The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy

by A. A. Long

  What is at issue here is whether or not Heraclitus wants to distinguish the way opposites are usually perceived from the way they actually are. His interest in latent structure, his contempt for the mental habits of “most people” and for their lack of understanding, suggest that the distinction is important for him. A further “everyday” remark is relevant here.

  Sea: purest and most polluted water, for fish drinkable and life-sustaining, for people undrinkable and death-bringing (B61).

  Here the manifest effects of seawater are relative to the drinker. But, from that fact, Heraclitus explicitly infers that the sea is, simultaneously without qualification, both “purest” and “most polluted.” This supports a reading on which the observable relativities of “perception” or “valuation” are used by Heraclitus as evidence for a nonrelative copresence of opposites.14 It remains to be seen, though, just what that might mean, and whether it does not collapse into self-contradiction.

  3.3. Next, the generalisation. By piling up everyday examples, as we have seen, Heraclitus draws attention to the unity-in-opposites pattern. A sage might have left matters there, leaving the audience to draw their own conclusions. Heraclitus lives up to the standards he has set himself by his own appeal to the force of reason: he offers his own explicit statement in general terms of what he takes to be essential in the pattern he has noted.

  They do not understand how the diverging agrees with itself: a structure turning back on itself [palintropos harmonie], such as that of the bow or of the lyre (B51).

  The evidence so far suggests three theses:

  (1) The unity is more fundamental than the opposites. The programmatic declaration, in connection with the logos (cf. section 2), that “all things are one” (B50), already suggests that Heraclitus harbours monistic ambitions. In revealing his ultimate description of the pattern as a harmoniê or “unified structure,”15 and in presenting the bow and the lyre as everyday examples of such structure, Heraclitus focuses attention on the underlying unity, and on the way in which it incorporates and manifests the opposites.

  (2) The opposites are essential features of the unity. In whatever way the opposites are present in the unity, what matters is that their presence is of the essence of the unity. The unity could not be what it is without them. Both the word harmoniê and the bow and lyre examples point to the notion of something constituted by a functional unity. The functioning demands that this unity “turn back on itself” in some way; the turning back, and therefore the opposites that are manifested in the turning back, are essential features. (In the case of the bow, the turning back lies in the movement of the parts, both relative to one another and to their own previous movements, when the bow is used. In the case of the lyre, the turning back may be that of the vibrating strings, or of the up-and-down movement of the melody, or both.)

  (3) The manifestation of the opposites involves a process, in which the unity performs its essential function. This holds for the examples of the bow and lyre. In general, the words “diverging” and “turning back” imply at least movement,16 while harmoniê itself suggests a built-in teleology (see n.13).

  3.4. Various objections can be made to a reading of this kind. First of all, it must be admitted that the senses in which the unity is “more fundamental” than the opposites, and the opposites are “essential” to the unity, have been left indeterminate. Heraclitus had no readymade logical toolkit and vocabulary at his disposal. On the kind of reading that is being worked out here, he saw the need for something like the notions of essence and of ontological priority and responded to the need by providing (a) everyday examples of what he meant, and (b) words drawn from the everyday vocabulary, but transfigured into something like technical terms by the use he made of them. The interpreter of Heraclitus must try to gather as much of his intentions as is possible from his surviving words, and to make them comprehensible in modern terminology, without importing into the interpretation assumptions and problems that were absent from his mind.

  Next to the objection of indeterminacy is the objection of incoherence or self-contradiction. How can the opposites be essential features of the unity without being copresent in it in a self-contradictory way? To recur to the example of seawater: to say at the same time both that the sea is “most pure” and that it is “most polluted” is to contradict oneself, since genuine opposites are mutually exclusive. On this ground, Aristotle (Metaph. IV.7 1012024-26) concluded that Heraclitus must inevitably fall foul of the principle of Non-Contradiction, and therefore collapse into incoherence.

  The Aristotelian objection is crucial. The way to meet it is shown by the statement about seawater. For that makes one thing clear: Heraclitus does not wish to say that the presence of purity means that the sea is pure in its manifest effects for all animals all the time. Neither does the presence of pollution mean that the sea is polluted in its manifest effects for all animals all the time. So it is necessary to distinguish between the presence of the opposites in a unity, and their manifestation in it. We have been prepared for this distinction, by the observation about the importance of latent structure.

  The presence of the opposites in a unity is therefore, to borrow Aristotelian terminology, a matter of potentiality. It belongs to the essence of seawater, for example, that it has both the potentiality to be life-sustaining and the potentiality to be death-bringing. So a thing’s very being may require the coexistence within it of diametrically opposed potentialities, an “ambivalence of essence.”

