The Logos of Heraclitus 

by Eva Brann

You have 258 highlighted passages

You have 59 notes

Last annotated on June 9, 2017

THE LOGOS OF HERACLITUS

CHAPTER I

THE FIGURE OF HERACLITUS 

That is Heraclitus, an engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world, inventor of the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism, prose that could contend with poetry. It is linguistically ingenious, teasingly obscure in reputation, but hard-hittingly clear in fact. Each saying contains a concentrated drop of meaning—the kind of writing one would often stop to look away from.  Read more at location 122

(Note: Wittgenstein too)  Such a style, tense and beautiful, seems to be favored by people who find harsh realism exhilarating. The ancient Spartans, Hobbes, and Nietzsche are examples; its mood is now tersely mordant, now generously humane.  Read more at location 125

Did Heraclitus from eastern Ephesus incite Parmenides from western Elea to propose his seamless sphere of Being in opposition to the former’s river of Becoming (as I think), or was Parmenides the first philosopher and Heraclitus the first opponent?  Read more at location 133

always and above all, what did Heraclitus mean? About the meaning only this much is not disputed: that logos is Heraclitus’s key word. I think he retains in it an old, and also gives to it a distinctively new, meaning, though what that latter might be is very much under debate. Translations run from “word” to “world-principle,” from “sense” to “universal law.”  Read more at location 142

Even in antiquity Heraclitus was called “the Obscure, the Dark” (ho skoteinos).  Read more at location 147

Heraclitus is no less and no more pregnantly dark than an oracle, and perhaps he did in fact appropriate Apollo’s style: The Lord whose oracle is in Delphi neither speaks nor hides but signifies.  Read more at location 154

He certainly blew hot and cold on his fellow-Ephesians, now as one casting his pearls before swine, and then again as one repeatedly asserting the common character of a logos available to all human beings (Section V).  Read more at location 160

CHAPTER II

THE WORD LOGOS 

****   Logos is, I think, not only Heraclitus’s key word, but that of the Western philosophical tradition, which acts as a tradition because its moments are both bound together and driven apart by dialogue: the back-and-forth of the logos.  Read more at location 164

I should go briefly into what logos meant to those using the word before and after him.  Read more at location 174

the first, etymologically most original meaning, not entirely lost in common usage, goes back to the verb legein on which the noun logos is based. It first meant: to pick up and lay down or lay by, that is, to collect, hence to count up, to tell (as does a bank teller), to re-count (as in a tale), and thus to give an account.  Read more at location 178

Thence come a multitude of meanings connected to speech, especially as it is the vehicle for human rationality, both as the thought itself and the utterance that tells it, the word that focuses it, the saying that expresses it, the sentence that states it, the sense or meaning it conveys, as well as the explanation that expands and the argument that enforces it. In fact, Latin ratio, whence comes our “reason,” translates logos.  Read more at location 181

telling is relating, that is, referring to events through speech, naming them, and keeping in memory the people associated with them; thus logos means “fame,” and is used that way by Heraclitus once (112).  Read more at location 184

****   (Note:   Jesus to God)  sense most significant here is that of “addressing,” of entering into relations: The logos brings terms into relations to each other, particularly the ratio-relation that connects two terms in mutually determining juxtaposition, especially in respect to their common measurability; logos names a relation of magnitudes.  Read more at location 186

I am assuming here that this meaning was being brought into use by Pythagoras, the founder of Western mathematics, just before Heraclitus wrote. Heraclitus, ever the greatly absorptive despiser, mentions him—denigratingly—twice, as he does Homer, whom he offers to “thrash” (42).  Read more at location 188

Metaphor is, after all, the pervasive Homeric element, and metaphor says poetically what analogy says prosaically; the thought-structure is the same. Thus, incidentally, Heraclitus does quite deliberately what we are so frequently directed to do these days: think nonlinearly, “outside the box.”  Read more at location 191

After Heraclitus, logos gathered more and more uses; Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon gives five dense columns under ten general headings. The emphasis on the “logical” use increases and so also its aforesaid employment for linguistic structures from the single word (name) to a sentence (proposition), and a paragraph (argument). Both verb and noun acquire prepositional prefixes, of which the most weighty in this context (Section III E) is ana-logia (proportion), already mentioned; the most frequent in English, the “-logy” and “-logist” endings that designate a study or science and those who pursue it.  Read more at location 199

It comes to mean The Word that is from and with God, thus, The Son. Heraclitus will play a role in this future use (Section IV), since he will give logos a novel, elevated sense that works its way down the centuries; his is a remote precursor of the Christian use.  Read more at location 208

CHAPTER III

THE LOGOS OF HERACLITUS

A. Logos and logos 

****   for logos, at least, I will be eschewing translation in favor of transcription; circumscription of Heraclitus’s meaning is the best I can do. Here is the fragment most clearly relevant to that effort, first in transcribed Greek, then in a standard translation: ouk emou, alla tou logou akousantas homologein sophon estin hen panta [éinai] Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge that all things are one. (50) This is as tricky a Heraclitean saying as has survived.  Read more at location 216

He directs us not to intellectual self-reliance, not to seek some truth, but to comprehend and follow this truth: that said by the Logos. To convey this truth, Heraclitus expresses himself with canny ambivalence. So I will try my hand at conveying it: For those hearing not me but the Saying, to say the same is the Wise Thing: Everything [is] One. (my italics)  Read more at location 226

It translates “The Logos” and brings out not only that in one aspect it appears as humanly receivable utterance of wisdom but also that we—I think he means us—are obligated literally to “homo-logein,” “to say the same” (the ordinary meaning is “to agree”).  Read more at location 231

*********   It is both a maxim and Wisdom Incarnate. Here is the Saying’s announcement: One : Everything (or “one : all,” hen : panta). Hen, the neuter singular of “one,” betokens unity; to hen, the substantive, is the mathematical word for unity. Panta the neuter plural of pan, “all,” can mean “all things” or, distributively, “everything.”  Read more at location 238

this Logos is not only a Speech but a Speaker, for he is audible to us. So now: Listening not to me but to The Speaker, there is a Wise Thing to agree with—One : Everything.  Read more at location 245

in Greek the fragment begins with Heraclitus: “Not to me . . .” This is a proud subordination of a man to Logos. Consequently he sometimes seems to be propounding riddles, for he is attempting to render the Logos’s Saying to himself verbatim, as it were—himself both faithful listener and chosen speaker. I have no doubt that Heraclitus intended all the possibilities, and intended them all at once,  Read more at location 248

this Wise Thing is—it is actually the Logos himself—and what it does, and how it works by means of logoi (plural of logos) to bring everything to unity, to oneness. This is what Heraclitus has heard and heeded—we would say, discovered.  Read more at location 258

That would account for an observation Aristotle makes of Heraclitus somewhat out of the blue—that he was as convinced of what he believed as others are of what they know (Nicomachean Ethics 1146b).  Read more at location 261

B. The Wise Thing 

Human kind does not have [such] insights (gnomas); the divine has [them]. (78)  Read more at location 271

the world is self-steered; its Wisdom is inherent. Moreover: Of all whose logoi I have heard, not one has come this far—to know that “Wise” is separated (kechorismenon) from everything. (108) And finally: The Wise Thing, one and only, wants and does not want to be called by the name of Zeus. (32) So this Wise Thing is both separated from all things and is also at work within everything as well as on itself. It is both disposer and structure. It is, as philosophers now say, both transcendent and immanent.  Read more at location 276

When you speak of it, when you address it, you may call it by the name of a divinity, the chief one of the Olympians, but that would be something of a transgression. It isn’t a god and doesn’t want to be personalized. And yet—its being is a gnome, a judgment, which also means “purpose, intention.” The cosmic Wise Thing has intention.  Read more at location 283

how does Heraclitus, a man among men, know all this? He, at least, has listened to the Logos, Speaker and Speech, Uttered Wisdom.  Read more at location 286

****   What comes through clearly is this: Our logos and our logoi, the sense we receive and the words we in turn say, should be informed by our having heard the Logos. This great Logos has a wisdom, or rather it is the Wise Thing, and this Wise Thing has a maxim, or rather it is that practical principle which guides everything through everything, relates all things to all things, which says One : Everything.  Read more at location 289

C. The Common 

*******   (Note:  Akin to Jesus, Upanishads)  Who can know and does know what? The fragment that most bears on this question is the one that Aristotle speaks of as standing at the beginning of the “composition” (Rhetoric 407b): Men become (or, are born) unapprehending (or unmindful, axynetoi) of the Logos that ever is, both before they have heard it and having first heard it. (1, first sentence)  Read more at location 295

