Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 005 - Old Man River - Heraclitus.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Old Man River, the Puzzles and Paradoxes of Heraclitus. Heraclitus of Ephesus is, you might say, the ultimate pre-Socratic. He brings together many of the features we associate with Greek philosophy before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came along. For instance, most of the thinkers we've looked at in previous episodes wanted to reduce the whole cosmos to one fundamental principle. Thales chooses water, Anaximenes chooses air, and Anaximander has his more abstract principle, the unlimited. Heraclitus, too, has his basic element, namely fire. Another example, these thinkers also wanted to explain change and opposition, and once Heraclitus comes along, their forays in this direction seem like a mere prologue to his theory of the unity of opposites. But of course, the most basic thing about the pre-Socratics is that we read only fragments of their thought. We're left with intriguing quotations and paraphrases from later authors. But Heraclitus actually wrote in fragments. Heraclitus' body of work is not unlike that of a comedian from the 1950s. It consists mostly of one-liners. Heraclitus did apparently write a book. Like most of the pre-Socratics, he's credited with having written a work called On Nature. That title doesn't mean he was a natural scientist, or that he was only a natural scientist. The Greek word for nature is phusis, which is where we get the word physics, but when it was used by these early thinkers, it could have a very broad meaning. Nature was just everything there was, and that was the topic of the book Heraclitus wrote. In it, he reportedly dealt with the cosmos itself, political questions, and the gods. We have fragments on all these topics, but with one major exception, the fragments we have from Heraclitus don't look like excerpts from a book, really. They look, as I say, more like one-liners, like philosophical riddles. For example, the road up and down is one and the same, or to paraphrase slightly, sea water, healthy for fish, unhealthy for men. Or how about this one, nature knows how to hide. Or, the most famous of all, you can't step into the same river twice. So, it is with good reason that the ancients referred to him as the Riddler, or Heraclitus the Obscure. He didn't make himself popular with the sort of philosophy in his hometown of Ephesus, which inevitably was yet another city in Ionia, like Meletus, Colophon, and Samos, where our philosophers have come from so far. Unlike his contemporaries in the 6th century BC, Pythagoras and Xenophanes, Heraclitus didn't travel to the west. It seems he was quite happy to stay in the east and provoke people into deep thought, or just plain annoyance, with his riddles. As I said, there is a notable exception to this way of philosophizing, namely a fragment which is apparently the start of his book. In this opening passage, the key word is logos. This is, unfortunately, a word that is always difficult to translate in Greek philosophical texts. In this case, it's even harder. Logos basically means word, but it expands to mean many other things too, like account and reason, or even proportion or measure. It's where we get all those English words that end in "-ology", so, for example, theology is giving an account, a logos, of God, theos, and anthropology is giving an account, a logos, of man, anthropos. So, quite an important word. And it's here in Heraclitus that it first becomes really crucial in philosophical Greek. At the beginning of his book, Heraclitus tells us that the logos he speaks of is something nobody understands, even once they've heard it. People go on through life blissfully unaware of the logos, even though evidence of it is staring them in the face. Which is a shame, because the logos Heraclitus is trying to get you to listen to is one that he claims explains absolutely everything, and here he uses that word nature or phusis. So this will be an account of everything there is. What was contained in this account? Another fragment from early in the book, which has the familiar one-liner form, says, Hearing not me, but the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one. A lot of ink has been spilled over this sentence. For one thing, why is he distinguishing between listening to the logos and hearing him, Heraclitus? Isn't this his account, his logos? Maybe the idea is, we shouldn't believe this because he's saying it, but because it's true. Some people have offered other explanations. For example, that logos doesn't really mean a count here, meaning the views being put forward in Heraclitus' book, but rather the proportion that binds together all things so that they turn out to be one. On the other hand, this logos needs to be something you can hear or listen to. Actually, I suspect Heraclitus, who liked to play around with the double meanings of Greek words, may have had several different aspects of the word logos in mind when he wrote this. What about the other part of this fragment, that we should agree all things are one? This is pretty exciting, because it makes Heraclitus the first philosopher to endorse what is called monism, the idea that everything is, in some sense, a unity. Here, Heraclitus is anticipating the theory of Parmenides. Parmenides, as we'll see, thought that unity is all there is, and he accordingly rejected our experience of the world that tells us there are many things. Heraclitus wasn't going this far, though. In fact, it's typical of him that he says that all things, plural, things, are one. His idea isn't that reality is one and not multiple. His idea is that reality is both a multiplicity and a unity. Heraclitus stresses the unity here, because he thinks this is the aspect of reality that tends to escape us. We go through life not hearing the logos, because our limited vision only takes in one little bit of the world at a time. Heraclitus' philosophy is designed to teach us to see all of nature, everything there is, as one unified whole, but