that some one stuff is the source of
everything else. But if A is the source of B and B of C, and C turns
back into B and then A, then B is likewise the source of A and C, and
C is the source of A and B. There is no particular reason to promote
one stuff at the expense of the others. What is important about the
stuffs is that they change into others. The one constant in the whole
process is the law of change by which there is an order and sequence
to the changes. If this is what Heraclitus has in mind, he goes beyond
the physical theory of his early predecessors to arrive at something
like a process philosophy with a sophisticated understanding of
metaphysics.
5. Physical Theory
Heraclitus' criticisms and metaphysical speculations are grounded in a
physical theory. He expresses the principles of his cosmology in a
single sentence:
This world-order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it
ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and
being quenched in measures. (DK22B30)This passage contains the
earliest extant philosophical use of the word kosmos, "world-order,"
denoting the organized world in which we live, with earth, sea,
atmosphere, and heavens. While ancient sources understand Heraclitus
as saying the world comes to be and then perishes in a fiery
holocaust, only to be born again (DK22A10), the present passage seems
to contradict this reading: the world itself does not have a beginning
or end. Parts of it are being consumed by fire at any given time, but
the whole remains. Almost all other early cosmologists before and
after Heraclitus explained the existence of the ordered world by
recounting its origin out of elemental stuffs. Some also predicted the
extinction of the world. But Heraclitus, the philosopher of flux,
believes that as the stuffs turn into one another, the world itself
remains stable. How can that be?
Heraclitus explains the order and proportion in which the stuffs change:
The turnings of fire: first sea, and of sea, half is earth, half
firewind (prêstêr: some sort of fiery meteorological phenomenon).
(DK22B31a) Sea is liquefied and measured into the same proportion as
it had before it became earth. (DK22B31b)
Fire is transformed into water ("sea") of which half turns back into
fire ("firewind") and half into earth. Thus there is a sequence of
stuffs: fire, water, earth, which are interconnected. When earth turns
back into sea, it occupies the same volume as it had before it turned
into earth. Thus we can recognize a primitive law of conservation-not
precisely conservation of matter, at least the identity of the matter
is not conserved, nor of mass, but at least an equivalence of matter
is maintained. Although the fragments do not give detailed information
about Heraclitus' physics, it seems likely that the amount of water
that evaporates each day is balanced by the amount of stuff that
precipitates as water, and so on, so that a balance of stuffs is
maintained even though portions of stuff are constantly changing their
identity.
For Heraclitus, flux and opposition are necessary for life. Aristotle reports,
Heraclitus criticizes the poet who said, 'would that strife might
perish from among gods and men' [Homer Iliad 18.107]' for there would
not be harmony without high and low notes, nor living things without
female and male, which are opposites. (DK22A22)Heraclitus views strife
or conflict as maintaining the world:
We must recognize that war is common and strife is justice, and all
things happen according to strife and necessity. (DK22B80) War is the
father of all and king of all, who manifested some as gods and some as
men, who made some slaves and some freemen. (DK22B53)
In a tacit criticism of Anaximander, Heraclitus rejects the view that
cosmic justice is designed to punish one opposite for its
transgressions against another. If it were not for the constant
conflict of opposites, there would be no alternations of day and
night, hot and cold, summer and winter, even life and death. Indeed,
if some things did not die, others would not be born. Conflict does
not interfere with life, but rather is a precondition of life.
As we have seen, for Heraclitus fire changes into water and then into
earth; earth changes into water and then into fire. At the level of
either cosmic bodies (in which sea turns into fiery storms on the one
hand and earth on the other) or domestic activities (in which, for
instance, water boils out of a pot), there is constant flux among
opposites. To maintain the balance of the world, we must posit an
equal and opposite reaction to every change. Heraclitus observes,
The road up and down is one and the same. (DK22B60)Here again we find
a unity of opposites, but no contradiction. One road is used to pursue
two different routes. Daily traffic carries some travelers out of the
city, while it brings some back in. The image applies equally to
physical theory: as earth changes to fire, fire changes to earth. And
it may apply to psychology and other domains as well.
6. Moral and Political Theory
There has been some debate as to whether Heraclitus is chiefly a
philosopher of nature (a view championed by G. S. Kirk) or a
philosopher concerned with the human condition (C. H. Kahn). The
opening words of Heraclitus' book (DK22B1, quoted above) seem to
indicate that he will expound the nature of things in a way that will
have profound implications for human life. In other words, he seems to
see the theory of nature and the human condition as intimately
connected. In fact, recently discovered papyri have shown that
Heraclitus is concerned with technical questions of astronomy, not
only with general theory. There is no reason, then, to think of him as
solely a humanist or moral philosopher. On the other hand, it would be
wrong to think of him as a straightforward natural philosopher in the
manner of other Ionian philosophers, for he is deeply concerned with
the moral implications of physical theory.
