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| Imaginary portrait of Heraclitus looking characteristically gloomy. Artist unknown |
The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, Book IX, Chapter 5) that Aristotle says that the inventor of dialectic was the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno of Elea. This may mean Zeno was the first to write dialogues; or Aristotle may have been thinking of Zeno’s paradoxes, which aim to refute the opposing position by presenting it as leading to absurd and therefore unacceptable consequences.
A stronger candidate for the founder of the tradition however would be another pre-Socratic philosopher, born before Zeno, whom we know in English as Heraclitus (Greek Ἡράκλειτος, which transliterates as Hērákleitos but I’ll stick to the conventional rendering here). He came from Ephesus, a major Ionian Greek trading city in Asia Minor. Diogenes dates his floruit to the 69th Olympiad, namely 504-1 BCE (late 6th century),[1] and references by Heraclitus himself corroborate this dating, making him roughly contemporary with the playwright Aeschylus, the poet Pindar, and the philosophers Pythagoras and Xenophanes, but prior to the births of Socrates and Plato.
We know very little about him. Ancient commentators are not always reliable, and even Diogenes was writing in the 3rd century CE, several hundred years later. However, according to him (citing a lost work by Antisthenes), Heraclitus renounced a claim to kingship in Ephesus in favour of his brother, which if true indicates that he was a high-ranking member of the aristocracy. Legend has it that he separated himself from society to practice philosophy in the mountains and was given to melancholy, but this may be apocryphal, fabricated from things he said. Certainly in the fragments he can be scathing about fellow philosophers and of his fellow humans generally, regarding them as ‘uncomprehending’ and ‘asleep’. We needn’t agree with the many commentators who take this for misanthropy: Heraclitus’s primary concern is the nature and place of humankind, and its tragic ignorance in the face of truth. He wants to offer his fellow humans a better way of understanding the world.
From 547 BCE to the mid-5th century BCE, Ephesus was under Persian rule. It lies just 25 miles north of Miletus – the birthplace of a new paradigm of philosophy and science through his percursors Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, who together represent the Milesian school. Heraclitus was of course conversant with the intellectual life of his time and refers to a few figures by name, usually disapprovingly, such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes.
Although his work has only survived in fragments, Heraclitus seems to have attempted a systematic philosophy: of a world whose truth and unity is hidden, driven by opposition (a unity or coincidence of opposites) and transformation (constant change). The complexity and profundity of Heraclitus’s thought makes him one of the most interesting early Greek philosophers (and one of my intellectual heroes). He exerted an enormous influence on philosophers ancient and modern, from Plato and the Stoics to Hegel, who asserted: ‘There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic.’[2] It is reasonable to describe him as a ‘process’ philosopher, i.e. one who holds that all is process and change. For my part, I regard him as the effective founder of dialectics, and it’s mostly in that light that I will consider him here, rather than being detained by his cosmology, politics or ethics.
Surviving texts
Heraclitus seems to have written one (probably short) work, possibly known as On Nature, which according to Diogenes was placed in the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus – where the general public, incidentally, would have had no access to it.[3] He probably didn’t only write a book – he would have communicated ideas orally too, but that of course is irrecoverable. Like all ancient Greek writings, the original manuscript, along with any copies that were made, is long lost. What survives of his work is about 130 fragments that were preserved in citations – themselves lucky to have survived – by other, later (sometimes much later) writers. These include Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plutarch, the Christians Clement and Hippolytus, and the 5th century CE compiler John Stobaeus. If you find this frustrating, it is considerably more text than we have for Heraclitus’s predecessors.
The standard system for referencing his work, as for all pre-Socratic philosophers, is based on the collection Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics), by the German classical scholar Hermann Alexander Diels. First published in 1903, this was expanded a few times by Diels himself and then in two further editions by the German philologist Walther Kranz (final edition 1952), giving us the Diels-Kranz referencing used in academia. To illustrate the DK system, the fragment
Men who love wisdom must be good inquirers into many things indeed.
is referred to as 22B35: where ‘22’ refers to the philosopher (here Heraclitus), ‘B’ refers to the nature of the fragment, whether a summary or ‘testimony’ by someone else (A), a direct quote (B), or a reputed paraphrase (C), and the ‘35’ refers to the particular fragment. A complete English translation of all the fragments can be found in Kathleen Freeman’s Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers [4] (‘ancilla’ here means an aid to understanding or handbook). For this article I will reference them using their last DK number (so I’d call the one above ‘DK35’).
