HERACLITUS
According to one source, Heraclitus was a king who abandoned the title to become a philosopher. This has been identified as a close resemblance to the story of the Buddha in India, and some scholars have argued that Heraclitus was in fact the Buddha from India while others have argued that the Buddha was in fact Heraclitus from Greece. Both thinkers were mythologized as a king who left powerful king position and became a sage, putting the mental and spiritual above the corporeal and material. Both believe in the enlightening sun rising above the watery chaos of human perception and desire, but it is far more likely that the two were not the same individual and simply share the cosmology common to the cultures of the ancient world. Plato, who we will study next, shares this as well.
We do not know much at all about Heraclitus’ life, but he likely lived about 540 BCE. It is said in some sources that he was a king who gave up his throne to his brother to be a sage, but this is impossible to confirm and as mentioned quite allegorical which is always suspicious. He is said by other sources to have been a doctor, and many of his fragments do speak about the workings of physiology within the larger frame of physics as a thinker who is immersed in ancient cosmology would. A fragment reads:
Moisture makes the soul succumb to joy. Dry, the soul grows wise and good.
Heraclitus believed that the soul, mind and self becomes soggy and intoxicated when one indulges in desire and pleasure (drinking and sex are moist by nature), and likewise when one studies with the fire of the mind and abstains from pleasure the soul dries out. While this could come from a physician, some fragments seem critical of physicians and the practice of medicine just as others are critical of philosophers, spiritual groups and politics. A fragment reads:
The cosmos works by harmony of tensions, like the lyre and bow. Therefore, good and ill are one. Good and ill to the physician must be one, since he derives his fee from torturing the sick.
Heraclitus did write a book which he entrusted to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, though we only have the very beginning today. There was a popular book of Heraclitus’ philosophy in ancient Greece, but this may or may not have been the original text. While we do not have any of his writings today, he is mentioned often by other writers, philosophers and historians who quote him and his work, and these pieces are put together as the fragments of Heraclitus which we read as a single text.
Heraclitus is a very skeptical thinker. He is sometimes portrayed as sad or depressed, called the ‘weeping philosopher’ by some and looking very down in Raphael’s painting, The School of Athens. He may, however, have been quite happy and misconstrued as sad by others, particularly Platonists who are opposed to his idea of formless fire and were supported in the Christian tradition. Raphael, who painted in the period of the Neoplatonic Renaissance, would have seen Heraclitus in this light. Heraclitus is angry at the politics of his city state Miletus. Like the Athenians killed Socrates for questioning too much and so “inciting the youth to riot”, Miletus exiled Hermadoros (whose name means ‘lover of Hermes’, Hermes being a god of wisdom and knowledge who was identified with Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge) because was ‘worthier than average’, presumably doing philosophy and cosmology. Heraclitus responded:
As for the Ephesians, I would have them, youths, elders, and all those between, go hang themselves, leaving the city in the abler hands of children.
Just like the ancient Sumerian lamenter, Confucius, and many other great thinkers, Heraclitus did not like the politics of his day and was critical of traditions of thought in general. Heraclitus was not, however, sad or angry as much as he was a skeptic. Many of his fragments appear playful jokes. Despising the beliefs, traditions and politics of the day does not make one a sad or angry person relative to others. Rather, it turns criticism of the other into criticism of the self and one’s own civilization. Heraclitus was convinced that wisdom and inquiring within show us that all is one big cosmic fire, and things that unify the community and the individual bring wholeness and true happiness. However, he believed that humans are often foolish and let their minds divide themselves from the whole and from each other such that their understandings are disjointed and ignorant.
This is very typical thinking of skeptics the world over. A dogmatist would say that there are specific truths that are certain and must be separated from the uncertain, specific goods that must be separated from the evil. A skeptic would say, like Heraclitus and the Daoists from China, that the truth and the good is the whole and the great One, and the tendency of the mind to divide the good and the true from the rest is the opposite of true understanding and wisdom.
Heraclitus was not a fan of experts and specialists, and he ridiculed the cultural leaders of his time. He says that the common people are completely asleep, but far more dangerous are the experts who have a small piece of the puzzle and say that they know the entire truth. He calls the poets (Hesiod and Homer) and the Pythagoreans frauds, and says that there are no permanent truths or laws other than the constant formation of watery chaos by the sun and cosmic fire. Notice that this does not question the set up of the cosmos as we have studied it everywhere (and what the Persians gave to the Eastern Greek city states). Many often ask, “Why, then, should I listen to Heraclitus, since he is simply an expert?”. Heraclitus replies as most skeptics do: don’t take my word for it, but look into the world and within yourself and you will find that it is true. The beginning of his book, which we still have, reads:
The word proves those first hearing it as numb to understanding as the ones who have not heard, yet all things follow from the word. Some, blundering with what I set before you, try in vain with empty talk to separate the essences of things and say how each thing truly is, and all the rest make no attempt. They no more see how they behave broad waking than remember clearly what they did asleep.
