What is philosophy? The first and most important answer to this question is that Philosophy is an activity, not a body of knowledge. The verb “philosophise” and the adjective “philosophical” are more important than the noun “Philosophy”.
To philosophise is to spotlight knowledge itself as the object of thinking. While there is a specialisation called “Philosophy”, the power of philosophy is the way it’s put to use to other specialisations — we have “philosophy of science”, “philosophy of art”, “moral philosophy” and so on.
There’s a “philosophy of” practically every field of knowledge or topic, but the reverse isn’t true — there’s no morals of philosophy, no science or art of philosophy. There’s no one way to do philosophy, and certainly no best way to do it.
Philosophy aims toward a meta-understanding of anything we could apply thought to, and therefore a more holistic understanding. It takes a higher, more abstracted, view of whatever is in its sights, taking into consideration the subjectivity of the knower and the wider context of the known by using the powerful human capacity to reason.
Philosophical thinking is fundamentally analytical, connective and creative. It drives innovation and improvement in practically every facet of human life.
But philosophy also reveals truths that cannot be seen nor heard. It guides and goads us into wisdom, sometimes dragging us out of our burrows of contentment and complacency into the searing light of interrogation. It sniffs out illusions and comforting beliefs.
And so the pendulum of philosophy swings through creation and destruction, innovation and futility, insight and agnosticism, certainty and scepticism, structure and ruin.
Where did it start? In the Western tradition, we could perhaps start with Thales, Xenophanes, or Pythagoras. Among these visionaries, the life of philosophy as a species of thinking emerged from the primordial heat of mysticism.
But it’s in Heraclitus of Ephesus that we get the first distinct image of a philosopher — one still half-steeped in mysticism, but whose thinking, unusually written in prose form, had a systematic and critical character. Heraclitus is the earliest thinker whose philosophical ideas are still influential today.
The philosopher’s widely acclaimed work — given the title On Nature, by subsequent authors — was lost to history, but we have fragments of the book salvaged from passages of commentary.
It’s unknown how accurate all of the fragments are, and it’s almost impossible to reconstruct their correct order, but we have enough of them to form a coherent picture of Heraclitus’s philosophy.
His writing is curt but dense and profound, making use of double meanings and allusions. His lines are often crisply rendered as symmetrical or “chaistic” proverbs. They have a mystical flavour without losing insight.
Heraclitus lived at a time of enormous upheaval. Civil turmoil followed the ravages of the Persian Wars on the Greek colonies of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), including Ephesus.
Amidst a social revolution in which tribal aristocracies collapsed under the pressure of war and trade, the philosopher railed against the masses who turned against the blue-blooded ruling classes to which he belonged.
He was outright opposed to the emerging democratic forces sweeping across the Greek world, and scornful of the masses’ beliefs, religious rituals, and the popular wisdom of bards such as Hesiod and Homer.
Through many of the fragments is a sour haughtiness that borders on exasperation. He wrote,
“As for the Ephesians,
I would have them, youths,
elders, and all those between,
go hang themselves, leaving the city
in the abler hands of children.
With banishment of Hermodoros
they say, ‘No man should be
worthier than average.’ Thus,
my fellow citizens declare,
whoever would seek
excellence can find it
elsewhere among others.”
“Insolence needs drowning worse than wildfire”, he wrote, blaming insolence on the mob’s congenital ignorance. He made frequent comparisons between people and animals, thinking the masses knew not what was good for them in the same way that hungry animals need prodding even in the sight of pasture, or like dogs they “bark at what they cannot understand”.
The ignorant masses simply “eat their way to sleep”. They also gorge themselves on religious stupidity — he conjures visions of priests and men bringing the sacred into disrepute, raising their profane hymns and loud prayers to ugly idols as a man “might argue with his doorpost”. In the works of the bards, the gods are anthropomorphised with passions, phobias and flaws. This was anathema to Heraclitus.
