Heraclitus#
Revised
12 Jul 2023
Fragments#
Kahn, Charles. (1979). The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: A New Arrangement and Translation of the Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Natural philosophy; the general law of nature; fire; change#
34#
The ordering, the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and is and will be: fire everliving, kindled in measures and in measures going out.
35#
The reversals of fire: first sea; but of sea half is earth, half lightning storm.
36#
Sea pours out < from earth >, and it measures up to the same amount it was before becoming earth.
37#
All things are requital for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.
38#
The death of fire is birth for air, and the death of air is birth for water.
39#
The sun is overseer and sentinel of cycles, for determining the changes and the seasons which bring all things to birth.
40#
There is a certain order and fixed time for the change of the cosmos in accordance with some fated necessity.
41#
The sun will not transgress his measures.
If he does, the Furies, ministers of Justice, will find him out.
42#
The limits of Dawn and Evening is the Bear; and, opposite the Bear, the Warder of luminous Zeus.
43#
If there were no sun, it would be night.
44#
The sun is the size of a human foot.
45#
The sun is new every day.
46#
Cold warms up, warm cools off, moist parches, dry dampens.
47#
As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them.
48#
One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs.
49#
It rests by changing.
50#
It is weariness to toil at the same tasks and be always beginning.
51#
The wise is one, knowing the plan by which it steers all things through all.
52#
Human nature has no set purpose, but the divine has.
Other fragments#
53#
The most beautiful of apes is ugly in comparison with the race of man; the wisest of men seems an ape in comparison to a god.
54#
A man is found foolish by a god, as a child by a man.
55#
Human opinions are toys for children.
56#
What wit or understanding do they have?
They believe the poets of the people and take the mob as their teacher, not knowing that ‘the many are worthless’, good men are few.
57#
A fool loves to get excited on any account.
58#
Dogs bark at those they do not recognize.
59#
In Priene lived Bias son of Teutames, who is of more account than the rest.
60#
What the Ephesians deserve is to be hanged to the last man, every one of them, and leave the city to the boys, since they drove out their best man, Hermodorus, saying ‘Let no one be the best among us; if he is, let him be so elsewhere and among others’.
61#
One man is ten thousand, if he is the best.
62#
The people must fight for the law as for their city wall.
63#
It is law also to obey the counsel of one.
64#
It is not better for human beings to get all they want.
It is disease that makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.
65#
For god all things are fair and good and just, but men have taken some things as unjust, others as just.
66#
If it were not for these things, they would not have known the name of Justice.
67#
The sea is the purest and foulest water: for fish drinkable and life-sustaining; for men undrinkable and deadly.
68#
Asses prefer garbage to gold.
69#
Swine delight in mire more than clean water; chickens bathe in dust.
70#
Doctors who cut and burn and torture their patients in every way complain that they do not receive the reward they deserve.
71#
The path of the carding wheels is straight and crooked.
72 - conflict and attunement#
The counter-thrust brings together, and from tones at variance comes perfect attunement, and all things come to pass through conflict.
73#
All beasts are driven by blows.
74#
Even the potion separates unless it is stirred.
75 - the bow and the lyre#
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.
76 - life’s work is death#
The name of the bow is life; its work is death.
77#
The hidden attunement is better than the obvious one.
78#
Homer was wrong when he said ‘Would that Conflict might vanish from among gods and men!’
For there would be no attunement without high and low notes nor any animals without male and female, both of which are opposites.
79#
One must realize that war is shared and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass (and are ordained?) in accordance with conflict.
80#
War is father of all and king of all; and some he has shown as gods, others men; some he has made slaves, other free.
81#
What awaits men at death they do not expect or even imagine.
82#
The great man is eminent in imagining things, and on this he hangs his reputation for knowing it all.
83#
Incredibility escapes recognition.
84#
Justice will catch up with those who invent lies and those who swear to them.
85#
Corpses should be thrown out quicker than dung.
86#
Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep.
87#
A man strikes a light for himself in the night, when his sight is quenched.
Living, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper.
88#
Men asleep are laborers and coworkers in what takes place in the world.
89#
Immortals are mortal, mortals immortal, living the others’ death, dead in the others’ life.
90#
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.
91#
Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game.
Kingship belongs to the child.
92#
A generation is thirty years, in which time the progenitor has engendered one who generates.
