Judaism
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Abstract
Contents Updated: Monday, January 24, 2000
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Heraclitus of Ephesus, (c 535-475 BC), son of Bloson, “flourished” in 504-501 BC in the middle of the reign of Darius the Persian, with whom several traditions connected him. Ephesus was another city on the coast of Asia Minor. Like Xenophanes, Heraclitus despised traditional religion. Homer, he believed, deserved to be flogged.
Heraclitus refers to Pythagoras and Xenophanes by name and in the past tense and he is alluded to by Parmenides. The spurious Letters of Heraclitus show that the banishment of Hermodorus, whom Heraclitus defended, was believed to have taken place during the reign of Darius, and the party led by him had probably enjoyed the confidence of the Persian government. The Ionian movement against Persian rule was the likely reason for the expulsion, which would explain how Parmenides could have known the views of Heraclitus.
Heraclitus disdained all men including the previous inquirers into nature. Heraclitus was an elitist, believing in government by aristocrats, and he intended his writings to be read only by a worthy minority. He was conscious of writing in a prophetic style because it was the manner of the time. The stirring events of the age, and the influence of the religious revival, gave something of a prophetic tone to all the leaders of thought.
Heraclitus believed that clarity about oneself led to appropriate behavior toward others and that the search for enlightenment could lead to a sound mind and virtue. Consequently the Stoics held him in particular veneration, seeking to interpret him in accordance with their own system, and offering comentaries on him that provide us with some of our information about him. Stoic editors divided the work of Heraclitus into three discourses: one dealing with the universe, one political, and one theological.
Heraclitus is so obscure he was nicknamed “the Dark,” but he realized that that knowledge was not simply a collection of facts, that sense experience was not enough:
Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men if they have souls that understand not their language.
Names encourage us to look at the world in a fragmentary way and to obscure the whole. He tried to construct a view of the whole according to what seemed reasonable or fit together—on coherence rather than a construction of proven facts.
Unlike Pythagoras, Heraclitus believed the world of change visible in materiality on earth was continueous with the world of the heavens. The universe consisted of motion, everything was in a state of change:
You cannot step twice into the same rivers, for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.
Change, Heraclitus believed, made yearning for permanence in God and immortality futile—it was the work of conflict, and conflict was a permanent and integral part of nature. In the physical world and in human society, conflict created development and decay. Conflict made wars inevitable and humans were unable to harmonize their differences through reason. Yet he believed in compromise. In seeing conflict as natural, he introduced the idea of objectivity into questions of justice, and that justice might best be served by superimposing compromise upon conflicting interests.
It was fashionable to explain things in terms of conflict, strife or opposites of some kind. It reflects Zoroastrian dualism, the war of Good and Evil…
Homer was wrong in saying: “Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!” He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away.
…Yet, as in Zoroastrianism, where originally Ormuzd was responsible for both the Good and the Evil spirits, the opposites are a unity!
It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one.
Good and ill are one.
Heraclitus thought he had found an obvious truth that others had missed, that the many apparently independent and conflicting things we know are really one, and that this one is also many. The “strife of opposites” is really an harmonia. Wisdom is not a knowledge of many things, but the perception of the underlying unity of opposites. Philo says:
For that which is made up of both the opposites is one, and, when the one is divided, the opposites are disclosed. Is not this just what the Greeks say their great and much belauded Heraclitus put in the forefront of his philosophy as summing it all up, and boasted of as a new discovery?
Anaximander had taught that the opposites were separated out from the Boundless, but passed away into it once more, so paying the penalty to one another for their unjust encroachments. It implies there is something wrong in the war of opposites, and that the existence of the opposites is a breach in the unity of the One. The truth Heraclitus proclaimed was that the world is at once one and many, and that it is just the “opposite tension” of the opposites that constitutes the unity of the One. Pythagoras had the same conclusion, though put in another way. The use of the word harmonie suggests that Heraclitus had come under the influence of his older contemporary to some extent.
Plato clearly states that this was the central thought of Heraclitus:
Reality is both many and one, and is kept together by Hate and Love. For, say the more severe Muses, “in its division it is always being brought together” while the softer Muses relaxed the requirement that this should always be so, and said that the All was alternately one and at peace through the power of Aphrodite, and many and at war with itself because of something they called Strife.