a whole which includes many different things. And that brings us to Heraclitus' core idea, which is the so-called unity of opposites. We've already seen examples of this idea in some of Heraclitus' one-liner riddles. For example, sea water poisons humans, but fish need it to live. It's the same water, but it has opposite properties. A similar one says that donkeys prefer garbage to gold. The gold is valuable for us, and garbage has no value for us, but for the donkey, things are the other way around. The most classic example is when Heraclitus says the road up is the road down. His point here is not incidentally that whether it is the road up or the road down depends on your perspective, namely whether you are headed to the peak of the mountain or to the foothills. Instead, his point is that the same thing really is the road up and it really is the road down at the same time. The gold really is both valuable and worthless as is the garbage. The only point about perspective here is that people's perspective limits them to grasping only one of the opposed aspects of each thing. Again, they're not listening to that logos. With their limited understanding, they're only aware that they can buy things with gold, need to avoid drinking sea water, and are walking uphill. Of course, not everything in the world so obviously unites opposites in this way, but Heraclitus has something else up his sleeve to persuade you. This is the thing he's most famous for, his attention to the phenomenon of change. One of his nicest sayings is about a popular beverage drunk by the ancient Greeks made of wine, barley, and cheese. He said that this barley drink falls apart when it is not stirred. For an example we're more familiar with, think about a salad vinaigrette, how you have to stir it and then pour it over the salad before the oil separates from the vinegar. The nature of the drink or the dressing depends on the fact that it is in motion or changing. Like the vinaigrette, the unity of the world consists in what Heraclitus called a constant war or strife between all things. Maybe we see here why Heraclitus decided to express his philosophy in these mysterious fragmentary riddles. The truth he was trying to express was itself paradoxical, that stability resides precisely in change, that unity resides precisely in opposition. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, I've read about Heraclitus, or I've studied him in college or whatever, and what I seem to recall is that Heraclitus says that everything is always changing and that there is no stability, no unity. Heraclitus, in short, thought that everything is in flux. This version of Heraclitus is epitomized in his most famous statement, you can't step into the same river twice. The world is like the river. It doesn't persist but is constantly flowing. There is only change and nothing ever remains the same from one moment to the next. One nice thing about this interpretation of Heraclitus is that it provides a clear contrast to Parmenides, who thinks that change is an illusion. He thinks this, as we'll see, because all things are one. For change to happen, one thing would need to become something else, and there is nothing else. So, we'd have Heraclitus the change guy and Parmenides the stability guy, nice and easy to remember. Now I'm all for making things easy to remember. So, remember this. The flux interpretation of Heraclitus is wrong, and it's all Plato's fault. It's Plato, in his dialogue the Theaetetus, who sets up this neat opposition between the unity theory of Parmenides and the radical flux theory of Heraclitus. He may have been doing so honestly. We know of people who lived in Plato's day who styled themselves as followers of Heraclitus, and they did apparently believe in this flux doctrine. One of them was Cratylus, a philosopher after whom Plato actually named a dialogue. Cratylus is famous for having held that it's impossible to name anything, because whatever you try to name is always changing. Instead, you can only point with your finger at the so-called things that are melting one into another. Rather wittily, he tried to outdo Heraclitus by saying that you can't even step into the same river once. But this supposed improvement shows how badly Cratylus, and perhaps as a result Plato, understood Heraclitus, because Heraclitus did believe that there was one in the same river on different occasions. We can see this from a different version of the famous saying, which, from its language and point, seems more likely to be what Heraclitus actually said, or maybe he said both. In this version, he said, Different waters flow over those who step into the same rivers. It is the same river on different occasions, but with different bits of water each time. This illustrates the point we've been talking about, the unity of opposites. Just like the gold is both valuable and worthless, the river is both the same and different. So if he did think that all things were constantly changing and in flux, he also thought that they remained the same and stable throughout change. This would explain his making war or strife a kind of universal principle, but it would leave standing his idea that all things are one. In fact, it explains why he thinks all things are one. It's perhaps because he was so impressed by change and destruction that Heraclitus chose fire for the fundamental element of his cosmology. In another fragment he says, All things are exchanged for fire, and fire for all things, like gold for goods and goods for gold. His idea here is in part that fire will consume things and actually turn them into itself. Think of a small blaze engulfing a whole forest and seemingly transforming it into flame until it is all used up and the conflagration dies out. But Heraclitus thinks it can go the other way too, with fire being turned into water and earth. In fact, he sees a fundamental opposition between fire and water. One is transformed into the other, though, like Anaximenes' air, which can become the other elements. We can find a parallel to Heraclitus' image of paying out fire, like