On Heraclitus

Process Philosophy

History

Born in 540 B.C. in Ephesus (Ionian). Heraclitus intentionally shrouded his wisdom in mystery: 

“Those who seek gold dig much earth and find little.”

Sources say that Heraclitus was of royal descent and was on track to become the king of Ephesus - he declined passing this right on to his brother. Heraclitus saw no value in governing the masses towards whom he held a strong aversion, and instead decided to spend his life in the lonely search for truth and wisdom. A story says that one day Heraclitus was playing a dice game with some children in the streets of Ephesus, some passing politicians asked him what he was doing, to which Heraclitus replied:

“Why are you surprised, you good-for-nothings? Isn’t it better than playing politics with you?”

Heraclitus can be classified as an Aristocrat and a Misanthropist – most men, Heraclitus thought, were ignorant conformists. He believed in a single principle called, ‘Logos’ which permeated all of reality. This Logos could be perceived by humans if they made an effort to understand it. As such Heraclitus thought that truth was common, as this Logos, which unveils the truth regarding the nature of all things, literally existing everywhere – ordering and structuring reality. Heraclitus held that this Logos expressed an ‘objective truth’. Heraclitus thought most people lived in their own reality tunnels, blinding them from the Logos - a type of sleepwalking of ignorance. 

One must find the truth on one’s own (Spinoza’s Active Man, development of Conatus) to develop how to listen to the Logos. Heraclitus however would not say that an understanding of the Logos could be obtained through academic study, or listening to the teachings of a philosopher. He would say that the best one could do who knows the truth is to point to it, but ultimately an individual will need to see the truth through their own eyes. 

Heraclitus arrived at his ideas solely through inner contemplation:

“I searched myself.” Heraclitus

“He was no man’s disciple, but said that he had searched himself and learned everything from himself.” Diogenes Laertius

Heraclitus’s Ontology (Vision of Reality)

1. Everything is in flux

2. The world is an ever living fire

3. War is the father of all

Heraclitus thought that every object, even though it may appear to our senses as being temporarily stable and permanent, is in fact in constant motion – morphing and transforming itself into a different object each instant. 

This idea has consequences for philosophical thought, for if nothing remains the same for two instances, then knowledge of this sensible world is an impossibility. Even if you can obtain knowledge of something in one instant (moment with duration), a mere second later that thing will have changed. 

Heraclitus’s symbolic description of the world was ‘The World is an Ever Living Fire’. Not only did he say fire was the symbolic description of the world and that which permeates reality, but he also said that a Man’s Soul is Fire. When an individual exercises their reason, their soul becomes pure fire - hot and dry. 

“The dry soul is wisest and best.” Heraclitus

“For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth, and from water, soul.” Heraclitus 

Heraclitus believed in a type of death or war being the father of all and king of all. A duality of sorts in the taoistic sense where everything that comes into existence does so only through the destruction of something else. Light cannot exist without dark, war without peace, etc. 

“Fire lives the death of air, and air of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water.” Heraclitus

Heraclitus was unique in his belief in war and strife which all things in the world are engaged in as good. Other Greeks thought that this same war and strife was evil and they longed for a stable and permanent reality where peace and rest resigned supreme. 

“Strife is justice.” Heraclitus

Heraclitus thought that every entity (each object/living thing) is constituted by opposing forces' intention (a combination). This concept can be illuminated by the following quote:

“Look at a strung bow lying on the ground or leaning against a wall. No movement is visible. To the eyes it appears a static object, completely at rest. But in fact a continuous tug-of-war is going on within it, as will become evident if the string is not strong enough, or is allowed to perish. The bow will immediately take advantage, snap it and leap to straighten itself, thus showing that each had been putting forth effort all the time. The harmonia was a dynamic one of vigorous and contrary motions neutralized by equilibrium and so unapparent.” W.K.C. Guthrie

Heraclitus believes everything is in flux, this implies that any apparent harmony conceals an underlying strife in the same way as the above example. 

Nomadic Notes “We’re Finally Landing”

Nietzsche on Heraclitus

Nietzsche takes Heraclitus’s idea that all things are constituted by opposing and warring forces, and applies this idea to the nature of human beings. Whereas it is common to think of a great individual as one who has overcome their evil passions, and cultivated inner peace and harmony this way – Nietzsche disagrees and says that the great individual is one who harbors a strong internal division, where evil and good passions are engaged in a battle with each other. It is through this battle that one develops strength, insight, and wisdom. 

