Philosopher of the Week

[Raphaella]

When Socrates read Heraclitus book:

The concepts I understand are great, but I believe that the concepts I cant understand are great too.

That sums it up for me too.

[Iason Ouabache]

I've always liked Heraclitus becuase I see him as a (very very) proto-Discordian. As Cram noted, he liked to talk about Fire a lot because it was the Element of violent change.  Fire has the power to destroy and let other things take it's place:  destructive disorder that leads to creative disorder.

And if you think about it, his fragments are some of the very first memebombs.  Nice little bite-sized sayings meant to convey some very big ideas.  And many of them are similar to Discordian concepts and sound like they could have been by any one of us here. Here are some quick highlights that I enjoyed:

You cannot step twice into the same rivers ; for fresh waters are flowing in upon you.

If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it; for it is hard to be sought out and difficult.

The people must fight for its law as for its walls

Time is a child playing [checkers], the kingly power is a child's.

War (conflict) is the father of all and the king of all; and some he has made gods and some men, some bond and some free.

The way up and the way down is one and the same.

Fire is want and surfeit.

Fire in its advance will judge and convict all things.

It is not meet to act and speak like men asleep.

We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away (?) through strife.

The wisest man is an ape compared to god.

All things are exchanged for Fire, and Fire for all things, even as wares for gold, and gold for wares.

Dogs bark at every one they do not know.

If there were no sun, it would be night.     

It is no good for men to get all they wish to get.

Man's character is his fate.

Nature loves to hide.


(I have more to add later)

[Cain]

I'd forgotten how much commentary on philosophical works makes my eyes bleed.

Sorry, I'll try and tone it down.

Anyway, the thing that comes across to me so far is how Heraclitus' skepticism of the validity of the senses seems to lead him into a sort of semiotic area of inquiry.

Also, there is the implication of a sort of natural knowledge, that when one discovers a truth, its not so much found as a way to express it has been discovered.  In some ways the Logos reminds me of the Tao because of that, being in accordance with it permits one access to deeper levels of understanding, yet at the same time an almost banal understanding of the world around you.

The logos could also be reason, not in the sense of the Enlightenment philosophers who thought reason and rationality were the base standard of human thinking, but as something that can be accessed, with effort and hard work, which allows one to consider the knowledge one already has and make new discoveries.

[Reginald Ret]

wow never heard of Heraclitus before, for some reason i'm surprised that there were such smart men so long ago. a bit silly really.

the Logos is the fundamental order of all.

I'm not sure i agree with this. I understand Logos as the understanding of the world that all people can observe and agree on.

things like "if i put this cup on the table it will stay on the table unless something causes it to move" 

The 'latent structure' or 'essence' of common sense if you will. The idea(l) of wich common sense is the earthly representation.

[Honey]

When I think Heraclitus, I think "You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in."  Everything changes, nothing is permanent, a rhthym to the flow?  Maybe.  Playing with it.  So much beauty.  Like a timeless dance.

I know there's so much more but that's what I remember. 

[Cain]

What then is this authority that the logos enjoys, and which is characterised sharply if obliquely in these statements? It can be none other than the impersonal kind of authority that is intrinsic to reason or rationality. Nothing short of that fits in with what is claimed of it, and logos, as already noted, was at this time already developing connotations of "reasonableness" and "proper proportion."  It is consonant too with the riddle and oracle analogies: when once the solution to a good riddle is found, there is no doubt left that it is the solution, because everything fits, everything makes sense, though in an unexpected way.

[...]

Unity-in-opposites appears in Heraclitus in three distinct ways: (1) He presents, in suitably plain language, mostly without comment, examples of the pattern taken from everyday experience; (2) he generalises from these examples, in statements where the language verges on the abstract, seemingly in an attempt to state the pattern in itself; and (3) he applies the pattern in the construction of theories, in particular to cosmology and to the theory of the soul.

In play or in philosophy, they are examples of something amusing, disconcerting, and even confusing: that opposites, by means of which we structure and find our way about so much of our experience, are not purely and simply opposed and distinct. They are not to be thought of, as in Homer's and Hesiod's myths, as pairs of distinct individuals who simply hate and avoid each other. On the contrary, they are found in ordinary life to be copresent, interdependent, liable to change into one another, tacitly cooperating. If there were no such thing as disease, not only would we not find health enjoyable, there would be no such thing as health.  Roads could not go uphill if they did not also, and at the same time, go downhill. Rivers can never stay the same except by a constant change of water. The paradoxical behaviour of doctors - who expect rewards for doing unpleasant things to people - and of donkeys - who prefer humanly worthless garbage to humanly valued gold-shows that the same thing can at the same time be both valued and rejected for the very same qualities.

