HERACLITUS OF EPHESUS

Heraclitus of Ephesus is an early Greek philosopher who lived around the end of the sixth century BCE. He was a native of Ephesus, an important Ionian city just north of Miletus on the western coast of Asia Minor, and his father's name was Bloson. If the story can be credited that he voluntarily surrendered to his brother a hereditary right to a ceremonial kingship, Heraclitus would be the oldest son of an old noble family. His birth and death dates are uncertain, but the evidence of our doubtful sources would place his floruit in the reign of Darius I of Persia. The authors Heraclitus names make it impossible for his single book to be dated much before the end of the sixth century, and since he is fond of naming his rivals, the lack of any reference or allusion in his surviving words to Parmenides of Elea argues for dating Heraclitus's book before the publication of Parmenides's poem.

Tradition tells us that Heraclitus deposited his book at the great temple of Artemis in Ephesus. His dedication of his book to the goddess may be tantamount to publishing it and to making his thoughts publicly available rather than hiding his thoughts away from the vulgar, as some have surmised. This publicity would be in keeping with Heraclitus's conviction that the truth is common and open to anyone and is not a private possession of the privileged few. From antiquity, Heraclitus is infamous for his obscurity, and he was dubbed early on "the dark." His obscurity has often been credited to his emulation of the Pythian Apollo, whose oracular deliverances Heraclitus analyzes insightfully: "The lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither tells nor conceals, but gives a sign" (frag. 93 Diels-Kranz). He highlights the indirection of the lord because of his conviction that the nature of things reveals itself indirectly, and he may mimic in his obscure writing what he takes to be the obscurity in reality itself. Instead of the hexameters of Apollo's priests and of the heroic poets, Heraclitus writes in prose, like most of the new intellectuals of the sixth century who were critical of the poetic tradition and undertook independent inquiry, or historiê, in a wide variety of areas.

The Milesian natural philosophers Anaximander and Anaximenes wrote on cosmology and cosmogony, while their fellow Milesian Hecataeus composed the first comprehensive geography of the Greeks, which in part he based upon what he learned from his own voyages. The fragments of Heraclitus's book, of which there are more than a hundred, provide the first substantial sample of Greek prose. Yet Heraclitus is also the most poetic of the early prose authors; he displays skillful use of traditional poetic devices, such as parallel and antithetical sentence constructions, chiasmus, alliteration, assonance, rhyme, and ring composition, as well as an adept use of wordplay that enhances his message. His book was probably not a continuous treatise of unbroken prose but a sequence of short passages, some of which are pithy enough in their moral import to look like a maxim of the Seven Wise Men: "It is hard to fight with anger; for whatever it should want it buys with the soul" (frag. 85 D-K). Despite his much-heralded obscurity, many of his sayings are as straightforward as this astute observation on moral psychology.

The Logos and the Unity of Opposites

Like his older contemporary Xenophanes of Colophon, Heraclitus is openly critical of the poets of the ancient past, but he also includes among his targets contemporary intellectuals. He is critical of "Hesiod and Pythagoras, and also Xenophanes and Hecataeus" for their "polymathy" that does not yield "understanding" (frag. 40 D-K). He finds "much learning" an impediment to understanding, and this puts him at odds with the new intellectuals who practicehistoriê, which depends upon polymathy. "Understanding" comes from heeding what Heraclitus calls "the Logos," by which "all things come to be," and whose message the common stock of humanity fail to appreciate, as well as those reputed to be wise. They live in a private world of their own making, comparable to dreams, but those who harken to the Logos live in the one public world of the wakeful (frag. 89 D-K). Along with Xenophanes, Heraclitus is among the first of the new breed of intellectuals to make an issue of the human epistemic condition.

The nature of this Logos is contested. Some scholars understand it as the nature or essence of reality, as it shows itself in discourse, others as a universal principle or law that regulates the basic workings of reality, and a few render it as Heraclitus's true account of reality in the form of his own book, or logos. With his predilection for wordplay, Heraclitus could well allow Logos to stand for both his book and the subject of his book. He lays down a telling parallel when he urges "those speaking with understanding" to hold to what is "common to all things," presumably the Logos, just as a city holds to its "laws." The commonality of the Logos would be comparable to the way in which the laws of a city apply across the whole of its citizenry, as the rules that regulate their behavior and shape them into a single community, and not to the way the air of Anaximenes's cosmology is the common constitution of all things. What is comparable to "human laws" is also what they are "nourished by," "by one, the divine," which in his ambiguity Heraclitus may intend to be "the one divine law" (frag. 114 D-K). The importance of what sustains "human laws" devolves upon them, so that "The people must fight for the law as for a city wall" (frag. 44 D-K).

