Diogenes Laertius says (IX. 1) that Heraclitus flourished about the 69th Olympiad (500 B.C.), and that he was of Ephesus and in part contemporaneous with Parmenides: he began the separation and withdrawal of philosophers from public affairs and the interests of the country, and devoted himself in his isolation entirely to Philosophy. We have thus three stages: (α) the seven sages as statesmen, regents and law-givers; (β) the Pythagorean aristocratic league; (γ) an interest in science for its own sake. Little more is known of Heraclitus’ life than his relations to his countrymen the Ephesians, and according to Diogenes Laertius (IX. 15, 3), these were for the most part found in the fact that they despised him and were yet more profoundly despised by him—a relationship such as we have now-a-days, when each man exists for himself, and despises everyone else. In the case of this noble character, the disdain and sense of separation from the crowd emanates from the deep sense of the perversity of the ordinary ideas and life of his people: in reference to this, isolated expressions used on various occasions are still preserved. Cicero (Tusc. Quæst. V. 36) and Diogenes Laertius (IX. 2) relate that Heraclitus said: “The Ephesians all deserve to have their necks broken as they grow up, so that the town should be left to minors” (people now say that only youth knows how to govern), “because they drove away his friend Hermodorus, the best of them all, and gave as their reason for so doing that amongst them none should be more excellent than the rest; and if any one were so, it should be elsewhere and amongst others.” It was for the same reason that in the Athenian Democracy great men were banished. Diogenes adds: “His fellow-citizens asked him to take part in the administration of public affairs, but he declined, because he did not like their constitution, laws and administration.” Proclus (T. III. pp. 115, 116, ed. Cousin) says: “The noble Heraclitus blamed the people for being devoid of understanding or thought. ‘What is,’ he says, ‘their understanding or their prudence? Most of them are bad, and few are good.’” Diogenes Laertius (IX. 6) furthermore says: “Antisthenes cites, as a proof of Heraclitus’ greatness, that he left his kingdom to his brother.” He expresses in the strongest manner his contempt for what is esteemed to be truth and right, in the letter preserved to us by Diogenes (IX. 13, 14), in which, to the invitation of Darius Hystaspes, “to make him acquainted with Greek wisdom—for his work on Nature contains a very forcible theory of the world, but it is in many passages obscure—to come to him and explain to him what required explanation” (this is certainly not very probable if Heraclitus’ turn of mind was also Oriental), he is said to have replied: “All mortal men depart from truth and justice and are given over to excess and vain opinions according to their evil understandings. But I, since I have attained to an oblivion of all evil, and shun the overpowering envy that follows me, and the vanity of high position, shall not come to Persia. I am content with little and live in my own way.”
The only work that he wrote, and the title of which, Diogenes tells us, was by some stated to be “The Muses” and by others “On Nature,” he deposited in the temple of Diana at Ephesus. It seems to have been preserved until modern times; the fragments which have come down to us are collected together in Stephanus’ Poësis philosophica (p. 129, seq.). Schleiermacher also collected them and arranged them in a characteristic way. The title is “Heraclitus, the Dark, of Ephesus, as represented in fragments of his work and by the testimony of the ancients,” and it is to be found in Wolf and Buttmann’s “Museum of ancient Learning,” vol. I. (Berlin, 1807) pp. 315-533. Seventy-three passages are given. Kreuzer made one hope that he would work at Heraclitus more critically and with a knowledge of the language. He made a more complete collection, particularly from grammarians; however, as, for lack of time, he left it to be worked up by a younger scholar, and as the latter died, it never came before the public. Compilations of the kind are as a rule too copious: they contain a mass of learning and are more easily written than read. Heraclitus has been considered obscure, and is indeed celebrated for this; it also drew upon him the name of σκοτεινός. Cicero (De Nat. Deor. I. 26; III. 14; De Finib. II. 5) takes up a wrong idea, as often happens to him; he thinks that Heraclitus purposely wrote obscurely. Any such design would, however, be a very shallow one, and it is really nothing but the shallowness of Cicero himself ascribed by him to Heraclitus. Heraclitus’ obscurity is rather a result of neglecting proper composition and of imperfect language; this is what was thought by Aristotle (Rhet. III. 5), who, from a grammatical point of view, ascribed it to a want of punctuation: “We do not know whether a word belongs to what precedes or what succeeds.” Demetrius is of the same opinion (De Elocutione, § 192, p. 78, ed. Schneider). Socrates, as Diogenes Laertius relates (II. 22; IX. 11-12), said of this book: “What he understood of it was excellent, and what he did not understand he believed to be as good, but it requires a vigorous (Δηλίου) swimmer to make his way through it.” The obscurity of this philosophy, however, chiefly consists in there being profound speculative thought contained in it; the Notion, the Idea, is foreign to the understanding and cannot be grasped by it, though it may find mathematics quite simple.