Plato tells us Heraclitus taught that reality was at once many and one. This was not meant as a logical principle. The identity which Heraclitus explains as consisting in difference is just that of the primary substance in all its manifestations. This identity had been realized already by the Milesians, but they had found a difficulty in the difference. Anaximander had treated the strife of opposites as an “injustice,” and what Heraclitus set himself to show was that it was the highest justice.
So, Heraclitus accepted the view of Pythagoras that behind all was harmony. He synthesized the world of conflict and the harmony, seeing the world as a harmony of opposing forces—which some have compared to the opposing tensions in a bow when the cord is pulled back, or a lyre:
As the arrow leaves the string, the hands are pulling opposite ways to each other, and to the different parts of the bow, and the sweet note of the lyre is due to a similar tension and retention. The secret of the universe is the same.
Like Thales, Pythagoras and others he continued to believe in a supreme but abstract god, who presided over the universe, a god that was the prime mover behind all things, good and bad:
To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right.
He had to find a new primary substance, not merely something from which opposites could be “separated out,” but something which of its own nature would pass into everything else, while everything else would pass in turn into it—Fire! Fire had been held in awe by the ancients and had been seen as a spiritual force by the Persians. In fire, Heraclitus also saw soul or spirit.
A flame burning steadily appears to remain the same, the flame seems to be a “thing.” Yet the substance of it is continually changing, passing away in smoke, and its place is always being taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it. If the world is an “ever-living fire,” it must always be becoming all things, while all things are always returning to it. Heraclitus effectively had the modern concept of energy, of which heat is an example.
Fire burns continuously and without interruption, consuming fuel and liberating smoke. Everything is either mounting upwards to serve as fuel, or sinking downwards after having nourished the flame. Reality is an ever-flowing stream and nothing is ever at rest for a moment. The substance of the things we see is in constant change. Even as we look at them, some of the stuff of which they are composed has already passed into something else, while fresh stuff has come into them from another source. This is usually summed up, appropriately enough, in the phrase “All things are flowing” (panta rei), though this is not a quotation from Heraclitus.
Plato, however, expresses the idea quite clearly:
Nothing ever is, everything is becoming;
All things are in motion like streams;
All things are passing, and nothing abides.
We saw that Heraclitus held, “you cannot step twice into the same stream”. Any given thing, however stable in appearance, was merely a section in the stream, and the stuff composing it was never the same in any two consecutive moments. The Milesians had held a similar view.
That fire is the primary substance and that all things are momentary are Heraclitean ideas shared with the early schools of Buddhism. The floruit of the Buddha was in the latter part of the sixth century, and he adopted many ideas from earlier schools, so it is unlikely these two such doctrines should have arisen independently in widely separated places at about the same time. The link must have been the Persians.
Traces of the belief in fire as the primordial element occur in the Rig Veda, so was already present as a revered phenomenon in Hindu culture, but perhaps it was the example of the Persian religion that led Buddha, like Heraclitus, to chose fire as the most mutable of the elements to represent his metaphysical principle of becoming. Buddha compares the existence of beings to the candle flame that is renewed every instant. Buddha also uses the analogy of the river which is never the same for two moments but is sustained by ever-new waters, a sentiment echoed in Hetaclitus. Theophrastus wrote:
The all is finite and the world is one, arising from fire and consumed again by fire alternately through all eternity in cycles. This happens according to fate. Of the opposites, that which leads to the becoming of the world is called War and Strife. That which leads to the final conflagration is Concord and Peace.
Heraclitus appears to have used the theories of Anaximenes to work out the details, though not on the basis of the theory of rarefaction and condensation, which do not appear in Heraclitus’s own writing. The expression he used was “exchange,” a good name for combustion.
He called change the upward and the downward path, and held that the world comes into being in virtue of this. When fire is condensed it becomes moist, and when compressed it turns to water. Water being congealed turns to earth, and this he calls the downward path. And, again, the earth is in turn liquefied, and from it water arises, and from that everything else, for he refers almost everything to the evaporation from the sea. This is the path upwards.
