
	Top News: Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789 Elite Warriors: The Special Forces of the United States and Its Allies Warrior Cults. A history of Magical Mystical and Murderous Organizations A Pictorial History of the Civil War Years Emperor Michael Palaeologus And The West, 1258-1282 A History of Artillery The Complete Book of U.S. Naval Power The Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific War Air Force: A Pictorial History of American Airpower Aisne 1914 (Battleground Europe)

Contact

8-08-2015, 06:29

Heraclitus of Ephesus

Philosopher

Born: c. 540 b. c.e.; Ephesus, Greece

Died: c. 480 b. c.e.; place unknown

Category: Philosophy; astronomy and cosmology

Life Heraclitus of Ephesus (hayr-uh-KLI-tuhs of eh-FUH-suhs) was born to an important family that had an ancient and respected reputation. He was a man of great personal integrity who sought the truth and wanted to proclaim it for the benefit of humankind. Heraclitus attacked the sacred festival of the Bacchanalia, condemned the worship of images of the gods, and spoke unkind words about Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Hecataeus, and Hesiod. His arrogance was legendary. Aristotle and Theophrastus observed, however, that the statements in Heraclitus’s writings were sometimes ambiguous, incomplete, and contradictory. It is no wonder that his contemporaries named him “The Riddler,” “The Obscure One,” and “The Dark One.”

Heraclitus’s book was titled Periphysefs (c. 500 b. c.e.; partial translation in The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature, 1899). Heraclitus would not qualify as a scientist; his talent was more that of the mystic. He had the ability to see further into the nature of things than others did. He was the first to unify the natural and the spiritual worlds, while others saw only the discrete components of nature. For Heraclitus, that which underlay the world of form and matter was not substance but process.

Heraclitus saw the world as a place where change, at every level and every phase of existence, was the most important phenomenon. The processes governing the world involved the four elements: fire, water, air, and earth. Air was hot and wet, water was cold and wet, earth was cold and dry, and fire was hot and dry. Under certain circumstances, each of the four elements could be transformed into another. All the possible transformations were happening at any given time somewhere in the universe, such as in the cooking of a meal, the thawing of the winter ice, or the volcanism of Mount Etna.

Heraclitus described two fundamental directions of this change. In the downward path, some of the fire thickens and becomes the ocean, while

Heraclitus of Ephesus (Library of Congress

Part of the ocean dies and becomes land. On the upward path, moist exhalations from the ocean and the land rise and become clouds; they then ignite (perhaps in the form of lightning) and return to fire (presumably the fiery ether, which was thought to dwell in the heights of the sky). If the fiery clouds from which the lightning comes are extinguished, however, then there is a whirlwind (a waterspout, perhaps), and once again the fire returns to the sea and the cycle is complete.

All this change and transformation was not, however, simply random motion. There was a cosmic master plan, the Logos. Nothing in the English language translates Logos perfectly. In the beginning of the Gospel of John, it is usually translated as the Word. In Heraclitus’s time, Logos could mean reputation or high worth. This meaning devolved from another definition of Logos: narrative or story. The Logos can be considered the soul of the universe. Logos, Soul, and Cosmic Fire are eventually different aspects of the same abstraction—the everlasting truth that directs the universe and its conscious constituents. According to Heraclitus, the enlightened soul is hot and dry, like fire, which is why it tends upward, in the direction of the fiery ether. Soul and ether are the same material.

Soul is linked to Logos, but its roots are in the human body that it inhabits. Soul is possibly the healing principle in the body: Heraclitus likened the soul to a spider that, when its web is torn, goes to the site of the injury. Though the body was subject to decomposition, some souls seem to have been exempted from physical death. Certain situations, among them dying in battle, tune the soul to such a heightened state that it merged directly with the world fire. After death, there seems to be no survival of personal identity, though it is likely that the soul-stuff is merged with the Logos and that the Logos is the source of souls that exist in the physical world.

Heraclitus saw that the world was a unity of many parts, but the unity was not immediately manifest. The oneness of the world was the result of an infinite multiplicity. Heraclitus thought that the key to understanding this multiplicity was to look on the world in terms of the abstract concept of Harmony. Heraclitus believed that Harmony existed only where and when there was opposition. His most controversial statement on the subject was that the opposites that define the continuum are identical. Hate and love, therefore, would have to be one and the same. The absence of either defining term destroys the continuum. The Harmony that Heraclitus discerned was dependent on the tension between two opposites. The cosmos was, for him, a carefully and beautifully balanced entity, poised between a great multiplicity of contrasting interests, engaged in continual strife. Only the Logos, which was One, and which created and tuned the Harmony, was exempt from the balancing of opposites.

Heraclitus believed not only that the Logos bestowed life on all its parts but also that the forms of matter were intrinsically alive and that the flux was a function of the life within the matter. Heraclitus summed it up poetically in his famous analogy: “You cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters are flowing on.” From one second to the next, the flux of things changes the world; though the river is the same river, the flux of things has moved its waters downstream, and new water from upstream has replaced the old.

Influence Heraclitus was quite unlike his contemporaries, both in terms of his personality and in the nature and scope of his thoughts. Whereas the works of his contemporaries were more in the line of primitive scientific inquiry, the endeavors of Heraclitus were more closely akin to poesy and perhaps prophecy. His aim was not to discover the material world but to seek out the governing principles within and behind the physical forms. In this respect, he was the most mystical of the Greeks.

Though the body of Heraclitus’s work is faulted by time, by problems of interpretation, and by obscurity of the text (some of which was solely Heraclitus’s fault), it is clear that he believed he had provided a definitive view of the processes that govern the cosmos and the workings of the human soul. His ideas were novel and daring in their time.

Top News:

Heraclitus of Ephesus