Ranga Sitaram
23rd January, 2023
In this essay, I will discuss the philosophical views of the ancient Ionian philosopher Heraclitus, considering his doctrines of logos, the Doctrine of Universal Flux, the Doctrine of the Unity of Opposites, the role of fire in his cosmology, and his conceptions of the kosmos and God.
Logos
Logos has multiple meanings in Greek, including account, reason, proportion, discourse, thought, measure, and language. Heraclitus is said to have used these many meanings and played on their ambiguities to put forth his doctrines. As later philosophers understood it, Heraclitus used logos to mean the organizing principle of the world (Barnes, 1979).
Heraclitus wrote: “Hearing not me, but the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one” (DK12B44). Here Heraclitus suggests that a wise person would not listen to him but would listen to logos, and only then can he understand that all things are one. The above fragment does not mean that there is only one thing in the world but that things are highly interconnected. According to Heraclitus, the understanding of this interconnectedness is also the understanding of logos.
To the extent that the word logos indicates an account of things in the world, it has given philosophers and scientists a way of naming a field of inquiry and encapsulating all accounts of that discipline. The word logos forms the basis of several scientific disciplines, e.g., theology is an account of theo (God), and biology is the account of bio (life). In Heraclitus’ view, logos also means an account of everything in the world, in a complete understanding of nature, and wisdom is the understanding of this meaning.
Flux
According to Heraclitus’ philosophy, everything in the world passes, and nothing remains as is (Terrence, 1999; Barnes, 1979). This conclusion was drawn from Heraclitus’ fragments 61 to 63, meaning that one cannot step twice into the same river (B61-63) because the material environment with which one’s feet are in contact is different every time one steps into a river.
When superficially looked at, the above saying may appear contradictory because a river has a specific name indicative of the same identity over time despite its change. However, with more analysis, one may see a deeper meaning in this paradox. First, a river is a changing body of water, not a stationary body such as a pond or a lake. Stepping into any part of this changing body of water necessarily implies that one is in contact with a material portion of it only momentarily, and a second step into it would have changed the material nature of the environment of the river around the feet. When this example is extended to all life, one may understand that the world is constantly changing, and despite names attributed to entities, the entities themselves are not constant. Thus, Heraclitus chooses an ordinary example to highlight an extraordinary understanding.
From the above interpretation, a more profound insight is that change underlies the stability and constant identities of things in the world. Not only are things constantly changing, but their ever-changing nature also results in their stability. Rivers constantly flow and yet are identified as the same rivers, trees constantly grow and wither to be identified as trees, and people are born, live, and die to be identified as individuals. In other words, the material world remains constant by the very nature of its constituents changing all the time. Heraclitus believed in material flux as a necessary condition for the constancy of the world. In the above view, while flux and stability may appear to be opposed to each other, they are to be seen as part of a more significant process that connects them in an intertwined manner.
In essence, the doctrine of flux opposes the Compositional Criterion of Identity (Noonen et al., 2018), which states that things maintain their identity if they continue to be made of the same material over time. However, in real life, we encounter trees losing their leaves, rivers flowing, and humans and animals losing their hair, and yet are considered to maintain their identity. Hence, things in the world are identified by the process of change and not so much by their constituents.
Unity of opposites
A more general doctrine to the Flux doctrine is the Unity of Opposites, whose central notion is that things in the world are both constant and changing as two unifying opposites. Heraclitus depicts the doctrine by showing how the same thing has opposite qualities in two different contexts: “Sea is the purest and most polluted water: for fish drinkable and healthy, for men undrinkable and harmful” (B61). In the above fragments, Heraclitus shows that although seawater is a life-sustaining force for fish, it is not healthy for some other creatures, such as humans.
In another fragment, “The name of the bow is Life, but its work is Death” (B65), Heraclitus uses the Greek word Bios, which has two meanings, “life” and “bow” (i.e., as in bow and arrow), in his typical style of play on words to show his doctrine of the unity of opposites. Just as a bow needs a wooden stick and a string to be in opposing tension to work towards inflicting death (which is the opposite of life), so does life itself is based on the unity of opposing forces. The opposing tension in the bow and the string is a critical connecting factor without which the bow cannot fling an arrow. Similarly, in fragment 83, Heraclitus says, “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, safety and hunger, but changes the way fire when mingled with perfume is named according to the scent of each” (B83). Thus, Heraclitus proposes that the world is made of things with constituents, which have opposite qualities, that separate into individual constituents under certain conditions and combine to form a whole in others (B10). According to Heraclitus, apparently, contrary qualities can still be in the same physical entity because one can change to another and vice versa under different conditions. He suggests that sleep and waking, opposite qualities of the same living being, can be seen in different contexts and points in time. Heraclitus observes that these opposites are not occurring independently but in a connected fashion, in a manner of one leading to the other (Graham, 2021). Hence, as these opposites are present in different temporal or spatial extents, there is no danger of a logical fallacy in Heraclitus’ doctrine of Unity of Opposites.
Fire and Kosmos
If the unity of opposites and constant change are the world’s underlying principles, what is fire’s role in Heraclitus’ philosophy? The question is whether Heraclitus believes that fire is the fundamental substance of the universe, as water, according to Thales, and air for Anaximenes. Given Heraclitus’ flux and unity principles, does it even make sense for Heraclitus to hold a belief as a material monist?
In this regard, it is perhaps instructive to read the fragment, “This world-order (kosmos), the same for all, none of the Gods nor humans made, but ever was and is and will be, an ever-living fire, being kindled in measures and extinguished in measures” (B30). If one reads the above fragment literally, one may conclude that, after all, Heraclitus holds the view that fire is the primary substance of the world, and all the other things in the world are made of it. However, when read with the preceding doctrines of flux and unity of opposites, one may realize that fire is an example of change, as it is constantly in motion, changes, and causes change to things it comes in contact with.
Although Heraclitus’ primary focus in philosophy was on the human condition, due to which he is considered the first humanist (Graham, 2021), he had views on cosmology too. In fragment B30 above, Heraclitus is supposed to have used the Greek word kosmos to mean world order.
Through several of his complex and riddle-infused epigrams, Heraclitus illustrates that the kosmos is structured along the principle of strife between opposing forces in dynamic equilibrium by their constant flux. Thus, Heraclitus believes that kosmos is the divine underlying principle of the universe.
Bibliography:
- Irwin, Terence (ed.), “Classical Philosophy”, Oxford University Press, 1999.
- Graham, Daniel W., “Heraclitus”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), , URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/heraclitus/>.
- Adamso, Peter., “Classical Philosophy”, Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Barnes, Jonathan., “The Presocratic Philosophers”, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1979.
- G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, and M. Schirfield, “The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge Press, 1983.
- Noonan, Harold and Ben Curtis, “Identity”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/identity/>.
Eclectic Musings by Ranga Sitaram 