By: A.C. Grayling
One sure way to live in philosophical memory is to issue striking remarks that are obscure or ambiguous – or better still a mixture of both. Heraclitus is an example. Known as ‘the Obscure’, ‘the Dark’ and ‘the Riddler’, he sauced his obscurities with arrogance and misanthropy. He was an aristocrat, born in Ephesus about 540 BCE or soon afterwards, whose family were part of the city’s ruling elite. He gave his hereditary political office of ‘Basileus’ to a brother, and later in life went to live a rustic hermit’s life, though he returned to the city when he fell ill, and died at about the age of sixty.
He wrote a book, a copy of which was given to Socrates by the playwright Euripides (so says Diogenes Laertius, reporting what is probably a mere legend). Euripides asked him what he thought of it. Socrates replied, ‘What I understand of it is splendid, what I don’t understand of it is probably splendid too; but it would take a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.’
A major problem with understanding Heraclitus’ philosophy is that the surviving fragments of his book are obscure in themselves, and it is not clear how to arrange them in order, which is a problem because different orders support different interpretations. Aristotle in the Rhetoric complained that it was hard to know how to punctuate Heraclitus’ sentences to clarify their sense, and gives as an example the only sentence whose position in the work we know, namely, its opening sentence: ‘Of this account [logos] which holds forever men prove uncomprehending.’ Is it the logos that holds forever, or are men forever uncomprehending?
We do not even know the title of his book, which would be some guide to what it is about; later doxographers said that it had three parts, one on nature, one on politics and one on theology. This is a break with the philosophical tradition to that point, in ranging more widely than cosmology. But which of these subjects contained the main point of what he wished to say? Given that it appears to have been written in a consciously oracular style – one imagines that comparisons with Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra might be suggestive (and perhaps with its author too) – one can see how difficulties increase.
The account Heraclitus gives of the nature of the world is accompanied by remarks on perception, knowledge and enquiry: ‘Nature loves to hide … the eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears’ (does he mean: To observe for oneself is better than to listen to what others say?). Even those who, like Pythagoras, engage in scientific enquiry do not get things right: ‘The learning of many things does not teach understanding, otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, and again Xenophanes and Hecataeos.’
In any event Heraclitus thought that he had grasped the correct logos – a word used by Greek philosophers in such a variety of ways that it can be taken to mean any and more of ‘account’, ‘theory’, ‘framework’, ‘word’, ‘reason’, ‘significance’, ‘principle’ and as we might say ‘the underlying logic (of something)’. One reasonable reconstruction of Heraclitus’ account is as follows.
Everything is in flux; as Plato puts it in the Cratylus, ‘Heraclitus says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says that you could not step into the same river twice.’
Heraclitus’ disciple Cratylus, who was so convinced that everything is constantly changing, would not reply when spoken to but would only waggle his finger to indicate that he had heard, because by the time he was ready to answer, the world had changed.
Some commentators disagree that Heraclitus meant what Plato says he meant. Rather, they say, he meant that things stay the same only by changing – as is the case with a river; its flux does not destroy its continuity as the same river, but in fact constitutes it. This latter reading is more consistent with another of Heraclitus’ doctrines, that of the ‘unity of opposites’. One interpretation of this is that a thing can combine opposite qualities: ‘sea is simultaneously the purest and the foulest water: for fish it is drinkable and healthy, for men it is undrinkable and harmful.’ Likewise youth and age, waking and sleeping, life and death are ‘the same thing in us … for having changed round they are these, but when changed round again they are those’, though in these cases not simultaneously. But others of his fragments seem to say that opposites are in fact identicals: ‘the straight and the crooked path of the fuller’s comb is one and the same … the way up and the way down is one and the same.’ These remarks are true: a staircase is both up and down simultaneously, differentiated only by whether you are ascending or descending. ‘Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like the bow and the lyre.’
Another identification of opposites requires, however, a more studied interpretation: one fragment says, ‘good and ill are one.’ Does this imply a version of Hamlet’s ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’? Most likely the explanation is deeper, for Heraclitus seems to have held that it is by the conflict or tension that holds opposites together that existence itself is made possible: ‘Homer was wrong to say, “Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe, for if his prayer were heard all things would pass away … all things come into being and pass away through strife … strife is justice, all things happen according to strife and necessity.’
Following Aristotle, many commentators see Heraclitus as conforming to the tradition of the earlier Ionians in being a material monist, that is, as holding the view that there is a single underlying material arche. As we saw, his predecessors had successively nominated water, the infinite and air; he nominated fire. ‘The cosmos, which is the same for all, was not made by gods or men, but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be, an ever-living fire, parts of it kindling, and parts of it going out … fire is lack and abundance … All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things.’ Fire turns into water, and half of water turns into earth and half into a fiery wind, and both can turn back into water and water back into fire. These changes are the result of the strife that is an application of justice which reverses the domination of one thing by another.
It might seem that the fact of eternal flux and change makes knowledge impossible, and Plato thought that Heraclitus meant this. But his remarks about the value of learning, and his criticism of others for not achieving understanding even though they study and enquire, suggest otherwise. Indeed it appears that he attached great ethical significance to knowledge: ‘Sound thinking is the greatest virtue and wisdom; [it is] to speak the truth and act on a proper understanding of the nature of things.’ This is why he says of himself that his preference is for ‘seeing, and hearing, and learning’. Pythagoras had taught a way of life; Heraclitus offers wisdom teachings of his own. Like many others he counselled moderation and self control in such activities as drinking and eating, but unlike many others he frankly extolled the pursuit of fame: ‘The best choose one thing above all else, everlasting fame.’ Since he also thought that the best deaths occur in battle, it is not clear that he meant philosophical fame. He said ‘character is fate,’ and that it is not good always to get what one wants.
In politics he advocated the rule of law – ‘The people must fight for [the city’s] laws as for its walls’ – and a wise choice of rulers. Both pieces of advice are consistent with the idea that there is a cosmic logos (which can be interpreted as saying: the cosmos is governed by universal laws) and that rationality – the rational apprehension of these universal laws – applies as much to ethics and politics as in cosmology. But he was not a protodemocrat; he had no time for ‘fools’ and ‘the many … the mob’. ‘Most men’s teacher is Hesiod; they are convinced he knew most things – he, a man who could not recognize that day and night are one.’
It cannot be denied that other and later philosophers were struck by Heraclitus’ views – how can one say ‘influenced’ by them given that neither they nor we are quite clear what they were? Of course his contemporaries and successors had their interpretations of what he meant, and were doubtless influenced by those; but one could extrapolate quite different results for later thinking from this. Some think Parmenides developed his philosophy in opposition to Heraclitus, others see Democritus echoing Heraclitus in his ethical pronouncements; Plato is often read as employing an interpretation of Heraclitus in arguing for the transience and instability of the material world, and from Parmenides in arguing for the eternity and immutability of the intelligible world. Some saw Heraclitus as squarely in the Ionian tradition of physics, others as a sceptic. Such is the fate, and the usefulness, of being a ‘Riddler’.