The one surviving explicit message of the Logos declares that "all things are one" (frag. 50 D-K). This unity is not the oneness of the monism Aristotle credits the earliest natural philosophers with advocating, but the unity of opposites. This "connection" lies "unseen" (frag. 54 D-K), beyond the patterns of ordinary ways of thinking, as well as the teachings of the old authorities and of the new intellectuals. A "strife" between opposing powers lies hidden within the nature of each thing, and without this strife, the cosmos and everything in it would perish. While contesting with one another, the opposing powers within the essence of each thing cooperate with one another and yield a unified object: "They do not comprehend how each thing quarreling with itself agrees; it is a connection turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre" (frag. 51 D-K). There would be no bow or lyre unless there were a striving between the wood and string through their powers of pulling in opposing directions.

At the cosmic level, the unity of opposites displays itself in the strife between the great cosmic powers of the hot and cold, the dry and moist, since even as they strive with one another for dominion, in the form of fire, water, and earth, they are tightly linked. The destruction of one cosmic mass is the generation of another, "death for water is the birth of earth, from earth water is born" (frag. 36 D-K), where birth and death unite in a single event. The strife between opposing powers is beneficent and just, and "justice is strife" (frag. 80 D-K), contrary to the teaching of Anaximander, who describes the dominion of one opposite over another as "injustice." When people count some things as just and others as unjust, they divide justice from injustice, but from the objective position of god, all things are "fair and good and just" (frag. 102 D-K). The division between opposites is real enough, but so too is the unity, "it scatters and again brings together" (frag. 91b D-K). This divisive thought of the popular imagination leads to a false impression, which Homer fosters, that the positive of the pair is preferable, morally superior, and should dominate. Aristotle reports that Heraclitus criticizes Achilles's lament, "Would that strife might perish from among gods and men" (Iliad 18.107), since without strife there would be no peace, no coherent cosmos.

Heraclitus's originality lies most prominently in his efforts at establishing the integrity of each thing through the unity of opposing powers within each thing, and he revolutionizes thought about values through his insistence upon this unity. No opposite can be valued to the exclusion of its counterpart g powers, because of the various ways in which they are tied to one another for their presence in the world and their efficacy. Heraclitus goes beyond his predecessors in displaying the positive nature of those powers that ordinary ways of thinking deem to be purely negative.

Epistemology and Rationalism

The truth is "hidden," yet "obvious." The blind poet Homer, who is the "wisest of all the Greeks," fails to appreciate the "obvious" (frag. 56 D-K). The truth is obscure, yet it remains open to anyone's inspection through simple means of comprehension. The unity of opposites is no mysterious dogma handed down from on high, and its confirmation may be achieved through observation and argumentation, linguistic analysis, and self-reflection. Heraclitus has confidence in the truth-yielding capacity of observation, "Those things that come from sight, hearing, learning from experience, these I esteem" (frag. 55 D-K), although observation must be evaluated carefully: "Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if they have barbarian souls" (frag. 107 D-K). Simple arguments premised on trivial empirical truths provide evidence for the unity: "Sea water is the purest and foulest of water, for fish it is drinkable and life-sustaining, for men it is undrinkable and deadly" (frag. 61 D-K).

In his exploitation of everyday language as a pathway to truth, Heraclitus puns on an uncommon word for "bow," which differs only in accent from the common word for "life," so that he may make manifest the connection between life and death: "The name of the bow is life, but its work is death" (frag. 48 D-K). Death is life, since, for example, the destruction of earth is the birth of water. When Heraclitus notes that "they would not know the name of Justice, if these things did not exist" (frag. 23 D-K), presumably "unjust things," he draws together opposites in the belief that a "name" like "justice" has no meaning in isolation, but only with its opposite, "injustice." Heraclitus will also appeal to a word's etymology for his evidence. The assistants of Justice, he reports, are the Furies (frag. 94 D-K), whose name meshes well with his identification of justice and strife (frag. 80 D-K), since it derives from "strife."