All the pre-Socratic philosophers come to us in fragments, but from the pithy nature of his sayings, it seems Heraclitus deliberately wrote in that form – G.S. Kirk suggested there was no book, just ‘isolated statements’.[5] Diels too viewed H’s works as essentially aphoristic – in the Fragmente he presents them effectively randomly rather than presuming to organise them. However Diogenes describes Heraclitus’s book as a ‘continuous treatise’, which suggests it was more than a string of aphorisms. This makes it hard to know how to present the fragments: if we present them randomly, we suggest Heraclitus wasn’t a systematic thinker, whereas he actually presents what the scholar Charles Kahn described as ‘a fully articulated vision of the world’ [6] and was perhaps the first to do so. It does an injustice to his obvious literary artistry to suggest he would compose individual sentences with such care yet be indifferent to how they sit together in his book – as Kahn observes, ‘Heraclitus is not merely a philosopher but a poet as well’ – particularly given his preoccupation with unity. Thus Kahn and others have attempted to arrange the fragments into a meaningful order based on their content.
There are several English translations available. We have already mentioned Freeman (1948). Others include H.W.S. Jones (Loeb, 1931), Philip Wheelwright (1959), Guy Davenport (1976), and the aforementioned Charles Kahn (1979). Then there’s Fragments by Heraclitus by Brooks Haxton (2003), a poet who presents the fragments as free verse. When you compare Kahn’s
Although all things come to pass in accordance with this account
with Haxton’s
Yet all things follow from the Word
…the poetic simplicity of the latter is preferable to my taste. But that doesn’t mean it represents Heraclitus better, and the book isn’t a very scholarly edition with a poor foreword. For this article I will use Kahn’s translations unless I indicate differently.
Diogenes Laertius repeats the view found in several ancient commentators that Heraclitus’s work was ‘obscure’ or ‘mysterious’: the epithet σκοτεινός (skoteinós). And yes, his style is paradoxical, using wordplay and deliberately ambiguous syntax (as noted by Aristotle)[7], and is thus open to contrasting interpretations. Heraclitus surely has his own style in mind when he remarks that the Delphic oracle ‘neither declares nor conceals, but gives a sign’ (DK93). This oracular style distances him from the reader, but his impenetrability is much exaggerated, and to accuse him of being deliberately obfuscating is to miss the point. There is a reason for employing ambiguity, as we’ll see – Hegel was unfair when he accused Heraclitus of mere sloppiness, but hit the mark when he noted, ‘The obscurity of this philosophy, however, chiefly consists in there being profound speculative thought contained in it.’[8] The truth is not easy for mere humans to find. The strength of Heraclitus’s ambiguity is that it lets him say several things at once. The disadvantage is that it is easy for others to impose their own interpretations onto it. He has even been interpreted as the first postmodernist, possessing a ‘deconstructive mind’.[9] Of course, all interpretations are located in a particular historical perspective, and a timeless vantage point is unattainable, as is a final, definitively correct account. But this doesn’t mean all interpretations have equal worth.
Logos
We must begin with one of Heraclitus’s key ideas – the logos (λόγος) . This is where we get the English suffix -ology from: thus ‘psychology’ is the ‘account of the soul/mind’ (psyche). Aristotle tells us Heraclitus puts this concept at the opening of his book:Although this account [logos] holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend, both before hearing it and once they have heard. (DK1)
The polysemous term logos can be interpreted and translated in many ways, though we must take care not to read connotations into the fragments – such as the Logos as Word of God from John’s Gospel – which post-date Heraclitus by centuries.[10] It is a verbal noun, that is, it is derived from the ancient Greek verb legein (λέγειν) which can mean ‘to say (something significant)’, ‘to gather’ or ‘to count’. In context, logos can mean utterance/word/saying, reckoning/enumeration, account/narration, even proportion or ratio, depending on the context. Greek philosophers posed it as rational, significant discourse, as opposed to mere mythic discourse. This abundance of meanings gives the word logos flexibility and power, and as a wordsmith Heraclitus could have several of them in mind at once, or use different meanings in different sentences. The utterance or account Heraclitus refers to in his opening lines could in one sense mean his own book – an acknowledgment that its opacity means that people won’t understand him even after they’ve read or heard his words.