The cycle of life lies in this interval, when nature returns from human seed-time to seed-time.
93#
Greater deaths are alloted greater destinies.
94#
The best choose one thing in exchange for all, everflowing fame among mortals; but most men have sated themselves like cattle.
95#
Once born they want to live and have their portions; and they leave children behind born to become their dooms.
96#
The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle.
97#
Gods and men honor those who fall in battle.
98#
To the soul belongs a report that increases itself.
99#
For souls it is death to become water, for water it is death to become earth; out of earth water arises, out of water soul.
100#
The way up and down is one and the same.
101#
One must quench violence quicker than a blazing fire.
102#
It is hard to fight against passion; for whatever it wants it buys at the expense of the soul.
103#
A man when drunk is led by a beardless boy, stumbling, not perceiving where he is going, having his soul moist.
104#
It is better to hide one’s folly; but that is difficult in one’s cups and at ease.
105#
It is delight, not death, for souls to become moist.
106#
A gleam of light is the dry soul, wisest and best.
107#
…to rise up and become wakeful watchers of living men and corpses.
108#
Souls smell things in Hades.
109#
If all things turned to smoke, the nostrils would sort them out.
110#
The soul is an exhalation that perceives; it is different from the body, and always flowing.
111#
Man’s character is his fate.
112#
The mysteries current among men initiate them into impiety.
113#
If it were not Dionysus for whom they march in procession and chant the hymn to the phallus, their action would be most shameless.
But Hades and Dionysus are the same, him for whom they rave and celebrate Lenaia.
114#
They are purified in vain with blood, those polluted with blood, as if someone who stepped in mud should try to wash himself with mud.
Anyone who noticed pray to these images as if they were chatting with houses, not recognizing what gods or even heroes are like.
115#
The wise is one alone, unwilling and willing to be spoken of by the name of Zeus.
116#
The thunderbold pilots all things.
117#
Fire is need and satiety.
118#
Fire coming on will discern and catch up with all things.
119#
How will one hide from that which never sets?
120#
The god: day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger.
It alters, as when mingled with perfumes, it gets named according to the pleasure of each one.
121#
Graspings: wholes and not wholes, convergent divergent, consonant dissonant, from all things one and from one thing all.
122#
The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.
What does Heraclitus think people fail to comprehend?
How are we asleep, even while awake, according to Heraclitus?
What does Heraclitus mean by saying that ‘the account is shared’? What does this have to do with being awake?
‘Whatever comes from sight…this I prefer.’ What does Heraclitus mean?
‘Eyes and ears are poor witnesses for men if their souls do not understand the language.’ Why does he think that this is true?
What does Homer deserve, and why?
What does Heraclitus say about thinking well? What argument might he give for saying that?
He says that ‘the ordering is the same for all’. What is this ordering in the universe, and why does he emphasize that it is the same for all persons?
Why does Heraclitus claim ‘the way up and down is one and the same’?
What is the logos or principle underlying all change, according to Heraclitus?
What does Heraclitus mean by asserting that one cannot step into the same river twice? What does he say immediately after this famous saying?
Does Heraclitus believe that there are substances? What would it mean to deny that any substance exists?
Quite apart from Heraclitus, what reasons are there for thinking that substances do not exist?
Why does Heraclitus claim that the thunderbold steers or pilots all things?
Why does Heraclitus claim that ‘asses prefer garbage to gold’? What do swine prefer?
What does Heraclitus say about attunement and the bow? What does the bow stand for?
Why was Homer wrong to wish for the end of conflict?
Notes#
ANAXIMANDER’S APEIRON
infinite eternal nature, the first principle of what is, from all things come: its eternality is linked to generation, destruction, change
coins the word “principle” (ARCHE) for the source of all things
not the first to use element, cause
ELEMENT: the pattern of change according to its principle
STOIXEION: element as chemical (Plato’s Timaeus)
ARCHE AITIA beginning, originating cause
things are a source, or they derive from a source
the infinite has no source
if a thing is a beginning or comes from a beginning, then the beginning is different from the thing that comes from the beginning: the difference means that there’s a limit
Proof
a way to get deeper into phenomena
isolate decisive factors, causes, implications
a way to generalize from particular phenomena to other phenomena
a proof comes along with necessity: one part of the world is related of necessity to another part of the world; one claim is related of necessity to another claim; then we have ontological and logical coherence
a discovery about the world
becomes the basis for criticism between philosophers
coherence, the criterion for the adequacy or goodness of a philosophical theory
brings about a worldview of homogeneity in contrast the prior heterogeneous one
Heraclitus
pure flux?