He held, too, that exhalations arose both from the sea and the land, some bright and pure, others dark. Fire was nourished by the bright ones, and moisture by the others.
He does not make it clear what is the nature of that which surrounds the world. He held, however, that there were bowls in it with the concave sides turned towards us, in which the bright exhalations were collected and produced flames. These were the heavenly bodies.
The flame of the sun was the brightest and warmest, for the other heavenly bodies were more distant from the earth and for that reason gave less light and heat. The moon was nearer the earth, but it moved through an impure region. The sun moved in a bright and unmixed region and at the same time was at just the right distance from us. That is why it gives more heat and light. The eclipses of the sun and moon were due to the turning of the bowls upwards, while the monthly phases of the moon were produced by a gradual turning of its bowl.
Day and night, months and seasons and years, rains and winds, and things like these, were due to the different exhalations. The bright exhalation, when ignited in the circle of the sun, produced day, and the preponderance of the opposite exhalations produced night. The increase of warmth proceeding from the bright exhalation produced summer, and the preponderance of moisture from the dark exhalation produced winter. He assigns the causes of other things in conformity with this.
As to the earth, he makes no clear statement about its nature, any more than he does about that of the bowls.
So, the pure fire is found chiefly in the sun. This, like the other heavenly bodies, is a trough or bowl, with the concave side turned towards us, in which the bright exhalations from the sea collect and burn. How does the fire of the sun pass into other forms? If we look at the fragments which deal with the downward path, we find that the first transformation it undergoes is into sea, and we are further told that half of the sea is earth and half of it prester.
What is this prester? In the sense it usually bears elsewhere, the word means a hurricane accompanied by a fiery waterspout. Heraclitus explained the rise of the sea to fire by means of the bright evaporations and a meteorological explanation allows the passing of fire back into sea. A fiery water spout will stand for the smoke produced by the burning of the sun and for the immediate stage between fire and water. It resembles smoke enough to be accounted for by the sun’s combustion, and it comes down in the form of water.
The report of Aetius about the Heraclitean theory of presteres says they were due “to the kindling and extinction of clouds.” The bright vapor, after kindling in the bowl of the sun and going out again, reappears as the dark fiery storm-cloud, and so passes once more into sea. At the next stage water continually passes into earth. On the “upward path,” the earth is liquefied. In the same proportion as the sea becomes earth, so that the sea is still “measured by the same tale”. Half of it is earth and half of it is prester.
In short, at any given moment, half of the sea is taking the downward path, and has just been fiery storm cloud, while half of it is going up, and has just been earth. As the sea is increased by rain, water passes into earth in proportion and as the sea is diminished by evaporation, it is similarly proportionately fed by the earth. Lastly, the ignition of the bright vapor from the sea in the bowl of the sun completes the circle of the “upward and downward path”.
In spite of this constant flux, how do things appear relatively stable? Heraclitus said it was because the “measures” of the bulk of each form of matter in the long run remains the same, though its substance is constantly changing. Certain “measures” of the ever-living fire “are always being kindled, while like measures” are always going out. All things are “exchanged” for fire and fire for all things, and this implies that for everything it takes, fire will give as much. “The sun will not exceed his measures”.
And yet the “measures” are not absolutely fixed. Theophrastus spoke of an alternate preponderance of the bright and dark exhalations.
Man is made up of three things, fire, water, and earth. But, just as in the macrocosm fire is identified with the one wisdom, so in the microcosm the fire alone is conscious. When it has left the body, the remainder, the mere earth and water, is altogether worthless. Of course, the fire which animates man is subject to the “upward and downward path,” just as much as the fire of the world:
All things are passing, both human and divine, upwards and downwards by exchanges.
We are just as much in perpetual flux as anything else in the world. We are and are not the same for two consecutive instants. The fire in us is perpetually becoming water, and the water earth but, as the opposite process goes on simultaneously, we appear to remain the same.