“The essential point is: the greatest perhaps also possess great virtues, but in that case also their opposites. I believe that it is precisely through the presence of opposites and the feelings they occasion that the great man, the bow with a great tension, develops.” Nietzsche

Heraclitus arose from the fog that shrouded Anaximander’s problem of becoming and illuminated a path by a divine stroke of lightning. He says that in becoming he sees lawful order, unfailing certainties, an everlasting wave beat and rhythm of things. Heraclitus has a type of intuition about him about becoming that offers a unique perspective, one that derives two connected negations:

1. Heraclitus denied the duality of totally diverse worlds – a position which Anaximander had been compelled to assume. Heraclitus no longer distinguished a physical world from a metaphysical one, a realm of definite qualities from an undefinable “indefinite”. 

2. Heraclitus altogether denied being. For this one world which he retained - supported by eternal unwritten laws, flowing upward and downward in rhythmic beat, in an indestructible stream. 

Heraclitus declares that he sees nothing other than becoming. It would be a mistake of yours, a myopia, to see anything other than becoming as the nature of things, that is if you believe you see land somewhere in the ocean of coming-to-be and passing away. This is to use names for things as though they rigidly and persistently endure. 

Nietzsche declares Heraclitus’ extraordinary power to be in his intuitive thinking. When Heraclitus is faced with the other type of thinking, that which is accomplished in concepts and logical combinations (in other words reason), Heraclitus shows himself to be insensitive and hostile. Heraclitus even seems to derive pleasure whenever he can contradict this type of reason with an intuitively arrived-at truth. He does this with statements like:

“Everything forever has its opposite along with it” Heraclitus

Aristotle even accuses Heraclitus of the highest crime before the tribunal of reason: to have singed against the law of contradiction. But intuitive thinking embraces two things:

1. The present many-colored and changing world that crowds in upon us in all our experiences.

2. The conditions which alone make any experience of this world possible: time and space. 

For they may be perceived intuitively, even without a definite content, independent of all experience, purely in themselves. Now when Heraclitus contemplates time in this fashion, apart from all experience, he finds in it the most instructive monogram of everything that might conceivably come under the head of intuition. 

As Heraclitus sees time, so does Schopenhauer. He repeatedly said of it that every moment in it exists only insofar as it has just consumed the preceding one, its father, and is then immediately consumed likewise. Past and future are as perishable as any dream, but that the present is the dimensionless and durationless borderline between the two. And that space is just like time, and that everything which coexists in space and time has but a relative existence, that each thing exists through and for an equally relative one. This is a truth of the greatest and immediate self-evidence for every one, and one which for this very reason is extremely difficult to reach by way of concept or reason. But whoever finds himself directly looking at it must at once move on to the Heraclitean conclusion and say that the whole nature of reality lies simply in its acts and that for it there exists no other sort of being. Nietzsche uses Schopenhauer to elucidate this point further:

“Only by way of its acts does reality fill space and time. Its activity upon the immediate object conditions that intuitive perception in which alone it has existence. The consequence of the activity of any material object upon another is recognized only insofar as the latter now acts differently from what it did before upon the immediate object. Reality consists of nothing other than this. Cause and effect in other words make out the whole nature of materiality: its being is its activity. That is why in German the epitome of all materiality is called ‘Actuality’, a word much more apt than ‘Reality’. That upon which it acts is likewise invariably matter; its whole being and nature consists only in the orderly changes which one of its parts produces in another. Actuality, therefore, is completely relative, in accordance with a relationship that is valid only within its bounds, exactly as is time, exactly as is space.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Vol. 1 Book 1

The everlasting and exclusive coming-to-be, the impermanence of everything actual, which constantly acts and comes-to-be but never is, as Heraclitus teaches it, is a terrible, paralyzing thought. Its impact on us can be likened to the sensation during an earthquake when one loses one’s familiar confidence in a firmly grounded earth. It takes astonishing strength to transform this reaction into its opposite, into sublimity and the feeling of blessed astonishment. Heraclitus achieves this by means of an observation regarding the actual process of all coming-to-be and passing away. He conceives it under a polarity, as being the diverging of a force into two qualitatively different opposed activities to seek to reunite, everlastingly and eternally. Ordinary people might think these as something rigid, complete and permanent; in truth, however, light and dark, bitter and sweet are attached to each other and interlocked at any given moment like wrestlers of whom sometimes the one, sometimes the other is on top. Honey, says Heraclitus, is at the same time bitter and sweet; the world itself is a mixed drink which must be constantly stirred. 

