By Ryan Smith
In this article, I am going to continue our tour of themes in the thought of Heraclitus. As I mentioned in the prior installment, many of Heraclitus’ themes cannot be analyzed dispassionately, but must be entered into with all one’s being. To really understand Heraclitus, one must allow him to alter one’s consciousness, as it were. As such, Constantine Vamvacas said it best when he said that Heraclitus’ “meanings are not crystallized but inhere in integral images and visions, grasped as an indissoluble whole.”[1] It is not possible to critically analyze each theme, rejecting some and accepting others, and each theme can easily have more than one meaning. To understand Heraclitus, one must attune one’s mind to all the themes, experiencing them directly as faint refrains that recur gently in the deafening chaos of the torrential whole. That is to say, the map is not the territory and the themes are not the points themselves. They are entry-points and supports for entering into the fullness of the Heraclitean vision with one’s own being, and not textbook ideas to be approached with a critical stance.
Relativity
In the work of Heraclitus, several fragments espouse a doctrine of relativity or perspectivism, such as:
“The most beautiful ape is ugly compared with the human race.” – DK 82
“The thoughtless man understands the Deity as little as the child understands the man.” – DK 79
“Swine delight in mire more than clean water; chickens bathe in dust.” – DK 13/37
“Seawater is the purest and foulest water: for fish drinkable and life sustaining; for men undrinkable and deadly.” – DK 61
“Donkeys would choose garbage over gold.” – DK 9
This relativistic facet of Heraclitus is often ignored, but in my opinion, it contains several important clues to the Heraclitean vision. I will argue that the import of these fragments is threefold:
First, we have already seen how Heraclitus is a radical nominalist: “Things” are not things, but a chaos of entities devoid of stable Being, suspended in a state of perpetual becoming.[2] The flower is not the same flower from one moment to the next, nor is the human being, nor even the sun.[3] Furthermore, no two flowers are ever exactly the same, but nevertheless we deceive ourselves; we take them to be. Like Plato, we postulate a form of the flower and approach the individual florae of the rose-garland as interchangeable, missing much of what is really true about each one.[4] By the Platonic gaze, man imagines himself the master of the world, but perceives no more than an empty certitude; a self-generated fiction.[5] Thus, recalling the lesson of the previous article, we keep in mind that things are not things. They are constructed as ‘things’ in the mind of the observer. This must be understood to understand the second point.
Second, just like ‘things’ are not objective, so qualities are not objective. They too are constructed in the mind of the observer. Thus, the wise man is wise only in relation to his peers; the adult understands more than children on the one hand, but less than Zeus on the other. The most beautiful ape can never be as beautiful to humans as a member of our own species, and so on. The common man would say gold is objectively valuable, but pigs prefer mud baths, and donkeys would choose refuse over gold. Things have contrary qualities from different points of view.[6] The same ‘thing’ appears light and heavy, new and old, high or low, depending on perspectives, relations, and the mind(s) involved in perceiving it. The qualities of objects – wisdom, value, beauty, etc. – are properties of the relation, not of the objects themselves. How could things ever possess qualities in themselves, when ‘things’ do not exist?
Furthermore, Heraclitus expands this hyper-nominalism to the domain of ethics and morality: Everything that happens in the world is equally ‘true,’ equally ‘beautiful,’ and equally ‘just.’[7] It is simply humans who, having a predilection for morality plays, construct ideas of good or bad, just and unjust in their minds. Heraclitus does not distinguish between is and ought, descriptive and normative. The world possesses its own logic. Whatever happens, happens, and cannot really be ‘wrong’ or ‘bad,’ except in the minds of certain people (and are not their minds, in the final instance, determined by and born of the world?). To say that things have ‘true’ qualities, or that actions and deeds have ‘true’ moral properties, is therefore simply meaningless.[8] There is nothing that is ‘in itself,’ prior to the real-world relations that constitute it.[9]
Third (last and perhaps least), note that several of the fragments contain the structure A/B = B/C (Child/Man = Man/God; Ape/Man = Man/God, etc.). This is sometimes interpreted to mean that Heraclitus postulates three rungs of reality (Child/Ape, Man, God), but as we have seen, this cannot possibly be true since there are no distinct qualities or things, and nothing that is ‘in itself.’