****  both senses are to be heard: that humans are at birth deaf to the Logos that is always present and that they become unmindful in the course of ordinary living; even those who have been told but haven’t listened. Of these latter, Heraclitus says that they are unapprehending (axynetoi) even when they’ve heard, similar to the deaf. The proverb is witness to their being “absent though present.” (34) And probably close to Fragment 1 came: Therefore one must follow what is the Common (toi xynoi). But although the Logos is common (xynou) the many live as if they had a private mind (phronesin, in the sense of mindful insight). (2)  Read more at location 300

(Note: Clever)  There is a riotous triple punning here: xynos (Ionian Greek for Attic koinos “common”) is intended to resonate with xyn noi, “with intellect” and also with axynetoi, “unapprehending” in Fragment 1.  Read more at location 307

puns insinuate diverse meanings into one word-sound; his paradoxes force opposing facts into one verbal assertion (Section III R). In this case, in Fragment 2, Heraclitus relates intelligence and its opposite, lack of apprehension, to “the Common,” by one (approximate) sound. Again, even this “common” is to be heard in two aspects. On the one hand, there is the Common, our world and the wise plan that holds it together, the Logos that always is, that both works in the world and speaks to all from beyond it. On the other hand, there are some who hear and heed it, and to whom it is common, but more who are deaf and inattentive—unapprehending.  Read more at location 322

To Heraclitus it is a scandal that the world’s governor speaks to us out of the cosmos and about it, that its wise plan is patent within it, that the message is utterly common both in the sense of being everywhere, being always the same, and being for us—and yet people go off on their own—idiot minds: That Logos with which they keep company most continuously, the one who manages the whole—with that they are at variance, and things they meet with every day—those appear strange to them. (72)  Read more at location 328

****  Heraclitus finds human incomprehension in a world comprehended by the Logos pretty incomprehensible.  Read more at location 336

I think this sense, that truth lies most patent in what is most ordinary and is for that very reason least apprehended, is the first motive of philosophy. Socrates, that Post-Heraclitean, will call it “wonder”:  Read more at location 339

Heraclitus observes the Common surrounding us all and blames humankind for being estranged from it; Socrates tries to induce a sense of estrangement from what we take for granted around us—that is what his wonder is. This difference betokens the directions in which philosophy is to lead: into the cosmos for Heraclitus, out of the world for Socrates—Raphael’s Plato points upwards.  Read more at location 342

He insists on the universality of sane humanity even in the face of ordinary retreat into the privations of willful privacy: It belongs to all men to know themselves and to be soundminded. (116) Here is the antecedent of the injunction “Know Thyself” that Socrates borrowed from the Temple at Delphi: With Heraclitus it is original, for we know that there was no standing temple at Delphi in his lifetime; Herodotus says so (Persian Wars 1.50, 5.52).  Read more at location 348

****  Heraclitus takes very seriously this inward-turning to meet the cosmos (Section V).  Read more at location 353

a logos-teller speaks both as this human being, that is, originally—and Heraclitus is an original if ever there was one—and yet not for himself, for he has to “say the same” as the Logos. That is what it means to speak truths, a word that occurs only once in the fragments: To be soundminded: the greatest excellence; and wisdom: to say and do true things, giving heed according to nature. (112) This fragment brings out the above-mentioned relation of truth, virtue, and deeds (Section V), but it also specifies where and how truth is to be found—in nature and in the Logos,  Read more at location 356

hence Heraclitus must expound words and deeds as the common-less cannot: dividing each thing according to nature and declaring its relation [to others]. (Part of 1)  Read more at location 362

**********   (Note:   as within, so without)  Logos is, as I intimated, not only double-tongued but also two-faced: It shows one aspect within, another without the cosmos. Consequently Heraclitus too is cognitively comprehensive: A wisdom-loving man must be inquiring into many things. (35)  Read more at location 367

he also says: Much-learnedness (polymathia) does not teach one to have intellectual insight (noos). (40) On the one hand, you have to be keenly and extensively observant to see the Logos at work in—or as—nature; on the other, heaps of learning lead to knowing everything and nothing. It drowns out the Logos.  Read more at location 373

D. The Discovery of Pythagoras

Fragment 40 continues: For it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras and further Xenophanes and Hecataeus. (end of 40)  Read more at location 379

Surely Heraclitus did in fact learn something from Hesiod; Xenophanes was said to have actually been his teacher; and he was, possibly, personally associated with a putative Pythagorean. Yet he defamed them lustily. He is supposed to have said that “he listened to no one”; which has the overt meaning in Greek of attending to no one’s lectures and here the implied sense of “heeding only the Logos.”  Read more at location 383

Pythagoras was born in 570 b.c.e., a “long” generation, about 35 years, before Heraclitus. He could have been his teacher, not in the sense that Heraclitus was a listener in on Pythagoras’s so-called “oral teachings,” but rather by way of influence, as we say. It is a strange fact that the early testimony about Pythagoras comes largely from a few Heraclitean fragments. That he was Heraclitus’s teacher, both scorned and studied, having a part in the shaping of the central Heraclitean terms, both the Logos and subsidiary logoi, I am about to claim. Indeed, the abuse Heraclitus heaps on him might attest to some sort of intimacy;  Read more at location 387

If Heraclitus was the first philosophical philosopher, it may be that there was an earlier, a mathematical philosopher—Pythagoras, who is indeed credited with the introduction of the word “philosophy”—and that he opened the way.  Read more at location 397

Then what exactly did Heraclitus have against Pythagoras? I conjecture that he means by kakotechnie “bad-skill” or “low-skill,” not as opposed to high-tech, but as we sometimes feel compelled to speak of “boorscientists,” unreflective number-crunchers. Perhaps Pythagoras put his newly discovered logoi and their analogia to too narrow a use for Heraclitus, who had more cosmic applications in mind.  Read more at location 403

Heraclitus, the equal-opportunity despiser of poets and mathematicians, nonetheless needs and uses metaphors; they perfectly suit the expression of his way of thinking and the construction of his cosmos—by the bond of all-pervasive logoi.  Read more at location 419

E. logoi and analogia 

The discovery of Pythagoras and those around him was, one might say, a metaphorical structure in musical sound: If two strings of equal weights but of different measured lengths are stretched over a sound board and plucked, then this physical metaphor (so to speak) ensues: As the length is to the length, So the heard tone is to the heard tone. Moreover, the pairs of strings producing “tones” (tonos; “pitch from tension”) that agree—sounds that are agreeable when heard together and are, as we say, “con-sonant”—have to each other the “ratio” of a small whole number to a small whole number.  Read more at location 422

take the simplest and most remarkable case, in which the consonance is a near-identity, the octave. As a string of unit length 2 is to a string of unit length 1, so is the tone an octave below to that an octave above.  ….when all the tones are all filled in, the result, the complete octave, is what the Pythagoreans called a harmonia. Harmonia means literally a fitted whole, a piece of mathematico-physical joinery. Its pitch limits, those of the octave, are even now called by the Greek term diapason, “through all.” That, as it happens, is Heraclitus’s descriptive phrase for the wise Design that steers all things “through all (dia panton)” (41)!  Read more at location 433

The Pythagoreans resolved this dilemma by their difficult doctrine that the sense-world was numerical and was constituted of numbers and number-relations. This meant that in the analogy they had discovered, namely that sounds are to each other as numbers, the numbers were what was really present and the sounds were epiphenomena, mere incidental sense-effects.  Read more at location 449

I have called what the Pythagoreans discovered an analogy. That is the literal Greek mathematical term: analogia. It means that one and the same ratio-relation, for which the Pythagoreans borrowed the term logos, was carried up and over (ana) the whole expression, a collection of logoi.  Read more at location 454

I will liken to it one of Heraclitus’s favorite figures, chiasmus, the rhetorical inversion which identifies all terms with each other:                     a          b                     b              a

Out of everything one and out of one everything. (10)  Read more at location 465

for the Pythagoreans a ratio is a relation all numbers can have toward each other. And so they do say: Logos belongs to all numbers toward each other. (Diels, p. 451, l. 24)  Read more at location 480

F. The New logos

The general theory of the proportion constituted of ratios is set out by Euclid in the fifth book of his Elements.  ...the definition of the logos that enters into a proportion is given in the general theory: A ratio (logos) is a sort of relation (schesis) with respect to size of two magnitudes of the same kind. (Bk. 5, def. 3)  Read more at location 497

The definition is prescriptive in that only magnitudes and only those of the same kind may enter into the logos-relation: straight lines with straight lines, planes with planes, numbers with numbers, and, as he well knew, sounds with sounds—if sounds have some measurable aspect within them.  Read more at location 500