A high-minded religiosity electrifies the fragments, but there is nothing to preach or even teach — Heraclitus thinks of himself as less of a theorist than a prophet who’s setting out the independent truth of the cosmos. The indirect and aphoristic language attests to this as it conjures a vivid image of the ways of the world. In effect, the philosopher shows and doesn’t tell, leaving enlightenment up to his readers.
The Cosmos
The philosopher’s vision of the cosmos is that it’s like an eternally burning fire. Combustion is a process, not a thing as such. And so everything around us is process. An object we see as enduring through time is a fleeting lick of plasma in the grand scheme of things. What's more, just as is the case with fire, everything is born from the death of other things. Everything is in transformation, nothing endures.
“By cosmic rule,
As day yields night,
So winter summer,
War peace, plenty famine.
All things change.
Fire penetrates the lump
Of myrrh, until the joining
Bodies die and rise again
In smoke called incense.”“As all things change to fire,
and fire exhausted
falls back into things,
the crops are sold
for money spent on food.”
But the fire is one — there is an essential oneness in the world, and we can understand this through the unity of opposites that drive change.
“From the strain
Of binding opposites
Comes harmony.”
Heraclitus gives the examples of the bow and the lyre — both require the tension of opposing forces to fulfil their purpose. Under the comb too the “tangle and the straight path are one and the same.”
Opposites, then, are both equal and interchangeable in the course of time. The “beginning is the end”, the “way up is the way back”, what is cold soon warms, and what is warm cools, what is dry moistens, and what is moist dries out, what is scattered, gathers and what is gathered blows apart. And so in these opposites we have what is truly one.
With all their moral fairytales in the myths and legends, the masses, of course, don’t understand this ultimate simplicity that underlies existence. He writes,
“Many who have learned
From Hesiod the countless names
Of gods and monsters
Never understand
That night and day are one.”
His ire is not only reserved for the poets and masses, he also assails would-be scientists and rival philosophers. True knowledge is not to be found in books, instead he advises “applicants for wisdom” to “do what I have done: inquire within.”
He encourages people to see and hear, to travel to see for themselves what they may have learned from poets and theorists.
It’s hard to convey just how groundbreaking Heraclitus’s ideas were. The world of Hesiod and Homer is like an eternally static stage on which all living actors play out their roles — both Gods and people. In Heraclitus the whole cosmos is a process and we human beings are simply part of that process.
In the Greek imagination before Heraclitus, processes such as the cycle of seasons and life and death were simply part of the edifice, maintaining its integrity. For Heraclitus, the whole edifice, or rather what seems to be an edifice, is process. There are not things, but rather events. The seemingly solid ground beneath your feet is an event — a temporary mixture of matter which itself is energy.
This eternally changing, transforming cosmos was not created by the gods, and there is no escape from the fate set for us. How would you escape, he asks his reader, from a fire that “never sinks or sets”? His most quoted maxim, that we never step in the same river twice, with the river taken to be a metaphor for existence itself, powerfully conveys just how unstable the cosmos is, how it pours forth unremittingly through our consciousness.
Historicism
Yet God is all that is fundamental and unchanging. Probably with Zeus in mind, he wrote, “it is the thunderbolt that steers the course of all things.”
This makes Heraclitus a “historicist” of sorts. Historicism is the idea that worldly events — or simply change itself — are driven by some underlying logic.
The philosopher Karl Popper saw Heraclitus as a father figure to all subsequent historicists in the history of philosophy, from Plato to Hegel and Karl Marx. This is because of the combination of all-pervasive change with the “complimentary belief in an inexorable and immutable law of destiny”, as Popper put it.
So while the world is in constant flux, what happens is destined to be the divine will of God.
“While cosmic wisdom
Understands all things
Are good and just,
Intelligence may find
Injustice here, and justice
Somewhere else.”
All that is ordained in fate is just, and the mechanism of so much change among people is contest. Heraclitus was a hawk who loathed Homer’s dove-ish laments.
“The poet was a fool
who wanted no conflict
among us, gods
or people.