The strife of the opposites gives birth to all that comes-to-be, definite qualities that look permanent to us express but the momentary ascendency of one partner. But this by no means signifies the end of the war; the contest endures in all eternity. Everything that happens, happens according to this strife, and it is in this strife that eternal justice is revealed. This idea, that strife embodies the everlasting sovereignty of strict justice, bound to everlasting laws is found in Hesiod. This is Hesiod’s good Eris transformed into the cosmic principle; it is the contest-idea of the Greek individual (neighborly competition) and the Greek state (competition in war), taken from the gymnasium and the palaestra, from the artist’s agon, from the contest between polis – all transformed into universal applications so that now the wheels of the cosmos turn on it. 

Just as the Greek individual fought as though he alone were right and an infinitely sure measure of judicial opinion were determining the trend of victory at any given moment, so the qualities wrestle with one another, in accordance with inviolable laws and standards that are immanent in the struggle. The things in whose ‘definiteness’ and endurance narrow human minds, like animal minds, believe have no real existence. They are but the flash and spark of drawn swords, the quick radiance of victory in the struggle of the opposites. That struggle which is peculiar to all coming-to-be, that everlasting alternation of victory, is again something Nietzsche uses Schopenhauer to describe:

“Forever and ever, persistent matter must change its form. Grasping the clue of causality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena greedily push to the fore, snatching matter from one another, for each would reveal its own inherent idea. We can follow this strife throughout the whole of nature. In fact we might say that nature exists but by virtue of it.” Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation: Vol. 1 Book 2

Strife for Schopenhauer is a proof of the internal self-dissociation of the Will to Live, which is seen as a self-consuming, menacing, and gloomy drive, a thoroughly frightful and by no means blessed phenomenon. The arena and the object of the struggle is matter, which the natural forces alternately try to snatch from one another, as well as space and time whose union by means of causality is this very matter – this is quite different in tone of their description than that which Heraclitus offers.

While Heraclitus was playing in his imagination, eyeing the never-ceasing motion of the cosmos, the ‘actuality’, like a blissful spectator who is watching innumerable pairs of contestants wrestling in joyous combat and refereed by stern judges – a still greater intuition overtook him. He could no longer see the contesting combatant pairs and their referees as separate; the judges themselves seemed to be striving in the contest and the contestants seemed to be judging them. Now perceiving basically nothing but everlastingly sovereign justice itself, Heraclitus dared to proclaim:

“The struggle of the many is pure justice itself! In fact, the one is the many. For what are all those qualities, in essence? Are they immortal gods? Are they separate beings, acting on and in themselves, from the beginning and without end? And if the world which we see knows only coming-to-be and passing away, but not delaying or postponing, is it possible that those qualities might constitute a different kind of world, a metaphysical one? Not a world of unity, to be sure, such as Anaximander sought beyond the fluttering veils of the many, but a world of eternal substantive multiplicities?” Heraclitus according to Nietzsche

Did Heraclitus take a detour, after all, back into a dual world order, however violently he might deny it, with an Olympus of numerous immortal gods and demons - of many realities in other words - and with a human world which sees but the dust cloud of the Olympic battle and the flash of divine spears – a coming-into-being, in other words? 

Anaximander had fled into the womb of the metaphysical ‘indefinite’ to escape the definite qualities; because they came-to-be and passed away, he had denied them true, nuclear existence. But does it now look as though becoming were but the coming-to-be-visible of the struggle between eternal qualities? Should the talk of coming-to-be perhaps be derived from the peculiar weakness of human insight, whereas in the true nature of things there is no coming-to-be at all, but only a synchronicity of many true realities which were born and will not die? 

