Heraclitus

Introduction

  1. Fl. 500 B.C. in Ephesus, north of Miletus in Asia Minor. He was known in antiquity as "the obscure." And even today, it is very difficult to be certain what Heraclitus was talking about.  As Barnes says (Presocratics, p. 57):

    "Heraclitus attracts exegetes as an empty jampot wasps; and each new wasp discerns traces of his own favourite flavour."

    The reason for this: his dark and aphoristic style. He loved to appear to contradict himself. Even some of his doctrines sound incoherent and self-contradictory.
  2. One thing seems certain: Heraclitus had an extremely negative reaction to Milesian thought. For the Milesians, what is real is fixed and permanent; change somehow had to be explained away. They understood changes as alterations of some basic, underlying, material stuff which is, in its own nature, unchanging. Heraclitus reversed this: change is what is real. Permanence is only apparent.
  3. Heraclitus had a very strong influence on Plato. Plato interpreted Heraclitus to have believed that the material world undergoes constant change. He also thought Heraclitus was approximately correct in so describing the material world. Plato believed that such a world would be unknowable, and was thus driven to the conclusion that the material world was, in some sense, unreal, and that the real, knowable, world was immaterial.

The unity of opposites

  1. A number of fragments suggest that Heraclitus thought that opposites are really one.

    Main fragments: RAGP numbers 50, 60, 67, 83, 86 (= B61, B60, B88, B67, B62)

    See also: 70 (=B111), 75 (=B84a).
  2. What does this mean? Does Heraclitus think that hot = cold, that mortality = immortality, etc.? Does he think, in general, that each property that has an opposite is identical to its opposite?

    This is not likely. The fragments suggest, rather, that he thinks that opposites may be compresent or coinstantiated. That is, that one and the same thing may be both hot and cold, pure and polluted, etc.
  3. Barnes suggests that his view can be represented as a conjunction of the following two claims:
    1. Every object instantiates at least one pair of contrary properties.
    2. Every pair of contrary properties is coinstantiated in at least one object.
  4. But Heraclitus's argument for this seems to be weak. He argues that sea-water can be both pure and polluted since it brings life to fish and death to humans. But if he thinks that sea-water is therefore both pure and polluted, full-stop, he has committed (what Barnes calls) the "fallacy of the dropped qualification." Sea-water is good for fish and bad for humans, but from this it does not follow that it is both good (simpliciter) and bad (simpliciter).

    Perhaps, however, Heraclitus was not committing this fallacy at all. He may have meant something more subtle, namely, that no object has any of its properties simpliciter, and that there is always (in some way, relative to something or other, with suitable qualifications) an element in it of the opposite property.  It's hard to know for sure what he meant here.
  5. Of course it is true that opposites have to be understood in relation to one another, and that in this limited way a pair of opposites have a kind of unity. But that is less than Heraclitus claims.
  6. The unity of opposites that Heraclitus is talking about is perhaps better illustrated by his example of a bow or a lyre. Cf. fr. 46=B51:

    They do not understand how, though at variance with itself, it agrees with itself. It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and lyre.

    The point comes out more clearly in Freeman's (slightly less literal) translation:

    They do not understand how that which differs with itself in is agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre.

    Here the tension between opposed forces - the string being pulled one way by one end of the bow and the other way by the other - enables the bow to perform its function, to be the kind of thing that it is. It seems static, but it is in fact dynamic. Beneath its apparently motionless exterior is a tension between opposed forces. Cf. KRS, 193:

    ... the tension in the string of a bow or lyre, being exactly balanced by the outward tension exerted by the arms of the instrument, produces a coherent, unified, stable and efficient complex. We may infer that if the balance between opposites were not maintained, for example if 'the hot' began seriously to outweigh the cold, or night day, then the unity and coherence of the world would cease, just as, if the tension in the bow-string exceeds the tension in the arms, the whole complex is destroyed.

    We should not be surprised to find this, for, as Heraclitus tells us, 'nature loves to hide' (39=B123) and 'An unapparent connection (harmonia) is stronger than an apparent one' (47=B54).

    Heraclitus ties these themes - the tension of the bow and the opposites - together beautifully, if somewhat metaphorically, in fragment 65 (=B48):

              The name of the bow (bios) is life (bios), but its work is death.

    [The accent is on different syllables in the two Greek words, but they are spelled the same.] The bow in tension represents the tension between opposites in conflict; the opposition is expressed metaphorically in the name of the bow, which means just the opposite of what the bow's work is.

