The Melancholic Riddler: The Philosophy and Influence of Heraclitus
The Philosophy of Heraclitus
Heraclitus was a man of extreme views. He is said to have heavily criticized Homer, Hesiod and Pythagoras. Heraclitus died of dropsy at the age of fifty. He left a work that according to Diogenes Laertius seemed only half-finished and a hodgepodge.
Like Thales of Miletus and Anaximander before him, Heraclitus saw the nature of true reality as obscure. He also posited a philosophy of aesthetics.
Dates of Heraclitus
Heraclitus (also Heraclitus) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who was famous for his obscure brand of metaphysics boiled down to the tidy maxim that “you can never step into the same river twice.” He also had a reputation as melancholic and cryptic, earning him the nicknames “The Weeping Philosopher” and “The Riddler.”
His philosophy centered on the idea that everything is constantly in flux. Heraclitus was part of a group of philosophers called the Monists, who were interested in uncovering what the universe is made of. Thales of Miletus (c. 620-546 BCE) and Anaximander (c. 610-546 BCE) both proposed that the universe is made up of one basic universal constituent, while Heraclitus claimed it was fire.
Heraclitus avoided participation in politics and was a bit of a hermit, which helped him preserve his thoughts for later writers. He was influential on the Stoic philosophers, and his ideas would be picked up by Plato and Aristotle, who would lay the foundation of Western philosophy.
Heraclitus’ life
Heraclitus develops the natural philosophy of his Ionian predecessors but he also makes important criticisms and suggests profound implications of those criticisms. His view of the world was one that it was in flux and that opposites coinstantiated in an interplay of balances and cyclic alternations of pairs of contraries.
He argued that the only thing that is constant in this world is change and that the Logos was the force behind this change. He was no pessimist but he emphasized that human beings are mortal and their knowledge of recondite matters is limited.
He also criticized many intellectuals of his time and of the past. He ridiculed the poets for their ignorance of recondite topics and he criticized Hesiod, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes for their polymathy. Heraclitus thought that understanding could only come from heeding the Logos. This meant avoiding the practice of polumathie which Heraclitus described as the collecting of information and did not lead to understanding.
Heraclitus’ philosophy
Heraclitus developed a profound, though obscure, philosophy of change. His doctrine is based on the dynamic and cyclic interplay of opposites that are part of a greater whole. He also posited that each change has an equal and opposite reaction. He is considered one of the first philosophers to make human values a central focus of philosophical speculation.
He rejects polumathie, information gathering as a means of finding truth and suggests that true knowledge comes from direct experience. He also suggests that truths reveal themselves only in a form that is hard to understand. He explains this in riddling statements such as, “The lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither tells nor conceals; he gives a sign.”
Heraclitus was a native of Ephesus and held an important hereditary position in the city’s government. He had little interest in politics or traditional religion and renounced his hereditary ruling position, which he passed on to his brother.
Heraclitus’ writings
Like the other Presocratics Heraclitus believes there is a hidden stability in the universe, but unlike them he does not conceive of this as an enduring thing, or even something that can be understood. He is also aware that there are many different things in the world and that they all exist in a state of flux. He therefore chose fire as a metaphor for this reality, because it is always changing yet remains stable at the same time.
Heraclitus wrote on a range of topics, from cosmology and politics to ethics and theology. He criticized most of his contemporary thinkers and made a point of rejecting polumathie or information-gathering as a way to understand the world (B40). He is seen by later philosophers as an independent thinker who broke out of the several traditions of thought. According to Teichmuller, Heraclitus is a process philosopher; to Zeller, he is a metaphysician; and to Pfleiderer, he is a religionist.
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