Heraclitus, unlike many of the new intellectuals, has no use for travel and the information it yields as a means for gaining "understanding." The only "journey" he ever mentions is into one's soul, in search of oneself (frag. 101 D-K), and "You would not find out the limits of the soul by going, even traveling over every road, so deep is its logos (frag. 45 D-K). This inward journey reveals the value of a measured existence for human well-being. The "measured man" learns from self-examination the proper limits of the great destructive forces of emotion and desire. Despite Heraclitus's revolutionary reassessment of values, he shows himself still bound to tradition when he pairs self-knowledge with measure (frag. 116 D-K), which are values highly esteemed by the Pythian Apollo, whose Alcmaeonid temple posted prominently the famous maxims of the Seven Wise Men: "Know yourself" and "Nothing too much." Like the "measured man," the world-order "lives" a measured existence; the cosmos is "fire ever living, kindled in measures and in measures going out" (frag. 30 D-K). When one cosmic mass changes into another, a logos, or proportion, holds between them, so that, for instance, the sea "measures up to the same logos it was before becoming earth" (frag. 31b D-K). The cosmos is a self-regulating system that keeps within spatial and temporal limits the great destructive forces of nature: "The Sun will not step over his measures" (frag. 94 D-K).

The Logos belongs to the soul as much as anything else; thus, self-knowledge may provide a path to cosmic knowledge and to "understanding." One need not go far afield or draw upon extraordinary powers to discover the truth. Heraclitus is no pessimist, in contrast with Homer and the poets who believe that humans left to themselves without the aid of the Muses have no knowledge of recondite topics and are the victims of "rumor" (Il. 2.485—486). Humankind has within its reach the truth of reality, "It belongs to all men to know themselves and to think in a measured way" (frag. 116 D-K), although Heraclitus thinks that few will ever exercise successfully these shared capacities. He tempers his optimism further when he maintains that a man hears from a divinity that he is "infantile" just as a child hears the same from a man (frag. 79 D-K), and some think that they detect poetic pessimism in his observation that "human character," in contrast with "divine," "has no judgment" (frag. 78 D-K).

Yet Heraclitus is also no mystic, if by "mysticism" is meant a private insight into the truth, vouchsafed to the few, which goes beyond the ordinary capacities of humankind. Instead of intuition, Heraclitus has recourse to argument and public verification. His rationalism holds, even if Aristotle is correct in charging him with contravening the principle of non-contradiction, when Heraclitus insists that the same thing displays opposing properties (Metaphysics, 1062A30-35). Aristotle's charge is plausible even if we may easily dispel the appearance of contradiction, when Heraclitus maintains, for example, that sea water is both pure and impure, by our pointing out that these properties are not contradictory since they are qualified in different ways by applying to different creatures: fish and humans. Heraclitus may have not been able to recognize that the ambiguity gives him only the appearance of contradiction. But he comes by his view of unity honestly, without mystery, through his appeal to argument and observation.

Change and Fire

Heraclitus argues for the truth of the unity of opposites, by arguing that the contrary pairs, the living and the dead, the waking and the sleeping, and the young and the old, are the "same" because the contraries of each pair mutually replace one another (frag. 88 D-K). Living things die, but from the remains of the dead living things emerge. Day and night are "one," thinks Heraclitus, probably because of their mutual succession (frag. 57 D-K). Heraclitus ties together inferentially two of his important doctrines when he derives the unity of opposites from the fact of change, and he may see change at the foundation of his speculations. Despite the centrality of change, its nature has been subject to exaggeration. Plato, who may be more under the influence of Cratylus than of Heraclitus, finds change to be incomprehensible, and he credits Heraclitus with a doctrine of universal flux in which reality is likened to the flow of a river, where "you could not step twice into the same river" (Cratylus 402A). These words indicate an extreme sort of change in which nothing retains its identity. The "river fragments" suggest something less extreme, that things constantly change but retain their identity: "As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them" (frag. 12 D-K). The rivers remain rivers; only the water that constitutes them is constantly changing.

Cosmic change is not chaotic, but occurs in an orderly way, as Heraclitus suggests when he speaks grandiloquently of the eternity of the world-order: "This cosmos, the same for all, no one of gods and men made, but always was and is and shall be fire ever living, kindling in measures and going out in measures" (frag. 30 D-K). The fire the cosmos is identified with changes, but in a measured way, changing in its extinction into the other great cosmic masses, and in an orderly pattern changing back again in its ignition. The flow of fire matches the flow of a river, but fire is more than an image when Heraclitus identifies it with the cosmos, and when he makes fire worth all else: "All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, just as gold for goods and goods for gold" (frag. 90 D-K). Heraclitus privileges fire, but not after the fashion of the monists, as Aristotle and Theophrastus would have us believe, as the stuff that constitutes all else. Theophrastus explains the "exchange" between fire and all things as fire's yielding everything else through its rarefaction and condensation, although he must admit that Heraclitus "sets out nothing clearly" (Diogenes Laertius 9.8).