Such remarks have sometimes been read as implying (a) that the oppositions in question are unreal, because the opposites are either illusory or in fact identical; or (b) that they are merely relative, to a point of view or a context.

[...]

What is at issue here is whether or not Heraclitus wants to distinguish the way opposites are usually perceived from the way they actually are. His interest in latent structure, his contempt for the mental habits of "most people" and for their lack of understanding, suggest that the distinction is important for him. A further "everyday" remark is relevant here.

Sea: purest and most polluted water, for fish drinkable and life-sustaining, for people undrinkable and death-bringing (B61).
Here the manifest effects of seawater are relative to the drinker.

But, from that fact, Heraclitus explicitly infers that the sea is, simultaneously without qualification, both "purest" and "most polluted."
This supports a reading on which the observable relativities of "perception" or "valuation" are used by Heraclitus as evidence for a nonrelative copresence of opposites.  It remains to be seen, though, just what that might mean, and whether it does not collapse into self-contradiction.

[...]

The evidence so far suggests three theses:

(1) The unity is more fundamental than the opposites. The programmatic declaration, in connection with the logos, that "all things are one", already suggests that Heraclitus harbours monistic ambitions. In revealing his ultimate description of the pattern as a harmonie or "unified structure," and in presenting the bow and the lyre as everyday examples of such structure, Heraclitus focuses attention on the underlying unity, and on the way in which it incorporates and manifests the opposites.

(2) The opposites are essential features of the unity. In whatever way the opposites are present in the unity, what matters is that their
presence is of the essence of the unity. The unity could not be what it is without them. Both the word harmonie and the bow and lyre
examples point to the notion of something constituted by a functional unity. The functioning demands that this unity "turn back on
itself" in some way,- the turning back, and therefore the opposites that are manifested in the turning back, are essential features. (In the
case of the bow, the turning back lies in the movement of the parts, both relative to one another and to their own previous movements,
when the bow is used. In the case of the lyre, the turning back may be that of the vibrating strings, or of the up-and-down movement of
the melody, or both.)

(3) The manifestation of the opposites involves a process, in which the unity performs its essential function. This holds for the examples of the bow and lyre. In general, the words "diverging" and "turning back" imply at least movement, while harmonie itself suggests a
built-in teleology.


[...]

The presence of the opposites in a unity is therefore, to borrow Aristotelian terminology, a matter of potentiality. It belongs to the essence of seawater, for example, that it has both the potentiality to be life-sustaining and the potentiality to be death-bringing. So a
thing's very being may require the coexistence within it of diametrically opposed potentialities, an "ambivalence of essence."

This thought offers a solution to the debate between monism and pluralism: namely, that unity-in-opposites shows that the dichotomy is not exhaustive. That this was part of Heraclitus' motivation is confirmed by a key passage of Plato

[Heraclitus and Empedocles] realised that it is safer to weave together both [monism and pluralism] and to say that what is, is both one and many, and is held together by enmity and friendship,- for " diverging is always converging" [says Heraclitus], but [Empedocles] relaxed the demand that that should always be so ...

If Heraclitus was indeed thinking along such lines, we expect him to say more about the way in which the potentialities manifest themselves.

Point (3) of the present interpretation claims that this is done by means of a process unfolding in time. It may be objected that many of the everyday remarks do not involve any process in time, yet the opposites are still manifest. For example, we can see at one glance that a road is both an uphill road and a downhill one. And yet, neither the uphill-ness nor the downhill-ness are fully manifested until someone actually travels along the road. They may be simultaneously manifested to different travellers, or successively manifested
to the same traveller; in either case, there are two distinct processes.17 (The very word hodos, "road/7 also means "journey";
many other words used by Heraclitus show an analogous doublingof sense).

The central role of processes becomes even more obvious when Heraclitus applies the unity-in-opposites to cosmology and psychology.
Here, the opposites are clearly not just potentialities but contending powers. The unity's "functioning" also becomes more than
mere schematism: we find that the unity unites, controls, and gives meaning to the opposites.

[...]

No god and no human being made this cosmos, but it was always and is and will be an ever-living fire, getting kindled in measures and getting quenched in measures.

It is natural to think of the "ever-living fire" as a process. If so, then the cosmic constituents too - the familiar "world masses": earth,
sea, air, and celestial fire - will be stages of the process; for they are "turnings of fire". "Turnings," like many other nouns inHeraclitus, is ambiguous as between process and product. Likewise, with the same ambiguity in "exchange": All things are an exchange for fire and fire for all things, as gold is for goods and goods for gold.