But these are so to say, ‘un-Heraclitean’ loop-holes and labyrinths. Once again Heraclitus proclaims, “The one is the many''. The many perceivable qualities are neither eternal substances nor fantasms (specter, ghost) of our senses. Anaxagoras is later to imagine the former (eternal substances), Parmenides the latter (fantasms of our senses); they are neither rigid autocratic being nor fleeting semblance dancing lightly through human minds. 

The third possibility, the only one for Heraclitus, cannot be guessed by dialectic detective work nor figured out with the help of calculations. For what Heraclitus here invented is a rarity even in the sphere of mystic incredibilities and unexpected cosmic metaphors. 

“The world is the game Zeus plays.” Heraclitus

“Of the fire with itself. This is the only sense in which the one is at the same time the many.” Heraclitus 

Anaximander had trusted Thales and supported his observations with new evidence, but could not yet convince himself that there was no further quality-stage before water – beyond water as it were. It seemed to Anaximander as though the moist formed itself from warm and cold, and thus warm and cold must therefore be preliminary stages of water, the even more aboriginal qualities. With their departure from the primal essence of the ‘indefinite’, coming-to-be begins. 

Heraclitus who as far as being a physicist was concerned subordinated himself to Anaximander, re-interprets the Anaximandrian warm as warm breath, a dry vapor, or in other words - as fire. Of this fire he now says what Thales and Anaximander had said of water; that it coursed in countless transformations through the ‘orbits of becoming’; above all, in its three major occurrences as: 

1. Warmth

2. Moisture

3. Solidity

For water is transformed into earth on its way down, into fire on its way up, or as Heraclitus seem to have declared more precisely: from the sea rise only the pure vapors which nourish the heavenly fire of the celestial bodies; from the earth only the dark misty ones, from which moisture draws its nourishment. The pure vapors are the transformation of sea into fire, the impure ones the transformation of earth to water. Thus the two transformation-orbits of fire run forever upward and downard, back and forth, side by side: from fire to water, from then to earth, from earth back to water, from water to fire. 

While Heraclitus is Anaximander’s disciple as to the main ideas, such as fire being fed by vapors, or water separating into earth and fire, he is independent of Anaximander and in opposition to him in that he excludes cold from the physical process. Anaximander had juxtaposed cold and warm as equal terms, in order to produce moisture from both, Heraclitus of necessity could not allow for this, for if everything is fire, then in spite of all its transformations there can be no such thing as ‘absolute opposite’. This is why he probably interpreted what is called ‘cold’ as but a degree of warmth. 

A further agreement with Anaximander is Heraclitus’ belief in a periodically repeated end of the world, and in an ever renewed rise of another world out of the all-destroying cosmic fire. The period in which the world hurries toward the conflagration and dissolves into pure fire Heraclitus characterizes with notable emphasis as a desire, a want, or lack; the full consumption in fire he calls satiety. This leaves us to ask exactly how he interpreted and what he might have called the newly awakening impulse toward cosmic formation, the new outpouring into the forms of plurality:

“Satiety gives birth to hubris.” Greek proverb

This proverb can come to our aid here, and can allow us to ask ourselves if Heraclitus did not perhaps derive the return to the many from hubris. If we take this thought seriously we can see by its illumination how the expression of Heraclitus is transformed. The proud light in his eyes is extinguished, wrinkles of painful renunciation, ‘of impotence’, become apparent; this allows us to understand the perspective adopted by later antiquity characterizing Heraclitus as the “weeping philosopher”. Is not the entire world process now an act of punishment for hubris? The many the  result of wrong-doing? The transformation of the pure into the impure the consequence of injustice? Is guilt not now transplanted into the very nucleus of materiality and the world of becoming and of individuals thereby unburdened of responsibility, to be sure, but simultaneously sentenced to carry the consequences of evil forever and anew? (Prometheus or Sisyphus style)

That dangerous word hubris is indeed the kryptonite of every Heraclitean. Here they have to show whether they have understood or failed to recognize their master. Do guilt, injustice, contradiction, and suffering exist in this world?