gold, in Anaximander's idea that all things pay retribution to one another, if you remember that from episode 2. Same basic thought, even if Heraclitus uses an economic analogy instead of a legal one. Another reason that Heraclitus emphasized fire was, it seems, that he was very impressed by the heavenly bodies and wanted to give them a primary place in his cosmology. He said that the sun, moon, planets, and stars are actually bowls full of fire turned towards us so that we're looking into the bowls. In a nice image, he suggested that the reason the moon waxes and wanes each month is because that bowl is slowly turning, so we can only see some of the fire from the side. Thus, Heraclitus, despite his obvious interest in the fundamental principles of things, continues the Presocratic's interest in specific phenomena of the natural world, and especially the stars. As we've seen, this goes back to Thales with his expertise in astronomy. And their interest in the stars isn't so surprising. After all, these philosophers lived in a time before electricity, and hence before light pollution. If you walked outside at night, even within the walls of a big city like Athens, you would see a stunning night's sky, with more stars than most Europeans ever get to see nowadays. If anything in the world of the ancient Greeks cried out for explanation, it was the heavens. So, overturn bowls of fire. Why not? Another area of Heraclitus' philosophy where fire plays a major role is his theory of the human soul. Actually, he thinks that the human soul is just made of fire. When we die, it is because our souls have turned into water. The most fiery souls, Heraclitus calls them drier souls, are the ones which are wisest. And here's my favorite thing Heraclitus said, we can explain the pathetic behavior of drunk people by the fact that their souls are moist, presumably from the wine they've been drinking. This idea that the soul is made of fire makes more sense than you might at first think. After all, when humans and other animals are alive, they are warm, and it's easy to notice that they cool down fast as soon as they die. Heraclitus won't be the last Greek thinker to suggest that the soul has some fiery aspect. He adds, and again this is something later philosophers will agree with, that our breath is closely related to the soul, suggesting even that we take fire in from the cosmos by breathing it in along with the air. This shows that his conception of fire is not just flame, such as you'd see in a fireplace or a candle. It's a more abstract conception of some dry, warm, fast-moving stuff that is the most exalted substance in the universe. Notice also how he makes both the stars and our souls fiery, and thus suggests that we share a nature with the divine, heavenly world. A final aspect of Heraclitus' thought is one that doesn't usually get much emphasis. I mentioned that later sources have him writing on politics, though a mischievous ancient anecdote claims that Heraclitus was approached by the people of his city of Ephesus and asked to write a set of laws for them, as Solon did for Athens. He declined, saying he'd rather play with the town's children. That's actually rather charming, but unfortunately it's not a story with much plausibility. In any case, we don't have a great deal of his political thought, but what we do have emphasizes obedience to the laws of the city. One should protect them as one protects the walls in a siege. He also says that human laws are given sustenance by the laws of the god. Whether this reference to law should be connected to Heraclitus' logos and the unity of opposites is not clear, but it's tempting to think that these are the absolute rules of justice which our human laws imitate. Here we see Heraclitus building a strong connection between different parts of philosophy, and this is typical of the pre-Socratics, who explore areas of philosophy that we now distinguish as if they were all more or less one interconnected inquiry. It was really Aristotle who first got into the business of distinguishing the branches of philosophy. Nowadays it's common, even expected, that a professional philosopher might work only on ethics, for example, or only on the philosophy of mind. Heraclitus, though, had something to say about every philosophical subject, and the different things he had to say all tied together. In this, Heraclitus anticipates the systematic interests of Plato and Aristotle, who, for instance, connect the question of what it is to be a human being to the question of how humans should conduct themselves. In other words, for them, ethics and the study of human nature are intimately related. It's not a little ironic, that as far as we can tell it was Heraclitus, a riddler with his ready-made fragments, who really first began to indulge in this systematic way of doing philosophy. So now I have an announcement. If all goes according to plan, next week's episode will feature our first guest here on the History of Philosophy podcast. We'll be joined by my colleague Professor M. M. McCabe to talk some more about Heraclitus. This will be one of the first of several interviews, which will I hope be a regular offering on the podcast, and will allow us to go into greater depth on some topics. So, it will be in two weeks that we get to another philosopher, and one who outdoes Heraclitus when it comes to being systematic. I mean, of course, Parmenides. He offers us not one, but two systems. The true system, which tells you that everything you think you knew was wrong, and the system which consists of mere opinion, but is still pretty different from what you thought you knew. Parmenides has much more in common with Heraclitus than Plato would have us believe, but there's little doubt that, with him, we are really stepping into a new era of philosophy, which we might call the era of metaphysics. It's an era which still hasn't ended. So, be sure to listen to the Logos, not of Heraclitus, but of M. M. McCabe, and then of Parmenides, next week and the week after, on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.