3. Heracleitus of Ephesus

Across the Caystrian Gulf from Samos stood Ionia’s most famous city—Ephesus. Founded about 1000 by colonists from Athens, it prospered by tapping the trade of both the Cayster and the Maeander. Its population, its religion, and its art contained a strong Eastern element; the Artemis worshiped there began and ended as an Oriental goddess of motherhood and fertility. Her renowned temple had many deaths, and almost as many resurrections. On the site of an ancient altar twice built and twice destroyed, the first temple was erected about 600, and was probably the earliest important edifice in the Ionic style. The second temple was raised about 540, partly through the generosity of Croesus; Paeonius of Ephesus, Theodoras of Samos, and Demetrius, a priest of the shrine, shared in designing it. It was the largest Greek temple that had yet been built, and was ranked without dispute among the Seven Wonders of the World.*

The city was known not only for its temple but for its poets, its philosophers, and its expensively gowned women.⁵¹ Here, as early as 690 B.C., lived Callinus, the earliest known elegiac poet of Greece. Far greater and uglier was Hipponax, who, towards 550, composed poems so coarse in subject, obscure in language, pointed in wit, and refined in metrical style, that all Greece began to talk about him, and all Ephesus to hate him. He was short and thin, lame and deformed, and completely disagreeable. Woman, he tells us, in one of his surviving fragments, brings two days of happiness to a man—“one when he marries her, the other when he buries her.”⁵² He was a ruthless satirist, and lampooned every notable in Ephesus from the lowest criminal to the highest priest of the temple. When two sculptors, Bupalus and Athenis, exhibited an elegant caricature of him he attacked them with such corrosive verse that some of it has proved more durable than their stone, and sharper than the teeth of time. “Hold my coat,” says a typically polished morsel; “I shall hit Bupalus in the eye. I am ambidextrous, and I never miss my aim.”⁵³ Tradition said that Hipponax died by suicide; but perhaps this was only a universal wish.

The most illustrious son of Ephesus was Heracleitus the Obscure. Born about 530, he belonged to a noble family, and thought that democracy was a mistake. “There are many bad but few good,” he said (111*), and “one man to me is as ten thousand if he be the best” (113). But even aristocrats did not please him, nor women, nor scholars. “Abundant learning,” he wrote with genial particularity, “does not form the mind; if it did it would have instructed Hesiod, Pythagoras, Xenophanes and Hecataeus” (16). “For the only real wisdom is to know that idea which by itself will govern everything on every occasion” (19). So he went off, like a Chinese sage, to live in the mountains and brood over the one idea that would explain all things. Disdaining to expound his conclusions in words intelligible to common men, and seeking in obscurity of life and speech some safety from individuality-destroying parties and mobs, he expressed his views in pithy and enigmatical apophthegms On Nature, which he deposited in the temple of Artemis for the mystification of posterity.

Heracleitus has been represented in modern literature as building his philosophy around the notion of change; but the extant fragments hardly support this interpretation. Like most philosophers he longed to find the One behind the Many, some mind-steadying unity and order amid the chaotic flux and multiplicity of the world. “All things are one,” he said, as passionately as Parmenides (1); the problem of philosophy was, what is this one? Heracleitus answered, Fire. Perhaps he was influenced by the Persian worship of fire; probably, as we may judge from his identification of Fire with Soul and God, he used the term symbolically as well as literally, to mean energy as well as fire; the fragments permit no certainty. “This world . . . was made neither by a god nor by man, but it ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out” (20). Everything is a form of Fire, either in Fire’s “downward path” through progressive condensation into moisture, water, and earth; or in its “upward path” from earth to water to moisture to Fire.*⁵⁴

Though he finds a consoling constancy in the Eternal Fire, Heracleitus is troubled by its endless transformations; and the second nucleus of his thought is the eternity and ubiquity of change. He finds nothing static in the universe, the mind, or the soul. Nothing is, everything becomes; no condition persists unaltered, even for the smallest moment; everything is ceasing to be what it was, and is becoming what it will be. Here is a new emphasis in philosophy: Heracleitus does not merely ask, like Thales, what things are, but, like Anaximander, Lucretius, and Spencer, how they became what they are; and he suggests, like Aristotle, that a study of the second question is the best approach to the first. The extant apophthegms do not contain the famous formula, panta rei, ouden menei—“all things flow, nothing abides”; but antiquity is unanimous in attributing it to Heracleitus.⁵⁶ “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you” (41); “we are and we are not” (81); here, as in Hegel, the universe is a vast Becoming. Multiplicity, variety, change are as real as unity, identity, being; the Many are as real as the One.⁵⁷ The Many are the One; every change is a passage of things towards or from the condition of Fire. The One is the Many; in the very heart of Fire flickers restless change.