Plato studied the philosophy of Heraclitus with special diligence; we find much of it quoted in his works, and he got his earlier philosophic education most indubitably from this source, so that Heraclitus may be called Plato’s teacher. Hippocrates, likewise, is a philosopher of Heraclitus’ school. What is preserved to us of Heraclitus’ philosophy at first seems very contradictory, but we find the Notion making its appearance, and a man of profound reflection revealed. Zeno began to abrogate the opposed predicates, and he shows the opposition in movement, an assertion of limitation and an abrogation of the same; Zeno expressed the infinite, but on its negative side only, in reference to its contradiction as being the untrue. In Heraclitus we see the perfection of knowledge so far as it has gone, a perfecting of the Idea into a totality, which is the beginning of Philosophy, since it expresses the essence of the Idea, the Notion of the infinite, the potentially and actively existent, as that which it is, i.e. as the unity of opposites. From Heraclitus dates the ever-remaining Idea which is the same in all philosophers to the present day, as it was the Idea of Plato and of Aristotle.
[1. The Logical Principle.] Concerning the universal principle, this bold mind, Aristotle tells us (Metaph. IV. 3 and 7), first uttered the great saying: “Being and non-being are the same; everything is and yet is not.” The truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non-being; but with the Eleatics we have the abstract understanding that Being is alone the truth. We say, in place of using the expression of Heraclitus, that the Absolute is the unity of being and non-being. When we understand that proposition as that “Being is and yet is not,” this does not seem to make much sense, but only to imply complete negation and want of thought. But we have another sentence that gives the meaning of the principle better. For Heraclitus says: “Everything is in a state of flux; nothing subsists nor does it ever remain the same.” And Plato further says of Heraclitus: “He compares things to the current of a river: no one can go twice into the same stream,”[61] for it flows on and other water is disturbed. Aristotle tells us (Met. IV. 5) that his successors even said “it could not once be entered,” for it changed directly; what is, is not again. Aristotle (De Cœlo, III. 1) goes on to say that Heraclitus declares that “there is only one that remains, and from out of this all else is formed; all except this one is not enduring (παγίως).”
This universal principle is better characterized as Becoming, the truth of Being; since everything is and is not, Heraclitus hereby expressed that everything is Becoming. Not merely does origination belong to it, but passing away as well; both are not independent, but identical. It is a great advance in thought to pass from Being to Becoming, even if, as the first unity of opposite determinations, it is still abstract. Because in this relationship both must be unrestful and therefore contain within themselves the principle of life, the lack of motion which Aristotle has demonstrated in the earlier philosophies is supplied, and this last is even made to be the principle. This philosophy is thus not one past and gone; its principle is essential, and is to be found in the beginning of my Logic, immediately after Being and Nothing. The recognition of the fact that Being and non-being are abstractions devoid of truth, that the first truth is to be found in Becoming, forms a great advance. The understanding comprehends both as having truth and value in isolation; reason, on the other hand, recognizes the one in the other, and sees that in the one its “other” is contained. If we do not take the conception of existence as complete, the pure Being of simple thought in which everything definite is denied, is the absolute negative; but nothing is the same, or just this self-identity. We here have an absolute transition into the opposite which Zeno did not reach, for he remained at the proposition, “From nothing, comes nothing.” With Heraclitus, however, the moment of negativity is immanent, and the Notion of Philosophy as complete is therefore dealt with.
In the first place we have here the abstract idea of Being and non-being in a form altogether immediate and general; but when we look closer, we find that Heraclitus also conceived of the opposites and their unification in a more definite manner. He says: “The opposites are combined in the self-same one, just as honey is both sweet and bitter.” Sextus remarks of this (Pyrrh. Hyp. I. 29, §§ 210, 211; II. 6, § 63): “Heraclitus, like the Sceptics, proceeds from ordinary ideas; no one will deny that healthy men call honey sweet, while those who are sick will say it is bitter.” If it is only sweet, it cannot alter its nature in another individual; it would in all places and even to the jaundiced patient be sweet. Aristotle (De mundo, 5) quotes this from Heraclitus: “Join together the complete whole and the incomplete” (the whole makes itself the part, and the meaning of the part is to become the whole), “what coincides and what conflicts, what is harmonious and what discordant, and from out of them all comes one, and from one, all.” This one is not an abstraction, but the activity of dividing itself into opposites; the dead infinite is a poor abstraction as compared with the depths of Heraclitus. All that is concrete, as that God created the world, divided Himself, begot a Son, is contained in this determination. Sextus Empiricus mentions (adv. Math. IX. 337) that Heraclitus said: “The part is something different from the whole and is yet the same as the whole; substance is the whole and the part, the whole in the universe and the part in this living being.” Plato says in his Symposium (p. 187, Steph.; p. 397, Bekk.) of Heraclitus’ principle: “The one, separated from itself, makes itself one with itself like the harmony of the bow and the lyre.” He then makes Eryximachus, who speaks in the Symposium, criticize this thus: “In harmony there is discord, or it arises from opposites; for harmony does not arise from height and depth in that they are different, but from their union through the art of music.” But this does not contradict Heraclitus, who means the same thing. That which is simple, the repetition of a tone, is no harmony; difference is clearly necessary to harmony, or a definite antithesis; for it is the absolute becoming and not mere change. The real fact is that each particular tone is different from another—not abstractly so from any other, but from its other—and thus it also can be one. Each particular only is, in so far as its opposite is implicitly contained in its Notion. Subjectivity is thus the “other” of objectivity and not of a piece of paper, which would be meaningless; since each is the “other” of the “other” as its “other,” we here have their identity. This is Heraclitus’ great principle; it may seem obscure, but it is speculative. And this to the understanding which maintains the independence of Being and non-being, the subjective and objective, the real and the ideal, is always difficult and dim.