The definition is, secondly, existential insofar as a relation is supposed to exist. The Greek word comes from the verb echein, “to have, to hold”; this suggests the English version “habitude,” habitual behavior, but it is too strange.  Read more at location 507

I am thinking that everything in Euclid’s definition implicitly there for a post-Pythagorean user of the term was indeed, as we say, “intuitively” present to Heraclitus.  Read more at location 514

G. The Ratio-Relation

****   This new logos is, then, above all a relation. It bonds two terms without merging them.  Read more at location 517

The modern colon-like symbol expresses the ratio-bond; it keeps the terms apart and jams them together, as it will come to mark the division of antecedent by consequent. Also, by yet another serendipity, the colon is the symbol which we use to mark direct speech or an apposite thought.  Read more at location 521

ratio of number is nothing but the number terms up against each other, and that is what the Latin pro-portio indicates: The leading term lays a claim on the following term that causes the latter to distribute, to apportion, itself over the former. So 1 : 2 means “2 distributed over (or dividing) 1,” which yields the ratio “one-half.”  Read more at location 538

It first gives a similarity-recognizing account that brings together different elements and only then extracts their qualitative relation—as Heraclitus does when he speaks of himself as “dividing each thing according to nature and declaring its relation [to others] (hokos echei)” (1).  Read more at location 546

H. The Heraclitean Application

Heraclitus surreptitiously, antagonistically, absorbed something crucial from the reviled Pythagoras, be it man or school—that new meaning for the word logos: “relation.” It is a sense subordinate to and yet inherent in the great Logos, the Saying whose sentence collects the world into a universal unity and expresses it to those who give heed: hen : panta—One : Everything.  Read more at location 552

pondering what makes the multifarious world one, he began to think about relationality itself and to consider that a Logos might fill the bill who was all at once the relater of all relations, beyond and within them, a maker of the world-order and himself that order, a world-governor, and also the world—a doer, a sayer, and perhaps himself a listener. I say “perhaps” because the fragments, though full of homage, never mention prayer.  Read more at location 557

This world-order is what Heraclitus calls by its Pythagorean name the cosmos. Cosmos, again, means the world seen as well ordered, well fitted together, a thing handsomely arranged, beautified (the meaning still alive in our “cosmetics”—articles of beautification). Thus he speaks of the “most beautiful harmony” (8) of the whole, the harmony of the cosmos . . . (By 56),  Read more at location 561

****   a characteristically Heraclitean, interpretation (Section III K). Moreover: The unapparent harmony is stronger than the apparent one (54), which means, I think, that non-sensory logoi govern the sensory world.  Read more at location 566

I. The Milesian Predecessors 

What did the three earlier Milesians provide? The texts are even more fragmentary than Heraclitus’s own remains. Evidently there were three elements, three basic stuffs from which the other appearing matters were derived by some process: Water (Thales); The Boundless (Anaximander); Air (Anaximenes).  Read more at location 583

****   Heraclitus must have been put off by the notion of time as an ordering principle (Section III L) and thought absurd this anthropomorphic cosmo-ethics that punished the arrogation of quality by matter. He says: To the god all things are beautiful and good and just, but men understand some things as unjust, some as just. (102)  Read more at location 595

J. Heraclitus the First Physicist 

I shall claim that title for Heraclitus and claim it for real: He is, as the first physicist of force and matter, and thus as the first modern scientist, closer to us than is Aristotle,  Read more at location 606

Here, in sum, is my sense of Heraclitus’s sense of all the others’ deficiency: They introduce anthropomorphically mythical or unfoundedly technical causes of change, which are inexplicably supervenient upon the elements or mysteriously spontaneous within them—causeless causes. Nor does their material really underlie elemental transformations; rather, it is itself transformed.  Read more at location 614

()Note: Akin to Tao)  I think that Heraclitus came on the question of change and motion as a proto-problem, and that he, too, needed a divine cause. But unlike Aristotle’s Nous, his Logos is—at least in one of its aspects—involved in motion. His answer to the question, “What might be the non-temporal source of cosmic motion?” will be incompletely determinate, will be ambivalent, will be in suggestive suspension. He probably thought of that irresolution as jibing with the cosmic truth.  Read more at location 624

I might venture a first comparison: Unresolved dualisms are not unknown to physics; for example, light and matter behave either as particles or as waves under different aspects. Here, to begin with, is Heraclitus on the design of the world: Not a single one of those whose logoi I have heard has come so far as to recognize that “Wise” is separated from everything. (108)  Read more at location 629

****   Even today it is a problem about (though not within) physics whether the cosmos is guided by an intelligent design and, if so, whether that design is itself impersonal, immanent, incarnate intelligence (meaning that the world is self-organizing), or whether it is produced and administered by the intellect of a divinity above it (meaning that the world is a creation). Heraclitus has answered with firm ambivalence:  Read more at location 634

The Physicists, as I have presented them, end up with a single-level nature, whose active principle is adventitious.  Read more at location 647

Three centuries later, the Stoics, those sometimes discerning traducers of Heraclitus, saw the difficulty and explicitly located an active and a passive aspect right within the world’s matter (Section IV).  Read more at location 648

********   Heraclitus’s world is, on the other hand, double-leveled; it has a transcendent aspect. I say “aspect” because that seems to me peculiarly Heraclitean: the defining characteristic of his main term shifts as it is seen from different perspectives. Once again, since I think it is of the essence: This is not an “early” thinker’s muddle begging to be de-confused, but a very unconfused way of seeing the real indeterminacies of the cosmos asking to be followed out.  Read more at location 650

****   (Note:   akin to Tao; beyond name)  “Who or what is this design-principle?” It has several names besides “Wise” (Section III N), and it both is and is not a “who,” a person, a divinity: One is the Wise, alone; and it does not want and does want to be called Zeus by name. (32)  Read more at location 654

K. Contentious Harmony 

The great Logos collects, discerns, and then brings the things that constitute the world together—in an incomposably unfriendly, indissolubly intimate face-off. Like his model the Oracle, Heraclitus signifies this confrontation.  Read more at location 662

This is the way the Logos speaks to the heedful listener: The god is day : night, winter : summer, war : peace, surfeit : famine. (67)  Read more at location 664

****   (Note:   again, akin to Tao)  He places it just before the great Fragment 50: “Listen not to me but the Logos . . . ,” and it describes the constituents of the cosmos, the All (to pan), held together by that Logos: divisible : indivisible, born : unborn, mortal : immortal  Read more at location 667

Then, embedded in that fragment, comes the greatest of all logoi, the Superlogos: One : Everything, in which scholars have accepted that deforming emendation by inserting some form of the copula “is.”  Read more at location 671

They will all enter into what Heraclitus names a harmonia. It is, recall, a Pythagorean term. But it is not the neat fitting achieved by compounding ratios of consonant tones. It is instead an ultimately oppositional cosmic framework, as of rafters, a terminally contentious joining of antitheses (Section III P).  Read more at location 677

****   This is the structure of which Heraclitus says: The unapparent harmonia is stronger than the apparent one. (54)  Read more at location 680

As I have intimated, this framework is, first, purely formal, immaterial—that is the unheard, the stronger harmony of fitted logoi; and second, it is materially embodied tension—that is the sensed, less potent lock of straining bodies.  Read more at location 684

L. Elemental Transformations 

Heraclitus has chosen fire as the root-element, the first but not the last to do so (Section IV). The flarings-up and dyings-down of this fire have ratios to each other, as announced in Fragment 30 above; they enter into Euclidean “relations with respect to size.” Thus mathematical logoi go quite literally cosmo-logical. The world-order is realized in logos-governed transformations: Turns of fire: first sea, and of sea, the half earth, and the half typhoon . . . Earth is poured out as sea, and it is measured according to the same ratio (logos) as it had before it became earth. (31)18 Heraclitus is announcing that the great Logos informs all the changes observed in the cosmos, mostly transformations, so that these are governed by fixed ratios, logoi.  Read more at location 700

The logoi, however, remain the same, in any order. That makes what is called an analogia, a universal proportion, true for any pair of the same elements at different times.  Read more at location 715

the Law of Fixity of Composition, is formulable. Here is the law, regarded as “one of the fundamental principles of chemistry”: If one substance is transformed into another, the masses of these two substances always bear a fixed ratio to each other.19 This is so nearly what Heraclitus says that his aphoristic cosmology might be regarded as a project for a future chemistry; it is a proto-chemistry, as it were, the project of discovering the actual ratios of substances.  Read more at location 722

