Heraclitus

"I cannot approve of Heraclitus, who, being self-taught and arrogant, said, "I have explored myself." Nor can I praise him for hiding his poem in the temple of Artemis, in order that it might be published afterwards as a mystery; and those who take an interest in such things say that Euripides the tragic poet came there and read it, and, gradually learning it by heart, carefully handed down to posterity this darkness of Heraclitus."

"Herakleitos, about 460 B.C., one of the boldest thinkers of ancient Greece, declared that Homer deserved to be ejected from public assemblies and flogged..."

"When... Heraclitus names the world an ever-living fire that... extinguishes itself and again kindles itself, when... all is exchanged for fire and fire for all... he can only understand by this that fire, this restless, all-consuming, all-transmuting, and equally (in heat) all-vivifying element, represents the constant force of this eternal alteration and transformation, the notion of life, in the most vivid and energetic manner. ...the means of which the power of motion that is precedent to all matter avails itself for the production of the living process of things. Heraclitus... explains the multiplicity of things... [fire] condenses itself into material elements, first air, then water, then earth. ...These two processes of extinction and ignition... alternate... in perpetual rotation with each other and... in stated periods the world resolves itself into the primal fire, in order to re-create itself out of it again. ...[F]ire is to him... the principle of movement, of physical as of spiritual vitality; the soul itself is a fiery vapour; its power and perfection depend on its being pure from all grosser and duller elements."

"In... Heraclitus... Becoming occupies the foremost place. He regarded that which moves, the fire, as the basic element. The difficulty, to reconcile the... one fundamental principle with the infinite variety of phenomena, is solved... by recognizing... strife of... opposites is... a kind of harmony. ...[T]he world is ...one and many ..."the opposite tension" of ...opposites ...constitutes the unity of the One. He says: "...war is common to all and strife is justice ...all things come into being and pass away through strife." ...[T]hat infinite and eternal undifferentiated Being ...cannot ...explain the infinite variety of things. This leads to the antithesis of Being and Becoming and ...to the solution of Heraclitus ...change ...is the fundamental principle; the "imperishable change, that renovates the world," as the poets have called it. But ...change ...is not a material cause and therefore is represented ...by the fire ...both matter and a moving force. ...[[Physics|[P]hysics]] is ...extremely near to ...Heraclitus ...[i]f we replace ..."fire" by ..."energy" ...Energy is a substance, since its total ...does not change, and ...elementary particles can ...be made from this ...Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world. ...Energy is ...that which moves; it may be called the primary cause of all change, and ...can be transformed into matter or heat or light. The strife between opposites in the philosophy of Heraclitus can be found in the strife between two different forms of energy."

"If the flow is steady, the field velocity vectors and the system of streamlines remain unaffected by the progress of time. Looking at the vector field and its streamlines we do not notice any change. Yet if we could distinguish the different particles of fluid from each other, we could observe incessant change... We have here two aspects of a steady flow, one of unchanging persistence, the other of incessant change. ...Heraclitus was called the "Dark Philosopher"; his views of human affairs were sombre and his sayings obscure. ... "You cannot look twice at the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in." "We look and do not look at the same rivers; we are, and we are not." What is the intended meaning of these sentences? I do not venture to find out. Yet I think that the originator of these senteces came pretty close to formulating the concept "steady flow of a fluid."

"Herakleitos held..., that any... thing, however stable in appearance, was merely a section in the stream, and... the matter composing it was never the same in any two consecutive moments... [T]he idea was not... novel, and... hardly the central point in the system of Herakleitos."

"If neither sub-atomic particles nor organic species exemplify the permanent entities of Greek metaphysics, what else in the real world does so? ...Two hundred years of historical research have had their effect. Whether we turn to social or intellectual history, evolutionary zoology, historical geology or astronomy—whether we consider explanatory theories or star-clusters, societies or cultures, languages or disciplines, organic species or the Earth itself—the verdict is not Parmenidean but Heraclitean. As we now understand it, nothing in the empirical world possesses the permanent unchanging identity which all Greek natural philosophers (the Epicureans apart) presupposed in the ultimate elements of Nature. So, if we... are to entertain metaphysical thoughts about the nature of things-in-general consistent with the rest of our late-twentieth-century ideas, we must explore the consequences of the modern, post-Darwinian or populational approach, as applied not just to species, but to historical entities of all kinds. Confronted with the question, How do permanent entities preserve their identity through all their apparent changes?, we must simply deny the validity of the question itself. In its place, we must substitute the question, How do historical entities maintain their coherence and continuity, despite all the real changes they undergo?"

"[H]e believed himself to have attained insight into... truth... not hitherto... recognised, though... staring men in the face (fr. 93). ...[W]e must ...find out what he was thinking ...when he launched into ...denunciations of human dulness and ignorance. The answer... in ...fragments, 18 and 45 ... the many apparently independent and conflicting things we know are really one, and ...this one is also many. The "strife of opposites" is really an "attunement" ...[[Wisdom|[W]isdom]] is not a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of the warring opposites."

"Anaximander had taught... the opposites were separated... from the Boundless, but passed away into it once more... paying the penalty for... unjust encroachments on one another. It is... implied... there is something wrong in the war of opposites, and... existence of the Many is a breach in the unity of the One. ...Herakleitos proclaimed ...there is no One without the Many, and no Many without the One. The world is at once one and many, and ...the "opposite tension" of the Many ...constitutes the unity of the One."

"[In] Plato.., the Sophist (242 d), the Eleatic stranger, after explaining how the maintained that what we call many is really one, proceeds:— But certain Ionian and (at a later date) certain Sicilian Muses remarked that it was safest to unite these two things, and to say that reality is both many and one, and is kept together by Hate and Love. "For," say the more severe Muses, "in its division it is always being brought together" (cf. fr. 59); while the softer Muses relaxed the requirement that this should always be so, and said that the All was alternately one and at peace through the power of Aphrodite, and many and at war with itself because of something they called Strife. ...the Ionian Muses stand ...for Herakleitos, and the Sicilian for Empedokles."

"Herakleitos... explained the world by man rather than man by the world. ...Aristotle implies that soul is identical with the dry exhalation, and this is ...confirmed by the fragments. Man is made... of... fire, water, and earth. But, just as in the macrocosm fire is... the one wisdom, so in the microcosm... fire alone is conscious. When it has left the body..., the mere earth and water, is... worthless (fr. 85)."

"The true Herakleitean doctrine doubtless was, that sleep was produced by the encroachment of moist, dark exhalations from the water in the body, which cause the fire to, burn low. In sleep, we lose contact with the fire in the world which is common to all, and retire to a world of our own (fr. 95). In a soul where the fire and water are evenly balanced, the equilibrium is restored in the morning by an equal advance of the bright exhalation."