This primacy of process in the observable world is compatible with later testimony about a theory of "flux." Both Plato and Aristotle report that Heraclitus held that "the whole universe is in flux like a river" or that "all is in flux" or "in progression" or "in change." Embedded in this testimony is a story about the selfstyled "Heraclitean" Cratylus, a philosopher of the later fifth century.

Cratylus denied the possibility of any kind of sameness through time. To make his point, he foisted on to Heraclitus the remark that
"you could not step twice into the same river"; apparently for the sake of trumping it with his own claim that one could not even
step once into the same river.

Cratylus' version of the sentence about rivers must be rejected as un-Heraclitean. The rest of Plato's and Aristotle's testimony can
be accepted: they do not attribute to him the extreme views of Cratylus.  They show that, for him, process is the basic form of existence in the observable world; although something, not directly observable, persists throughout:

[Heraclitus says] that while other things are in process of becoming and flux, and none exists in a well-defined way, one thing alone persists as a substrate, of which all these [other] things are the natural reshapings.

[Iason Ouabache]

That seems like a lot of over-analyzation considering the fact that Heraclitus wrote exactly four fragments about Logos (#1, 2, 64, & 118). It seems to me that Logos was just an early manifestation of Greek monotheism that was eventually transfered over to Judaism and Christianity (and eventually Deism). 

Please note John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word (Logos) was with God, and the Word (Logos) was God.

[Reginald Ret]

just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

[Cain]

Well yes, but you have to remember

1.  Professional philosophers.  The non-artistic answer to Ulysses by James Joyce.
2.  They can set the comments in a historical context by relating them to debates that other philosophers used.  Heraclitus actually wrote at least one book, we just don't have access to it.  So we have to assume that where he touches on subjects that other Greeks discussed, that there is actually a good deal that can be inferred, even from fragments.

[Cain]

just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

Plus, he places emphasis on the unity-of-opposites, which actually seems to be an advanced system of gnostic thinking, that reconciles the Manichean tendencies within religions like Christianity.

[Iason Ouabache]

just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

I wouldn't say that it's a minority view.  It's more of a "Thing We Believe In But Don't Actively Admit To Because It Messes With Our Narative".  If you ask a Christian where God is located at, they will say Everywhere.  If you also ask him what God made the universe out of, most will say from Himself.  If that's not pantheism, then I don't know what it.

Plus, he places emphasis on the unity-of-opposites, which actually seems to be an advanced system of gnostic thinking, that reconciles the Manichean tendencies within religions like Christianity.

I do have a fondness for the dualism of Gnosticism and Taoism.  I toyed around with both of them before I settled on Discordianism.  Looks like I need to read up on Manichaeism since I know next to nothing about it.

[Cain]

just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

I wouldn't say that it's a minority view.  It's more of a "Thing We Believe In But Don't Actively Admit To Because It Messes With Our Narative".  If you ask a Christian where God is located at, they will say Everywhere.  If you also ask him what God made the universe out of, most will say from Himself.  If that's not pantheism, then I don't know what it.

Well I would say its very weak Pantheism.  Heraclitus's views suggest that he though humans themselves carried a spark of the divine essence of the Univerise or whatever...but I'll be getting to that later.

[Iason Ouabache]

just because the monotheists hijacked logos does not mean that everyone who used the concept was victim to that particular way of faulty thinking.

Agreed.  Heraclitus was actually, if I understand the rest of this section correctly, moving more towards a sort of pantheism, which is generally a minority view in Christianity.

I wouldn't say that it's a minority view.  It's more of a "Thing We Believe In But Don't Actively Admit To Because It Messes With Our Narative".  If you ask a Christian where God is located at, they will say Everywhere.  If you also ask him what God made the universe out of, most will say from Himself.  If that's not pantheism, then I don't know what it.

Well I would say its very weak Pantheism.  Heraclitus's views suggest that he though humans themselves carried a spark of the divine essence of the Univerise or whatever...but I'll be getting to that later.

You mean like the Logos dwelling in his heart? 

[Cain]

Um, you do realize you're doing that annoying Fundie thing where they pick out obscure Bible quotes to make their point, totally ignoring the evolution of Christianity for over 2000 years and the mainstream practices and beliefs of these popular strands, right?

[Iason Ouabache]

Um, you do realize you're doing that annoying Fundie thing where they pick out obscure Bible quotes to make their point, totally ignoring the evolution of Christianity for over 2000 years and the mainstream practices and beliefs of these popular strands, right?

Of course, I realize that. I'm just being a dick.  I got lucky by finding a quote that mentions "the word" being "in your heart". It's fun to cherry-pick the Bible.  You can make it say almost anything.

There is a meme among modern-day evangelicals about "asking Jesus into your heart" and "Jesus is always with you".  It's not an inherent prescence though. You've got to say pretty please first.