Man is also subject to a certain oscillation in his “measures” of fire and water, which gives rise to the alternations of sleeping and waking, life and death. Sextus Empiricus quotes the account given by Aenesidemus:
The natural philosopher is of opinion that what surrounds us is rational and endowed with consciousness. According to Heraclitus, when we draw in this divine reason by means of respiration, we become rational. In sleep we forget, but at our waking we become conscious once more. For in sleep, when the openings of the senses close, the mind which is in us is cut off from contact with that which surrounds us, and only our connexion with it by means of respiration is preserved as a sort of root (from which the rest may spring again), and, when it is thus separated, it loses the power of memory that it had before. When we awake again, however, it looks out through the openings of the senses, as if through windows, and coming together with the surrounding mind, it assumes the power of reason. Just, then, as embers, when they are brought near the fire, change and become red-hot, and go out when they are taken away from it again, so does the portion of the surrounding mind which sojourns in our body become irrational when it is cut off, and so does it become of like nature to the whole when contact is established through the greatest number of openings.
In this passage is a mixture of later ideas. “That which surrounds us” equalling the air cannot be Heraclitean, for Heraclitus knew nothing of air except as a form of water. The reference to the pores or openings of the senses is probably foreign to him also, the theory of pores being due to Alcmaeon. The distinction between mind and body is also too sharply drawn.
The role assigned to respiration might be Heraclitean, for Anaximenes knew it. The striking simile of the embers which glow when brought near the fire is genuinely Heraclitus. Sleep was produced by the encroachment of moist, dark exhalations from the water in the body, which cause the fire to burn low. In sleep, we lose contact with the fire in the world which is common to all, and retire to a world of our own. In a soul where the fire and water are evenly balanced, the equilibrium is restored in the morning by an equal advance of the bright exhalation.
But in no soul are the fire and water thus evenly balanced for long. One or the other acquires predominance, and the result in either case is death. To become water is death to souls, and that is what happens to souls that seek pleasure, for pleasure is a moistening of the soul, as the drunken man, who has so moistened his soul that he does not know where he is going, proves. We must quench wantonness, for whatever our heart’s desire insists on it purchases at the price of life, the fire within us. The dry soul, lacking moisture, is the best, but a preponderance of fire, as much as water, causes death. However, it wins “greater portions” for those who die it.
Just as summer and winter are one, and reproduce one another by their “opposite tension,” so do life and death. They, too, are one, and so are youth and age. The soul will be now living and now dead, and will only turn to fire or water to recommence once more its unceasing upward and downward path. The soul that has died from excess of moisture sinks down to earth, but from the earth comes water, and from water is once more exhaled a soul.
So, too gods and men are really one:
Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the others’ death and dying the others’ life.
Those mortals that die the fiery death become immortal, they become the guardians of the quick and the dead, and those immortals become mortal in their turn. Everything is the death of something else. The living and the dead are always changing places, like the pieces on board game, and this applies not only to the souls that have become water, but to those that have become fire and are now guardian spirits. The real weariness is continuance in the same state, and the real rest is change. Rest in any other sense is tantamount to dissolution. So they too are born once more.
Heraclitus estimated the duration of the cycle which preserves the balance of life and death as thirty years, the shortest time in which a man may become a grandfather.
Fire was kept up by the bright vapors from land and sea, and moisture by the dark. What are these “dark” vapors which increase the moist element? From the “Air” of Anaximenes, it is darkness itself. More Zoroastrian dualism.
Heraclitus will have thought night and winter to be produced by the rise of darkness from earth and sea—valleys were dark before the hill-tops—and this darkness, being moist, increased the watery element and put out the sun’s light. This, however, destroys the power of darkness itself. It can no longer rise upwards unless the sun gives it motion, and so it becomes possible for a fresh sun to be kindled, and to nourish itself at the expense of the moist element for a time, but only for a time. The sun, by burning up the bright vapor, deprives himself of nourishment, and the dark vapor once more gets the upper hand. In this sense “day and night are one”. Each implies the other, They are merely two sides of one process, in which alone their true ground of explanation is to be found.