Heraclitus views the soul as fiery in nature:
To souls it is death to become water, to water death to become earth,
but from earth water is born, and from water soul. (DK22B36)Soul is
generated out of other substances just as fire is. But it has a
limitless dimension:
If you went in search of it, you would not find the boundaries of the
soul, though you traveled every road-so deep is its measure [logos].
(DK22B45)Drunkenness damages the soul by causing it to be moist, while
a virtuous life keeps the soul dry and intelligent. Souls seem to be
able to survive death and to fare according to their character.
The laws of a city-state are an important principle of order:
The people [of a city] should fight for their laws as they would for
their city wall. (DK22B44) Speaking with sense we must rely on a
common sense of all things, as a city relies on its wall, and much
more reliably. For all human laws are nourished by the one divine law.
For it prevails as far as it will and suffices for all and overflows.
(DK22B114)
The laws provide a defense for a city and its way of life. But the
laws are not merely of local interest: they derive their force from a
divine law. Here we see the notion of a law of nature that informs
human society as well as nature. There is a human cosmos that like the
natural cosmos reflects an underlying order. The laws by which human
societies are governed are not mere conventions, but are grounded in
the ultimate nature of things. One cannot break a human law with
impunity. The notion of a law-like order in nature has antecedents in
the theory of Anaximander, and the notion of an inherent moral law
influences the Stoics in the 3rd century BCE.
Heraclitus recognizes a divine unity behind the cosmos, one that is
difficult to identify and perhaps impossible to separate from the
processes of the cosmos:
The wise, being one thing only, would and would not take the name of
Zeus [or: Life]. (DK22B32) God is day night, winter summer, war peace,
satiety hunger, and it alters just as when it is mixed with incense is
named according to the aroma of each. (DK22B67)
Evidently the world either is god, or is a manifestation of the
activity of god, which is somehow to be identified with the underlying
order of things. God can be thought of as fire, but fire, as we have
seen, is constantly changing, symbolic of transformation and process.
Divinity is present in the world, but not as a conventional
anthropomorphic being such as the Greeks worshiped.
7. Accomplishments and Influence
Heraclitus goes beyond the natural philosophy of the other Ionian
philosophers to make profound criticisms and develop far-reaching
implications of those criticisms. He suggests the first metaphysical
foundation for philosophical speculation, anticipating process
philosophy. And he makes human values a central concern of philosophy
for the first time. His aphoristic manner of expression and his manner
of propounding general truths through concrete examples remained
unique.
Heraclitus's paradoxical exposition may have spurred Parmenides'
rejection of Ionian philosophy. Empedocles and some medical writers
echoed Heraclitean themes of alteration and ongoing process, while
Democritus imitated his ethical observations. Influenced by the
teachings of the Heraclitean Cratylus, Plato saw the sensible world as
exemplifying a Heraclitean flux. Plato and Aristotle both criticized
Heraclitus for a radical theory that led to a denial of the Law of
Non-Contradiction. The Stoics adopted Heraclitus's physical principles
as the basis for their theories.
8. References and Further Reading
Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1982, vol. 1, ch. 4.
Uses modern arguments to defend the traditional view, going back to
Plato and Aristotle, that Heraclitus' commitment to the flux doctrine
and the identity of opposites results in an incoherent theory.Graham,
Daniel W. "Heraclitus' Criticism of Ionian Philosophy." Oxford Studies
in Ancient Philosophy 15 (1997): 1-50.
Defends Heraclitus against the traditional view held by Barnes and
others, and argues that his theory can be understood as a coherent
criticism of earlier Ionian philosophy.Hussey, Edward. "Epistemology
and Meaning in Heraclitus." Language and Logos. Ed. M. Schofield and
M. C. Nussbaum. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982. 33-59.
Studies Heraclitus' theory of knowledge.Kahn, Charles H. The Art and
Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979.
An important reassessment of Heraclitus that recognizes the literary
complexity of his language as a key to interpreting his message.
Focuses on Heraclitus as a philosopher of the human condition.Kirk, G.
S. Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1954.
Focuses on Heraclitus as a natural philosopher.Marcovich, Miroslav.
Heraclitus: Greek Text with a Short Commentary. Merida, Venezuela: U.
of the Andes, 1967.
A very thorough edition of Heraclitus, which effectively sorts out
fragments from reports and reactions.Mourelatos, Alexander P. D.
"Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Naive Metaphysics of Things."
Exegesis and Argument. Ed. E. N. Lee et al. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1973.
16-48.
Examines Heraclitus' response to the pre-philosophical understanding
of things.Nussbaum, Martha C. "Psychê in Heraclitus." Phronesis 17
(1972): 1-16, 153-70.
Good treatment of Heraclitus' conception of soul.Robinson, T. M.
Heraclitus: Fragments. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987.
Good brief edition with commentary.Vlastos, Gregory. "On Heraclitus."
American Journal of Philology 76 (1955): 337-68. Reprinted in G.
Vlastos, Studies in Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, Princeton: Princeton U.
Pr., 1995.
Vigorous defense of the traditional interpretation of Heraclitus
against Kirk and others.
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