The Logos

  1. Heraclitus stresses the importance of (what he calls) "the logos". This term can have a variety of meanings: word, statement, reason, law, ratio, proportion, among others. (Barnes translates it as account.) It is related to the verb "to say" - a logos is something that is said.
  2. Fragments 1, 2, 44 (=B1, B2, B50)
  3. If there is any special importance to be attached to Heraclitus's use of this term (Barnes thinks not - see Presocratics p. 59) it is this:
    1. there is an orderly, law-governed process of change in the universe.
    2. The unity of diverse phenomena is to be found not in their matter, but in their logos. Indeed the very identity of an object depends not on the matter that composes it, but on the regularity and predictability of the changes it undergoes.
    3. The lyre (cf. above) is a good example of a logos in action. The orderly balance of opposed forces is what keeps the lyre functioning. The harmony of the lyre is an instance of the logos.
    4. Another good example in which the nature of a thing is given by its logos, and by the changes it undergoes, rather than by a list of its ingredients, is found in his discussion of the mixed drink that the Greeks called kykeon (here translated "posset") - a mixture of wine, barley and grated cheese (76=B125):

                   even the posset (kykeon) separates if it is not being stirred.

      His point is that the continued existence of a certain kind of thing depends on its undergoing continual change and movement. What makes something a posset is not just what it's made of (not just any collection of wine, barley, and cheese is a posset), but how it behaves, what kind of process it undergoes.

      In a way, then, the logos for something is rather like a recipe. That is, it is more than a list of ingredients. It includes an account of how they are put together, and how they interact.

Puzzles about Identity and Persistence

1. The puzzling doctrine for which Heraclitus is best known is reported by Plato:

Heraclitus, you know, says that everything moves on and that nothing is at rest; and, comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says that you could not step into the same river twice (Cratylus 402A).

Plutarch, no doubt following Plato, also ascribes this idea to Heraclitus (62=B91).

The idea is this: since the composition of the river changes from one moment to the next, it is not the same (numerically the same) river for any length of time at all.

Note that Plato thinks that Heraclitus uses the river as an example of what he takes to be a general condition: everything is like a river in this respect. That is, nothing retains its identity for any time at all.

That is: there are no persisting objects.

Indeed, according to Plato and Aristotle, there was a follower of Heraclitus who carried it even further:

Seeing that the whole of nature is in motion, and that nothing is true of what is changing, they supposed that it is not possible to speak truly of what is changing in absolutely all respects. For from this belief flowered the most extreme opinion of those I have mentioned - that of those who say they 'Heraclitize', and such was held by Cratylus, who in the end thought one should say nothing and only moved his finger, and reproached Heraclitus for saying that you cannot step in the same river twice - for he himself thought you could not do so even once (Metaph. 1010a7-15).]

2. Did Heraclitus mean to say that there are no persisting objects? Not likely. What Heraclitus actually said was more likely to have been this:

Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow. (61=B12)

This sounds more like a genuine quotation from Heraclitus. It fits the pattern of the "unity of opposites" fragments: suppose you step in the water of a river. What you step in is both the same and different. So the pair of contraries - same and different - are coinstantiated in the same object.

And, once again, it exhibits Heraclitus' familiar tendency to appeal to different qualifications when applying a pair of opposed concepts: what you step in is different water but the same river.

Moreover, Plato's idea seems to get Heraclitus backwards. If Heraclitus thought, as Plato suggests, that a compound object does not persist if its component parts get replaced, then he would be making the matter, rather than the orderly process of change, the logos of that object.

[For more on puzzles about identity and persistence, read about the famous case of the Ship of Theseus.]

The Flux Doctrine

  1. This is the view that everything is constantly altering; no object retains all of its component parts, or all of its qualities or characteristics, from one moment to the next.
  2. Plato attributes the Doctrine of Flux to Heraclitus. And it is because he thought Heraclitus was a Fluxist that he thought Heraclitus denied that there were any persisting objects.
  3. But even if Heraclitus was a Fluxist (which is far from clear) it does not follow that he had to deny that there are persisting objects. If an object is more like a process than like a static thing, then one and the same object can endure even though it is undergoing constant change.

    Further, there are different degrees of Fluxism:
    1. Extreme fluxism: The most extreme is: at every moment, every object is changing in every respect. Perhaps an extreme Fluxist is committed to the denial of persisting objects.
    2. Moderate fluxism: A less extreme version of Fluxism: at every moment, every object is changing in some respect or other. A proponent of this less extreme Flux doctrine could well allow for the persistence of objects through time.
  4. Heraclitean Fluxism
    1. It is unlikely that Heraclitus was an extreme fluxist. His discussions of change in general, and the river fragments in particular, suggest that he thought that change and permanence could co-exist, that is, that an object could persist in spite of continually undergoing change in some respect or other.
    2. If you step in the same river, you step in different waters: the river is still (numerically) the same river even though it has changed (compositionally), in that it (the same river) is now composed of different waters.
    3. So it is unlikely that Heraclitus denied that there are persisting objects.

Go to next lecture on Parmenides, Stage I

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For more on Heraclitus' epistemology, see James Lesher's Presocratic Contributions to the Theory of Knowledge.

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Copyright © 2000, S. Marc Cohen