HERACLEITUS
Heracleitus was born about 535 B.C., and is believed to have lived to
the age of sixty. This places his death at 475 B.C. He was thus
subsequent to Xenophanes, contemporary with Parmenides, and older than
Zeno. In historical order of time, therefore, he runs parallel to the
Eleatics. Heracleitus was a man of Ephesus in Asia Minor. He was an
aristocrat, descendant of a noble Ephesian family, and occupied in
Ephesus the nominal position of basileus, or King. This, however,
merely meant that he was the Chief Priest of the local branch of the
Eleusinian mysteries, and this position he resigned in favour of his
brother. He appears to have been a man of a somewhat aloof, solitary,
and scornful nature. He looked down, not only upon the common herd,
but even upon the great men of his own race. He mentions Xenophanes
and Pythagoras in terms of obloquy. Homer, he thinks, should be taken
out and whipped. Hesiod he considers to be the teacher of the common
herd, one with them, "a man," he says, "who does not even know day and
night." Upon the common herd of mortals he looks down with infinite
scorn. Some of his sayings remind us not a little of Schopenhauer in
their pungency and sharpness. "Asses prefer straw to {73} gold." "Dogs
bark at everyone they do not know." Many of his sayings, however, are
memorable and trenchant epitomes of practical wisdom. "Man's character
is his fate." "Physicians who cut, burn, stab and rack the sick,
demand a fee for doing it, which they do not deserve to get." From his
aloof and aristocratic standpoint he launched forth denunciations
against the democracy of Ephesus.
Heracleitus embodied his philosophical thoughts in a prose treatise,
which was well-known at the time of Socrates, but of which only
fragments have come down to us. His style soon became proverbial for
its difficulty and obscurity, and he gained the nickname of
Heracleitus the "Dark," or the "Obscure." Socrates said of his work
that what he understood of it was excellent, what not, he believed was
equally so, but that the book required a tough swimmer. He has even
been accused of intentional obscurity. But there does not seem to be
any foundation for this charge. The fact is that if he takes no great
trouble to explain his thoughts, neither does he take any trouble to
conceal them. He does not write for fools. His attitude appears to be
that if his readers understand him, well; if not, so much the worse
for his readers. He wastes no time in elaborating and explaining his
thought, but embodies it in short, terse, pithy, and pregnant sayings.
His philosophical principle is the direct antithesis of Eleaticism.
The Eleatics had taught that only Being is, and Becoming is not at
all. All change, all Becoming is mere illusion. For Heracleitus, on
the contrary, only Becoming is, and Being, permanence, identity, these
are nothing but illusion. All things sublunary are {74} perpetually
changing, passing over into new forms and new shapes. Nothing stands,
nothing holds fast, nothing remains what it is. "Into the same river,"
he says, "we go down, and we do not go down; for into the same river
no man can enter twice; ever it flows in and flows out." Not only does
he deny all absolute permanence, but even a relative permanence of
things is declared to be illusory. We all know that everything has its
term, that all things arise and pass away, from the insects who live
an hour to the "eternal" hills. Yet we commonly attribute to these
things at least a relative permanence, a shorter or longer continuance
in the same state. But even this Heracleitus will not allow. Nothing
is ever the same, nothing remains identical from one consecutive
moment to another. The appearance of relative permanence is an
illusion, like that which makes us think that a wave passing over the
surface of the water remains all the time the same identical wave.
Here, as we know, the water of which the wave is composed changes from
moment to moment, only the form remaining the same. Precisely so, for
Heracleitus, the permanent appearance of things results from the
inflow and outflow in them of equivalent quantities of substance. "All
is flux." It is not, for example, the same sun which sets to-day and
rises to-morrow. It is a new sun. For the fire of the sun burns itself
out and is replenished from the vapours of the sea.
Not only do things change from moment to moment. Even in one and the
same moment they are and are not the same. It is not merely that a
thing first is, and then a moment afterwards, is not. It both is and
is not at the same time. The at-onceness of "is" and "is not" {75} is
the meaning of Becoming. We shall understand this better if we
contrast it with the Eleatic principle. The Eleatics described all
things under two concepts, Being and not-being. Being has, for them,
all truth, all reality. Not-being is wholly false and illusory. For
Heracleitus both Being and not-being are equally real. The one is as
true as the other. Both are true, for both are identical. Becoming is
the identity of Being and not-being. For Becoming has only two forms,
namely, the arising of things and their passing away, their beginning
and their end, their origination and their decease. Perhaps you may
think that this is not correct, that there are other forms of change
besides origination and decease. A man is born. That is his
origination. He dies. That is his decease. Between his birth and his
death there are intermediate changes. He grows larger, grows older,
grows wiser or more foolish, his hair turns grey. So also the leaf of
a tree does not merely come into being and pass out of being. It
changes in shape, form, colour. From light green it becomes dark
green, and from dark green, yellow. But there is after all nothing in
all this except origination and decease, not of the thing itself, but
of its qualities. The change from green to yellow is the decease of
green colour, the origination of yellow colour. Origination is the
passage of not-being into Being. Decease is the passage of Being into
not-being. Becoming, then, has in it only the two factors of Being and
not-being, and it means the passing of one into the other. But this
passage does not mean, for Heracleitus, that at one moment there is
Being, and at the next moment not-being. It means that Being and
not-being are in everything at one and the same time. Being is {76}
not-being. Being has not-being in it. Take as an example the problem
of life and death. Ordinarily we think that death is due to external
causes, such as accident or disease. We consider that while life
lasts, it is what it is, and remains what it is, namely life, unmixed
with death, and that it goes on being life until something comes from
outside, as it were, in the shape of external causes, and puts an end
to it. You may have read Metchnikoff's book "The Nature of Man." In
the course of that book he develops this idea. Death, he says, is
always due to external causes. Therefore, if we could remove the
causes, we could conquer death. The causes of death are mostly disease
and accident, for even old age is disease. There is no reason why
science should not advance so far as to eliminate disease and accident
from life. In that case life might be made immortal, or at any rate,
indefinitely prolonged. Now this is founded upon a confusion of ideas.
