Heraclitus of Ephesus (http://sailturkey.com/panoramas/ephesus/)

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Heraclitus of Ephesus(http//sailturkey.com/panor
amas/ephesus/)

• 540-480
• Studied with Milesians
• Wrote philosophical poetry, insights
• Reflected on physics, language, ethics,
  self-knowledge, society

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Chronology600-530? Milesian school
of philosophy530 Persians begin conquest of
Ionia540-480 Life of Heraclitus530-440 Life of
Parmenides490-479 Persian Wars (Greek
victory)479-405 Athenian Empire in
Aegean470s-50s Anaxagoras, Parmenides in
Athens445-30 Protagoras in Athens433-399
Socrates philosophical mission
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(No Transcript)
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Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
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Heraclitean Doctrines

• Logos (language, logic, truth)
• Harmony-in-tension
• Fire
• Relativity
• Flux
• Self-Knowledge
• Law

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Logos

• Listening not to me, but to the Logos, it is wise
  to agree all things are one.
• This Logos holds always but humans prove unable
  to grasp it.
• The Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks
  nor conceals, but gives a sign

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Harmony-in-tension

• They do not understand how, at variance with
  itself, it agrees with itself, a
  backwards-turning attunement.
• Together whole and divided, accordant and
  discordant, coming together in one, dividing into
  all things.
• God is day and night, winter and summer, war and
  peace, satiety and hunger.

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Fire

• Fire lives the death of earth and air the death
  of fire, water lives the death of air, earth that
  of water.
• This cosmos, the same for all, none of the gods
  nor humans has made, but it was always and is and
  shall be an ever-living fire being kindled in
  measures and extinguished in measures.
• All things are an exchange for fire

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Two Fragments

• This kosmos, the same for all, none of the gods
  nor humans has made, but it was always and is and
  shall be an ever-living fire being kindled in
  measures and extinguished in measures.
• To God all things are beautiful and just and
  good but humans have supposed some unjust and
  other just.

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Rituals of Eros and Thanatos

• Dionysian and Orphic rituals a God who dies and
  is reborn
• Expressed in drunken processions, music and
  (sometimes) orgies
• Heraclitus realizes these have a spiritual aspect

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Dionysus
If it were not for Dionysus that they hold
processions and sing hymns to the shameful parts
(phalli), it would be shameful but Hades and
Dionysus are the same, in whose honor they go mad
and celebrate the Bacchic rites.
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The wise is one alone willing and unwilling to
be called Zeus.
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Relativity

• The suns breadth is the length of a human
  foot.
• The sea is the purest to fishes and most
  polluted water to humans
• The most beautiful ape is ugly to a human the
  wisest human is an ape to a god

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Panta rei the Doctrine of Flux

• Upon those who step into the same rivers,
  different and different waters flow.
• It is not possible to step twice into the same
  river.
• We step and do not step into the same rivers. We
  are and we are not.

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• Becoming Being
• (ta panta, all things processes)
• / \
• Being Fire/energy
• (arche, origin or governing-principle)

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Flux

• Of matter earth-air-water-fire
• Of individuals life and death
• Of social or natural laws
• Of concepts (linguistic change)

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Cratylus the Heraclitean

• You cannot step into the same river even once.
• Nouns are all a lie and should be replaced by
  gerunds. A tree is not a thing it is a
  treeing.
• Things seem to be, but in reality, they are all
  in motion, on fire.

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Ship of Theseus

• Theseus, sailing ship A to Crete, replaces plank
  by plank of his ship.
• Scavenger, following in ship B, picks them from
  the sea and replaces all the parts of his own
  ship, before they make land.
• Is Theseus still sailing the same ship?
• Or is Scavenger now sailing ship A?

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Self-Knowledge

• It belongs to all people to know themselves and
  to think rightly.
• I searched myself.
• The soul has a self-increasing logos.

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Ethics

• A man when drunk is led by a boy.
• Whatever anger wants it buys at the cost of soul.
• Character is fate.

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Law (Nomos)

• The people must fight for the law as for the city
  wall.

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Heraclitean Frame of Meaning

• Nature Logos changing framework of physical
  intellectual world
• But Nature loves to hide
• Humans must discover and re-discover the Logos
  to overcome delusion

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Dynamic Tension

• Openness to Physis --
• to the Logos, to contingency, to Fire
• /
• vs.
• /
• Concealedness of everyday life
• in the technenomosmythos world of the polis
• Nature loves to hide.

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Man and Nature

• Nature is not resource for technology or
  intellectual appropriate
• Nature E-mergence, the encompassing reality in
  which human-being dwells
• We are in and of Nature, and Nature is in us
• The Heraclitean Sage is at one with Nature, but
  this must be ever-recovered through creative
  logos, since even words become reified

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Science and Alienation

• Heraclitean sage is cognitively alienated from
  conventional social reality
• But H-sage discovers Fusis, Logos, i.e.
  discovers alienation from Reality associated
  with conventional belief
• Is it possible to embrace the aesthetic vision
  of Nature/Life that Heraclitus teaches?

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• The aeon (unending time) is a child playing,
  playing checkers the kingdom belongs to a child.
• --Heraclitus (Curd 109)

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Aesthetic View of Life

• Just as the child and the artist play, the
  eternally living fire plays, builds up and
  destroys, in innocence--and this is the game the
  Aeon (God, Nature, Matter) plays with himself.
• Who will demand from such a philosophy a moral
  vindication of life? Heraclitus is not compelled
  to prove that this is the best of all possible
  worlds, as if he were caught between Christian
  piety and science it is enough for Heraclitus,
  in his sublime Greek naivete, that the world is
  the beautiful, innocent play of the Aeon.
• It is not for the mere human to judge this
  contest, this play it is for him to share in it,
  and to take sides as a joyful warrior, gamesman,
  and creator.
• --Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the
  Greeks