Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus was a Greek philosopher active around 500 BCE, known for his teaching that the world is in constant change, that opposites are bound together in a hidden unity, and that all things are governed by a rational order he called the logos. He wrote a single book in a compressed, riddling style that earned him the nickname "the Obscure", and only around 130 short fragments of it survive, quoted by later writers. Through Plato, the Stoics and modern thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche, he became one of the most influential of the early Greek philosophers.

Heraclitus came from Ephesus, a large Greek city on the Ionian coast, in what is now western Turkey, which during his lifetime was ruled by the Achaemenid Empire through local governors. The dates usually given, around 535 to around 475 BCE, derive from the ancient chronographers, who placed his prime in the years 504 to 501 BCE and reported that he died at sixty; they are approximate at best.

Very little about his life is secure. Diogenes Laertius, writing some seven centuries later, says that he belonged to an old aristocratic family and gave up an inherited honorary office, a kind of priestly kingship, to his brother. Other stories present him as a proud misanthrope who despised his fellow citizens, withdrew to play dice with children at the temple of Artemis, and died after trying to cure himself of dropsy by covering himself in dung. Many of these anecdotes were evidently invented from his own sayings and should be read as legend rather than biography.

Heraclitus is said to have deposited his book in the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was probably a collection of carefully crafted sayings rather than a continuous argument, full of wordplay, paradox and striking images. No copy survives. What remains are quotations and paraphrases in authors from Plato and Aristotle to the Christian bishop Hippolytus in the third century CE, who quoted him in order to attack a heresy. A papyrus found at Derveni in northern Greece, dating from the fourth century BCE, preserves another quotation. Because each source chose and sometimes reworded passages for its own purposes, scholars disagree about the original order of the fragments, about some of the wording, and about what Heraclitus meant.

He was openly scornful of other authorities. He said that wide learning does not teach understanding, otherwise it would have taught Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus, and he attacked Homer and the popular religion of his day, including blood sacrifice and the worship of statues.

At the opening of his book, Heraclitus speaks of a logos, a word that can mean account, reason or proportion, which is always true and according to which everything happens, although most people fail to grasp it even after hearing it. The logos seems to be both his own message and the structure of the world that the message describes. Wisdom, for Heraclitus, means recognising this common order instead of living as if each person had a private understanding.

Central to that order is the unity of opposites. The road up and the road down are one and the same; sea water is wholesome for fish and deadly for people; illness makes health pleasant, and hunger makes satisfaction sweet. Opposites depend on one another and turn into one another, and their tension produces the world's balance, like the strung bow or the lyre. In the same spirit he called war the father of all and justice a form of strife, meaning that conflict is not a defect in the world but what keeps it going.

Heraclitus described the world as an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and going out in measures, that no god or human made. Fire turns into sea and then earth and back again, so that the world persists through orderly exchange, as goods are exchanged for gold. Whether he thought of fire as the underlying stuff, as Aristotle assumed, or as an image of continuous transformation remains debated.

His most famous idea is that you cannot step into the same river twice. That wording is Plato's summary; the fragment itself seems to say that upon those who step into the same rivers, different waters flow. Read this way, the river remains the same river precisely because its waters are always changing, a point about stability through change rather than about mere chaos. Plato nevertheless presented Heraclitus as the philosopher of universal flux, the view that everything is always changing, and this interpretation shaped how he was remembered. Aristotle went further and accused him of denying the law of non-contradiction.

Heraclitus also wrote about the soul, which he connected with fire and dryness: a dry soul is wisest and best, while a drunk man, his soul made wet, stumbles and is led by a boy. He said that one would never find the limits of the soul, so deep is its logos, and that character is a person's fate. His political sayings are aristocratic in tone. He praised rule by the one best man and condemned the Ephesians for exiling his friend Hermodorus on the grounds that no one should stand out.

Heraclitus' influence began almost at once. Parmenides is often read as replying to him, though this is disputed. Cratylus, an extreme follower, reportedly concluded that one could not step into the same river even once and in the end only moved his finger; Aristotle says that Plato, in his youth, learned Heraclitean views from Cratylus, which helped convince him that true knowledge must be of unchanging Forms rather than of the shifting physical world. These developments run through ancient Greek philosophy and beyond.

The Stoics, beginning with Zeno of Citium and his successors, adopted Heraclitus' fire and logos as the basis of their physics, and early Christian writers connected his logos with the Word of the Gospel of John. Later writers turned him into "the weeping philosopher", set against Democritus, "the laughing philosopher". In the modern era Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said there was no proposition of Heraclitus he had not taken into his own logic, Friedrich Nietzsche admired him as a thinker of becoming, and Martin Heidegger returned repeatedly to his fragments. Their brevity and ambiguity have allowed each age to find something new in them.