Shawn Daniels is a Ph.D. of classical studies and contributing guest writer for CelebrityTypes. As always with guest writers on the site, Daniels’ piece represents his own insights and assessments and not necessarily those of the site.
By Shawn Daniels, Ph.D.
Among the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus is amongst the most famous, if not the most famous. Diogenes Laertius is the earliest author to describe his life and philosophy at length, but all of the biographical details are likely to be apocryphal, if not complete fabrications. The problems of his biography are further complicated by the extremely fragmentary character of his work, On Nature.
Although a sizable number of fragments exists, there is no apparent order to them, and nor do they provide any definite indication of Heraclitus’ life. Instead, the commonalities among the various biographical accounts of his day relay to us that he (1) came from Asia Minor (2) wrote a single work, and (3) deposited it in the grand temple of Artemis. These pivot points can then be combined with inferences from the fragments themselves. Although he criticizes many other pre-Socratics (such as Homer and Pythagoras) by name, Heraclitus makes no mention of Parmenides, suggesting that his work predates that of the Eleatic.
Even more so than the facts of his life, the personality of Heraclitus is unclear. Diogenes Laertius states that Heraclitus was first and foremost “high-minded,” “arrogant,” and “contemptuous” and believed that he alone knew best. These are the characterizations that inform the rest of his biography and hence Heraclitus is customarily presented as a visionary loner and misanthrope who had little need for the company of other men. An indicative scene is the biographic narrative of Heraclitus’ death in which, after contracting edema from living in the wild, the philosopher returned to Ephesus and posed a riddle to the town’s physicians, asking them whether they could create a drought after heavy rain. Not understanding his riddle, he allegedly buried himself in a dung heap and died shortly thereafter.
The Heraclitus that we meet in the ancient sources is a man too clever by half and contemptuous of his fellow men to the end. The obscurity of Heraclitus in thought and speech is also emphasized, and may well be factual: The many fragments of his writing are fairly opaque.
The surviving morsels of Heraclitus’ own work consist of roughly 125 citations and fragments. These fragments are themselves disordered and we do not know the sequence of their original arrangement, as it appeared in On Nature. However, this lack of structure is less of an obstacle to the understanding of his thought than it may seem at first, since the aphoristic nature of the fragments suggests that Heraclitus’ work was more like a series of maxims and one-liners than a comprehensive and systematic treatise in the manner of Aristotle.
Thus, what survives of Heraclitus actually provides us with a reasonably thorough outline of general art and thought. Foremost among his beliefs is the inability of humanity to comprehend the truth, save for a few extraordinary individuals. The first of his fragments, which likely formed the opening lines of On Nature, begins by saying that men do not understand the truth and that for most men, the truth will forever be unattainable.
Heraclitus’ style complements and underscores the nature of his argument: It is dense and aphoristic, purposefully defying easy and straightforward interpretations and inviting various readings. His description of the Delphic oracle, who neither tells nor hides, but indicates, is an apt description of his own philosophy as well. It is likely that Heraclitus purposefully wrote for an audience that was capable of sifting through multiple layers of meaning and abstraction in order to discern the many aspects of truth that he had hidden beneath, and according to Plato, not even Socrates could understand the full scope of his thought.
In the fragments, we find the idea of the constant metamorphosis of elements, suggesting that one of the central notions of Heraclitus’ thought was the ubiquity and all-pervasiveness of change. Although the catchphrase “everything flows” is nowhere to be found in his writings, it is nevertheless indicative of his thought. To illustrate change, Heraclitus uses the example of a flowing river, stating that a person who stepped into it would not be capable of entering the same river twice. This notion seems have been important, not just to Heraclitus, but also to Plato, who cites it twice.
Connected to the idea of ubiquitous change is Heraclitus’ obscure notion of the Unity of Opposites, i.e. that things cannot be understood, except in relation to their opposites: Hot and cold, wet and dry; according to Heraclitus each is meaningless without the other. This doctrine famously caused later philosophers, such as Aristotle, to accuse Heraclitus of improper reasoning and paradoxical beliefs.
Diogenes Laertius remarks that Heraclitus’ major work was left unfinished because of his melancholy disposition. This created the artistic motif of Heraclitus as the “weeping philosopher,” who was then contrasted with the “laughing philosopher,” who found his guise in Democritus. The juxtaposition was already being exploited for literary purposes by the 2nd century CE, with Lucian’s Auction of the Philosophers pairing Democritus and Heraclitus as a matching set. The description stuck, and at the time of the Renaissance, with the rediscovery of the Classics, the pair again became popular as a joint motive in painting and sculpture. Although the fragments of Heraclitus do not suggest any underlying depression, it is rather fitting that he and Democritus have come to be depicted as a unified pair of opposites; happiness and sorrow, forever entwined in popular thought – a fitting tribute to the philosophy of Heraclitus.
Even from the relatively scant traces that remain, a general picture can be drawn of Heraclitus and his philosophy: A querulous, riddling thinker, who challenged all who explored his work to uncover its multiple meanings for themselves. A proponent of change in everything, his only constant inconstancy. A resonant figure for philosophers and artists, imaginative thinkers and wonderers alike, Heraclitus’ position in the history of thought is that of a true original of the Greek canon, and one whose thought will likely continue to influence creative people for centuries to come.
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Image of Heraclitus in the article commissioned for this publication from artist Georgios Magkakis.