The term’s primary sense for him seems to be a kind of ordering or structuring of the cosmos, a principle that is eternal and total:
This account [logos] holds forever… all things come to pass in accordance with this account. (DK1)
It is wise, listening not to me but to the report [logos], to agree that all things are one. (DK50)
From all things one and from one thing all. (DK10)
Heraclitus seems to be saying that everything that exists is a single whole or unity, yet also is made of many things. The logos is the account of everything that is. He also remarks:
To the soul [psyche] belongs a report [logos] that increases itself. (DK115)
Here logos is particular to a living being. The soul has its own process of growth within it, driven by a rational principle that can be discovered and understood. The connotations in the Greek of speech, discourse and reason show that logos is not just a material principle of the cosmos but includes human thought and discourse (hence Hegel’s interest in Heraclitus as the originator of what he called the Idea). Everything we think and do depends upon it. This association of thinking with logos is clear in remarks like this:
Although the account [logos] is shared, most men live as though their thinking were a private possession. (DK2)
…which makes a distinction between thinking privately and thinking in common in accordance with the logos. We may conclude that for Heraclitus there is, as Kahn notes, an ‘identity of structure between the inner, personal world of the psyche and the larger natural order of the universe’[11].
In this fragment we can see how Heraclitus contends that people realise neither the existence of this logos nor their place within this unity. They are involved in it, but tragically distanced from it by ignorance. To understand the world, we must grasp the relationships between the parts, and of the parts and the whole to each other. A person restricted to their own limited thoughts and experience is like someone asleep:
Although all things come to pass in accordance with this account, men are like the untried [inexperienced] when they try such words and works as I set forth, distinguishing each according to its nature and telling how it is. But other men are oblivious of what they do awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do asleep. (DK1)
Someone who is asleep is partaking of an unreal private world, not understanding the shared, actually existing world: he or she is ‘absent while present’ (DK34). Even highly erudite people, says Heraclitus, do not necessarily have philosophical insight:
Much learning does not teach understanding. For it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus. (DK40)
As the SEP points out, Heraclitus stresses that ‘the message is not his own invention, but a timeless truth available to any who attend to the way the world itself is’ – the logos exists independently and Heraclitus is just trying to explain it. He uses paradoxical language not out of mischief but because it’s appropriate to a reality that is itself complex and paradoxical. To make simple assertions would be to pretend to greater knowledge than Heraclitus or other human beings can claim to have, given our mortal limitations. As we struggle with the text to make sense of his meaning, we strengthen our prowess in those two aspects of logos, reason and language, which might bring us closer to understanding logos as whole.
Heraclitus admits that understanding how the world works is difficult:
Nature loves to hide. (DK123)
Men are deceived in the recognition of what is obvious. (DK56)
The world is not as it appears on the surface – it takes effort, and philosophy, to look beneath appearances and grasp the actual forces at work. However, the logos can be understood. Heraclitus advises
distinguishing each according to its nature and telling how it is (DK2)
because
it belongs to all men to know themselves and to think well. (DK116)
The logos then is multiple things: 1) the discourse of Heraclitus himself, 2) the structure of human language and of human thought, 3) the principle guiding all things. The logos will continue forever whether humans understand it or not. However, the best of us can learn to understand how the world works, if we learn from the insights shared by Heraclitus. Perhaps then we can achieve our goal:
Thinking well is the greatest excellence and wisdom: to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature. (DK112)
Change
This world is active and dynamic. Observing that things change is no great achievement, but explaining why and how it happens requires analysis. Heraclitus has often been posed as a kind of antithesis of Parmenides and the Eleatic school, whose claim that nothing changes at all is posed against the Heraclitean claim that things change all the time: stasis vs flux.
Heraclitus’s most famous remark on this world of change uses the image of stepping into a river. There are three river fragments:
As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them. (DK12)
In the same river, we both step and do not step. (DK49a, transl Freeman)One cannot step twice into the same river. (DK91)
The first is from Cleanthes via Arius Didimus via Eusebius. The second is from Homeric Questions by Heraclitus (a 1st century CE namesake). The third is a citation by Plutarch.
These fragments are often cited as evidence of what’s known as the doctrine of flux: that everything is constantly changing and nothing is stable. This is a widespread interpretation of Heraclitus, described for example by Jonathan Barnes in his book The Presocratic Philosophers (1979, revised 1982). It is first found in Plato:
Heraclitus… says that all things pass and nothing stays [or ‘everything flows and nothing abides’], and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river. (Plato Cratylus 402a)[12]
If Heraclitus says ‘everything flows’ (πάντα ῥεῖ or panta rhei), and has some view of the universe as being in flux, how far should we apply this principle?