The whole collection of ratios might well be entitled Out of everything one and out of one everything. (10) Everything is in a fixed ratio-relation that the Super-Ratio, the Hyper-Logos, both knows and administers, steering “everything through everything” (41) by means of the Pythagorean logoi.  Read more at location 741

Heraclitus looks to change and its rationale rather than to time as the locus of vital order; he thinks, comments a source, that “the cosmos came about not in accordance with time but thoughtful design (epinoia)” (Stobaeus in Wheelwright, p.122).  Read more at location 756

Yet he is first in an ancient tradition as well, one that Aristotle will later work out: that time is subordinate to change in being nothing but the counting of its passage (Physics 219b); the notion that time has substantiality bedevils modern mentalities.  Read more at location 759

M. Solvent Fire 

The pairs in a successive transformation, the terms in physical logoi, are sense objects.  Read more at location 763

Here is a revealing fragment: For Fire everything is an exchange (antamoibe) and Fire for everything, just as for gold, money (chremata) and for money, gold. (90)  Read more at location 765

Fragment 90 can also be read as a chiasmus, the X-like figure of speech that connects two terms inversely: Fire for everything as everything for fire. Recall that such a proportion of inverse logoi betokens an identity of the terms, just as gold and gold coins are indeed identical  Read more at location 783

Moreover, this Fire has marks of intelligence. Hippolytus reports Heraclitus as saying: Fire is thoughtful (phronimos) and causal in the management of all the whole. (Wheelwright, p. 122) Perhaps it is intelligence (Section III N). Heraclitus therefore takes care that in the aphoristic proportion fire is the leading term, as before he had prefaced his transformations with “the turns of Fire: . . .” (31). But then, in the chiasmus, “everything” gets to lead. For, while to Fire belongs the dignity of governing “everything” invisibly, “everything” is what presents itself to us day by day, visibly.  Read more at location 792

Fire, then, as the vitally warming, shiningly illuminating, analytically decomposing, upwardly mobile element, is the cause of measurability.  Read more at location 808

There are two fires—another case of Heraclitean double-thinking. Here is a pertinent fragment, already cited: This world-order (kosmos), the same for everything, was made neither by any one of the gods nor of men, but ever was and is and will be: an everliving Fire, kindled in measures and extinguished in measures. (30) And one more: Coming upon everything, the Fire will discriminate (also, “judge”) and take down (also, “condemn”) everything. (66) This everliving, measuring, judging Fire is surely not the sensed element, but neither is it a merely metaphorical notion,  Read more at location 813

****   a summary of the various functions fire performs for Heraclitus: Visible fire appears on the scene flaring up and dying down by the same measures as govern all elemental transformations. But there is a Fire that never goes out, being ever-present throughout the cosmos. Its all-penetrating, discriminating nature makes it the medium of choice for cosmic exchanges.  Read more at location 824

Fire enables the Logos to inform the cosmos with the most determinate relationality thinkable, that expressed in number-ratios.  Read more at location 829

I want to go so far as to make a probably unexpected comparison—between this Fire of Heraclitus and the Extension of Descartes,  ….As Fire remains everliving in Everything through its transformations and relates all things by making them measurable, so Extension is the primary, pervasive property of all body, and each delimited body is, as res extensa, a “thing stretched out”—not a being in or over space, but a spatial substance, a being of space.  Read more at location 835

N. The Multiform Logos 

I will try to show that the Logos is, in some aspect, all of these: Fire, God, the Wise, the Common, War.  Read more at location 843

First, the uncreated cosmos “ever was and is and will be ever-living Fire . . .” (31). Next a fragment quoted above begins: “The god is: . . .” and then goes on to say “satiety and famine” (67); these are pretty nearly the terms used in reverse of fire just now: “neediness and surfeit” (W 30), but so far these are mere hints. Next: The lightning bolt (keraunos) steers everything. (64) The keraunos, the thunderbolt always represented by a flash of lightning, belongs to Zeus;  Read more at location 844

****   (Note:   again, akin to Tao)  the Wise: to know the design by which everything is steered through everything. (41) Further, upon listening to the Logos all will agree: “Wise” is : One/Everything. (50) Thus they—we—are bidden to say what the Logos is and what it says. Moreover, there is something additional and crucial: The Wise is separated from everything. (108) It is and it transcends nature.  Read more at location 859

I think that this linking of identifications means that the impersonal Logos, the general Fire, the fire-wielding God, the designing Wise, the salient Common, and the kingly War are all one and are finally one even with the Cosmos itself. From the human side they are distinguishable as aspects of, as perspectives on, the Logos. From the cosmic side they are differentiated by diverse functions.  Read more at location 870

*********   From the divine view (Heraclitus’s) they are immanent and transcendent—both.  Read more at location 872

Thus Fire, as the pervasive discerning and measure-imparting medium, works immanently like a protomatter; the Wise, as the plan of the Logos, operates through everything but as its design rather than its constituent;  Read more at location 873

his Logos might be timelessly unamenable to law-decreed logic, and that what seems to us, with respect to thought, a case of “not yet” on Heraclitus’s side, is really a case of “no longer” on ours.  Read more at location 884

Heraclitus, who told his fellow-Ephesians to go hang themselves (121), tried to think from the god’s perspective under which apparently incomposable inner-cosmic antitheses disappear; once again:  Read more at location 896

**************  To the god all things are beautiful and good and just, but men have understood some things as unjust, some as just. (102)  Read more at location 898

O. The Qualitative Metaphor 

So far I have been dealing with the logoi governing elemental temporal transformations, which are, by Heraclitus’s own testimony, quantitative and, moreover, numerical. These logoi are, I have speculated, under the management of the Logos and are perhaps the expressions of “his” Wisdom.  Read more at location 902

****  Working in the cosmos, the Logos steers everything through everything and thus relates everything in a unity. Speaking to us, it extracts the measures from the fired-up elements, collects them as terms in logoi, in ratios, and imparts the result to those who can hear.  Read more at location 904

Heraclitus chides Homer for his pacific hopes, in that he would abolish strife from among both gods and men. For then everything would be done for. (W 27) Heraclitus’s qualitative logoi do not relate terms in friendly mutual address but in antagonistic opposition. Indeed the ratio-relation can be regarded as primarily holding these terms apart rather than together,  Read more at location 922

The “belch-battling” doctor Eryximachus, who speaks in Plato’s Symposium, quoting a—mauled—version of this fragment, just can’t understand how Heraclitus could commit so great an absurdity as to speak of harmony as difference: “For harmony is consonance” (187b). Period. It is the signature of a collapse-prone mind.  Read more at location 933

****  Heraclitus is all for a high-strung world. One more: Encounters: Wholes and not Wholes, what agrees and disagrees, is consonant and dissonant, and out of everything one and out of one everything. (10) Aristotle quotes this passage in On the World (396b), ascribing it to “Heraclitus, called the Obscure.” And indeed, Aristotle doesn’t get it;  Read more at location 939

These are unitings by meldings. But that is just what Heraclitus, the plain and radical, doesn’t mean. Oppositions do not compose in sweetness and light. It’s war, not peace, that maintains a taut and fiery cosmos.  Read more at location 945

P. Oppositional Pairs 

There are juxtapositions of quality—connected contraries, antitheses both separated and held together by a whole spectrum in between, like the surfeit-and-famine attributed both to god and fire (67, 63), which are mediated by degrees of sufficiency or dearth. Then there are abrupt, unmediated confrontations of contradictories “wholes and not-wholes,” said of all kinds of “encounters” (10).  Read more at location 953

(Note: Akin to emptiness, void of svabhava)  These encounters have nothing but their antagonisms to hold them together in a tight relation, a condition which comes out, curiously enough, in the fact that when you remove the negative, in itself a mere nothing, they collapse into a unity: “wholes and wholes.”  Read more at location 957

Compared (chronology aside) with Aristotle’s science, Heraclitus’s physics does indeed look like a rudimentary but real project for the kind of scientific inquiry respected in modernity: a matter-based mathematical physics, where fire functions as potentiality, transformation replaces actualization, and formal cause (design) supplants final cause (fulfillment). And as number-logoi, ratios, are the forerunners of rational numbers, so analogiai, proportions, are the avatars of equations.  Read more at location 967

Q. Cosmic Antagonisms 

Heraclitus’s force-physics is, to be sure, pre-mathematical, but in one particular, at least, it is astoundingly, observantly, intuitive, hence prescient: tension.  Read more at location 1003

Only a physics book for amateurs would deign to notice how strange this in-between force, this tension, is.26 It is the relating, the in-between, the mediating force-conduit par excellence, at every point and through the whole, nothing in itself and everything in its effect—nothing but relation, yet as such all-potent. That is what Heraclitus both observed and intuited: a relation that is quantitatively nothing, but qualitatively everything.  Read more at location 1016