No doubt death is always due to external causes. Every event in the
world is determined, and wholly determined, by causes. The law of
causation admits of no exception whatever. Therefore it is perfectly
true that in every case of death causes precede it. But, as I
explained in the last chapter, [Footnote 6] to give the cause is not
to give any reason for an event. Causation is never a principle of
explanation of anything. It tells us that the phenomenon A is
invariably and unconditionally followed by the phenomenon B, and we
call A the cause of B. But this only means that whenever B happens, it
happens in a certain regular order and succession of events. But it
does not tell us why B happens at all. The reason of a thing is to be
{77} distinguished from its cause. The reason why a man dies is not to
be found in the causes which bring about his death. The reason rather
is that life has the germ of death already in it, that life is already
death potentially, that Being has not-being in it. The causation of
death is merely the mechanism, by the instrumentality of which,
through one set of causes or another, the inevitable end is brought
about.
[Footnote 6: Page 64.]
Not only is Being, for Heracleitus, identical with not-being, but
everything in the universe has in it its own opposite. Every existent
thing is a "harmony of opposite tensions." A harmony contains
necessarily two opposite principles which, in spite of their
opposition, reveal an underlying unity. That it is by virtue of this
principle that everything in the universe exists, is the teaching of
Heracleitus. All things contain their own opposites within them. In
the struggle and antagonism between hostile principles consists their
life, their being, their very existence. At the heart of things is
conflict. If there were no conflict in a thing, it would cease to
exist. This idea is expressed by Heracleitus in a variety of ways.
"Strife," he says, "is the father of all things." "The one, sundering
from itself, coalesces with itself, like the harmony of the bow and
the lyre." "God is day and night, summer and winter, war and peace,
satiety and hunger." "Join together whole and unwhole, congruous and
incongruous, accordant and discordant, then comes from one all and
from all one." In this sense, too, he censures Homer for having prayed
that strife might cease from among gods and men. If such a prayer were
granted, the universe itself would pass away.
{78}
Side by side with this metaphysic, Heracleitus lays down a theory of
physics. All things are composed of fire. "This world," he says,
"neither one of the gods nor of the human race has made; but it is, it
was, and ever shall be, an eternally living fire." All comes from
fire, and to fire all returns. "All things are exchanged for fire and
fire for all, as wares for gold and gold for wares." Thus there is
only one ultimate kind of matter, fire, and all other forms of matter
are merely modifications and variations of fire. It is clear for what
reason Heracleitus enunciated this principle. It is an exact physical
parallel to the metaphysical principle of Becoming. Fire is the most
mutable of the elements. It does not remain the same from one moment
to another. It is continually taking up matter in the form of fuel,
and giving off equivalent matter in the form of smoke and vapour. The
primal fire, according to Heracleitus, transmutes itself into air, air
into water, and water into earth. This he calls "the downward path."
To it corresponds "the upward path," the transmutation of earth into
water, water to air, and air to fire. All transformation takes place
in this regular order, and therefore, says Heracleitus, "the upward
and the downward path are one."
Fire is further specially identified with life and reason. It is the
rational element in things. The more fire there is, the more life, the
more movement. The more dark and heavy materials there are, the more
death, cold, and not-being. The soul, accordingly, is fire, and like
all other fires it continually burns itself out and needs
replenishment. This it obtains, through the senses and the breath,
from the common life and reason of the {79} world, that is, from the
surrounding and all-pervading fire. In this we live and move and have
our being. No man has a separate soul of his own. It is merely part of
the one universal soul-fire. Hence if communication with this is cut
off, man becomes irrational and finally dies. Sleep is the half-way
house to death. In sleep the passages of the senses are stopped up,
and the outer fire reaches us only through breath. Hence in sleep we
become irrational and senseless, turning aside from the common life of
the world, each to a private world of his own. Heracleitus taught also
the doctrine of periodic world-cycles. The world forms itself out of
fire, and by conflagration passes back to the primitive fire.
In his religious opinions Heracleitus was sceptical. But he does not,
like Xenophanes, direct his attacks against the central ideas of
religion, and the doctrine of the gods. He attacks mostly the outward
observances and forms in which the religious spirit manifests itself.
He inveighs against the worship of images, and urges the uselessness
of blood sacrifice.
With the Eleatics he distinguishes between sense and reason, and
places truth in rational cognition. The illusion of permanence he
ascribes to the senses. It is by reason that we rise to the knowledge
of the law of Becoming. In the comprehension of this law lies the duty
of man, and the only road to happiness. Understanding this, man
becomes resigned and contented. He sees that evil is the necessary
counterpart of good, and pain the necessary counterpart of pleasure,
and that both together are necessary to form the harmony of the world.
Good and evil are principles on the struggle {80} between which the
very existence of things depends. Evil, too, is necessary, has its
place in the world. To see this is to put oneself above pitiful and
futile struggles against the supreme law of the universe.