THE WEEPING PHILOSOPHER

In the “wonderfully idealized company of philosophers,” Heraclitus is incontestably a giant among giants. Nietzsche mentions him affectionately in almost every one of his works. Russell devotes to him the biggest chapter in the pre-Socratic section of his History of Western Philosophy. He lived around 535-475 BC, and is commonly referred to as the weeping philosopher, because of his gloomy disposition, and thus contrasted to Democritus, who is called the laughing philosopher.

Heraclitus’ answer to Thales’ monistic question is neither water nor air, but an ever-living Fire. His often quoted fragment, for which he is called a materialist, asserts that “this world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or humans has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever will be an ever-living Fire.” As far as I can see it, this is not a rejection of theism as such, but a definite repudiation of polytheistic mythology. We may argue, of course, whether the ever-living Fire can be identified with One God, thus making Heraclitus an implicit monotheist, and, in fact, when we look at his extant fragments later on, we will see that this view is consistent with everything he says about Fire. He actually says the following in his Fragment 36: God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger; but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the taste of each. But even if we choose to judge this opinion inconclusive, we can still say about him without any doubt that what he rejects in particular is the religious anthropomorphism, rather than theism, and that in his treatment of fire he reveals himself as an accomplished religious mystic, definitely in the mold which is much to Nietzsche’s liking.

Heraclitus is generally recognized as the first philosopher to transcend physics in search of a metaphysical foundation and of moral applications. He is also given credit as the first pure metaphysician, he is believed to have solved the problem of change, which Anaximenes had identified with a question mark, but failed to find an answer to. How can one change into many?! And if the world is many, how can we talk of oneness at all?! For Heraclitus the answer comes in the different characters of one and many. Many are material in their composition, but over and above the many there is a oneness of the world order. In my opinion, he is the first structuralist, who is able to distinguish the single comprehensive structural organization from the components within the structure, which are many, and diverse, but all of them are governed by that single organizing structure.

The question of one versus many thus morphs into the recognizable philosophical question of permanence and change. ‘One cannot step into the same river twice’ is undoubtedly the most famous and recognizable of Heraclitus’ dictums, which reveals the fine subtlety of his approach to the immensely complex problem of permanence and change. On the one hand, everything is in a flux (another world-famous dictum of his is “Panta rhei,” that is, Everything flows, nothing stands still), but taking this flux to an extreme, it denies any kind of permanence to the world, which in itself is absurd. There must therefore exist different orders, one identified with change, the other, with permanence, and the order of permanence is far superior to the order of change and governs it. Hence his opening dictum numbered as Fragment 1: It is wise to listen not to me, but to the Logos, and to confess that all things are one.

There are other supremely important elements in Heraclitean philosophy, which we will get to in time, but not here, so as to avoid redundancy. In the meantime we shall find out what Bertrand Russell thinks about him, and also why Heraclitus is so dear to Nietzsche’s heart. We shall end the Heraclitus subsection by our own analysis of some of the most interesting of his extant fragments.