Hussey on Heraclitus
Heraclitus had a unique stylized and artful prose style
Many statements play with paradoxes with around a hundreds fragments of his work
surviving
The Greeks named him “the obscure”
Heraclitus talks about things ranging from politics to souls and the cosmos
He rejected the beliefs of “the many” and the authority they followed such as the poets
He attacked less popular wise men such as Pythagoras and Xenophanes
The only people he praised were himself and the sage Bias of Priene
Heraclitus has been grouped as a natural philosopher as he was concerned with cosmic
processes yet he tackles a large range of issues
He was pursuing a critique and reformulation of cosmology and all knowledge in new and
surer foundations
His quotes include “All of which the learning is seeing and hearing: that I value most”
His practice of critiquing tradition and myth is similar to Xenophanes’ doubting the nature of
any unobserved creatures such as the gods
In Heraclitus’s mind the soul must “speak the right language” otherwise any evidence may
be mistaken even by our own senses
His quote “Bad witnesses are eyes and ears to people, when they have souls that do not
speak the right language”. This is stating that our senses are shaped by how we see the
world
Through exploiting all resources can true knowledge be obtained such as the face that the
smart Homer was fool by the lice riddle
His quote “Nature likes to conceal itself” shows that through logically going through riddles
to find their meaning is the true wat to discover what was known to the senses, you must be
open to every hint
Heraclitus has listened to the riddles of the world and wishes to bestow his knowledge to us
Logos means what is said/story and proportions/measure
Heraclitus wants to bind the sense into one or logos
“Though the logos is shared, the many live as though they had a private source of
understanding”
The opposition between the sense and the illusion of the private source of logos are the
illusions of people
The realm of dreams are the supposed private sources of understanding to which Heraclitus
was referring to
Seeing the world, the way Heraclitus sees is according to him the only logical way to see the
world
The unity in opposite theory gave substance to the all things are one claim
The unity in opposites ideas comes in 3 forms: plain language without comment or
examples, generalization with abstract language and in the construction of cosmology
theories and the theories of the soul among others
The unity is seen as a “A road: uphill, downhill, one and the same” it is the same road from a
different perspective
With other examples such as “Into rivers, the same ones, on those who step in, different and
different waters flow”, “Beginning is together with end (on a circle)”, “Physicians cut and
burn people, and ask for a fee on top of that” and “Donkeys would choose garbage rather
than gold”
The opposites are found in everyday life and change or co-operate with each other. Without
disease no one cares about health, the donkey’s love of trash shows value is arbitrary and
doctors who are rewarded for doing things we are told not to
This shows that opposites are often a point of view or a context, illusory or identical
The reading that opposite are identical is untrue as night and day are different states of the
same thing
The reading that opposites are relative also fails as what is pleasant good also be due to a
human perspective such as the river being seen as the same rather that a collection of water
or a roads being uphill or downhill is relative to which way you travel
“Sea: purest and most polluted water, for fish drinkable and life-sustaining for people
undrinkable and death bringing” – where this is only a relative opposite
By using everyday example Heraclitus has the reader to draw the own conclusion using
reason
The unity is more fundamental the opposites with all things being one (could be argued that
modern science on a molecular level has proved this)
That even opposites such as bows and guitars can rely on the same function i.e. pulling back
to achieve their task
It is hard to gather Heraclitus’s goals through his remaining words
Aristotle argued that absolute opposites such as purity and pollution are mutually exclusive
and therefore Heraclitus falls into incoherence as some opposites contradict themselves
The argument against this attack is that they exist in unity relative to the drinker. Sea water
is both helpful and damaging possessing dichotomy.
As a road is both uphill and downhill neither are fully maintained until someone travels
through it. It can simultaneously manifest to different travelers
As he thought of the cosmos as an ever living fire and that all things are the exchange of fire
for fire
He thought that “all is in flux” as everything changes over time. To make this point clear
Cratylus said you cannot step in the same river twice this is un-Heraclitean but interesting
Plato and Aristotle backed that Heraclitus claimed that everything is in flux
His cosmology is based on the process of fire being kindling and quenching. In turn divided
into hot, cold, wet and dry. Masses being constructed from pairs of the opposites (earth:
cold + dry, sea cold + wet)
The processes repeating accounted for the day night cycle, annual cycles and the entire
cosmos in a fiery phase
All things being fire, Gold value is based on a fixed exchange rate for goods. Therefore, a
certain fire equivalent is preserved.
This idea created the principle of law likeness as a constraint on cosmic processes. This
states that no new entities that are not familiar exist. The sun may be the width of roughly a
human foot therefore it is as it looks to be. This stops the raising of any question of what lies
beyond our cosmos
The “ever-living fire” is not itself the ultimate unity that makes all things one it is the
manifestation of something else
“God: day night, winter summer, war peace, plenty famine; but it becomes of another kind.
as (fire) when it is mingled with incense, is named according to the savour of each”
He is saying that incense in not apple but apple mixed with fire. This carries onto day and
night and other actions as it is god in a different state
To Heraclitus the soul carries the person’s being to hades. Since to him the soul was our core
any comment on it is dissecting human nature
The soul is identified as a complex unity-in-opposites structure. As it should manifest itself in
processes of the living and contrary to dying
There is physical components as part of these process connecting to hot-cold and wet-dry.
“Dry light-beam is soul at its wisest and beat” “It is death to souls to become moist”
This dry wet dimension is why drunks who have wet souls have impaired senses
The process of death or Thanatos refers to both death and dying which Heraclitus identifies
with becoming wet. There is no permanent state of death as it is a momentary phase at an
extreme point of the cycle.
The living and dying of souls is only partly connected to living and dying in the normal sense.
For Heraclitus the decline of mind after it peak is dying whilst a violent death in your prime is
the soul separating from its body in its best state. Some evidence suggests that death in
battle rewarded the soul a place of honor perhaps as a star
“Corpse are more fit to be thrown away than dung”
As the soul gains immorality through death Heraclitus argues that “Immortals are mortals,
mortals are immortals, living the others’ death, dying the others’ life”.
Traditional fates such as Hades may occur for souls in a bad state as seen by “sols have the
sense of smell in Hades” indicating minimal senses
Heraclitus argued that the quality of one’s life was determined by one’s allotted character
It is a matter of character not of nature which means that men can grow up to the divine
“All share the capacity to understand”
The intelligent soul has “looked for myself” and introspectively transverse the unknowable
As the soul is talking about itself it must talk about its own talk forever
Is the soul meant essentially the same as the god or ever living flame of the cosmos, is the
unity in opposites extended to any meaningful opposites and are there any more
fundamental principles such as unity in opposites? Are all questioning brought on by
Heraclitus
The all things are one statement is incomplete due to lack of evidence but everything having
the same elements making up every materials is prove through the atom and quarks
“Wholes and not wholes, in unisons, not in unison; and from all things one and from one all
things” is an example of the unity in opposites
If opposites such as hot and cold are forces that are opposed there must be a real conflict
within them
He use the analogy of sating that the “Everlasting is a child at play, playing draughts” the
child is the only one their but is playing both sides resulting in a genuine conflict in which
both sides attempts to win whilst being the same
We learn the aspects of being God essentially through Craftsmanship and refreshed through
practice
Both Plato and Aristotle looked at Heraclitus with condescension. The canonization of
Heraclitus by early Christian writer and stoics add a layer of misunderstanding to his work
which also preserved his work.
Hegel and Schleirmacher renewed interest in Heraclitus