Hence Heracleitus passes to the third element in his philosophy—the unity of opposites, the interdependence of contraries, the harmony of strife. “God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger” (36). “Good and bad are the same; goodness and badness are one” (57-8); “life and death are the same; so are waking and sleeping, youth and age” (78). All these contraries are stages in a fluctuating movement, moments of the ever-changing Fire; each member in an opposing pair is necessary to the meaning and existence of the other; reality is the tension and interplay, the alternation and exchange, the unity and harmony, of opposites. “They understand not how that which is at variance with itself agrees with itself. There sits attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the harp” (45). As the tension of the string, loosened or drawn taut, creates the harmony of vibrations called music or a note, so the alternation and strife of opposites creates the essence and meaning and harmony of life and change. In the struggle of organism with organism, of man with man, of man with woman, of generation with generation, of class with class, of nation with nation, of idea with idea, of creed with creed, the warring opposites are the warp and woof on the loom of life, working at cross-purposes to produce the unseen unity and hidden concord of the whole. “From things that differ comes the fairest attunement” (46); any lover will understand.

All three of these principles—fire, change, and the tension unity of contraries—enter into Heracleitus’ conception of soul and God. He smiles at men who “seek in vain to purify themselves from blood-guiltiness by defiling themselves with blood” (130), or who “offer prayers to these statues here—as if one should try to converse with houses; such men know nothing of the real nature of gods” (126). Nor will he admit personal immortality; man too, like everything else, is a changeful and fitful flame, “kindled and put out like a light in the night” (77). Even so, man is Fire; the soul or vital principle is part of the eternal energy in all things; and as such it never dies. Death and birth are arbitrary points taken in the current of things by the human analyzing mind; but from the impartial standpoint of the universe they are merely phases in the endless change of forms. At every instant some part of us dies while the whole lives; at every second one of us dies while Life lives. Death is a beginning as well as an ending; birth is an ending as well as a beginning. Our words, our thoughts, even our morals, are prejudices, and represent our interests as parts or groups; philosophy must see things in the light of the whole. “To God all things are beautiful and good and right; men deem some things wrong and some right” (61).

As the soul is a passing tongue of the endlessly changing flame of life, so God is the everlasting Fire, the indestructible energy of the world. He is the unity binding all opposites, the harmony of all tensions, the sum and meaning of all strife. This Divine Fire, like life (for the two are everywhere and one), is always altering its form, always passing upward or downward on the ladder of change, always consuming and remaking things; indeed, some distant day, “Fire will judge and convict all things” (26), destroy them, and make way for new forms, in a Last Judgment or cosmic catastrophe. Nevertheless, the operations of the Undying Fire are not without sense and order; if we could understand the world as a whole we should see in it a vast impersonal wisdom, a Logos or Reason or Word (65); and we should try to mold our lives into accord with this way of Nature, this law of the universe, this wisdom or orderly energy which is God (91). “It is wise to hearken not to me, but to the Word” (1), to seek and follow the infinite reason of the whole.

When Heracleitus applies to ethics these four basic concepts of his thought—energy, change, the unity of opposites, and the reason of the whole—he illuminates all life and conduct. Energy harnessed to reason, wedded to order, is the greatest good. Change is not an evil but a boon; “in change one finds rest; it is weariness to be always toiling at the same things and always beginning afresh” (72-3). The mutual necessity of contraries makes intelligible and therefore forgivable the strife and suffering of life. “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest” (104). He rebukes those who desire an end of strife in the world (43); without this tension of opposites there would be no “attunement,” no weaving of the living web, no development. Harmony is not an ending of conflict, it is a tension in which neither element definitely wins, but both function indispensably (like the radicalism of youth and the conservatism of old age). The struggle for existence is necessary in order that the better may be separated from the worse, and may generate the highest. “Strife is the father of all and the king of all; some he has marked out to be gods, and some to be men; some he has made slaves, and some free” (44). In the end, “strife is justice” (62); the competition of individuals, groups, species, institutions, and empires constitutes nature’s supreme court, from whose verdict there is no appeal.

All in all, the philosophy of Heracleitus, concentrated for us now in 130 fragments, is among the major products of the Greek mind. The theory of the Divine Fire passed down into Stoicism; the notion of a final conflagration was transmitted through Stoicism to Christianity; the Logos, or reason in nature, became in Philo and Christian theology the Divine Word, the personified wisdom with which or through whom God creates and governs all things; in some measure it prepared for the early modern view of natural law. Virtue as obedience to nature became a catchword of Stoicism; the unity of opposites revived vigorously in Hegel; the idea of change came back into its own with Bergson. The conception of strife and struggle as determining all things reappears in Darwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche—who carries on, after twenty-four centuries, the war of Heracleitus against democracy.

We know almost nothing of Heracleitus’ life; and of his death we have only an unsupported story in Diogenes Laertius, which may illustrate the prosaic ends to which our poetry may return:

And at last becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to spend his time walking about the mountains, feeding on grasses and plants; and in consequence of these habits he was attacked by the dropsy, and so he returned to the city, and asked the physicians, in a riddle, whether they were able to produce a drought after wet weather. And as they did not understand him, he shut himself up in a stable for oxen, and covered himself with cow dung, hoping to cause the wet to evaporate from him by the warmth that this produced. And as he did himself no good in this way, he died, having lived seventy years.⁵⁸