****   Heraclitus introduces such a force to hold the cosmos, “everything” (panta), together in a vibrantly antagonistic tension. That is what is expressed in the super-chiasmus: “Out of everything one and out of one everything.” This is what the Logos utters, inaudibly but heedably, in its capacity as the design-making Wise (10, 50). Everything is held together by the unity of opposites, but not as their reconciliation,  Read more at location 1023

This Heraclitean tension between opposites in space or time or quality is, it seems to me, the ultimate substantial, qualitative relation.  Read more at location 1033

The chiasmus of contradictories such as “immortals : mortals, mortals : immortals” (62), begins to make sense if either both terms are the same by nature or if they turn into each other in time. Thus, this favored Heraclitean expression invites both kinds of interpretation: the ineradicable self-contrarieties of nature at any moment, and the permissible contradictions of verbally expressed change over time.  Read more at location 1048

Heraclitus had evidently often observed such balanced “agonies,” of antithetical natural forces and human values, and had found them both exhilarating and suggestive. It was what others had missed: They don’t understand how differing from itself it stays the same (or agrees, homologei) with itself: the back-tensed tuning (palintonos harmonia), just as of bow and lyre. (51, probably came close to Fragment 1 in the “Composition,” see figures 6 and 7)  Read more at location 1052

I cannot resist concluding this subsection with a risky observation—that Heraclitus sees his divinity, the Wisdom that wants and does not want to be called Zeus, in appearances and thinks him through his wise Design, his structure, and that in this he is appreciably like his proper successors, Galileo and Newton, the founders respectively of kinematics and dynamics, and thus of modern physics.  Read more at location 1078

Newton in 1713 to the second edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica: We know [God] only . . . by his most wise and best designs (structuras) of things . . . [He] is said to see, to hear, to speak . . . by allegory . . . For all talk of God is appropriated from human affairs by a certain similitude . . . And so much of God, to discourse of whom from appearances surely belongs to natural philosophy.  Read more at location 1081

R. Sensible Paradoxes 

Those infamous Heraclitean paradoxes, which look to logicians like paralogisms, fallacies of reason, are, I think, the expressions precisely adequate to his world-order. The Logos collects and expresses this world’s nature in logoi.  Read more at location 1086

For the human logos, human speech, has a capacity that is both strange and apropos. It can utter heedless contradictions; it can speak in a self-deaf way such as Aristotle is so willing to attribute to Heraclitus, that aboriginal listener to the Logos! He says that Heraclitus speaks “not listening to himself,” (Metaphysics 1262a)—when no one has ever listened harder to the Logos within!  Read more at location 1089

**********   Heraclitus speaks paradoxically because that is how the world is.  Read more at location 1107

there is nothing logically wrong with contraries or contradictions over time. Indeed “contradiction through time” is a definition of coming-into-being and of change: Then it was, now it isn’t, later it will be—each time-phase brings different or opposing conditions. But once again: Time never appears in the fragments; it is change that does it all. In fact, the only appearance of time is as change—a remarkably advanced demythification.  Read more at location 1112

It takes a high-strung, taut philosophical imagination to envision the world so ambivalently: It scatters and again gathers; it attacks and recedes (91), sometimes both at once.  Read more at location 1119

I don’t think that so ultimately uncompromising a philosophical physics ever again comes on the scene.  Read more at location 1122

Nicholas of Cusa (b. 1401), a putative Heraclitean heir since he sees God as a “coincidence of opposites,” in fact regards these opposites as reconciled in the divinity. And so on to Hegel’s “sublations” (Section IV). For Heraclitus’s divine Logos rationally collects the terms, yet brutely keeps the antagonisms—and  Read more at location 1124

His is, in its parts and as a whole, a tautly vital, twangingly alive, strainingly static cosmos. It is a world unified by confrontational encounters, propped up by mutual antagonisms, locked into inimical embraces.  Read more at location 1127

Hence for Heraclitus self-contradiction is indeed the vital crux of the cosmos, as expressed in his ratio-like juxtapositions and in his supposedly obscurantist paradoxes.  Read more at location 1131

****   Moreover, among paradoxes, one specially prominent type is the bald assertion of the identity of opposites, for example: The mutually abrasive [is the] advantageous. (8, here translated literally to sharpen the hostility: to antixoun means “what scrapes against each other”)  Read more at location 1132

That is its genesis and its rule: War is Father of all things, of all things King. (53) Antagonisms are, once more, ultimate.  Read more at location 1139

****   Heraclitus can both see a world constituted of antitheses and enunciate it as orderly because the Logos not only drives everything apart into confronting terms that face each other in fixed measures, but it also, and even primarily, collects everything into a unity: [1.] Out of everything one and [2.] out of one everything. (10) Thus the ratio-relations that express the Logos in the world are at once confrontations and correspondences.  Read more at location 1142

In one of these aspects, your Logos is a principle speaking the language of elemental nature. It says yes to this and no to that; it affirms and denies. In the language of governance spoken to the real world, this means: “Be preserved! or Be Destroyed!” or “Stay or Go!”—the  Read more at location 1154

In the other aspect, the opposite principle goes to work, that of collecting everything into one, of relating all things through an underlying element.  Read more at location 1158

A central meaning of this lesser logos, the one that positions it between the single word and the whole tale, is that of “sentence.” A sentence does indeed have the two capabilities just ascribed to the Logos: First, it can assert or negate, posit or remove, maintain or abrogate in the now or over time—and it can contradict itself by doing both at once. 

...Would Heraclitus be glad to be told that the governor of the world is modeled on a human sentence? I doubt it. The thought is a scholar’s taking-down of a philosopher. As he says: Much-learning (polymathie; translate for the purpose “scholarliness”) does not teach [anyone] to have a mind. (40) So that reductive explanation must be retracted, though it may survive as a helpful hint for comprehending the Logos. The reason why the world is as it is, or how Heraclitus came to hear the Logos, is unavailable.  Read more at location 1168

what looks like mere human provisionality may express a true cosmic ultimacy.  Read more at location 1174

S. Father War 

So it is Cosmic War for Heraclitus: War is Father of all things, of all things King. (53) This chiasmus expresses the equality of the generative and the ordering role of strife. Furthermore: It is needful to know that War is Common and Justice [is] strife, and that everything comes to be according to strife and what must be (chreon). (80)29  Read more at location 1178

Fire, at least, is not abolished in the transformations, but rather preserved; each presently existing element has in it the everliving first Fire (Section III M). I will speculate further: Each superseding element must both destroy and save (Hegel would say “sublate”) the previous element, must absorb something formative in it—else how would it be resurrected and reappear at a cycle’s end? Thus each element very pregnantly “lives the other’s death.”  Read more at location 1198

T. That Flux 

These are among the most famous sayings of Heraclitus: Everything flows, and nothing stays, and: Everything gives way and nothing stays. (both W 20) The trouble is that he never said the first; it is attributed by Plato to “those around him,” 

...The second seems to be like a distorting interpretation rather than a quotation. After all, Heraclitus thinks of strife precisely as keeping everything from “going by the board” (W 27). Neither fragment has been accepted into the canon.30  Read more at location 1207

*******   Here is another saying, which was evidently really said by Heraclitus: A river—it is not possible to step into the same one twice. For other and ever other water flows on. (91 combined with 12)  Read more at location 1210

****   (Note:  not just impermanence, but united with unity... akin to Buddhism)  Since Heraclitus wasn’t a man you could follow, the attempt not merely to follow but to trump him must of necessity have led to hyperbolic nonsense. 

...it’s clear what Cratylus was after: the extreme version of radical flux, ultimate inconstancy. For him there is no “a river” or, for that matter, anything at all that retains its being. Is this philosophy of radical flux compatible with the notions of vibrant stasis, of orderly transformations, of a wise Design, a discerning Fire, a governing Logos—of “One : Everything”? Not remotely.  Read more at location 1216

it has to be acknowledged that both Plato and Aristotle were ready to propagate this Flux-Heraclitus. Heraclitus the Obscure made a good relativistic whipping-boy; thus they are the sources of the fragments just quoted (Section IV).  Read more at location 1220

What does the genuine river-fragment actually say? It begins by acknowledging that there is a river, and from its banks one can step into it—not twice, yet also, in good Heraclitean style, twice. For the river is the same and not the same: bed-and-bank stay put, the waters roll on.  Read more at location 1222

I therefore need to say that relativism is actually the opposite of aspectseeing, of taking up different points of view on something, because the latter requires the assumption that there is something that stays put so that we may shift around it.  Read more at location 1227

****   Heraclitus does, famously, say: The way up and the way down is one and the same. (60) Again, the trite understanding, that this means that you climb up and down on the same trail, does not do him justice. 