They do, proclaims Heraclitus, but only for the limited human mind which sees things apart but not connected, not for the non-intuitive god. For him all contradictions run into harmony, invisible to the common human eye, yet understandable to one who, like Heraclitus, is related to the contemplative god. Before his fire-gaze not a drop of injustice remains in the world poured all around him; even that cardinal impulse that allows pure fire to inhabit such impure forms is mastered by him with a sublime metaphor. 

In this world only play, play as artists and children engage in, exhibits coming-to-be and passing away, structuring and destroying, without any moral additive, in forever equal innocence. And as children and artists play, so plays the ever-living fire. It constructs and destroys, all in innocence. Such is the game that the Élan vital plays with itself. Transforming itself into water and earth, it builds towers of sand like a child at the seashore, piles them up and tramples them down. 

From time to time it starts the game anew. An instant of satiety – and again it is seized by its need, as the artist is seized by his need to create. Not hubris but the ever self-renewing impulse to play calls new worlds into being. The child throws its toys away from time to time - and starts again, in an innocent unaccountable change of behavior. But when it does build, it combines AND joins AND forms its structures regularly, conforming to inner laws. 

Only Aesthetic man can look thus at the world, a man who has experienced in artists and in the birth of art objects how the struggle of the many can yet carry rules and laws inherent in itself, how the artists stands contemplatively above and at the same time actively within his work, how necessity and random play, oppositional tension and harmony, must pair to create a work of art. 

“Man is necessity down to his last fiber, and totally ‘unfree’, that is if one means by freedom the foolish demand to be able to change one's ‘essentia’ arbitrarily, like a garment - a demand which every serious philosophy has rejected with the proper scorn.” Nietzsche

Very few people have lived consciously by the standards of the Logos. And Heraclitus had no reason why he had to prove (as Leibniz did) that this is the best of all possible worlds to the un-knowing ones in his time. For Heraclitus, simply it was enough for him that it is the beautiful innocent game of the ‘aeon’. Heraclitus thought that man, in general, was an irrational entity which is no contradiction of the fact that in all aspects of his nature the law of sovereign reason is fulfilled. However he does not occupy any special favored position in nature, the loftiest phenomenon is fire, as exemplified by celestial bodies. By no means is a simple minded man an equal to the celestial lofty phenomenon:

• Insofar as he shares, of necessity, in fire, he has a plus of rationality

• Insofar as he consists of water and earth, his reason is in a bad way

There is no obligation on man to recognize the Logos just because he is man. But it does beg the question, why does water or earth exist? This for Heraclitus is a very serious question, and one much more important than asking why human beings are ignorant or wicked. The same immanent lawful order and justice reveals itself in the highest and in the wrongest man. If we could somehow press Heraclitus to the question as to why earth or water exists he might be forced into saying something along the lines of:

“It is a game, don’t take it so seriously and, above all, don’t make a morality out of it!” Heraclitus according to Nietzsche

Heraclitus only describes the world as it is and takes the same contemplative pleasure in it that an artist does when he looks at his own work in progress such as feelings of gloomy, melancholy, tearful, sinister, and pessimistic. How could you then permit yourself to express unclear or enigmatically the most difficult, abstruse, scarcely attainable goals of thinking that it is philosophy’s task to express? Here Nietzsche says we can use Jean Paul, the romantic writer:

“Generally speaking, it is quite right if great things – things of much sense for men of rare sense – are expressed but briefly and (hence) darkly, so that barren minds will declare it to be nonsense, rather than translate it into a nonsense that they can comprehend. For mean, vulgar minds have an ugly facility for seeing in the profoundest and most pregnant utterance only their own everyday opinion.” Jean Paul

Heraclitus has not escaped the ‘barren minds’; already the Stoics re-interpreted him on a shallow level, dragging down his basically aesthetic perception of cosmic play to signify a gross consideration for the world’s useful ends, especially those who benefit the human race. His physics became, in their hands, a crude optimism with the continual invitation to “plaudite, amici, comedia finita est” (Applaud, my friends, the comedy is over, Beethoven said on his deathbed). 