using a format of discourse in which he is not writing a treatise, but aphoristic separate insights
Heraclitus, Artemis, the goddess of nature
we don’t know the order of the fragments
incredibly systematic thinker
not sheer, unnable flux
precisely the philosopher of structure change, flux, patterns that can be discerned, sources that can be grasped
identify order and relationships of the fragments; which conceptual structures are we bringing into the text?
Heraclitus is not interested in making a set of claims that are all true
things that point beyond themselves, to understanding; not meant to literlly lay out plan
Everything is in flux, even when the change is imperceptible.
Doctrine of the unity of opposites
According to which everything is necessarily characterized by both of two opposing features.
The unity of opposites is a fundamental pattern of the universe.
It is in terms of the unity of opposites that we should understand the cosmos as a process.
Monism
The underlying nature of the universe is fire.
If there are no permanent entities because everything is in flux, then it may be incorrect to think of fire as a permanent underlying substance out of which everything is composed.
The cosmos is a process of burning and quenching, heating and cooling, rather than a static substance.
Heraclitus’ natural philosophy
1-33 stress the hidden/esoteric nature of real knowledge
34-44 general law of natur;, fire
38-51 change
There is a divine intelligence, eternal law governing the universe
A spark of this intelligence exists in human reason
Fire is the divine aspect of the cosmos and man
I
Everything happens in accordance with a general law of nature (logos)
Zoroastrianism, based on monotheism
there is dualism, but one god
the idea that all things are grounded in one source
due in part to a reception of Zoroastrianism
Heraclitus
approach to the logos and understanding phenomena
uniformitarianism and Copernicus proposes the sun at the center of the sun
connect the first fragment with the others to understand the first
Heraclitus
one has to go beyond the words to understand the things
attunement, harmonia
hide, kryptosthai
subjective variation to experience
something not apparent about the things
a thing diverging is also converging
a bow is constituted by the tension in both directions; when the string is cut (or hanging from one or the other end), the bow is gone
macro things’ particles
phenomena are constituted in a tension, a balance, a pull “in both directions”
hidden ratio, balance, attunement, harmony
the forces that pull apart and the forces that pull together
stationary phenomena constituted by an underlying dynamic structure
Heraclitus in a physical, force-like way
nature loves to hide, the hidden nature
hiddenness is the dynamic structure
the unity of the bow is a continual accomplishment
sameness and difference are related to one another
ousia is a theoretical object developed in Plato and Aristotle
the identity of a thing is its multitude of differences
Heraclitus’ philosophy of nature
doctrine of perpetual flux: PANTA REI “everything is in flux”
change is constant and perpetual
even when the change is imperceptible
Is the universe a process rather than an thing (object, substance)?
the doctrine of the unity of opposites: everything is necessarily characterized by both of two opposing features; the unity of opposites is a fundamental pattern of the universe; it is in these terms that the cosmos should be understood as a process
“The way up and down is one and the same”
monism according to which the underlying nature of the universe is “fire”: the cosmos is a process characterized by heating up and cooling down
everything in flux -> there are no permanent things -> fire is not a permanent underlying thing (static substance) out of which everything is composed
FIRE: warm vital force, or something more abstract
change is fire?
the δύναμις of fire is to cause motion [Loeb]
living fire
fire (the sun) becomes all things, and all things return to it
twofold way in nature: to fire and from fire
there is a divine, eternal intelligence or law of nature that governs the universe
a spark of the divine intelligence exists in human reason
fire is the divine aspect of the cosmos and man
FIERY principle connects human to nature
MOTION has its source in the unity of opposites
παλίντονος ἁρμονίη
Loeb
each opposite [tends] to turn into its opposite, and so…each is the same as the other
day and night, with all other opposites, are two sides of the same process, [inseparable] like concavity and convexity
an explanation of one opposite is also the explanation of the other
Resources#
Terms#
account ; logos ; order ; principle
of opposites: conflict ; strife ; tension
the common ; the shared