Summer and winter were to be explained in the same way. The “turnings back” of the sun were of interest in those days, and Heraclitus saw in its retreat to the south the advance of the moist element, caused by the heat of the sun itself. This, however, diminishes the power of the sun to cause evaporation, and so it must return to the north that it may supply itself with nourishment. In the Peri diaites:
And in turn fire and water prevails and is prevailed over to the greatest and least degree that is possible. For neither can prevail altogether for the following reasons. If fire advances towards the utmost limit of the water, its nourishment fails it. It retires, then, to a place where it can get nourishment. And if water advances towards the utmost limit of the fire, movement fails it. At that point, it stands still and, when it has come to a stand, it has no longer power to resist, but is consumed as nourishment for the fire that falls upon it. For these reasons neither can prevail altogether. But if at any time either should be in any way overcome, then none of the things that exist would be as they are now. So long as things are as they are, fire and water will always be too, and neither will ever fail.
Heraclitus spoke also of a longer period, which is identified with the “Great Year,” and is variously described as lasting 18,000 and 10,800 years—the Persian one was 12,000 years but 36,000 years was Babylonian, and 18,000 years is just half that period, a fact which may be connected with Heraclitus’s way of dividing all cycles into an “upward and downward path.” 18,000 is half 36,000, while 10,800 is 360 x 30 (the life-death cycle in humans), which would make each cycle a day in the Great Year.
No definite statement explains what process Heraclitus supposed to take place in the Great Year. Some Stoics held that the Great Year was the period between one world-conflagration and the next but Heraclitus cannot have had a theory of a general conflagration. Though most writers ascribe to Heraclitus the doctrine of a periodical conflagration or ekpurosis, to use the Stoic term, it is inconsistent with his general view of constant exchange, the central idea of his system, and should only be accepted if the evidence is irresistible.
But such an interpretation destroys the whole point of Plato’s contrast between Heraclitus and Empedocles, which is just that, while Heraclitus said the One was always many, and the Many always one, Empedocles said the All was many and one by turns. Could Heraclitus have flatly contradicted his own discovery without noticing it? And could Plato, in discussing this discovery, also have been blind to the contradiction?
The earliest statements that Heraclitus taught the doctrine of a general conflagration are Stoic, and Christian apologists reproduce the Stoic view. Curiously, there are differences even among the Stoics. Marcus Aurelius says:
So that all these things are taken up into the Reason of the universe, whether by a periodical conflagration or a renovation effected by eternal exchanges.
Some said there was no general conflagration at all in Heraclitus. Plutarch makes someone say:
I see the Stoic conflagration spreading over the poems of Hesiod, just as it does over the writings of Heraclitus and the verses of Orpheus.
Any statement of Heraclitus that could have settled the debate would be quoted over and over again. Not a single quotation of the kind can be produced. Heraclitus said Fire was Want and Surfeit. He also said that fire in its advance will judge and convict all things. Nothing in this, however, suggests that fire will judge all things at once rather than by degrees. These appear to be the only passages which the Stoics and the Christian apologists could discover.
Fragments inconsistent with a general conflagration can more easily be found. “The sun will not overstep his measures.” The metaphor of “exchange,” which is applied to the transformations of fire points in the same direction. When gold is given in exchange for wares and wares for gold, the sum or “measure” of each remains constant, though they change owners. All the wares and gold do not come into the same hands. When anything becomes fire, something of equal amount must cease to be fire, if the “exchange” is to be a just one, and that it will be just is assured by the watchfulness of the Erinyes, who sees to it that the sun does not take more than he gives. There is variation but it is confined within limits, and is compensated in the long run by a variation in the other direction.
Heraclitus blaming Homer for desiring the cessation of strife, is conclusive. The cessation of strife would mean that all things should take the upward or downward path at the same time, and cease to “run in opposite directions.” All taking the upward path would yield a general conflagration. If Heraclitus held this to be the appointment of fate, would he have upbraided Homer for desiring so necessary a consummation?
Moreover, this world, and not merely the ” ever-living fire,” is said to be eternal, and it appears also that its eternity depends on the fact that it is always kindling and always going out in the same “measures,” or that an encroachment in one direction is compensated by a subsequent encroachment in the other.