It is not surprising that Theophrastus finds Heraclitus unclear, since the mercantile image of exchange, of "gold for goods and goods for gold," indicates that what is exchanged for fire is no more fire than the goods exchanged for gold are gold. In keeping with the mercantile image, the primacy of fire lies in its providing the standard that fixes the value of all else, as equivalent to so much fire, and Heraclitus may value fire above all else because it is psychic stuff: "For souls death is the birth of water, for water death is the birth of earth, from earth water is born, from water soul" (frag. 36 D-K). The sequential change back and forth between soul, water, earth suggests an exhaustive cosmic exchange, and thus the absence of the important cosmic mass of fire calls for its identification with soul. It is a "dry soul" that is "wisest and best" (frag. 118 D-K). Heraclitus has room for only three great cosmic masses, fire, water, earth, in his physics and no place for the air of Anaximenes.

Theology

The soul is the basis of life, but also of intelligence (frag. 107 D-K). Heraclitus links fiery stuff and intelligence when he says that "Thunderbolt steers all things" (frag. 64 D-K). "Thunderbolt," which stands for the guiding principle behind the cosmos, is the instrument of Zeus, the greatest god in the Greek pantheon, and Heraclitus intends for his ruling principle to be identified with the divine, but in a qualified way, when he says: "The one, the wise alone, is not willing and is willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus" (frag. 32 D-K). Heraclitus appropriates a divine name from popular religion, but he warns against its literal application. His ruling principle, like Zeus, is the most powerful of deities, but, unlike Zeus, it should not be conceived in an anthropomorphic manner. The traditional language of divine anthropomorphism shows up in his praise of strife, "War is father of all and king of all" (frag. 53 D-K), which recalls the Homeric description of Zeus as "the father of men and gods," and Zeus is the "king" of the gods.

Heraclitus borrows freely from the conventional language and images of popular religion, but he applies them in unconventional ways, and his practice suggests that he is trying to formulate a new way of talking about the divine within the idiom of the old. Among the Greeks Xenophanes initiated the criticism of anthropomorphism, but, unlike Heraclitus, he purifies his language of the traditional anthropomorphic vocabulary. In one remarkable passage, Heraclitus draws together the divine, the opposites, and perhaps even fire: "The god, day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-hunger, and it undergoes change, as when mingled with perfumes, it is named according to the pleasure of each one" (frag. 67 D-K). The divine is actually identified with the opposites, as if their union was the divinity itself, and Heraclitus may treat the god like fire when referring to its changing in accord with the perfumes mixed into it. The significance of fire corresponds to the importance of Logos; war, like the Logos, is common; strife, like the Logos, is what all things come to be in accord with (frag. 80 D-K). The Logos, fire, strife, and divinity would seem to come together in Heraclitus's thought, although there is no evident formula for the expression of their convergence.

When he subjects particular cult practices to criticism, Heraclitus proves to be harsher than Xenophanes. The age-old practice of purging oneself of blood guilt through blood sacrifice Heraclitus ridicules as comparable to washing off mud with mud, praying to statues is like "chatting with houses" (frag. 5 D-K), and the "mysteries" men now believe in do no more than "initiate into impiety" (frag. 14 D-K). The "procession" for Dionysus and the "chant for the phallus" would be shameful if they were not done for the sake of the god, and the participants in these practices do not even recognize that "Hades and Dionysus are the same" (frag. 15 D-K). Once again Heraclitus appropriates conventional divine names, but uses them in a shocking way by identifying traditional deities of widely contrasting natures, Hades and Dionysus, perhaps once more as a way of signifying the identity of life and death. The alcohol beloved of Dionysus Heraclitus condemns as turning a man into a boy by making his "soul moist" (frag. 117 D-K), and, despite the "joy" men take in moisture, it is death (frag. 77 D-K).

Heraclitus does not recommend any new practices to take the place of those he censures, in contrast with Pythagoras who recommends many new rituals to supplement those of tradition. When Heraclitus maintains that "Character for a man is fate" (frag. 119 D-K), he looks as if he were removing humankind from the tutelage of the gods. Daemon, the word for "fate," is [a] also the word for a guardian divinity, and thus in identifying a man's own character with his guardian, Heraclitus would be stressing that humans should take responsibility for their actions instead of laying blame upon the divine for their fortunes, both good and bad. Heraclitus is often thought to sanction immortality for at least some souls, perhaps of warriors: "Greater deaths are allotted greater portions" (frag. 25 D-K); "Those slain by Ares, gods and men honor" (frag. 24 D-K). Personal survival is not possible in a cosmos of universal destruction, and Heraclitus may mean no more than enlightenment when he speaks of those who "arise and become wakeful watchers of the living and the dead" (frag. 63 D-K). The wakeful may be those awakened from folly, since Heraclitus associates subjective misapprehension with sleep and objective comprehension with wakefulness (frag. 89 D-K).