...This following fragment is even more vulnerable to traipsy interpretation: Sea-water is both the cleanest and the foulest, since it is for fish drinkable and safe, but for men undrinkable and destructive. (61) If this meant that certain items are good for some creatures and bad for others, it wouldn’t be worth saying.  Read more at location 1234

*********   both of these fragments intend something more original. The way and the water are in themselves both up and down, both safe and deleterious; the road goes up by reason of its opposing downness; the sea is safe because of its incorporated deleteriousness—but only when viewed from the aspect of a god, from a higher-level: To the god everything is beautiful and just, but men have understood some things as just, others as unjust. (102)  Read more at location 1238

************   (Note:   nondualism)  The beauty that the god apprehends thus comes, it seems, from the cosmos’s crisp order. It is a “both-and” order, undeterred in its factuality by the scruples of human talk-logic but not inaccessible to human thinking. For it is discernibly divided and discernibly collected by the communicating Logos. And this dividing and collecting is what the philosophos, the wisdom-loving man, repeats after the Logos (50).  Read more at location 1243

Recall here also that Heraclitus was the discoverer of transcendence, of the Wise Thing “separated” (kechorismenon) from everything (108); it is the word forms of which will later be used for distancing beings of thought from objects of sense (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1026a). Indeed the later form is weaker, since where Heraclitus says “separated,” Aristotle usually says only “separable” (choriston—its first sense, though often translated as “separate”).  Read more at location 1248

In conclusion, the picture of Heraclitus as the philosopher of ultimate instability, of radical mutability, is just ludicrous.  Read more at location 1252

U. The Being of Parmenides

the order of their coming on the philosophical scene is unsettled. As an issue of mere temporal precedence, who cares? But as a question concerning Heraclitus’s motive-impulse—Was his thinking reactive or aboriginal?—one might be interested in determining the direction of influence of these two founders of Western philosophy. This, however, seems to be impossible. We have no reason to think they ever met—given that they lived at opposite ends of the Greek world and that Heraclitus opted for immobility, while Parmenides apparently stopped his travels at Athens.  Read more at location 1257

we might as well accept the tradition of people closer to him than we are. It makes Heraclitus the elder, claiming that he was born c. 540 and Parmenides c. 510 b.c.e.  Read more at location 1261

it seems best to me to suppose that both thinkers were self-moved in point of originality—referring  Read more at location 1268

If Heraclitus were simply a fluxist all the way down—as Parmenides does seem to be a monist and the philosopher of Being first and last—there would be no thought-provoking relation between them. Our tradition would just be radically dual at its origin, and we would be left with speculations about personal propensities. As it is, the two founders can be put—because they in fact are—into a time- and space-indifferent dialectic with each other.  Read more at location 1278

Being is surely our deepest term, since it betokens inexhaustible, perhaps inarticulable, plenitude. But Logos is surely our most interesting one, because it is articulation itself and carries huge but delimitable complexes of meaning. Being is largely mute substance, Logos mostly talkative relationality.  Read more at location 1287

****   From the—atemporal—Heraclitean perspective, Parmenides is the thinker of a Being un-rent by oppositions: The only way of seeking that thinking may employ is that [it] is and that [there] is no “is not.” (Diels, Parmenides, 2, l. 3)  Read more at location 1291

The “it” comes from our English need for a pronoun. In Greek there is no “it,” there is only “Is” (esti). It is a complete sentence: Saying, Thought, and Being all at once, conceived as the all-absorbent copula: Issing so to speak. It contains neither differences nor changes, it is one, continuous, for what descent will you seek for it? (8, l. 6) The condition that seems to Parmenides whole, single-limbed, and also untrembling and complete (8, l. 4), seems to Heraclitus untuned, relaxed—“everything gone by the board” (W 27).  Read more at location 1295

****   The greater point, though, is, that they both see the same, a Whole, an All, a One, and search out its nature.  Read more at location 1301

notice must be taken of the fact that “Being” (to on) does not occur in our fragments of Heraclitus. His account of the being of the cosmos is not by way of Being but of Logos—a mindful collector, as well as a cosmic collection of opposing pluralities into a tensely connected unity.  Read more at location 1308

Many distinctions fall out from the one between Being and Logos. At bottom, Parmenides has a one-sentence, indeed, one-word message:        Only one story of the way Is left; that of Is. (8, l. 2) This story is his first-person story, his poem; from him come the prescriptions and injunctions concerning proper speaking of Being. He assumes a near-priestly function as an initiate into the inner sanctum of Truth. Heraclitus, on the other hand, utters medium-like what he hears from the Logos, and he expresses its Sayings in the terse style of an oracle.  Read more at location 1311

his way is to direct attention away from himself personally: “Listen not to me but to the Logos” (50). Parmenides, on the other hand, takes his induction into the untrembling heart of truth very personally (1, l. 29)—a difference inviting speculation, though not for now.  Read more at location 1318

It is characteristic that for Parmenides the copula, the expression of Being, swallows everything so that it alone remains, while for Heraclitus it disappears from between the terms so that they alone show up. Thus: Parmenides: Is. (8, l. 2) Heraclitus: One Everything. (50)  Read more at location 1322

**********   Here is an antiphonal pattern based on the word pan, “all,” that shows how close they are—and how far apart: Parmenides: All (pan) is alike. (8, l. 22) Heraclitus: All things (panta) come to be by strife. (8) Parmenides: All (pan) is together. (8, l. 5) Heraclitus: All things (panta) are one. (50) Parmenides: All (pan) is continuous. (8, l. 25) Heraclitus: Out of all things (panton) one and out of one all things. (10) Parmenides always says “All” in the singular, since his Being is undifferentiated, while Heraclitus says “All things” (or Everything), since his cosmos is a collection—but both say “All.” The first couplet shows the difference between them: the All is united by homogeneity for the one, by discord for the other. The second couplet shows that both achieve unity, albeit by different routes. The third shows that where Being is first and last ever and only itself—“for Being draws nigh to Being”—the Logos works in self-opposing ways, now from the parts to the whole, now inversely.  Read more at location 1326

they set out for the future, for us, the two perennial, yet ever-evolving, terms of that inquiry: Logos and Being and its one paramount and never-resolved perplexity: One and/or Many?  Read more at location 1337

CHAPTER IV

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE LOGOS 

Heraclitus’s followers seem never to have settled into a proper school. “Such people don’t become each other’s students,” Socrates says of them, “but they spring up on their own” (Plato, Theaetetus 180c). Probably  Read more at location 1341

The Heraclitean Logos, however, had a long and extensive afterlife: cycles of attributed misappropriations and unattributed appropriations. It was now adopted and adapted to perform a function in a new system, now selected for and subjected to an alien elevation in a new religion,  Read more at location 1346

Here are some high points of its later appearance. They are found in these authors, of whom I shall give very brief accounts. Classical: Plato, Aristotle, Old Stoa: Zeno, Chrysippos, Christian: John the Evangelist, Heretic-hunter: Hippolytus, Neoplatonic: Plotinus, Modern: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and, strange as it may seem, American: Madison.  Read more at location 1350

Plato (b. 427 b.c.e.) had, as I said, some connection to the Heracliteans, particularly to the above-mentioned Cratylus, whom he made the main character in the skeptical dialogue Cratylus (440c). But under the influence of Socrates, he had, as I imagine, divorced himself from them. In his Theatetus he lumps Heraclitus with the “wise men”—the Sophists, literally the crew of “wise-ists.” He excepts only Parmenides, whom he evidently regarded as the much more serious predecessor. He relegates Heraclitus to the “all is born of flow and change” party (152e); he says that “the companions of Heraclitus are leading the chorus of this account (logou) very vigorously” (179d). But he makes no reference to the Logos; surprisingly, he ignores it; far from appropriating the Logos of Heraclitus, Plato eclipsed it.  Read more at location 1358

yet—the effect of Plato’s early attachment to the Heracliteans seems to have been pervasive. Is not the Good both transcendent as even “beyond Being” and also immanent as active through everything in generating multiplicity, unifying it, and making it humanly intelligible (Republic 509b)?  Read more at location 1364

Aristotle (b. 384 b.c.e.) also undervalues Heraclitus, grouping him with the Physicists. As has been mentioned, this identification rests on the interpretation of Heraclitean fire as a “material cause” (Metaphysics 983b).  Read more at location 1369

