What is philosophy? How does it differ from science, religion, and other modes of human discourse? This course traces the origins of philosophy in the Western tradition in the thinkers of Ancient Greece. We begin with the Presocratic natural philosophers who were active in Ionia in the 6th century BCE and are also credited with being the first scientists. Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximines made bold proposals about the ultimate constituents of reality, while Heraclitus insisted that there is an underlying order to the changing world. Parmenides of Elea formulated a powerful objection to all these proposals, while later Greek theorists (such as Anaxagoras and the atomist Democritus) attempted to answer that objection. In fifth-century Athens, Socrates insisted on the importance of the fundamental ethical question—“How shall I live?”—and his pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, developed elaborate philosophical systems to explain the nature of reality, knowledge, and human happiness. After the death of Aristotle, in the Hellenistic period, Epicureans and Stoics developed and transformed that earlier tradition. We will study the major doctrines of all these thinkers. Part I will cover Plato and his predecessors. Part II will cover Aristotle and his successors.
Heraclitus on the LOGOS
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Ancient Philosophy: Plato & His Predecessors
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The Milesians & Heraclitus
Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes and Xenophanes seek the material principle of the cosmos, and arrive at a radical new conception of the gods. Heraclitus distills the essence of their “naturalism” in his riddling slogans.
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Susan Sauvé MeyerProfessor
Department of Philosophy
[MUSIC]
Heraclitus was known in antiquity as the riddler.
He had a reputation both for obscurity and profundity.
The one book he wrote was widely quoted in antiquity, and from the evidence we have,
it was full of oracular pronouncement and deliberate paradox.
Socrates is reported to have said upon reading the book, the parts that I
understood were very impressive, and so were the parts that I didn't understand.
So, what was the book about?
In a word, it is about the LOGOS.
Now Logos is a term that we've noted has a range of meanings.
From the very general sense in which a LOGOS is a word or anything said,
to the more restricted sense in which it's a particular way of using words.
Specifically, to give an explanation, or reason, or to figure something out.
So, let's see where Heraclitus' LOGOS fits into this range of meanings.
Not surprisingly, he turns out to have exploited most of them.
Let's look at the opening lines of the book, which is 22B1.
This LOGOS holds always, but humans always prove unable to understand it,
both before hearing it and when they have first heard it.
Now, here we might think the LOGOS is the book of Heraclitus itself.
And, that the philosopher is making the perennial complaint of the misunderstood
artist that his brilliant work is not appreciated by the general public.
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.
What the sleepers fail to understand is a deep truth about the world that
though at variance with itself It agrees with itself.
It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and the lyre.
Now this attunement is what he calls the unapparent connection
that he says is stronger than apparent connection.
Now connection and attunement translate the same Greek term here.
It's harmonia, which is the root, of course, of our term for
musical harmony, but it also means a joining together, as
when a cabinet maker fits tongue-in-groove when constructing a piece of furniture.
The important point here is that the unity involved in harmonia, and
hence in the Logos, is a matter of order and structure.
But does the world have a LOGOS?
Now you might ask, what reason does Heraclitus have for being so
confident that there is such an underlying order or Logos to the world?
We can grant him the order behind night and day.
But, why should we suppose that the whole world follows some underlying order?
Recall that Heraclitus says that everything comes to be
according to the Logos in the opening lines of the book.
Why not conclude that the world, or maybe large pockets of it, are just chaotic?
That's certainly what our experience often tells us.
But, Heraclitus tells us not to just trust our experience.
He says, eyes and ears are bad witnesses to people if they have barbarian souls.
And the soul, he says, has its own LOGOS.
In one place he calls it a deep LOGOS.
In another he calls it a self-increasing LOGOS.
Here is where I would want to translate LOGOS as reason or reasoning.
When Heraclitus says, I searched myself, or alternatively, I looked into myself.
He means he used his critical faculties.
His power of reasoning.
But, what chain of reasoning would support the conclusion that there is
an underlying unity and order to the world?
That's a pretty tall order.
If Heraclitus produced such an argument,
he hasn't shared it with us or no one saw fit to quote it from his book.
But, even if he doesn't have a proof that there is an underlying order to things,
his conviction that there is such an order isn't idle dogmatism or table thumping.
For the belief that the world is ultimately understandable or
explicable is a presupposition behind the whole enterprise of scientific inquiry.
To search for explanations is to try to uncover hidden connections and
unifying principles that explain the variety of phenomena that we observe.
Heraclitus belief that the world has a LOGOS
may simply express his conviction that the world is ultimately understandable.
If so, it is a conviction that he shares with the Melanesian Naturalists, Thales,
Anaximander, and Anaximenes, each of whom also insisted on a single
explanatory principle of the natural world.
It is their shared assumption that the world is ultimately explicable,
more than their specific proposals about how to explain it,
that have earned them a place in the history of natural science.
It is also what earns them the title that Aristotle gives them,
phusiologoi, which we can now understand in a slightly different twist,
as those who believe with Heraclitus, that there is a LOGOS to the natural world.
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