G.S. Kirk claimed that ‘the constancy of change is not an idea Heraclitus particularly stressed’.[13] For Kirk, Heraclitus is not commenting on constant change in all things but on a regularity of change in a particular entity or pairing. On the other hand, the extreme reading, derived from Plato’s Theaetetus and passed on through Aristotle in his Metaphysics, is that Heraclitus makes knowledge impossible because things are ‘in all ways and entirely changeable’ (Aristotle) and are therefore so unstable that they cannot be said to exist from one moment to the next, and in the absence of stable entities nothing can be said about them: open your mouth and they are already gone. Language itself dissolves. Cratylus therefore ‘criticised Heraclitus for saying that one cannot enter the same river twice, for he himself held that it cannot be done even once’! [14]
The objection is that the doctrine of flux contradicts two key laws of logic:
- The law of identity says that something has an identity, i.e. it is what it is, and not what it is not.
- The law of non-contradiction adds that something cannot be itself and not-itself at the same time. E.g. if you’re tall, you can’t also be not-tall.
Heraclitus doesn’t say so in as many words, because these were formulated later by Aristotle in the 4th century BCE. But the implication is there, say the critics. Furthermore, fragments like ‘asses prefer garbage to gold’ (DK9) can (if one chooses) be interpreted as relativistic, pessimistic comments on the impossibility of certain knowledge: gold is valuable to humans, but worthless to asses, so who can say which is right? Thus we can have no stable entities, no knowledge, no unity.
But this ‘strong’ flux reading is incorrect. First of all, Heraclitus places epistemological value upon the evidence of the senses:
Whatever comes from sight, hearing, learning from experience: this I prefer. (DK55)
This preference for the evidence of the senses would be a waste of time if he thought the senses told us nothing valid. Secondly, Heraclitus values knowledge, or wisdom. He thinks wisdom is
to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature. (DK112)
This is not the statement of a sceptic who denies the possibility of knowledge. For Heraclitus, people do receive information about the world – the problem is that they are so often unable to understand it. When he says
much learning does not teach understanding (DK40)
he is lamenting the inability of most people (including Greek intellectuals) to achieve wisdom simply from polymathy or accumulating facts. This is why Heraclitus writes in a Delphic style that requires work from the reader. As the SEP puts it, ‘he offers his readers materials for understanding and lets them educate themselves.’
As for objects not remaining stable: in the fragment ‘the sun is new every day’ (DK6), the sun changes, but it remains the sun from one day to the next. To return to the three river fragments above: the third fragment may well be merely a misremembering of the first, and in fact contradicts it; the second says we can step into the same river then confusingly says we can’t. It is the first fragment, DK12, that reads like an authentic text by Heraclitus in characteristically dense language, and that one says it is possible to step into the same river twice. Heraclitus is making a weaker claim: he is not saying that there is no constant object – no river – but only that the object is constantly changing. One steps into the same river, just not the same waters. Indeed, the choice of a river is very apt since a river is a body of water that by its nature (unlike for example a pond or lake) is moving or flowing. If it did not flow, it would not even be a river.
Thus Heraclitus is not, as James Hillman claims, a relativist who thinks nothing is stable and everyone has their own truth. ‘Everything flows’ in some respects, not all respects. The river fragments therefore should not be isolated from the fragments as a whole.
But Heraclitus has a more profound point to make. We may compare the river fragments to fragment DK125 about the kykeon drink, a mixture of wine, barley, and cheese:
Even the potion separates unless it is stirred.
The drink, like the river, only exists through movement: change is essential to its identity, its very existence. Heraclitus is saying that change or flux does not cancel constancy, in fact it is a condition of it: the two are in a necessary, if apparently paradoxical, relation. An object remains itself only by changing. Stop stirring and the potion separates; stop the waters and a river is just a very long lake. Thus Heraclitus says ‘the world ever was and is and will be’ (i.e. it is constant, permanent) and at the same time equates it to ‘fire’ that is ‘ever-living’ yet kindled and extinguished in a cycle (i.e. an element that is permanent yet constantly changing as part of its nature) (DK30). Similarly when he asserts god is ‘day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger’ (DK67) – there is a divine unity within which these opposites operate and which is predicated upon them. Stability is created by change; or, unity is created by opposition.
This leads us to the next doctrine.
