Heráclito

Heraclitus (c.540–c.480 bc)

No Greek philosopher born before Socrates was more creative and influential than Heraclitus of Ephesus. Around the beginning of the fifth century bc, in a prose that made him proverbial for obscurity, he criticized conventional opinions about the way things are and attacked the authority of poets and others reputed to be wise. His surviving work consists of more than 100 epigrammatic sentences, complete in themselves and often comparable to the proverbs characteristic of ‘wisdom’ literature. Notwithstanding their sporadic presentation and transmission, Heraclitus’ sentences comprise a philosophy that is clearly focused upon a determinate set of interlocking ideas.

As interpreted by the later Greek philosophical tradition, Heraclitus stands primarily for the radical thesis that ‘Everything is in flux’, like the constant flow of a river. Although it is likely that he took this thesis to be true, universal flux is too simple a phrase to identify his philosophy. His focus shifts continually between two perspectives – the objective and everlasting processes of nature on the one hand and ordinary human beliefs and values on the other. He challenges people to come to terms, theoretically and practically, with the fact that they are living in a world ‘that no god or human has made’, a world he describes as ‘an ever-living fire kindling in measures and going out in measures’ (fr. 30). His great truth is that ‘All things are one’, but this unity, far from excluding difference, opposition and change, actually depends on them, since the universe is in a continuous state of dynamic equilibrium. Day and night, up and down, living and dying, heating and cooling – such pairings of apparent opposites all conform to the everlastingly rational formula (logos) that unity consists of opposites; remove day, and night goes too, just as a river will lose its identity if it ceases to flow.

Heraclitus requires his audience to try to think away their purely personal concerns and view the world from this more detached perspective. By the use of telling examples he highlights the relativity of value judgments. The implication is that unless people reflect on their experience and examine themselves, they are condemned to live a dream-like existence and to remain out of touch with the formula that governs and explains the nature of things. This formula is connected (symbolically and literally) with ‘ever-living fire’, whose incessant ‘transformations’ are not only the basic operation of the universe but also essential to the cycle of life and death. Fire constitutes and symbolizes both the processes of nature in general and also the light of intelligence. As the source of life and thought, a ‘fiery’ soul equips people to look into themselves, to discover the formula of nature and to live accordingly.

The influence of Heraclitus’ ideas on other philosophers was extensive. His reputed ‘flux’ doctrine, as disseminated by his follower Cratylus, helped to shape Plato’s cosmology and its changeless metaphysical foundations. The Stoics looked back to Heraclitus as the inspiration for their own conception of divine fire, identifying this with the logos that he specifies as the world’s explanatory principle. Later still, the neo-Pyhrronist Aenesidemus invoked Heraclitus as a partial precursor of scepticism.

 

1 Life and work

Heraclitus appears to have spent his life in Ephesus, which had been founded as a Greek colony some 200 years before his birth. According to ancient biography he was an arrogant and surly aristocrat, given to eccentric behaviour, but these anecdotes are largely a fictional construction built out of his own words, in which the tone he adopts in relation to other people is contemptuous. Rather than viewing this as a psychological trait, it is better to treat it as an extreme instance of the way early Greek poets and sages claimed authority for their work. Heraclitus, however, is exceptional in the explicit contempt he expresses for such hallowed authorities as Homer and Hesiod, and also for the contemporary intellectuals Xenophanes, Hecataeus and Pythagoras. He may have been on bad terms with his fellow citizens for political reasons, including perhaps support he received from King Darius of Persia, and it is likely that he was opposed to the democratic constitutions some Greek communities were beginning to adopt.

Although Heraclitus presents himself as uniquely enlightened, he was clearly familiar with the leading thinkers of his time. He draws attention to the relativity of judgments and the difference between humans and animals in ways that recall Xenophanes’ critique of religious beliefs (see Xenophanes §3). He almost certainly knew and rejected Pythagoras’ doctrine of the transmigration of souls (see Pythagoras §2). His cosmology is both indebted to and a criticism of Milesian science: the criticism appears particularly in his denial of the world’s beginning, but his focus on the law-like processes of nature has clear affinities with Anaximander’s celebrated doctrine of cosmic justice (see Anaximander §4).