For wisdom, listen not to me but to the word and know that all is one. Those unmindful when they hear, for all they make of their intelligence, may be regarded as the walking dead. People dull their wits with gibberish, and cannot use their ears and eyes. Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know. Yet they lack the skill to listen or to speak. Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse. Things keep their secrets.
Now that we can travel anywhere, we need no longer take the poets and myth-makers for sure witnesses over disputed facts…If learning were a path of wisdom, those most learned about myth would not believe, with Hesiod, that Pallas in her wisdom gloats over the noise of battle. Pythagoras may well have been the deepest in his learning of all men, and still he claimed to recollect details of former lives, being in one a cucumber and one time a sardine.
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. Wisdom is the oneness of mind that guides and permeates all things.
Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.
Time is a game played beautifully by children. Applicants for wisdom do what I have done: inquire within.
Since mindfulness, of all things, is the ground of being, to speak one’s true mind and to keep things known in common, serves all being, just as laws made clear uphold the city, yet with greater strength. Of all pronouncements of the law the one source is the word whereby we choose what helps true mindfulness prevail. Although we need the word to keep things known in common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom. Fools seek counsel from the ones they doubt. People need not act and speak as if they were asleep. The waking have one world in common. Sleepers meanwhile turn aside, each into a darkness of his own.
Homer I deem worthy, in a trial by combat, of a good cudgeling…They raise their voices at stone idols as a man might argue with his doorpost. They have understood so little of the gods.
This is a psychological skepticism that is criticizing the human ability to know particular things as permanent that are able to be separated from the One and All (the cosmic fire). Only the All is permanent. All the other things are wandering temporal forms. The many beings arise from the energy of Being, and then they fall back into the fire and disappear. Heraclitus believes that the divisions made by the mind are mortal, not eternal, like the human body. Our knowledge and laws are impermanent like mounds of dirt. Heraclitus says many things to humble us, including pointing out our similarity to apes to put our achievements in perspective:
The language of a grown man, to the cosmic powers, sounds like baby-talk to men. 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. The ape apes find most beautiful looks apish to non-apes.
Heraclitus’ most famous idea is a memorable image: you can never step in the same river twice. Just as a river is always flowing and changing, so is reality always flowing and changing, such that nothing stays exactly the same for any two moments. You step in a river, then step out, then step back in the same river, but it is no longer ‘the same river’. Paradoxically, changing constantly in the way that things do is the stability and being of things. Rivers flow, fire burns, life thrives, always in motion to be stable in what it is. He says, “Goat cheese congeals in wine if not well stirred”. It is an example of a motion keeping a mixture what it is. When the motion stops, the elements disintegrate. In the same way that stability is motion, opposites work together:
From the strain of binding opposites comes harmony. The harmony past knowing sounds more deeply than the known…The sea is both pure and tainted, healthy and good haven to the fish, to humans undrinkable and deadly. Poultry bathe in dust and ashes, swine in filth…Two made one are never one. Arguing the same we disagree. Singing together we compete…Without injustices, the name of justice would mean what?..The way up is the way back. The beginning is the end.
PYRRHO AND SEXTUS EMPIRICUS
Sextus is a mystery. He is supposed to have lived towards 200 CE, 700 years after Heraclitus.
He is thought by scholars to have been from Alexandria Egypt. He might be Libyan, thus African, but it has been assumed that he was Greek living in Egypt or Rome. It is thought that he is a doctor because he mentions medical cases to show how sometimes things are good but then surprisingly bad in other cases or vice versa, but there is nothing that proves this.
Sextus is the first Pyrrhoian Skeptic, quite similar to the Jains and Buddhists of India. Agnosticism of all judgment and plurality of perspective and truth are staples for both. When Alexander fought his way to the border of India, to try to conquer the rich and fertile area, he brought the philosopher Pyrrho with him around 300 BCE. Pyrrho met with some ‘gymnosophists’ in the historian’s texts, and scholars argue whether these were Buddhists, Jains or if either existed yet at the time. Pyrrho witnessed the yoga and extreme penances of the sages, had discussions, then came home and refused to write anything or live in society. People would come to visit him on the edges of town, where he would argue that everything is true and not true, that every perspective is true but also false. His thinking sprouted a school in Alexandria Egypt, a great center of Greek, early Christian and later Muslim thought. We know of this exclusively through the writings of Sextus.
For example, Sextus calls upon the ‘where there is smoke, there is fire’ example used by Gautama and Aristotle, and then brings up many cases where one would be mistaken to draw the inference. The point is not that it can’t be drawn, but it can never be certain in a particular situation.
The Issue: IS has a temporary and eternal meaning, back and forth, like IS has a whole-part back and forth meaning. (Clinton, Rumsfeld vs. dealing with the real issue)