Lastly, Man, like the heavenly bodies, oscillates between fire and water. Neither fire nor water can prevail completely. Surfeit is also Want, or an advance of fire increases the moist exhalation, while an advance of water deprives the fire of its power to cause evaporation. The conflagration, though it lasted but for a moment, would destroy the opposite tension on which the rise of a new world depends, and then motion would become impossible.
At any given moment, each of the three aggregates, Fire, Water, and Earth, is made up of two equal portions—subject to the oscillation described above—one of which is taking the upward and the other the downward path. The fact that the two halves of everything are being “drawn in opposite directions,” this “opposite tension,” “keeps things together,” and maintains them in an equilibrium, which can only be disturbed temporarily and within certain limits. It forms the “hidden attunement” of the universe, though, in another aspect of it, it is Strife.
Philo writes that Heraclitus supported his theory by a multitude of examples and some can still be recovered. Men themselves act just in the same way as Nature, and it is therefore surprising that they do not recognize the laws by which she works. The painter produces his harmonious effects by the contrast of colors, the musician by that of high and low notes.
If one were to make all things alike, there would be no delight in them.
Several Heraclitean fragments are in a class of their own, and are among the most striking utterances. These assert in the most downright way the identity of various things usually regarded as opposites. The clue to their meaning is to be found in the account already given of the assertion that day and night are one. Heraclitus meant, not that day was night or night was day, but that they were two sides of the same process, namely, the oscillation of the “measures” of fire and water, and that neither would be possible without the other. Any explanation that can be given of night will also be an explanation of day, and vice versa, for it will be an account of what is common to both, and manifests itself now as one and now as the other.
This is only a particular application of the principle that the primary fire is one even in its division. It itself is, even in its unity, both surfeit and want, war and peace. The “satiety” which makes fire pass into other forms, which makes it seek “rest in change”, and “hide itself” in the “hidden attunement” of opposition, is only one side of the process. The other is the “want” which leads it to consume the bright vapor as fuel. The upward path is nothing without the downward. If either were to cease, the other would cease too, and the world would disappear; for it takes both to make an apparently stable reality.
All other utterances of the kind are to be explained in the same way. If there were no cold, there would be no heat, for a thing can only grow warm if, and in so far as, it is already cold. And the same thing applies to the opposition of wet and dry. These are the two primary oppositions of Anaximander, and Heraclitus is showing that the war between them is really peace, for it is the common element in them which appears as strife, and that strife is justice, and not, as Anaximander had taught, an injustice which they commit one against the other, and which must be expiated by a reabsorption of both in their common ground.
The most startling of these sayings is that which affirms that good and evil are the same, a remarkable echo of the Zoroastrian idea of the high God, ormuzd, embracing both of the opposing spirits—an idea that Christians have totally lost. It does not mean that good is evil or that evil is good, but that they are the two inseparable halves of one and the same thing. A thing can become good only in so far as it is already evil, and evil only in so far as it is already good, and everything depends on the contrast.
Heraclitus points out that torture was an evil, and yet it is made a good by the presence of another evil, namely, disease, as is shown by the fact that surgeons expect a fee for inflicting it on their patients. Justice is a good, but would be unknown were it not for injustice, which is an evil. That is why it is not good for men to get everything they wish:
It is not good for men to get all they wish to get. It is sickness that makes health pleasant—evil, good—hunger, plenty—weariness, rest.
Just as the cessation of strife in the world would mean its destruction, so the disappearance of hunger, disease, and weariness would mean the disappearance of satisfaction, health, and rest.
This leads to a theory of relativity which prepares the way for the doctrine of Protagoras, that “Man is the measure of all things.” Sea-water is good for fish and bad for men, and so with many other things. At the same time, Heraclitus is not a believer in absolute relativity. The process of the world is not merely a circle, but an “upward and downward path.” At the upper end, where the two paths meet, is the pure fire, in which, as there is no separation, there is no relativity. While to man some things are evil and some things are good, all things are good to God. Now by God, or the “one wise,” there is no doubt Heraclitus meant Fire. There can hardly be any question that what he meant to say was that in it the opposition and relativity universal in the world disappear.
Heraclitus speaks of “wisdom” or the “wise” in two senses.