Heraclitus’ work does not survive as a continuous whole. What we have instead is a collection of more than 100 independent sentences, most of which are ad hoc citations by authors from the period ad 100–300. Plato and Aristotle rarely cite Heraclitus directly, but their interpretations of him, which are influenced in part by their own preconceptions, shaped the ancient tradition of Heraclitus as exponent of universal flux and of fire as the primary material. Interpretation of Heraclitus is further complicated by the work of his professed follower Cratylus, and still more so by the way Stoics and Pyrrhonists looked back to him as a precursor of their own philosophies (see §6). This afterlife is important as an indication of Heraclitus’ complexity and capacity to influence a range of very different thinkers, but modern interpretation of him rightly treats it as secondary to the evidence of his own words.

Heraclitus is credited with writing a book, On Nature, and depositing it in a temple of Artemis. Some scholars believe that the book was a later compilation of sayings that he never wrote down, but while many of the fragments are well suited to oral delivery, this scarcely applies to the longest one, with which he is said to have begun his book:

Of this formula (logos) that is so always people are uncomprehending, both before hearing it and once they have heard it. For although all things come to pass in accordance with this formula, people seem lacking in experience even when they experience such words and deeds as I expound, when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and explain how it is. But other people are oblivious of what they do awake just as they forget what they do asleep.

 

2 Methodology

Heraclitus presents himself as the deliverer of a logos (see Logos). Any speaker could make a similar claim, but Heraclitus’ logos is not his personal message or thought. Rather, Heraclitus views himself simply as a conduit for the logos, the means by which his audience will learn the objective truth about everything. In characterizing the logos, Heraclitus claims that ‘it is so always’; it is the world’s rationale or determining formula, the key to each thing’s nature.

The logos is accessible to thought and linguistic expression because it is ‘common’ or ‘public’; but ‘most people live as though their thinking were private’. Heraclitus uses this contrast, and the contrast between waking and sleeping, to signal the gap between experience people have in common and the erroneous or purely subjective opinions they typically base on that experience. Taken as a set of general truths, the logos includes such propositions as the following: ‘All things are one’, ‘All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things’, ‘Nature loves to hide’, ‘War is father of all and king of all’, ‘The way up and down is one and the same’, ‘God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger’. Heraclitus does not present arguments for these cryptic statements, nor does he elucidate them. His Delphic style is a deliberate provocation of thought, a way of rousing his audience to solve his riddling account of nature and to discover the logos for and in themselves. In order to do so, he suggests, they need to rid themselves of naïve empiricism, to ‘expect the unexpected’, to connect things that they normally keep separate, to practise self-scrutiny, self-knowledge – in short, they need to discover the ‘depth of the soul’s own logos’, which presumably signifies the mind’s unlimited capacity to arrive at a complete understanding of the logos of nature.

In addition to general statements of the kind illustrated above, Heraclitus uses many other kinds of sentence. These include comments on the lack of wisdom manifested by the supposedly learned as well as by ordinary people, graphic statements concerning the ‘unity of opposites’ and the relativity of values, instruction concerning the ‘measures’ of physical change, characterizations of the soul, and numerous injunctions about the wisdom, lawfulness and piety requisite for a good life. One ancient commentator described his book as consisting of three topics: the universe, politics and theology. Another called it ‘a guide to conduct’, and it was also described as being about ‘society, with the treatment of nature being metaphorical’. Such attempts at systematizing Heraclitus are anachronistic, but they have the merit of recognizing his complexity. He was, as he describes himself, an inquirer into the ‘nature’ of things, but it would be no less correct to call him a moralist and psychologist; what he derived from his inquiry was an urgent message about the need for human beings to refashion their values and their outlook in accordance with the implications of the logos.