  This thought offers a solution to the debate between monism and pluralism: namely, that unity-in-opposites shows that the dichotomy is not exhaustive. That this was part of Heraclitus’ motivation is confirmed by a key passage of Plato (Soph. 242dy-e4):

  [Heraclitus and Empedocles] realised that it is safer to weave together both [monism and pluralism] and to say that what is, is both one and many, and is held together by enmity and friendship; for “diverging is always converging” [says Heraclitus], but [Empedocles] relaxed the demand that that should always be so …

  If Heraclitus was indeed thinking along such lines, we expect him to say more about the way in which the potentialities manifest themselves. Point (3) of the present interpretation claims that this is done by means of a process unfolding in time. It may be objected that many of the everyday remarks do not involve any process in time, yet the opposites are still manifest. For example, we can see at one glance that a road is both an uphill road and a downhill one. And yet, neither the uphill-ness nor the downhill-ness are fully manifested until someone actually travels along the road. They may be simultaneously manifested to different travellers, or successively manifested to the same traveller; in either case, there are two distinct processes.17 (The very word hodos, “road,” also means “journey”; many other words used by Heraclitus show an analogous doubling of sense (see section 4).)

  The central role of processes becomes even more obvious when Heraclitus applies the unity-in-opposites to cosmology and psychology. Here, the opposites are clearly not just potentialities but contending powers. The unity’s “functioning” also becomes more than mere schematism: we find that the unity unites, controls, and gives meaning to the opposites.

  4. THE COSMOS AS PROCESS

  4.1. Heraclitus’ cosmology cannot be understood in isolation from the rest of his thinking. It is dependent on unity-in-opposites; it leads on, in turn, to psychology and theology.

  No god and no human being made this cosmos, but it was always and is and will be an ever-living fire, getting kindled in measures and getting quenched in measures (B30).

  It is natural to think of the “ever-living fire” as a process. If so, then the cosmic constituents too – the familiar “world masses”: earth, sea, air, and celestial fire – will be stages of the process; for they are “turnings of fire” (B31). “Turnings,” like many other nouns in Heraclitus, is ambiguous as between process and product. Likewise, with the same ambiguity in “exchange”:

  All things are an exchang
e for fire and fire for all things, as gold is for goods and goods for gold (B90).

  This primacy of process in the observable world is compatible with later testimony about a theory of “flux.” Both Plato (Crat. 402a4-11, Tht. 152d2-e9) and Aristotle (Topics I.11 104b21-22; De caelo III.1 298b29-33) report that Heraclitus held that “the whole universe is in flux like a river” or that” all is in flux” or “in progression” or “in change.” Embedded in this testimony is a story about the selfstyled “Heraclitean” Cratylus, a philosopher of the later fifth century. Cratylus denied the possibility of any kind of sameness through time. To make his point, he foisted on to Heraclitus the remark that “you could not step twice into the same river” (B91a); apparently for the sake of trumping it with his own claim that one could not even step once into the same river (Aristotle, Metaph. IV.5 1010a10-15).

  Cratylus’ version of the sentence about rivers must be rejected as un-Heraclitean. The rest of Plato’s and Aristotle’s testimony can be accepted: they do not attribute to him the extreme views of Cratylus.18 They show that, for him, process is the basic form of existence in the observable world; although something, not directly observable, persists throughout:

  [Heraclitus says] that while other things are in process of becoming and flux, and none exists in a well-defined way, one thing alone persists as a substrate, of which all these [other] things are the natural reshapings (De caelo III. 1 298b29-32).19

  4.2. Not “the world is everything that is the case,” but “the observable world is everything that is coming to be the case” might then have been Heraclitus’ slogan. Space does not permit a discussion of Heraclitus’ cosmology. The following is a summary of a possible view.20 The overall cosmic process, “fire,” was subdivided into the opposed episodes of “kindling” and “quenching.” These in turn were subdivided into two subprocesses: one of “warming” and “drying,” and one of “cooling” and “moistening.” This made room for the four classical cosmic opposites (hot, cold, wet, and dry) and for the four world masses constructed from pairs of the opposites (earth = cold and dry, sea = cold and wet, and so on). All processes repeated with multiple periodicity, accounting for the day-night cycle, the annual cycle, and one or two cycles with longer periods. At some point in the longest cycle, the entire cosmos was in a fiery phase (at the extreme of hot and dry).

  Besides unity-in-opposites, a further structural principle is evident. Heraclitus insists on the preservation of fixed “measures” or “proportions” in the processes.

  … being kindled in measures and being quenched in measures (B30, part). All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods are for gold and gold for goods (B90).

  … [sea] is measured out in the same proportion as was previously (B31; part).

  Gold’s use as a medium of exchange depends on the existence of a (more or less) fixed exchange rate; that means a constant proportion between quantities of gold and quantities of goods in the exchanges. Hence a “conservation principle” is valid throughout all cosmic changes: a certain constant amount of “fire equivalent” is preserved. This is a first example in Heraclitus of a principle of lawlikeness (cf. section 6) as a constraint on the course of cosmic processes.

  4.3. The theory of the observable cosmos, as so far reconstructed, obeys the principles of Xenophanean empiricism. It introduces into the observable world no new entities that are not actually observed: the processes and cycles mentioned are all familiar or deducible from ordinary experience. It gives full weight to sense appearances: the sun is indeed, as it looks to be, “the width of a human foot” (B3). And it excludes speculation about what is wholly beyond human experience: the question of what might lie beyond our cosmos is not even raised.