2. Natural Philosophy. In his system Heraclitus did not rest content with thus expressing himself in Notions, or with what is purely logical. But in addition to this universal form in which he advanced his principle, he gave his idea a real and more natural form, and hence he is still reckoned as belonging to the Ionic school of natural philosophers. However, as regards this form of reality, historians are at variance; most of them, and amongst others, Aristotle (Met. I. 3, 8), say that he maintained fire to be the existent principle; others, according to Sextus (adv. Math. IX. 360; X. 233), say it was air, and others again assert that he made vapour to be the principle rather than air;[62] even time is, in Sextus (adv. Math. X. 216), given as the primary existence. The question arises as to how this diversity is to be comprehended. It must not be believed that all these accounts are to be ascribed to the inaccuracy of historians, for the witnesses are of the best, like Aristotle and Sextus Empiricus, who do not speak casually of these forms, but definitely, without, however, remarking upon any such differences and contradictions. We seem to have a better reason in the obscurity of the writing of Heraclitus, which might, by the confusion of its expression, give occasion to misunderstanding. But when regarded closer, this difficulty, which is evident when merely looked at superficially, disappears; it is in the profoundly significant conceptions of Heraclitus that the true way out of this difficulty manifests itself. Heraclitus could no longer, like Thales, express water, air or anything similar as an absolute principle—he could no longer do so in the form of a primeval element from which the rest proceeds—because he thought of Being as identical with non-being, or the infinite Notion; thus the existent, absolute principle cannot with him come forth as a definite and actual thing such as water, but must be water in alteration, or as process only.
a. Understanding the abstract process as time, Heraclitus said: “Time is the first corporeal existence,” as Sextus (adv. Math. X. 231, 232) puts it. Corporeal is an unfortunate expression; the Sceptics frequently pick out the crudest expressions or make thoughts crude in the first place so that they may afterwards dispense with them. Corporeal here means abstract sensuousness; time, as the first sensuous existence, is the abstract representation of process. It is because Heraclitus did not rest at the logical expression of Becoming, but gave to his principle the form of the existent, that it was necessary that time should first present itself to him as such; for in the sensuously perceptible it is the first form of Becoming. Time is pure Becoming as perceived, the pure Notion, that which is simple, and the harmony issuing from absolute opposites; its essential nature is to be and not to be in one unity, and besides this, it has no other character. It is not that time is or is not, for time is non-being immediately in Being and Being immediately in non-being: it is the transition out of Being into non-being, the abstract Notion, but in an objective form, i.e. in so far as it is for us. In time there is no past and future, but only the now, and this is, but is not as regards the past; and this non-being, as future, turns round into Being. If we were to say how that which Heraclitus recognized as principle, might, in the pure form in which he recognized it, exist for consciousness, we could mention nothing else but time; and it quite accords with the principle of thought in Heraclitus to define time as the first form of Becoming.
b. But this pure, objective Notion must realize itself more fully, and thus we find in fact, that Heraclitus determined the process in a more markedly physical manner. In time we have the moments of Being and non-being manifested as negative only, or as vanishing immediately; if we wish to express both these moments as one independent totality, the question is asked, which physical existence corresponds to this determination. To Heraclitus the truth is to have grasped the essential being of nature, i.e. to have represented it as implicitly infinite, as process in itself; and consequently it is evident to us that Heraclitus could not say that the primary principle is air, water, or any such thing. They are not themselves process, but fire is process; and thus he maintains fire to be the elementary principle, and this is the real form of the Heraclitean principle, the soul and substance of the nature-process. Fire is physical time, absolute unrest, absolute disintegration of existence, the passing away of the “other,” but also of itself; and hence we can understand how Heraclitus, proceeding from his fundamental determination, could quite logically call fire the Notion of the process.