Heraclitus was proud, and when a philosopher exhibits pride, it is a great pride indeed. His activities never directed him toward any “public”, toward any applause from the masses or toward the encouraging chorus of his contemporaries. To walk alone along a lonely street is part of the philosopher’s nature. His gift is the rarest gift of all, the most unnatural one in a certain sense, exclusive and hostile even toward others with similar gifts. The wall of his self-sufficiency must be built of diamonds if it is not to be destroyed and broken into, for everything and everyone is in league against him. His journey towards immortality is more difficult and burdensome than that of other men. A lack of consideration for what is here and now lies at the very core of the great philosophical nature. He has hold of a truth: let the wheel of time roll where it will, it can never escape truth. It is important to find out from such people that they once existed. Never, for example, could one imagine such pride as that of Heraclitus, simply as an idle possibility. 

Looked at from a general point of view, all striving for insight seems, by its very nature, forever dissatisfied and unsatisfactory. No one will believe, therefore, in such regal self-esteem and calm conviction that he is the only rewarded truth by the instruction of history that such a man did once exist. Such men live inside their own solar system; only there can we look for them. A Pythagoras, an Empedocles, they treated himself with an almost superhuman esteem, an almost religious reverence, but the greatest conviction of transmigration of the soul and of the unity of all life led him back to other human beings, for their salvation and redemption (bodhisattva). The feeling of solitude, that pierced the Ephesian hermit of the temple of Artemis, we can intuit only when we are freezing on wild desolate mountains of our own. No all-powerful feeling of compassionate emotions, no desire to help, to save, to heal, stream forth from Heraclitus. He is a star devoid of atmosphere - his eye, flaming toward its inward center, looks outward dead and icy, with but the semblance of sight. All around him, to the very edge of the fortress of his pride beat the wave of illusion and of wrong-ness. Nauseated, he turns from them. But others, too, those with feeling hearts, turn away in turn from such a mask, cast as if it were in brass. Perhaps in some remote study, among idols, surrounded by a cold serene sublime architecture, such an entity may seem more comprehensible. 

Heraclitus was thinking of the chance game of the great world-child Zeus and therefore did not need human beings, not even those who would benefit from his insights. Whatever others might ask of him, even other sages would not interest him - Heraclitus spoke deprecatingly of such questing, fact-gathering, ‘historical men’. 

“I sought and gathered myself.” Heraclitus according to Nietzsche

Heraclitus says so in a way following the Delphic dictum of ‘Know thyself’ as if he and no other could fulfill and perfect it. But like in the tradition, a consultation of an oracle still is made - this doesn’t necessarily have to be an external journey. Heraclitus hears from this consultation of the oracle, what he took for immortal wisdom - forever to be reinterpreted, of unlimited effectiveness upon far distant times. The model was the prophetic speeches of the Sibyl. There is enough to last humanity into the farthest future, even if they only interpreted him as though he were truly the oracle and spoke, like the Delphic God, “neither expressing nor hiding.” And though the oracle is announced by him “without smile, ornamentation or incense” but with “foaming mouth,” it must penetrate to the many thousands of years of the future. The world forever needs Heraclitus but Heraclitus does not need the world. 

Heraclitus saw behind the curtain of the greatest of all dramas. By raising this curtain and looking behind it he saw something – and gives it to us in the form of two teachings:

1. Teaching of Law in Becoming

2. Teaching of Play in Necessity

Each word of Heraclitus expresses the pride and majesty of truth, but of truth grasped in intuitions rather than attained by the rope ladder of logic, while in Sibylline rapture Heraclitus gazes but does not peer, knows but does not calculate. 

Heraclitus Fragments

Heraclitus provides us a type of aphoristic poetry where a deconstructive mind is at work. A more psychological type pre-socratic that posited no basic substance, nor did he abstract from the world of the senses into numbers, atoms, or assertions about Being as a whole. Instead Heraclitus says whatever you say about anything, its opposite is equally true. He brought language into the game of cosmological thinking. Declarations to Heraclitus will always be self-contradictory, relative, subjective. 

“People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes”, Heraclitus (fragment 4)

“They lack the skill to listen or to speak”, Heraclitus (fragment 6)

You cannot know the world in the manner of natural philosophy (Democritus) or mathematics (Pythagoras) or deductive logic (Parmenides). Because:

“By cosmic rule…all things change”, Heraclitus (fragment 36)

“The sun is new again, all day”, Heraclitus (fragment 32)

“The river where you set your foot just now is gone – those waters giving way to this now, now this”, Heraclitus (fragment 41)

Heraclitean fire, it must be clarified, is neither a metaphysical essence like the elements of his peers, nor a spiritual energy, nor a material substance, the fire that burns your hand. His fire is metaphorical, a psychological intensity that penetrates through all literalisms, a quicksilver fire that flows through the hand, burning away whatever tries to grasp reality and hold it firm. This fire, as the active principle of deconstruction, brilliantly deconstructs itself. 

