Heraclitus

  The Way Up and the Way Down are the Same

 

Brief Biography:

> Lived around 500 B.C.

> Born and lived in Ephesus (modern Turkey) in Ionia, not far from Miletus

> Said to have written a single book (scroll) which was left in the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. Theophrastus said he saw the scroll and read it; called in incomplete and a hodgepodge. It was said to contain many aphorism, including:

"The learning of many things does not teach understanding."

> His philosophy and the quotes attributed to him are obscure and paradoxical having lead both his contemparies and philosophers after him to consider him a rationalist, an anti-intellectual, a scientist, a religious mystic, a logician, and a betrayer of the law of non-contradiction (which, to be fair, had not be articulated yet).

> He was often referred to as the "weeping philosopher" and apparently suffered from depression. He had a dim view of human nature and thought that most people were too stupid to understand his philosophy.

 

Philosophy:

 

>    The "coincidence of opposites" was central to Heraclitus' philosophy.

> Heraclitus was a material monist, that is, his ürstoff, was fire. Fire is the One-in-the-Many and fire becomes the multiplicity of being through the coincidence of opposites.

»    "Every pair of contraries is somewhere coinstantiated; and every object coinstantiates at least one pair of contraries."

» This coinstantiation of contraries causes everything to be in a state of flux or change.

» Heraclitus thinking on the coincidence of opposites contrasted with that of Anaximader who believed that the encroachment of opposites was an act of injustice on the unity of the One. Heraclitus believed that the conflict of opposites were essential to the relationship of the One-in-the-Many.

»    Homer said, "Would that strife would perish from among gods and men." To which Heraclitus responded, "He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe, for if his prayer had been heard, all things would pass away."

» For Heraclitus, "...all things come into being and pass away through strife."

¸ Fire lives by feeding, by consuming and transforming into itself heterogenous matter. Spring up, as it were from a multitude of objects, it changes them into itself. The very existence of fire depends on this strife and tension.

¸    In the process of fire two paths are distinguished: the upward and the downward path. Change is the upward and downward path. The downward path forms water and earth; the upward path produces the air and the heavens.

¸ Things are by virtue of the kindling and going out. There is a balance of upward/downward and kindling/going out which sonstitutes the "hidden attunement of the universe."

¸ Neither the upward or downward paths can cease to exist: "The way up and the way down is the same," or "good and ill are one."

» Through these processes things continue into being but are in constant flux. We cannot know things as they are since they are always changing. Being comes through life through death. "Strife is justice and all things come into being through strife necessarily."

 

> Heraclitus makes clear that his teaching is not his own invention, but the perennial wisdom of the Logos (Word/Reason): "Having harkened not to me but to the Word (Logos) it is wise to agree that all things are one."

»    Heraclitus does not explicate a method as to how he acquired knowledge of the Logos, but he was quite clear that most men are capable of hearing the Word or having heard it capable of understanding it: "Of this Word's being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it."

»  Heraclitus claims that the poets of antiquity and the Ionian philosophers, especially Pythagoras, were frauds.

> Heraclitus view of God/Logos was equally obscure:

»    “God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger, and he alters just as [fire] when it is mixed with spices is named according to the aroma of each of them”

» "To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right."

»"The wise is one only. It is unwilling and willing to be called by the name of Zeus."

» One things seems to be true of Heraclitus' view of the Logos and that was that it was pantheistic, immanent in all things, the universal law binding all things into unity and determining the constant change in the universe.

> Heraclitus view of man:

»    Man's reason is a moment in the universal Reason. Man should strive to attain reason, live by it, realizing the unity of all things and the reign of unlaterable law, being content with the necessary processes of the universe and not rebelling against it.

»  Reason is man's fiery element—when fires leaves the body, water and earth are left behind. Man must strive to achieve a dry state avoiding pleasures that are moist.

» This state of being the Stoics developed into the "virtue" of apatheia, a state in which the mind is free of emotional disturbance and indifference. It is similar to the Buddhist state of nibbana.