 

3 Unity of opposites and perspectivism

In emphasizing the ‘unity of all things’, Heraclitus was not saying, as his Milesian predecessors had done, that every natural object is the manifestation of a single material nature such as water or air (see Anaximenes). Nor was he denying the obvious phenomenal difference between hot and cold, light and dark, living and dead, up and down. Heraclitus’ world includes the normal range of things that are different from one another. What makes all things one is the fact, as he sees it, that a common formula (logos) is at work in everything to which we attribute spatial and/or temporal identity and continuity. Such opposites as those just enumerated are not separate or separable from one another but are co-dependent contributors to the identity of things. In any day (regarded as twenty-four hours), light and dark are combined, as are up and down in any road. Nothing can be alive that will not die, and nothing can be dead that has not lived. If one of these opposites is removed, the other must go too.

Apart from cases where the co-presence or successive presence of opposites is obviously essential to things, Heraclitus drew support for the unity of opposites from examples where it could be inferred even though it was less obvious. In the bow and the lyre, he said, there is a ‘back-stretched structure’ (or ‘back-turning structure’ on an alternative reading). The effectiveness of both instruments depends upon tension between a piece of wood and a taut string. These components pull in opposite ways, and thereby they generate the unitary objects, lyre and bow. His famous image, ‘You can’t step twice into the same river’, is probably to be interpreted in a similar way. What gives the river its identity is the continuous flow of successively different water. If ‘All things flow’ is a statement that Heraclitus approved, it is best interpreted as his image for the claim that even apparently stable beings depend for their identity on the interchange or succession of their constituent parts or on conflicting forces. The image need not, and probably should not, be regarded as a claim that nothing has a stable identity, but rather that such stability as things do have is derived from the equipollence of their constitutive opposites.

The unity of opposites formula is also applicable to Heraclitus’ account of the way physical processes occur in the world at large. Changes of temperature and liquidity are constantly taking place, but they do so according to measure and balance. In the cosmic context, ‘All things are one’ obtains because a single thermodynamic principle (as it might be called now) is operative throughout the system: ‘an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures’ (fr. 30). Another name for this principle, and another view of the unity of opposites, are evident in the statement that ‘God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger. He alters as when [fire] mingled with spices is named according to each person’s pleasure’ (fr. 67). Two implications might be drawn from this passage. One is that, from a divine perspective, the contrary evaluations normally accorded to day or night, to war or peace, are transcended. The other is that human discriminations between these opposites are purely arbitrary.

Heraclitus certainly endorsed the first implication, but did so for the second only with qualification. The passage does indeed suggest a radical difference between the divine and the human, but Heraclitus’ point is probably that people need to adjust those of their perspectives that are purely personal or subjective and bring them into line with the objective way things are: it will always be the case that sea water is fair and foul, ‘fair for fish and foul for human beings’ (fr. 61). It is equally and necessarily the case that non-human animals have different preferences from humans. Yet the unity of opposites is a principle that also requires radical reordering of conventional opinions. Because the world is a dynamic interplay of opposing forces, ‘people must realize that war is common and justice is strife’ (fr. 80). In this difficult saying, Heraclitus is not recommending belligerence and the breakdown of civil society. His point is rather that people must come to terms with the fact that conflicting forces are basic to the way the world is structured – are in fact essential to its balance and order. That is how inanimate physical powers interact. He seems to have inferred, by analogy, that competition, involving winners and losers, is no less essential when accounting for the differences of status within his own day-to-day world. Hence the assertion that: ‘War is father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others as humans; some he has made slaves and others free’ (fr. 53).

4 Cosmology

Judging from the extant fragments, Heraclitus devoted only a small fraction of his philosophy to cosmology and explanation of physical phenomena. Many of his ancient interpreters, however, starting with Aristotle, interpreted him as if this were his main purpose. Working from texts in which Heraclitus refers to the transformations of ‘ever-living’ fire, they concluded that he endorsed the following doctrines: first, that fire is the underlying principle of all things; second, that particular phenomena are composed of and resolved into fire by rarefaction and condensation; and third, that the world as a whole is an everlastingly repeated sequence of temporally limited cycles, each of which emerges out of fire and ends in fire. These ‘doctrines’, or at least the first and the third of them, are generally treated today as anachronistic attempts to fit Heraclitus’ ideas into a pattern more applicable to other thinkers. Although this modern diagnosis is justified in part, ancient philosophers were clearly right in thinking that Heraclitus regarded fire as the world’s primary and most explanatory phenomenon. The problem is to understand what he intended by this claim.