Heraclitus offers his research on reflecting on your own mind, or seeing into your own thoughts:

“Applicants for wisdom do what i have done: inquire within”, Heraclitus (fragments 80)

“People ought to know themselves”, Heraclitus (fragments 106)

“You can not know the psyche no matter how endless your search”, fragment 71

“I am as I am not”, fragment 81

Consciousness seems to always have its opposite unconsciousness. Be careful Bergsonism would say not to think that before consciousness, unconsciousness pre-existed. That would be retro-projecting the possibility into the real. 

Heraclitus talks about the Logos being active in sleep. While you rest the fire burns, dreaming is the flicking activity of the mind participating in the world’s imagination. Whether the dream helps us feel better and sleep better, cures our distress, or prefigures our destiny, is less its essential nature than its energetic spontaneity. During sleep, we may be each apart from the commonly shared day-world, yet the never-resting Logos goes on producing images ever new as the sun each day, as the rivers flow. 

Heraclitus says wisdom is beyond learning and beyond cleverness: 

“Of all the words yet spoken none comes quite as far as wisdom, which is the action of the mind beyond all things that may be said.” Heraclitus

“Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.” Heraclitus

For Heraclitus, wisdom is the very essence of the cosmos, the fire, nous. Wisdom literature can take on a poetic aphorism like method, and under this lens we find this not limited to only the west. In the East, around the same time as Heraclitus, is Gautama Buddha, along with Lao-tzu and Confucius, all closely associated with poetic traditions of wisdom – various cultural wisdom poetry so to say. 

Wisdom poetry is often allied with religion, but it is distinct from the religious poetries of prayer, praise, and narrative, because it focuses above all on the task of speaking wisdom. The wisdom books best known in European cultures are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. Anyone can see marked similarities between the so-called pessimism of Heraclitus and that in the Book of Ecclesiastes, written not too far to the south during the same century.

Equally striking similarities may be found between the wisdom of Heraclitus and that in other traditions. The famous Egyptian Dispute Between a Man and His Soul, for example, feels trapped, like those said by Heraclitus to be, “confined in the sodden lumber of the body.” The Egyptian seeks “the movement of eternal return”. He awaits, “the Mystical Encounter with the Lord of Transformation hidden in the body,” this Lord being the falcon god Sokar, who disappears with his prey into the fire of the sun. 

All this represents the body, fire, death, and transformation much as Heraclitus would describe them more than a thousand years later. Heraclitus says of the dead, 

“Corpses, like night soil, get carted off…” Heraclitus

“Souls change into water on their way toward death…” Heraclitus

“Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher”, Heraclitus

“Cast the dead man from his house and flung him upon the hill, the flood takes him, the sun takes him, fish talk to him in shallow water.” Egyptian poet

Persia can be similar to Heraclitus through the prophet Zarathustra, through the worship of the Lord Wisdom, Ahura Mazda – Zarathustra lived earlier in the same century as Heraclitus. A tenet of Zoroastrian teaching was the identification of wisdom with an ever-living fire, pyraeizoon, as Heraclitus calls his version.

Heraclitus insisted upon the limits of his art as a way toward wisdom:

“To a god the wisdom of the wisest man sounds apish. Beauty in a human face looks apish too. In everything we have attained the excellence of apes.” Heraclitus

“To be even minded is the greatest virtue”, Heraclitus

“The beginning is the end” Heraclitus (fragment 70)

“The way up is the way back.” (69)

“The habit of knowledge is not human but divine.” (96)

“Dogs by this same logic bark at what they cannot understand.” (115)

“Good and ill to the physician surely must be one, since he derives his fee from torturing the sick.” (58)

“Time is a game played beautifully by children.” (79)

“Even a soul submerged in sleep is still hard at work, and helps make something of the world.” (90)

“Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.” (5)