Now, there is some truth to this, I think, but as we read on,
it seems that the Logos can't simply be the book that Heraclitus has written.
For although all things come to be in accordance with this LOGOs,
humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I
set out, distinguishing each according to its nature and saying how it is.
Heraclitus, here,
distinguishes between
the words he has written
down and the LOGOS.
The LOGOS is not what he says, but
a principle that governs everything that comes to be or happens,
even if people don't understand it when he tries to explain it to them.
And that they don't understand is a constant refrain in the book.
Our quote from the opening ends by contrasting Heraclitus' own insight
with the stupidity of other people who fail to notice what they do when awake.
Just as they forget what they do while asleep.
Heraclitus regularly appeals to the distinction between sleeping and
waking experience to make the point that those who do not understand
the Logos are like sleepers who mistake their dreams for reality.
So Heraclitus is giving a wake up call,
inviting us to understand the true reality behind our experiences.
That reality is expressed in the LOGOS.
But what does the LOGOS say?
Nothing very straightforward, obviously, or else it wouldn't be so hard for
us to get.
The closest thing we have to a clear statement of the LOGOS is in fragment B50.
Llisten not to me but
to the LOGOS; it is wise to agree that all things are one.
Now when he says don't listen to me but
to the LOGOS, he means look I'm not making this up.
When he says it is wise to agree that all things are one,
he is telling us what the LOGOS says.
So, the LOGOS is that all things are one.
But what does that mean, that there is only one thing?
How could that be true?
I'm here, you're here, and that makes at least two things.
Or, will Heraclitus roll his eyes at this objection and
say that's just the sort of response you'd get from people who can't tell that they
are dreaming rather than awake.
You see inviting us to wake up and realize that there really is no difference between
the things that seem pretty obviously different and distinct to us.
Well, at least for some things, yes.
For instance, here's some more quotes.
The road up and the road down are the same, hint.
The track of writing is both straight and crooked.
That's one of my favorites.
The beginning and the end are common on the circumference of a circle.
These are just a few of the many fragments in which Heraclitus proclaims
what people call the unity of opposites.
Now we might say, okay, so what's the big deal?
The same thing can have opposite properties depending on your frame of
reference.
What's so hard to understand about that?
But consider another unity that Heraclitus invokes when he castigates Hesiod as,
quote, a man who could not recognize day and night, for they are one.
What does it mean to say that day and night are one?
When it's day here, it's night in Australia?
My apologies to anyone who is taking this course from Australia.
More likely, he meant that day and night are different phases of the same thing,
where that thing is the complex system comprising the Earth,
the Sun, and the other celestial bodies.
Even though night and day are completely opposite in our experience of them,
as different as night and day, as we would say,
we can understand them as expressions of a deeper underlying regularity.
On this way of understanding Heraclitus' Logos, his point in claiming
that all things are one is not to deny that there is multiplicity and
variety in the world, but rather,
to insist that there is an underlying order to that multiplicity and variety.
This is what is not obvious.
And what most people, the sleepers fail to see.