Old Stoa (c. 300 b.c.e.) is the periodizing name given to the first phase of antiquity’s longest-lasting and most widespread philosophical movement, and the one of most consequence in modern times. These early Stoics are the true proto-moderns, especially in their representational theory of knowledge and their physicalism. For them Heraclitus’s thoughts, transmutable into set doctrines, were found fodder. But they were as much his traducers as his inheritors, since they reinterpreted his terms to suit their technically sophisticated system. Here we find, on the one hand, these Heraclitean items: Fire as basic element, Zeus as Fire, Zeus as Logos and world-manager, the Logos as Fire.1 On the other hand, their system is meant to be a genuine materialism with an underlying material hyle (an Aristotelian term) qualified as fire, and that is, I think, not true to Heraclitus.  Read more at location 1372

The Stoics’ chief elaboration is, indeed, built on a Heraclitean intimation. They understand the Logos-Fire to be at once an active and a passive principle.  Read more at location 1382

****  (Note:   bible, jesus)  John the Evangelist (1st century c.e.) is given here the merest, but unavoidable mention. His Gospel begins: In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. A Logos that is speech and God at once would seem to be directly Heraclitean, but that is leaping to conclusions. John may have heard of God as Logos from the Stoics, or had in mind the biblical “Wisdom” of God (hokhmah, sophia, as in Proverbs 8:22 ff).3 Indeed, Heraclitus and an earlier prophet do seem to sound the same tune: God is He Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountain in the scales, and the hills in a balance. (Isaiah 40:12)  Read more at location 1390

****  (Note:   bible, jesus)  Hippolytus (3rd century c.e.) leads less far afield. He is one of the most copious sources of Heraclitean fragments and for the oddest reason. He serendipitously co-opted pagan Heraclitus for his own attack on the Christian heresy of one Noetus, who claimed that the Father is his own son and is thus simply identical with him. (Notice that in John’s Gospel the identity is at first qualified: “was with.”) Hippolytus got the idea of confuting Noetus by showing that his doctrine was really pagan because it was simply Heraclitean, specifically with respect to the coincidence of inverses (Father : Son : : Son : Father; see Section III E) and the divinity of the Logos.  Read more at location 1399

****   He does indeed get it right: Noetus seems to have been a Christian Heraclitus in a crucial respect—in identifying the world-transcending with the world-indwelling deity.  Read more at location 1405

Plotinus (b. 205 c.e.) is chock full of Heraclitean allusions, though mellowed down. Here is the more diffuse, absorbable Heraclitus.  Read more at location 1407

Plotinus gives an almost lyrical description of the Logos-Fire, which is, for all that, recognizable as Heraclitean; it might have melted even Heraclitus himself: Fire itself is beautiful beyond the other bodies, because it has the rank-order of form in relation to the other elements. Above them in position, rarer than the other bodies as being incorporeal, it alone does not receive into itself the others, but the others receive it. (“On Beauty,” Ennead 1.6, 3)  Read more at location 1411

Nicholas of Cusa (b. 1401), mentioned above, is recalled here in passing both to shorten the leap into modernity and because his Coincidence of Opposites, reconciled in God, could be considered another case of Heraclitus being subjected to strife-mitigation.  Read more at location 1415

Hegel (b. 1770), as is ever his way with his predecessors, absorbs and assimilates Heraclitus dialectically, that is, as the human representative of the Idea’s logical design realized in the world—as a thinker not fully self-aware, but dignified by his historical role as forerunner. A saying hesitantly attributed by Aristotle to Heraclitus in the Metaphysics (1005b) comes in handy for Hegel’s purpose: “The same thing is and is not.”  Read more at location 1420

Unlike Parmenides, Heraclitus does not employ “to be” existentially; when he does use a form of the verb, he always completes the predicate: to be this or that. Hegel, however, contrives to credit Heraclitus with an albeit incompletely conceived prototype of Hegelian dialectic: “There is no proposition of Heraclitus that I did not accept in my logic,” he says early in the Heraclitean chapter of Lectures on the History of Philosophy. So he puts Heraclitus, as I mentioned, after Parmenides, since Being is absolutely first in Hegel’s dialectical development.  Read more at location 1425

by virtue of taking Heraclitus completely seriously, Hegel comes on remarkable insights—the one author, as it seems to me, who does not bowdlerize him philosophically. He credits him with a true dialectic, a movement of thought, as he says, made into a principle: the Logos. In this Logos-dialectic, this thought-motion, Being (One) is the starting point and Becoming (Transformation) a second moment. Becoming, however, is indeed both generation and destruction, positive and negative at once, and so, in onto-logical terms it “is and is not.” What Hegel slips into his account that is eminently un-Heraclitean is his own “sublation,” the saving absorption of the antithetical phase into a new, positive culminating moment. Heraclitus, after all, stops at unresolved difference and preserves pervasive contradiction in thought and perennial antagonism in the cosmos: no conflict-resolution, no reconciliation.  Read more at location 1430

****   (Note:   Interesting to think of fire as the epitome of reality, symbolized, concretized)  Hegel has grasped the absence of explicitly named time in his predecessor, but he finds it—brilliantly—in a “concrete process.” Fire, he says, “is physical time.” That description seems to me to be an acute encapsulation:  Read more at location 1440

Nothing can be what it is unless it is locked into a relation of mutual assertiveness with another. Its inner being, its vitality, emanates as force seeking resistance. This is Heraclitean tension to a T. However, in the Phenomenology, force comes under Consciousness, the kind of knowing that has its object outside itself as an other. Self-consciousness, which recognizes itself in all its objects, stands higher in the dialectical development. Hegel would say Heraclitus is dialectically arrested.  Read more at location 1451

Schopenhauer (b. 1788) speaks, in The World as Will and Representation, of “cognitionless strife” as the blind force driving that unorganic nature which is the object of natural science (2nd book, para. 27).  Read more at location 1466

Nietzsche (b. 1844) expresses what will be a lifelong veneration for Heraclitus in his early “Philosophy in the Tragic Era of the Greeks.” He takes his co-opted predecessor to deny both the separation between thought and nature and the being of Being. He explains Heraclitus’s paradoxes as the splendid result of the intuitive anti-rationalism that guides his representation of a force-replete world—as a sort of joyous, Whitmanesque “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)”  Read more at location 1471

In his late Ecce Homo, Nietzsche confesses that in Heraclitus’s “general proximity his mood grows warmer than anywhere else,” for he sees in him “the affirmation of passing away and destroying which is the decisive feeling of Dionysian philosophy” (3)—this of the despiser of drunk souls, the auditor of the designing Logos, the caster of a cold eye! Nietzsche, I must think, is very likely the only human being to summon warm feelings toward this curmudgeonly solitary who discovered within his soul the science of nature, of a cyclically living cosmos, tautbraced by antitheses, disciplined by measure, bonded by ratio-related confronting terms, and governed both immanently and transcendently by Thinking itself—the Logos.  Read more at location 1479

Madison (b. 1751), being an American, is out of order temporally and out of place geographically here; moreover I know no evidence that Heraclitus ever entered his reading or thinking. Yet I want to claim that this man, the most ingeniously practical of political philosophers, was a Heraclitean—proof  Read more at location 1485

Thus for Madison faction and freedom, tension and vitality, are facts of humanity. Though the first purpose of government is to protect “the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property”—one might say, to maintain the natural ratio-relations—its second is to keep citizens from overstepping their proper measures.  Read more at location 1495

This Madisonian conception of 1781, which I do not think I have misrepresented by casting it in Heraclitean terms, is the political complement to the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s economics.  Read more at location 1501

Thus a most fundamental aspect of American life is anticipated in the mordantly acute insights of a man, a philosopher, who stood aside from practical politics, yet announced a radical version of the Federalists’ aim: Greek: ek panton hen (10) Latin: e pluribus unum (on the Great Seal and currency of the United States) English: “out of many, one” —not, however, by seeking what Europeans currently call “social harmony,” but by asserting the mutual support of contesting energies.  Read more at location 1504

CHAPTER V

THE SOUL OF HERACLITUS 

At the human level there is logos, the more or less thoughtful utterance of our mind and its mindfulness (noos, phronesis) (40, 2). At its best, it expresses not the private thought of the speaker but rather listens to and conveys the Saying of the Logos, the Wise;  Read more at location 1516

*************  This Logos, which is divine but perhaps not a nameable deity, governs and pilots the cosmos, the ordered world. It does so from within as a Wise Design, a maxim or judgment that it does not have but is. By it Everything, all the things that constitute the cosmos, are unified, put into ordered relations: “Everything : One.”  Read more at location 1519