Unity of opposites
Heraclitus’s doctrine of the unity of opposites was not entirely original: there are precursors to his view in the Milesian natural philosophers, who also noticed that things were in motion, and interpreted natural phenomena in terms of opposing forces. Anaximander saw the world in terms of competing opposites – hot/cold, wet/dry, male/female – sometimes one of a pair is dominant, sometimes the other, in a relationship of ebb and flow. His one surviving quotation (incidentally these are, as Jonathan Barnes points out, literally ‘the earliest surviving words of Western philosophy’[15]) tells us:
The things from which existing things come into being are also the things into which they are destroyed, in accordance with what must be. For they give justice and reparation to one another for their injustice in accordance with the arrangement of time.
Anaximander concluded that since these elements were opposing, none was more basic than the others, and thus posited the basic stuff of the universe to be something else, an undefinable principle he called the apeiron.
Heraclitus seems to have adopted the Milesian view of an ordered cosmos marked by the transformation of opposite elements. The principle can be illustrated by several of his fragments, e.g.:
Cold warms up, warm cools off, moist parches, dry dampens. (DK126)
One of the most famous is this apparent paradox:
The sea is the purest and foulest water: for fish drinkable and life-sustaining; for men undrinkable and deadly. (DK61)
Sea-water, says Heraclitus, is both pure and foul. How can it be both at the same time? Surely that is contradictory? But he explains: for fish it is drinkable (pure), for humans it is undrinkable (foul), i.e. it is not a paradox at all. Both properties exist in sea-water at the same time. Similarly, Heraclitus was fond of making analogies from waking and sleeping: these are two different states we have as part of our nature, and we flip from one to the other and back again.
The same...: living and dead, and the waking and the sleeping, and young and old. For these transposed are those, and those transposed again are these. (DK88)
Pure and foul, waking and sleeping, young and old, are opposites that cannot pertain at the same time – there is not identity of opposites (they are not identical), and thus no violation of what Aristotle would later formulate as the Principle of Non-Contradiction. Opposites can both exist within one object, under different conditions or perspectives. Purity for fish, pollution for humans; waking during the day, sleeping during the night. Similarly with ‘The way up and down is one and the same’ (DK60) too there is no contradiction: the road is constant, simultaneously both a way up and a way down, but whether it is up or down on a given occasion depends on a person travelling upon it: the person is either going up or down, not both simultaneously. So there is a system of exchanges between equivalent states. When Heraclitus says that wet becomes dry, and dry becomes wet in DK126 he is talking about two different states, ‘wet’ and ‘dry’. One cannot become the other if they are already the same thing; neither means anything without the other. If everything was always wet, the concept ‘wet’ would be redundant; there has to be an opposite state of ‘dry’ for ‘wet’ to mean anything, and vice versa.
Therefore we talk not of an identity of opposites but of a unity of opposites, in a kind of necessary relationship.
As we’ve touched upon already, the universe (kosmos) is constant (‘everliving’, DK30) and is conserved, but at the same time there is a process within it of continual transformation – like the river whose flow is a necessary part of what it is. Thus in several fragments Heraclitus notes the ubiquity of conflict:
War is father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, others free. (DK53)
One must realise that war [polemos] is shared [or common] and conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass... in accordance with conflict. (DK80)
All beasts are driven by blows. (DK11)
To say that ‘all things come to pass in accordance with conflict’ is to say that conflict or tension between opposing forces is what makes the world, in all its dynamism and variety, possible. To say that ‘conflict is justice’ is to say that justice’s very existence arises from, is predicated upon, conflict.
There would be no attunement [or harmony] without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites. (DKA22)
To create harmony, we need high and low notes; to beget children, we need male and female. We could extend this to other opposites.
It is disease that makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest. (DK111)
In this fragment Heraclitus points out how qualities or experiences take their meaning from their opposites: knowledge of disease for example makes us value our good health all the more, and in fact gives the very concept of ‘good’ health meaning; it’s only ‘good’ because it’s also possible for our health to be ‘bad’. As Kahn observes, ‘in an opposed pair, the negative term, as defined by human needs and desires, is never wholly negative.’[16] The belief that something can be wholly negative or wholly positive is a human misunderstanding of a reality that actually requires us to grasp its two-sidedness and tensions.