Of all whose discourses I have heard, there is not one who attains to understanding that wisdom is apart from all.
He means the perception of the unity of the many, and he also applies the term to that unity itself:
Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the thought by which all things are steered through all things.
This is synonymous with the pure fire which is not differentiated into two parts, one taking the upward and the other the downward path. That alone has wisdom, the partial things we see have not. We ourselves are only wise in so far as we are fiery.
With certain reservations, Heraclitus was prepared to call the one Wisdom by the name of Zeus. These reservations were fairly simple. Wisdom is not to be pictured in the form of a man. Heraclitus was repeating what had already been said by Xenophanes. He agrees further with Xenophanes in holding that this “god,” if it is to be called so, is one.
He gives a list of some of the religious figures of his time, and he in some way threatened them with the wrath to come.
The most esteemed of them knows but fancies, and holds fast to them, yet of a truth justice shall overtake the artificers of lies and the false witnesses.
He comments on the absurdity of praying to images, and the strange idea that blood-guiltiness can be washed out by the shedding of blood.
They vainly purify themselves by defiling themselves with blood, just as if one who had stepped into the mud were to wash his feet in mud. Any man who marked him doing thus, would deem him mad.
His polemic against popular religion was directed against the rites and ceremonies themselves than their mythological outgrowth. It was absurd to celebrate the worship of Dionysos by cheerful and licentious ceremonies, while Hades was propitiated by gloomy rites. According to the mystic doctrine itself, the two were really one, and the one Wisdom ought to be worshiped in its integrity.
The moral teaching of Heraclitus is summed up in the rule:
So we must follow the common (truth?), for that is shared by all.
The “common” upon which Heraclitus insists is something different from common sense, for which he had the greatest contempt. His objection to “the many,” was that they lived each in their own world, as if they had a private wisdom of their own, and public opinion is therefore the opposite of “the common”.
The rule is really to be interpreted as a corollary of his anthropological and cosmological views. The first requirement is that we keep our souls dry, and thus assimilate them to the one Wisdom, which is fire. That is what is really “common,” and the greatest fault is to act like men asleep, that is, by letting our souls grow moist, to cut ourselves off from the fire in the world.
Combining his believe in universal change and harmony, Heraclitus believed in a single unchanging law in the universe that governs all change, comparing “the common” to the laws of a city, preparing the way for the Stoic world-state:
Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds fast to its law, and even more strongly. For all human laws are fed by the one divine law. It prevails as much as it will, and suffices for all things with something to spare.
These laws are imperfect embodiments of the divine law. They cannot, however, exhaust it altogether, for in all human affairs there is an element of relativity. “Man is a baby compared to God”. Such as they are, however, the city must fight for them as for its walls, and, if it has the good fortune to possess a citizen with a dry soul, he is worth ten thousand, for in him alone is “the common” embodied.
For the Buddha also, the fundamental principle of existence was the immutable dharma (law) which decreed that every smallest action and word earned its reward, not an ounce more or less. This principle seems to date back to Zoroaster, but the Buddha, like Heraclitus, enthroned it as the ruling power in the universe, a universe completely free from the tyranny of gods.
Finally, Heraclitus also said:
- Nature loves to hide.
- The things that can be seen, heard, and learned are what I prize the most.
- Corpses are more fit to be cast out than dung.
- They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse.
- Dogs bark at every one they do not know.
The judgement of Martin West is that Heraclitus could not have arrived at this system by pure reason, because it has too many echos of Zoroatrianism and even of the Upanishads. in the latter souls unable to rise beyond the moon return to the earth as rain and are reincarnated to reflect their behavious in their previous existence. Though Heraclitus is not attested as a believer in transmigration of souls, it is not incompatible with his system and was believed by his predescessor, Pythagoras, and his successor, Empedocles. So we have an interesting mixture of Indo-European beliefs here.
Philolaus (fl 470 BC) a pupil of Pythagoras, taught the earth floated in space and revolved in a circle once each day around a central fire, called “the hearth of Zeus,” or the hearth of the universe. The side of the earth on which the Mediterranean region is located always faced away from this fire. The heaven appeared to move because of this circular orbiting motion of the earth.