  And yet, to the extent that it stays close to the observable world, the theory cannot be a complete example of unity-in-opposites. The underlying structure should be at least partly latent, and not itself a process. So the “ever-living fire” cannot itself be the ultimate unity that ensures that “all things are one.” It must be the manifestation, the activity of something else.

  God: day night, winter summer, war peace, plenty famine; but it becomes of another kind, as (fire), when it is mingled with incense, is named according to the savour of each (B67).

  Here Heraclitus corrects the mistaken view of Hesiod (B57). Day and night are “one thing,” not two separate things. The analogy of the altar fire, the centre of the ritual process, on which different kinds of incense were successively burnt, shows that the ordinary naming of things is deceptive. Sniffing the smoke, the bystanders say (for example) “that’s frankincense”; what they ought to say is: “that’s fire mixed with frankincense.” So too one should speak, strictly, not of “day” and “night,” but of “god in diurnal state” and “god in nocturnal state.” (The opposites “war-peace” and “plenty-famine” probably refer to longer-term cosmic cycles.) Given the importance Heraclitus attaches to language, it is no surprise that he finds ordinary ways of speaking in need of reform.

  But who or what is this “god” (theos)? As implied by the word, something that is alive (its activity is the ever-living fire), intelligent, purposive, and controlling: “Thunderbolt steers all things” (B64). Plato’s and Aristotle’s testimony (cited in section 4.1) points in the same direction. The introduction of a living and intelligent being as the latent unity adds a further level of complexity. Heraclitus’ theory of “soul” must next be considered.

  5. THE THEORY OF SOUL

  5.1. Heraclitus operates with an untraditional concept of soul (psychê).21 In Homer, the soul is of no importance during life; it leaves the body at death, to carry what is left of the person’s individuality to a shadowy existence in Hades. For Heraclitus, it is clear that during life the soul is the carrier of personal identity and character, and the organising centre of intelligence and action. It is what the person really is; the theory of soul is the theory of human nature.

  Not surprisingly, the soul is identified as the underlying unity in a complex unity-in-opposites structure. So it should manifest itself in processes: presumably one of living, and a contrary one of dying. There should be physical constituents as phases of these processes, corresponding to earth, water, and so on. There should also be subprocesses, corresponding to the two physical dimensions, hot-cold and wet-dry. The evidence confirms some of this:

  Dry light-beam is soul at its wisest and best (B118).

  It is death to souls to become moist (377).22

  The dry-wet dimension accounts for intelligence and its opposite: a drunk man’s lack of knowledge and awareness is due to the fact that “his soul is moist” (B117). The ability to act effectively is also connected with dryness in this remark; and “soul… at its best (aristê)” also suggests a soul in action (when aristê is taken with its traditional associations of active male excellence). As for the hot-cold dimension in relation to souls, the very word psychê suggests something not hot (it is naturally etymologised from the verb psychein, “cool,” “breathe”); and a “dry light-beam” is presumably clearest when neither hot nor cold. To confirm this, heat is associated with a bad quality:

  Arrogance needs to be quenched more than wildfire (B43).

  5.2. Dying is the natural process opposed to living. The word thanatos (death), most often refers, not to the state of being dead but to the process or event of dying. For this reason Heraclitus can identify it with “becoming moist.” For a soul this must mean increasingly poor functioning both in mind and action. But there can be no permanent state of death; to be dead can be but a momentary phase at an extreme point of the cycle.

  It is the same that is present as living and dead, as waking and sleeping, as young and old; for these by change of state become those, and those by change of state become these (B88).

  This alternate “living” and “dying” of souls can only partly correspond to living and dying in the usual sense. (The secondary cycle of waking and sleeping, with dreams, introduces further compl
ications.) For Heraclitus, the natural decline in mind and body after the prime of life will already count as dying. By contrast, a violent death in one’s prime will not count as dying at all. The soul, though separated from the body, will be in its best state. Some evidence suggests, cryptically, that death in battle, in particular, was rewarded by a place of honour for the soul outside the body, perhaps as a star.23 In all cases, the mere corpse of a human being (the body without the soul) is valueless:

  Corpses are more fit to be thrown away than dung (B96).

  5.3. If souls by nature live and die, in the new senses, alternately, then they may be described both as “mortal,” being always subject to dying, and “immortal,” being always able to return to life. This gives Heraclitus a new, piquant case of unity-in-opposites:

  Immortals are mortals, mortals are immortals, living the others’ death, dying the others’ life (B62).

  This is a first suggestion (cf. section 6) that the difference between the gods and humanity, traditionally almost unbridgeable, is for Heraclitus inessential. Souls are of their own nature both mortal and immortal. Whether they exist in manifest shape as human beings, or as something like traditional gods, may well be a matter of chance and of their momentary position in the cycle of living and dying. (Heraclitus’ remarks on traditional Greek religion are, as might be expected, cryptically ambivalent.) Other degraded forms of being, like the traditional Hades, may also occur for souls in a bad state. The cryptic statement that “souls have the sense of smell in Hades” (B98) may indicate some kind of minimal sensory existence.