In more subtle example Heraclitus says:
They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself; it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre. (DK51)
This seems paradoxical: how can an object differ/be at variance and yet agree? In the bow (i.e. the weapon) and lyre, two things happen at once: a turning or tending away, a differing, yet at the same time an agreement. In order to realise itself, to function as the thing it is, a bow or lyre must have its strings stretched into tension. Again, conflict, tension, is part of the nature of things and results in a harmony or unity.
Heraclitus thinks this truth is not always obvious: ‘the hidden attunement is better than the obvious one’ (DK54). If we wish to be wise and understand the world, we must recognise contradictions hidden beneath the surface. DK53 tells us that war shows some as gods, some as men – conflict reveals to us the state of things, if we are able to see it.
As we’ve seen, it would be misleading to ascribe to Heraclitus a theory of ‘universal flux’, because on his account flux is not universal. Rather, the universe is stable and ‘measures’ or portions of it are in flux. He thinks there is a movement or transformation of elements into each other, as in fragment DK91:
wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.
This is reminiscent of the philosophy of Anaximander. The Anaximander fragment (already quoted) seems to be saying that the different substances separating off from the basic stuff or apeiron generate and destroy each other, and in the long term balance out to restore ‘justice’. Every so often the pendulum swings out of balance and some kind of natural law puts it back. The ‘arrangement of time’ implies that this happens according to a cycle: a popular idea in ancient Greece which is also found in Hesiod for example.
Similarly, Heraclitus’s unity of opposites is built upon a reciprocal movement: night follows day and then day follows night, creating an opposite of two states, day and night, which seem in contrast but in fact are in unity. Neither makes any sense without the other. They must however – in a parallel with Greek ethics – be kept in some kind of moderation or balance: too much summer or too much winter and the harvest will fail.
How are things kept in balance for Heraclitus?
The sun will not transgress his measures; otherwise the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find him out. (DK94)
The sun cannot step outside its proper measures because the Furies (aka Eumenides or Eurinyes), the servants of the goddess Dike (Justice), will come after him. There is a divine order keeping things in balance. Heraclitus writes, in a metaphor taken from navigation:
The thunderbolt pilots [or steers] all things. (DK64)
He also says:
The wise is one, knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all. (DK41)
Human nature has no set purpose, but the divine has. (DK78)
There is a guiding power, evoking both fire and the divine through the lightning bolt (an image associated with the god Zeus), for ‘all things’. This ‘purpose’ brings rational order to the universe. We should note that in DK30 Heraclitus also says that ‘no god nor man has made’ the cosmos – i.e. on this ancient Greek worldview there was not a single creator god who brought everything into being, and in some sense the cosmos is independent of the gods that steer it. Heraclitus says a bit more about the precise role of the god (singular):
The god: day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger. (DK67)
In this fragment, this steering, divine power represents in some way the unity of opposites. Heraclitus associates this cosmic process – this steered, reciprocal movement – with the logos:
Sea pours out from earth, and it measures up to the same amount [logos] it was before becoming earth. (DK31)
The logos here is measuring and structuring the transformations in the world, which implies it is in some sense associated with the divine that also does this (which in turn implies that human thought, which is also part of logos, also partakes of divinity). But Edwin L. Minar sounds a note of warning about deifying logos:
Heraclitus speaks of a power which pilots the world, and the logos has been thought to be simply equivalent to this. Sometimes, Heraclitus seems to identify it loosely with the gods and to attribute to it some of the elements of personality. It is dangerous however to overemphasise this fact, because Heraclitus was much more interested in the philosophy of natural process than in theology as such. His expressions about the gods and the divine are in part rationalistic and opposed to the spirit of traditional religious conceptions, in part poetic and general, clothing in theological language ideas which are in essence entirely secular. Thus the power which pilots the world cannot be identified one for one with the logos.[17]
For the later Stoics, much influenced by Heraclitean thought, the logos was a divine reason ordering the cosmos. Minar argues it is not at all certain that Heraclitus intended the same: rather, he was more interested in the Pythagorean idea of proportionality, harmony and rhythm, working through the conflict and unity of opposites. It is an ‘account’ of how the world works, rather than literally the same as the divine power that steers events. Whether Minar is correct in this interpretation is impossible to say with certainty.
