- Length
- 90 pagesKahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 1979 - fragments with commentary
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Fragments
The most quoted philosopher in antiquity whose book nobody could follow. Heraclitus was called the Obscure while he was still being read, and the surviving hundred and thirty sayings show why: each is compressed to the point of riddle, and the compression is the argument. He is the origin of the idea that stability is something change does rather than something change interrupts.
- Date
- c. 500 BC
- Author
- Heraclitus of Ephesus
- Region
- Ephesus, Ionia
- Language
- Ancient Greek
- 1889 English, G. T. W. Patrick Public domain Attested
- 1892 English, John Burnet Public domain; long the standard English Attested
- 1979 English, Charles H. Kahn With commentary; in copyright and now the usual citation Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Answered — Drew a named later reply, but was not itself a reply
- Form
- Aphorisms
- Method
- Aphorism — Short separate statements, repeated rather than built
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years to the reply
- 131 years
Nothing survives as a book. The sayings are quotations, and several are known only in a later writer's paraphrase.
What the book says
About a hundred and thirty short sayings, most of them a sentence long, none of them explained. They do not add up to a treatise and it is not certain they were ever meant to. Some are observations that turn as you read them: the road up and the road down are one and the same; sea water is purest and foulest, drinkable for fish and deadly to men; you cannot step into the same river twice, because other waters are flowing on. Some are attacks, and they are not gentle: learning many things does not teach understanding, or it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras; Homer deserved to be thrown out of the contests and whipped. Some state a principle. All things are an exchange for fire, as goods are for gold. The world was made by no god or man but always was and is an ever-living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures. What holds the sayings together is a single thought pressed from many directions: that things persist by changing, that opposites are not enemies but the two ends of one thing, and that most people go through life asleep to a pattern that is entirely open to view.
What it argues
That the world is a process holding a shape, and that the shape depends on the process rather than surviving it. A river is only a river because the water leaves. A flame is only a flame because the fuel is being consumed. Opposites that look like enemies turn out to be the same thing described from two positions or two moments - the road up and down, the bow held together by the string pulling both ways. Behind all of it runs what he calls the logos: an account, a proportion, a way things are ordered, which is common to everyone and which almost nobody attends to.
What answered it
Plato answers in the Theaetetus, and does it by pushing the position past where Heraclitus left it: if everything is changing in every way at every instant, then no word can hold still long enough to refer, and the doctrine cannot state itself. Aristotle answers in the Metaphysics, treating the denial of the principle of non-contradiction as a position that cannot be argued for without being abandoned. Both are arguing against Heracliteans as much as against Heraclitus, and the distinction matters, because the extreme flux doctrine they attack may be his followers' rather than his.
How it argues
By construction rather than by demonstration. A saying like the one about sea water sets two contradictory descriptions beside each other and leaves the reader to see that both hold, from different standpoints, and that the contradiction was in the expectation rather than the world. Nothing is spelled out. Aristotle complained that you cannot even tell where the punctuation goes. This is the earliest philosophical prose whose difficulty is deliberate, and the reason usually given is the one the sayings themselves give: an account that could be taken in without effort would be taken in without change.
The moment
Ephesus in about 500 BC was a rich Ionian city under Persian rule, and Heraclitus belonged to its old aristocratic family. He writes with the contempt of a man who has given up on his fellow citizens, and several sayings are direct political insults. Philosophy at this point had barely separated from cosmology; Heraclitus is the first Greek writer whose subject is as much how people fail to understand as what there is to understand.
How it travelled
Entirely by quotation, and the quoters had agendas. The Stoics read him as their own ancestor and preserved what suited them; the Christian apologists preserved the logos sayings for reasons of their own; Plato and Aristotle preserved what they were refuting. Almost nothing survives that no later writer had a use for, which means the shape of the book we cannot see may be quite unlike the shape of the sayings we have. He was rediscovered as a major figure in the nineteenth century, largely through Hegel and later Nietzsche, and his standing today is higher than at any point since antiquity.
The strongest objection
That the obscurity does real damage. Where a text can be read three ways, the reader tends to find the reading they arrived with, and Heraclitus has served as the ancestor of Stoic providence, Hegelian dialectic, Nietzschean becoming and process theology - which is a sign that the sayings underdetermine their own meaning. The complaint is not that he is difficult but that the difficulty transfers the work of interpretation onto the reader and then takes credit for whatever they build. Against this stands the fact that the sayings survived two and a half thousand years by being memorable, which a treatise would not have done.
Why read it
Because it takes twenty minutes and the sayings stay. There is no system to reconstruct and no argument to follow, only a hundred and thirty attempts to make a single point land - that permanence is a kind of motion - each from a different angle, in the most compressed prose anyone has written in the language.
- First printed
- 1573
- First in English
- 1889
- Digitised
- Yes
Diels-Kranz numbering is standard. Kahn, Marcovich and Robinson each print different orders, because there is no ancient order to follow.
Burnet's 1892 English is public domain. Kahn's 1979 and Robinson's 1987 versions are in copyright and are the ones normally cited.
Where it stands
Live. Process metaphysics, the identity of things over time, and the question of what makes a changing thing one thing are all active, and Heraclitus is cited in all three as a source rather than a curiosity.
On quoting this book
The Greek is public domain, but the memorable English phrasings are translators' work and in copyright. No saying is quoted.
Contested
Whether there was a book at all is disputed: some hold that Heraclitus wrote a continuous work later broken up, others that he composed separate sayings from the start. The order is entirely modern. The most famous line attributed to him, that everything flows, appears in no surviving fragment and comes from later reports. The river saying exists in three versions of differing strength, and which is authentic bears directly on whether the extreme flux doctrine Plato attacks was ever Heraclitus' own. The dating rests on a single schematic ancient notice.