Cosmology

There is little reason to think that Heraclitus makes any advances in physics or astronomy. Unlike the Milesians, he does not seem to take much interest in the details of natural philosophy, and the fragments speak little to the issue. His words testify to his belief in an eternal cosmos (frag. 30 D-K), even though Aristotle and Theophrastus report otherwise. His rejection of cosmogony would mark him out significantly from the early natural philosophers, although Xenophanes may, too, have championed an eternal cosmos. Theophrastus and the doxographical tradition he founded report some astronomical and meteorological speculations. Bright and dark exhalations arise from earth and sea, and "bowls" in the heaven trap the bright exhalations and form the heavenly bodies. The rotations of these bowls account for the phases of the moon and eclipses. The preponderance of bright and dark exhalations contributes to the explanations of day, night, months, seasons, years, rains, and winds. In what may be Heraclitus's own words, he traces daylight back to the sun, "If there were no sun, it would be night" (frag. 99 D-K), and he believes, along with Xenophanes, that the sun is "new each day" (frag. 6 D-K). Theophrastus concludes his report by saying that Heraclitus offers no explanation of "what the earth is like, or even about the bowls." The Hellenistic grammarian Diodotus finds Heraclitus's book to be about "man's life in society," and its statements on nature to serve only as "illustrations." (D. L. 9.15) The doxographical tradition may be misguided in assimilating Heraclitus's work to the discipline of natural philosophy. Theophrastus indicates further difficulties he had with Heraclitus's book when he maintains that some things Heraclitus wrote were "half-finished," others "inconsistent," which Theophrastus puts down to Heraclitus's "melancholy." (D. L. 9.6)

Influence

Of the Presocratic thinkers, Parmenides had the most influence, but Heraclitus may have had the most influence upon him, in drawing his attention to the problematic nature of change. Heraclitus may have had a certain vogue in the fifth century. Some minor Hippocratic authors reflect something of his paradoxicality, and Plato jokes about the fidgeting Ephesians, who are not stable enough to carry on an argument. Cratylus of Athens pushed change to such an extreme that he finds it necessary to rebuke Heraclitus for thinking that one could not step twice into the same river, when one could not step even once. Aristotle reports that in his youth, Plato was under the influence of Cratylus and found the objects of perception unknowable because of their instability. Heraclitus's most profound philosophical influence was upon the Stoics, who credited him with anticipating them. Fire has a primacy for them, and they, too, adopt a Logos as a ruling principle that is eternal, divine, and common to all things. Unlike Parmenides, Heraclitus exercises his charm well beyond antiquity and beyond philosophy. Hegel finds a positive parallel between his logic and the doctrines of Heraclitus, and T. S. Eliot spins out much of The Four Quartets in imagery borrowed from Heraclitus. Heraclitus's poetic prose attracts many to this day.

See also Anaximander; Anaximenes; Cosmology: Cratylus; Epistemology; God, Concepts of; Homer; Metaphysics; Parmenides of Elea; Philosophy of Religion; Philosophy of Religion, History of; Philosophy of Religion, Problems of; Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism; Xenophanes of Colophon.

Bibliography

works

Text

Diels, Hermann, with Walther Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, griechisch und deutsch. Vol. 1. 8th ed. Berlin: Weidmann, 1956–1959.

Texts and Commentaries

Kahn, Charles H. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Marcovich, Miroslav. Heraclitus: Greek Text with a Short Commentary. Mérida: Los Andes University Press, 1967.

Robinson, Thomas M. Fragments/Heraclitus: A Text and Translation with a Commentary. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.

Books and Articles

Barnes, Jonathan. The Presocratic Philosophers, Vol. 1: Thales to Zeno. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

Guthrie, W. K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. 1: Earlier Presocratics and Pythagoreans. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1962–1981.

Hussey, Edward. "Epistemology and Meaning in Heraclitus." In Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen, edited by Malcolm S. Schofield and Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Kirk, G. S., ed. The Cosmic Fragments. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1954.

Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. 2nd ed., rev. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Nussbaum, Martha Craven. "Psuchê in Heraclitus." Phronesis 17 (1972): 1—16, 153–170.

Vlastos, Gregory. "On Heraclitus." American Journal of Philology 76 (1955): 337—368.

Wiggins, David. "Heraclitus' Conceptions of Flux, Fire, and Material Persistence." In Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen, edited by Malcolm S. Schofield and Martha C. Nussbaum. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Herbert Granger (2005)