Fire
One of the goals of the pre-Socratic philosophers was to explain what the world was made of. There are monist views among various pre-Socratics: for Thales water seems to have been some kind of basic principle, for Anaximenes it was air. Heraclitus is arguably less of a cosmologist or natural philosopher and more a commentator upon the human condition. However, although he references the elements of earth, air and water (e.g. DK31 and 76) as if thinking in a similar framework to his Milesian predecessors, he placed a particular emphasis upon fire, which he presents as somehow running through all things. Our understanding of the role of fire is limited to about half a dozen fragments, of which the most cosmologically interesting has been touched upon already:
The ordering [kosmos], the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and is and will be: fire ever living, kindled in measures and in measures going out. (DK30)
It is an open question whether Heraclitus is thinking of actual physical fire or just a symbolic fire. To some extent, probably both. Fire is sacred (used in ritual), it is dynamic, it is both creative and destructive. Heraclitus does not seem to be a monist in the sense of claiming that ‘fire is the basic stuff that everything is made of’ as is often claimed. For example he writes in DK31 of fire changing into water. One can see the sense of making water the basic stuff of the universe, as Thales allegedly did, as it is both variable and relatively permanent, but fire is mobile, impermanent, transforming and processual by nature. It is clear however that Heraclitus places it in prime position:
All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods. (B90)
Fire here is given pride of place. However, goods and gold are not the same thing – they are exchanged for each other. Similarly, ‘fire’ is not the same as ‘all things’ – these too are in some sense being ‘exchanged’ for each other, implying that the world is not ‘made of fire’ so much as engaged in a permanent rhythmic process of flux between opposites of which fire is the most potent symbol.
Conclusion
We may now draw some conclusions about Heraclitus’s philosophical outlook.
- All that exists is a single unity; this whole is made of many parts.
- All things happen according to an eternal ordering principle known as the logos which structures both the material cosmos and human thought and discourse.
- The world is in eternal flux, symbolised by fire: there are stable entities but in a process of constant change.
- This is structured through a conflict of opposites that are non-identical and in tension but at the same time are in unity as they need each other to exist.
- All things are steered by a divine, rational organising power (which arguably can’t be simply equated to the logos).
- Though the truth is before us, it is hidden beneath the surface so most humans are ignorant of it (as if asleep), but the truth can be known with the right philosophical tools.
The great contribution of Heraclitus to philosophy in general and dialectics in particular is to make motion and contradiction the focus of his thought. An entity can, depending on one’s perspective in space and time, have apparently opposite tendencies at once. Heraclitus wants us to see reality as fluid: even apparently or relatively stable entities are in a state of flux and can change from one state to another, even becoming the opposite of what they are currently. Thanks to the common structure provided by the logos, ‘the pattern of human life and the pattern of cosmic order are one and the same’ (Kahn p22); it is in this sense, perhaps that ‘mortals are immortal’ (DK62). The task of philosophy then is to know the logos so that ignorant, confused and mortal human beings can awake to how the world actually works, i.e. as Heraclitus describes it, and know their place within it.
[This series needs a Part 1 to introduce dialectics in general but I haven't written it yet (sorry). I will write it at some point then back-date it to provide a frame for this one.]
Footnotes
1. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, Book IX, chapter 1. Reproduced in ed. Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (1987), p105 or read online here. The dating of Heraclitus is discussed in G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, The PreSocratic Philosophers (1957), p182-3.
2. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Part One Section One D.
3. The temple Heraclitus knew was burned down in 356 BCE. From 323 BCE it was rebuilt, and this new temple became one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
4. Published in 1948, this is a translation of the 5th edition of Diels-Kranz, not the last 1952 6th edition.
5. G.S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (1962), p7.
6. Charles H. Kahn, ‘A New Look at Heraclitus’ (1964).
7. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1407b11-18.
8. Hegel, op. cit.
9. See the Foreword by James Hillman in Fragments by Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton (2003). Hillman seems to draw an equivalence between Heraclitus’s view of nature as hiding its true nature, which must be revealed through ambiguous signs, and post-structuralist ideas about drawing out hidden meanings from beneath the surface using the flawed mode of language.
10. For a full discussion of what logos meant in the 5th century BCE and earlier, see W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, Volume 1: The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (1962), p419-24.
11. Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (1979), p21.
12. Cratylus, who appears in this dialogue as a character, was a follower of Heraclitus. The flux reading may have been misunderstood, and passed on to Plato, by him.
13. G.S. Kirk, ‘Natural Change in Heraclitus’ (1951).
14. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1010a7–15.
15. Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (1987), p74.
16. Kahn, op. cit., p188.
17. Edwin L. Minar Jr, ‘The Logos of Heraclitus’ (1939).