Some of his statements suggest that fire is what one should start from and end with in any reflection on natural change. He certainly thought that what would later be called elements or elementary qualities (hot, cold, moist and dry) are interdependent phases of a continuous cycle. Hence his use of statements such as ‘The cold gets warm, the warm gets cold, the moist gets dry, the dry gets damp’ (fr. 126). This kind of insight is obviously suitable as an illustration of the way ‘All things flow’ and the unity of opposites, but it does not explain why he said that ‘All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods’ (fr. 90). What is it that privileges fire in the cycle of change and makes it the one appropriate exchange symbol for everything else?

The answer, authorized by the Aristotelian tradition, is that fire is the underlying principle or the element. An underlying principle or element should be the unchanging foundation of everything that changes, but Heraclitus explicitly denies that fire is like this. Rather, it is continuously changing, ‘kindling in measures and going out in measures’. What is unchanging about Heraclitus’ fire is the way it changes – according to ‘measures’. Heraclitus uses the term ‘measures’ to indicate cosmic order, balance, proportionality, natural law. He probably inferred by observation that, of all natural phenomena, fire is not only the most dynamic but also the one that is most obviously self-regulating. A fire consumes all the material that is available to it, nothing more and nothing less. What it consumes it also changes. It lives, as it were, by destroying something else; or, viewed from another perspective, it destroys itself by creating something else.

Heraclitus’ fire, then, is not merely one phase in the cycle of natural changes. As the world’s ‘currency’ or exchange symbol, the sum of fire’s activity is completely commensurate with the sum of everything else. Fire’s gain is everything else’s loss and vice versa. The reciprocity or exchange between fire and the rest of things is Heraclitus’ principle of cosmic order. There is a clear similarity here to Anaximander, who invoked ‘crime and retribution’ as the model to explain how change (hot to cold, wet to dry, and so forth) is balanced and reciprocal. Heraclitus was clearly impressed by his predecessor’s bold appeal to ‘justice’ as the regulating principle of natural processes. But he was entirely original in treating fire as the primary process of nature. Given the conceptual resources available to him, nothing could have served him better as the way to indicate that nature is a dynamic system, that apparently stable things are also processes, that apparent unities are also polarities.

This, then, appears to be what Heraclitus meant by premising his cosmology on ‘ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures’. He probably did not think, as ancient interpreters supposed, that our world is everlastingly recreated and destroyed, but rather, that nothing exists outside the system of fire and its exchanges. The system is self-regulating, and because there is nothing to interrupt its rhythm it persists for ever. Heraclitus is the earliest Greek thinker to postulate an everlasting world, and he is also probably the earliest to apply the term kosmos (meaning ‘beautiful structure’) to the world (see however Pythagoras §2).

Did Heraclitus identify his cosmic fire with the god to whom he sometimes referred? Did he also think of these as the physical correlate or referent of his logos formula? Precise answers to these questions are scarcely possible, but his Stoic interpreters were probably not far wrong in answering affirmatively for him. Although he evidently took a huge step in the direction of treating the universe as an autonomic field of counterbalancing forces, he probably also thought of it as a mind-directed system. Some of the fragments seem to allude to a divine plan or purposiveness. Still more suggestive are connections he drew between fire, soul, life and intelligence.

5 Psychology, ethics and religion

No fewer than ten of the fragments are statements about the Psychē. In its primary Greek usage this term signifies a human being’s life, but Heraclitus uses the word not only in this way but also to signify mind and intelligence. He made a major contribution to the idea (immensely important to Greek philosophy from Socrates and Plato onward) that cultivation of the psychē is the prerequisite for living well.