Harmony needs
low and high,
as progeny needs
man and woman.”
The outcome of war was always just, because it is the will of God. To remove strife from the world would destroy the unity of opposites. “War is the father and king of all,” he wrote.
In his landmark The Open Society and Its Enemies, Popper starts with Heraclitus as enemy number one to democracy, not just for his conservatism, but for his deep-rooted belief in hidden destiny.
Popper acknowledges the genius of Heraclitus but also sees the words as a bluster disguising a deeper psychological weakness. The elitist exorcises the grief they feel in the face of change by embracing it as a rule, as the constant they yearn for. Like all historicists, Popper contends, their Ancient Greek forefather puts an overemphasis on change simply to underscore a belief in destiny.
But unlike Marx and Hegel and certain religious thinkers, Heraclitus envisaged no cessation to the fire, no resolution to the ongoing contest of opposites. There is no “classless society”, no Kingdom of God, nor will there be an “end of history”, there is only more conflict as ordained by God. The fire burns for eternity.
Becoming
The philosopher’s ideas permeated history, we see the influence of Heraclitus surface in “process philosophy” or the philosophy of “becoming”. “Nothing ever is, everything is becoming,” Plato wrote, paraphrasing Heraclitus.
Forced to accept the Heraclitan notion that all is change, Plato constructed a dualist philosophy by developing the idea of a parallel world of unchanging Forms. So while Plato disagreed with Heraclitus, his philosophy is still built on the insights of his predecessor.
The early Stoics combined the cosmological ideas of Heraclitus with the Cynic ethical philosophy. They too saw the universe in terms of ongoing process, governed by divine reason, which people would do well to adhere to without pining for stability.
Of modern philosphers, of course Hegel and Marx, but also Nietzsche and Bergson, emphasised the primacy of change in the cosmos and contest in human life. Heraclitus remains influential, perhaps more so now than Plato in having his central ideas taken seriously. His process approach was praised and adopted by Martin Heidegger, Giles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, three thinkers who still loom large over our age.
Modern science to some extent agrees with Heraclitus if we were to take fire to be energy. Yet modern scientific thinking largely grasps onto the idea of the universe as an edifice — the “laws of nature” supply consistency and conformity to Being. This is not because of some divine reason, as Heraclitus envisaged, but because scientists had to somehow invent a concept even more implausible than Zeus to explain away the seeming causal consistency that makes our lives possible.
Perhaps Nietzsche’s Heraclitan fantasy, written in his notebook in his last years, gives us a Godless and lawless view of how the cosmos would regulate itself — being invariable in magnitude but always changing,
“This world is a monster of energy, without beginning or end, a fixed and invariable magnitude of energy, no more, no less, which is never expended, merely transformed, of unalterable size as a whole, whose budget is without either expenses or losses, but likewise without gains or earnings, surrounded and bounded by ‘nothingness’. […] This world is the will to power — and nothing besides!”
As we enter the twenty-first century, a frightening age in which humans are once again shown to be puny in the face of nature, in which inherited certainties are eroded by globalisation, and conflict defies any neat narratives, Heraclitus seems less the embittered historicist and more the truth-teller.
He is the prophet of thunder, a fork of bright plasma that bellows,
“Just as the river where I step
is not the same and is,
So I am as I am not.”
Thank you for reading. I hope you learned something new.
Thank you! I enjoyed the article. I do have a point of contention with your statement that "... scientists had to somehow invent a concept [the laws of nature] even more implausible than Zeus to explain away the seeming causal consistency that makes our lives possible." The "laws of nature" were developed over time through observation, experimentation, hypothesis, sharing of data, repeat, etc. In the spirit of Heraclitus, the process of understanding the cosmos through the scientific method is ongoing and continues without an end point.
Your reference to Heraclitus as "the philosopher of thunder" for his saying about the thunderbolt is something I missed in my article on Heraclitus. Good observation! https://pyrrhonism.medium.com/the-thunder-perfect-mind-a-heraclitean-interpretation-c173f0086fe2