Rather, to understand Heraclitus’ meaning here, we must peek ahead to our next theme: The Logos (meaning ‘word,’ ‘principle,’ or ‘logic’). Many fragments of Heraclitus speak about this Logos, such as the following, which is widely agreed to have constituted the beginning of his book:
“Although this logos holds true always, men ever fail to comprehend it, both before hearing it and once they have heard. Although all things come to be in accordance with this logos, men are like the untried when they try such words and works as I set forth, distinguishing each thing according to its nature and describing how it is…” – DK 1
Since logos has the connotation of ‘logic’ (among other things), it has often been interpreted as logic or rationality, not least by scientists who have taken an interest in Heraclitus. For example, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger maintained that rationality and logic, dispassionately applied, produce a body of reliable scientific knowledge. The people who base their worldview on science are thus the people who understand the logos, but many “fail to comprehend it,” turning away into their own private worlds of superstition and non-reliable knowledge.[10] Thus, to Schrodinger, since many men do not have a scientific temperament, it made sense why Heraclitus lamented the inability of most men to understand the logos.
Unfortunately for Schrodinger, he is just completely wrong here. There was already a considerable scientific tradition among the Greeks in Heraclitus’ time, as exemplified by the Ionian school of Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and so on. By all accounts, they conducted scientific inquiries into the mysteries of nature in a remarkably modern spirit.[11] Yet, though an Ionian himself, Heraclitus showed no interest in their theories. It is possible that he had a rudimentary theory of physics – a few fragments hint at that. But overall, scientific inquiry was not a major undertaking for him. He agreed with science on the importance of empirical observation, but not on the importance of arranging those observations into a scientific ‘system.’ In a certain respect, one could say he was too empirical for science. Thus, in certain places, he appears to mock the scientists’ propensity for theory-generation, short-circuiting their claims to empiricism by stating – with recourse to direct observation – that “the sun is the size of a human foot.”[12] (One could easily imagine him defending this utterance by lying down in the town square and blotting out the sun from his face by raising his foot into the air.)
So if Heraclitus’ logos is not science or logic, what it is then? We shall have more to say on this when we dedicate ourselves to exploring that theme in depth. For now, let us just say that the logos is the principle by which everything happens in the world. Someone who understands that there is no stable Being, no objects or things, and no qualities-in-themselves; someone who understands that that every ‘entity’ that exists is but a point in a process; a fleeting ‘blip’ in a chaotic stream of becoming; someone who understands these things, not intellectually, but instinctively – without willing it, simply seeing it – he comprehends the universe in accordance with the logos. And truthfully, there are not many people who can penetrate into, let alone maintain, such a vision. Heraclitus is therefore right to remark that most men do not comprehend the logos. However, Heraclitus does not consign himself to lamenting that most men do not understand his teaching (as the Buddha did): Remember that what we are attempting to answer here is the third sense of why Heraclitus uses the relativistic formula A/B = B/C (Child/Man = Man/God; Ape/Man = Man/God, etc.). If read together with his lamentations that most men do not understand the logos, one could read Heraclitus’ use of this formula as a device for calling attention to the relative inferiority to one who understands the world according to ‘normal’ knowledge when compared to one who sees the world through the eyes of the logos. In Heraclitus’ view, the man who does not comprehend the logos is truly like an ape or child compared to the man who does.
Thus the threefold meaning of the relativity theme in Heraclitus is:
- Things are not things; they are constructed by the mind of the observer.
- Qualities are not objective; they are determined by their relations.
- People who understand reality devoid of the logos are like children compared to the people who understand how the logos steers everything.
NOTES
[1] Vamvacas: The Founders of Western Thought (Springer 2009) p. 105
[2] Heraclitus: DK 124
[3] Heraclitus: DK 6
[4] Plato: Symposium 211ae
[5] Nietzsche: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks §11
[6] McKirahan: Philosophy Before Socrates (Hackett 2010) p. 117
[7] Heraclitus: DK 102
[8] Heraclitus: DK 65
[9] Heraclitus: DK 10
[10] Schrodinger: Nature and the Greeks and Science and Humanism (Cambridge University Press 1996) pp. 72-73
[11] Smith: The Pre-Socratics as a Dance of Personalities, Part 2 (CelebrityTypes 2015)
[12] Heraclitus: DK 3