In its inner-worldly function, the Logos, as cosmic Fire, ranges through the physical elements as their second nature, so to speak, as the fungible, measurable aspect of their materiality, having the powers of elemental fire to dissolve them, to break them down, as does an analyzing intelligence. This Logos-Fire, then, at once instills and discerns measures in the elements.  Read more at location 1521

The Logos might well be said to be ultimately responsible for all these quantitative and qualitative ratios by which the cosmos is held together in transformative or agonistic intimacy. At any rate, the Greek name for ratios is logoi, and logoi are the cosmic unifying relations—call them the offspring, the utterances, the specifications of the Logos. Moreover, immanently active though that thoughtful, discerning Fire, that divinely ruling Logos of logoi may be, it is also transcendent as the aforesaid Wise Design; it is the Superlogos, the Logos, who not only manages the cosmos from within but also informs it from beyond.  Read more at location 1526

Logos is both nature and its language, and it expresses itself in measures, that is, in numbers; in physics, the numbers of the calculating reason are more “modern” than the figures of the geometric imagination.  Read more at location 1545

how does Heraclitus himself come to know this language? By observing the apparent “tuning” (harmonia) of the cosmos and by grasping its unapparent “fitting” (also harmonia), its governing design.  Read more at location 1547

***********   (Note:   answers to without found within)  What is the venue for this observant listening? It is the soul: I have searched myself. (101) While Parmenides rides a chariot right into the house of Being “which is outside of the path of men” (1, l. 27), Heraclitus walks the ways of his soul, which are boundless: Setting out for the bounds of the soul, you would not find them out, though you passed along every way, so deep a Logos does it have. (45) It is the original “depth-psychology”: searching into oneself, exploring the never-ending ways of an enormously capacious inner place. Here, one last time, Heraclitus appears as a modern: Here is the subjective origin of the science of nature, that is, the mathematical construction of nature that proceeds from the human cognitive subject.  Read more at location 1549

*********  (Note:   as without, so within)  It is, in its passable immensity, a mirror of the cosmos; to “search myself” means to observe the soul-encompassed world within as a reflection of the Logos- and logoi-informed world without.  Read more at location 1561

Heraclitus had already discovered the world within himself. Moreover: The Logos of the soul is one that increases itself. (115)  Read more at location 1567

Thus, as the man discovers more and more logos-relations, passes over more ways, the Logos grows in comprehensiveness. It is a familiar effect of habitual introspection: more self-knowledge produces more self to know, and as the explored soul expands, so does the knowledge of the divine Logos itself and of the cosmos it rules and inhabits.  Read more at location 1571

(Note: Striking difference to John Calvin, saying to "know thyself and know God" as though they are entirely different)  Is this capacity of soul Heraclitus’s alone? Is his activity eccentric, “outside the paths of men?” Not at all: It is possible for all men (my italics) to know themselves and to be soundminded (sophronein). (116) This saying is just what the two inscriptions on the portal sides of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi will famously enjoin, “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much”—the  Read more at location 1575

I think Heraclitus is first, or if not first—for who can ever prove primacy in thought?—at least all on his own, in going within; indeed, derivativeness in this matter would be self-contravening.  Read more at location 1588

****  (Note:   again, as within so without)  there is a two-fold commonality to our thinking: It is both a common capacity of humankind, and it is concerned with what is in its very nature common. Thus: Common (xynon) to everyone is thinking (to phronein). (113) Heraclitus once more puns on xynon and xyn nooi, “common” and “with mind.” And also: Those who [wish to] speak with mind (xyn nooi) must make themselves strong in the Common (toi xynoi) to all, just as a city [should] in its law—and much more strongly. For all human laws are nourished by the One, the Divine. For it rules as largely as it wants and is sufficient to everything and is [so even] over and above. (114) Note that the Divine, surely the Logos, rules within the political community as the source of law, and also beyond as the cause of cosmic unity.  Read more at location 1591

The most private, most mindless state is dreaming—no revelations from the repressed unconscious here; thus also no responsibility: For those who are awake there is a single and common cosmos; each of those who are asleep turns himself away to the private one. (89) The contrasting pair “common cosmos : private world” is at the center of Heraclitus’s psychology—or rather of his cosmo-psychology.  Read more at location 1610

The Logos-listener, the soulsearcher, finds that the Logos-steered Cosmos is the true Common and that Logos-deafness and dreaming world-aversion are the real privacy and privation.  Read more at location 1618

Souls are exhaled from, vaporized out of, moisture (ton hygron anathymiontai) (12). Presumably, intelligent fire has a part in this conversion of the wet element: The flash-dried [or dry] soul is wisest and best (118), while the stumbling drunk has a sodden soul (117). Evidently this wetting of the soul is a sort of living regression to its birth-element, to its pre-birth condition before its fiery sublimation, but also to its post-mortem dissolution: For souls it is death to become water, and for water to become earth; and from earth comes water, and from water soul. (36) Here the soul is placed within its cycle of transformations—through water, earth, water, back to soul by exhalation. This wet origin and end stays with the soul and appears in its pleasures: It is a delight—or death—for souls to become wet. (77) So the soul takes part in the universal elemental transformations of the cosmos, and that explains why it is capable of obtuseness: It may be deleteriously, wetly, immattered. Hence it is not a trans-material substance—and yet, it also is, for in a behind-the-scenes sense, when most truly soul, it is ever fiery, dried to incandescence by the agency of thoughtful Fire.  Read more at location 1628

This human soul, Heraclitus’s soul, is possessed of a specifically human way of being in the world: It is an early, maybe a first, instance of what will come to be called “intentionality,” the remarkable capacity, peculiar to thinking, of “aboutness,” of containing its object within itself, such that it is at once before the mind and of the mind. That is, I imagine, how Heraclitus’s own soul both held and beheld the cosmos, which spoke to it oracularly.  Read more at location 1661

My near-last fragment, as famous as the flux fragments, is usually rendered as “A man’s character is his destiny.”  Read more at location 1664

*********   Here is the fragment again, practically in transcription: Ethos is daimon to a man. (119) Daimon is here, I think, not destiny but “divinity,” as in this fragment: A man is called “infant” in relation to (pros) a divinity (daimon) as is a child in relation to man. (79—one last case of a continuous proportion)7 And ethos in Fragment 119 is not “individual character” but our sort, our “kind”—humankind, as in this fragment: Human-kind (ethos anthropon) does not have insight (gnome); the divine-kind (theion) has it. (78) Then the fragment in question might go: His kind is man’s divinity, meaning: Humanity is man’s divinity, a very Heraclitean paradox.  Read more at location 1667

Although from one perspective, “the wisest of men appears as a monkey in wisdom and beauty and everything compared to the god” (83), 

...from another aspect, human beings have the life of divinity within them: Immortals : mortals : : mortals : immortals—[mortals] living the death of those [immortals] and [immortals] having died the life of those [mortals] (62)  Read more at location 1681

****   The chiasmus, recall, unifies inverses. Gods, the fragment announces, are related to men inversely as men to gods. Thus they are locked into each other; they are more than oppositionally paired. They are reciprocally dependent, antithetically identical.  Read more at location 1685

*********   (Note:   relates to mystery of Jesus, resurrection)  men “live the death” of gods. I think this means that their living deathboundness, their mortality, is the condition for the immortality of the gods; im-mortals (a-thanatoi) are, after all, mortals (thnetoi) of negative quality. Men live the gods’ death for them. Reciprocally, the gods have died the life of men. They are in the completed state of death, beyond the dying done by mortals. But being thus past dying, they live, as dead, the life available for living mortals—perhaps not for all, but for the listeners to the deep Logos in the soul. This thought had staying power.  Read more at location 1688

Heraclitus, too, has a high regard for mortals who live, within this life, the death of the immortals, for humans who, though yet living, reach the afterlife where living and dying have ended.  Read more at location 1695

Logos and the Soul in which it manifests itself. I imagine that Heraclitus first heard his, or rather the Logos within, delivering its sayings in the language of his mind. In pursuing its call through the pathways of his boundless soul, he found a psychic cosmos congruent with the physical one present to his observant eye. Thus, looking without and listening within, he came on the Wise Design that keeps everything antagonistically together and learned to articulate, in pungently precise Greek, his—and everyone’s—Logos.  Read more at location 1712

POSTSCRIPT 

By a reasonable reckoning, Heraclitus was writing down the sayings imparted to him by the Logos roundabout 490 B.C.E.  Read more at location 1717

To me it seems wonderful that these sayings have not lost their engaging immediacy—wonderful in itself and as a testimony to the insignificance of temporal passage in the presence of thinking.  Read more at location 1719