‘Eyes and ears’, he said, ‘are poor witnesses to those who have barbarian psychai’ (fr. 107). In this dense statement Heraclitus likens the unenlightened majority to ‘barbarians’ – that is, foreigners, who lack the language and culture of genuine Greeks. In order to live authentically, one needs a psychē that can interpret empirical evidence correctly – a psychē that understands the truths expressed by Heraclitus’ logos. The psychē as such, he suggests, has unlimited resources, but in order to draw on them it is necessary, as he has done, to ‘inquire into oneself’. Such observations indicate that Heraclitus’ philosophy was simultaneously outward-and inward-looking: his logos is both the formula of nature’s processes and the account of a mind or a self thinking and understanding that formula.

Heraclitus forges a link between these two aspects of his logos by invoking fire in remarks about the psychē. He associates life, intelligence and excellence with fire and dryness; by contrast, it is ‘death for souls to become water’, and a drunken man (that is, someone who has lost his bearings) ‘has a soul that is moist’. We are probably intended to take these statements both literally and symbolically. This complex reading fits Heraclitus’ statements about fire in cosmological contexts, where fire is both a constituent of nature and the currency for understanding all processes. It is also relevant in the case of the psychē. Living beings derive their vitality from the ever-living fire, but what a fiery soul contributes to humans is not merely life but the ‘light’ of intelligence. It is entirely in Heraclitus’ manner to exploit the multiple resonance of words, and to demand interpretation that is metaphorical as well as literal.

The intelligence that Heraclitus seeks to kindle should, he suggests, make people rethink their beliefs about life, death, religion and society. He attacks the folly of religious rituals, especially blood sacrifice; he recommends strict respect for civic law and order; he contrasts ‘the best’, who seek immortal fame, with the bovine satisfactions of the majority. He particularly emphasizes people’s inability in general to come to terms with death, suggesting that the way one dies has a bearing both on one’s worth as a person and also on one’s postmortem condition. Does this last point refer to some kind of postmortem existence or simply to a person’s reputation after death? The latter seems the more likely, given his emphasis upon the cyclical phases of natural processes. Nothing seems to have mattered more to Heraclitus than persuading people to regard themselves as integral parts of an ineluctable cosmic order. From this perspective, we should organize our lives in the realization that we are mortal but intelligent phases in the cosmic life of ever-living fire.

6 Influence

Heraclitus’ influence on subsequent philosophers was large and complex. It is probably first evident in Parmenides (§§3–8), whose argument for a wholly changeless and homogeneous reality reads often like a direct echo and refutation of Heraclitus. In response to the Heraclitean philosopher Cratylus, Plato was impressed by the thesis that phenomena are in constant flux, but he rejected this as an account of ‘intelligible’ reality on the grounds that what is in constant flux cannot be known. Aristotle, taking Heraclitus’ combinations of opposites to be a flagrant breach of the principle of non-contradiction, interpreted him as ‘making all statements true’. It seems not to have occurred to either Plato or Aristotle that Heraclitus’ logos could be interpreted as the changeless and knowable formula of a world that is incessantly but regularly changing.

Heraclitus’ most penetrating and positive interpreters were the early Stoic philosophers. He inspired basic features of their cosmology, especially their identification of the world’s ‘active principle’ with divine fire, and they also gave their own slant to the Heraclitean logos, which they interpreted as the ‘rationality’ embodied in divine fire (see Cleanthes; Stoicism §3). A reading of Cleanthes’ Hymn to Zeus is the best way to view Heraclitus’ influence on Stoicism. In that text, Cleanthes reflects Heraclitus not only in his references to fire and logos but also in the way he presents the divine principle as reconciling opposites and embodying the laws of nature.

A further aspect of Heraclitus’ influence is to be seen in Aenesidemus, the founder of neo-Pyrrhonist philosophy. Aenesidemus was in the habit of citing Heracliteanism as ‘a route to scepticism’, basing this claim on Heraclitus’ way of predicating opposites of the same subject.