Why was heraclitus important

Heraclitus prefigures the semantic complexity of his message. A barbarian is one who does not speak the Greek language. Thus while sense experience seems necessary for understanding, if we do not know the right language, we cannot interpret the information the senses provide. Heraclitus does not give a detailed and systematic account of the respective roles of experience and reason in knowledge. But we can learn something from his manner of expression. Similarly, Heraclitus does not reveal or conceal, but produces complex expressions that have encoded in them multiple messages for those who can interpret them.

He uses puns, paradoxes, antitheses, parallels, and various rhetorical and literary devices to construct expressions that have meanings beyond the obvious. This practice, together with his emphasis on the Word Logos as an ordering principle of the world, suggests that he sees his own expressions as imitations of the world with its structural and semantic complexity. To read Heraclitus the reader must solve verbal puzzles, and to learn to solve these puzzles is to learn to read the signs of the world.

Heraclitus stresses the inductive rather than the deductive method of grasping the world, a world that is rationally structured, if we can but discern its shape.

According to both Plato and Aristotle , Heraclitus held extreme views that led to logical incoherence. For he held that 1 everything is constantly changing and 2 opposite things are identical, so that 3 everything is and is not at the same time.

In other words, though the waters are always changing, the rivers stay the same. Indeed, it must be precisely because the waters are always changing that there are rivers at all, rather than lakes or ponds.

The message is that rivers can stay the same over time even though, or indeed because, the waters change. The point, then, is not that everything is changing, but that the fact that some things change makes possible the continued existence of other things.

Perhaps more generally, the change in elements or constituents supports the constancy of higher-level structures. As for the alleged doctrine of the Identity of Opposites, Heraclitus does believe in some kind of unity of opposites.

But if we look closer, we see that the unity in question is not identity:. As the same thing in us is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and conversely those having changed around are these.

The second sentence in B88 gives the explanation for the first. If F is the same as G because F turns into G, then the two are not identical.

This sort of mutual change presupposes the non-identity of the terms. What Heraclitus wishes to maintain is not the identity of opposites but the fact that they replace each other in a series of transformations: they are interchangeable or transformationally equivalent. Thus, Heraclitus does not hold Universal Flux, but recognizes a lawlike flux of elements; and he does not hold the Identity of Opposites, but the Transformational Equivalence of Opposites. The views that he does hold do not, jointly or separately, entail a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction.

Heraclitus does, to be sure, make paradoxical statements, but his views are no more self-contradictory than are the paradoxical claims of Socrates. They are, presumably, meant to wake us up from our dogmatic slumbers. The philosophers of the city of Miletus near Ephesus , Thales , Anaximander , and Anaximenes , believed some original material turns into all other things.

The world as we know it is the orderly articulation of different stuffs produced out of the original stuff. But fire is a strange stuff to make the origin of all things, for it is the most inconstant and changeable.

It is, indeed, a symbol of change and process. Heraclitus observes,. All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods. We can measure all things against fire as a standard; there is an equivalence between all things and gold, but all things are not identical to gold. Similarly, fire provides a standard of value for other stuffs, but it is not identical to them.

Ultimately, fire may be more important as a symbol than as a stuff. Fire is constantly changing-but so is every other stuff. One thing is transformed into another in a cycle of changes. What is constant is not some stuff, but the overall process of change itself. There is a constant law of transformations, which is, perhaps, to be identified with the Logos. Heraclitus may be saying that the Milesians correctly saw that one stuff turns into another in a series, but they incorrectly inferred from this that some one stuff is the source of everything else.

There is no particular reason to promote one stuff at the expense of the others. What is important about the stuffs is that they change into others. The one constant in the whole process is the law of change by which there is an order and sequence to the changes.

If this is what Heraclitus has in mind, he goes beyond the physical theory of his early predecessors to arrive at something like a process philosophy with a sophisticated understanding of metaphysics.

He expresses the principles of his cosmology in a single sentence:. This world-order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everliving fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures. While ancient sources understand Heraclitus as saying the world comes to be and then perishes in a fiery holocaust, only to be born again DK22A10 , the present passage seems to contradict this reading: the world itself does not have a beginning or end.

Parts of it are being consumed by fire at any given time, but the whole remains. Almost all other early cosmologists before and after Heraclitus explained the existence of the ordered world by recounting its origin out of elemental stuffs. Some also predicted the extinction of the world. But Heraclitus, the philosopher of flux, believes that as the stuffs turn into one another, the world itself remains stable.

How can that be? Sea is liquefied and measured into the same proportion as it had before it became earth. Thus there is a sequence of stuffs: fire, water, earth, which are interconnected.

When earth turns back into sea, it occupies the same volume as it had before it turned into earth. Thus we can recognize a primitive law of conservation-not precisely conservation of matter, at least the identity of the matter is not conserved, nor of mass, but at least an equivalence of matter is maintained. We must recognize that war is common and strife is justice, and all things happen according to strife and necessity.

War is the father of all and king of all, who manifested some as gods and some as men, who made some slaves and some freemen. His idea of a universe in constant change but with an underlying order or reason which he called Logos forms the essential foundation of the European worldview.

Many subsequent philosophers, from Plato to Aristotle , from the Stoics to the Church Fathers , from Georg Hegel to Alfred North Whitehead , have claimed to have been influenced by the ideas of Heraclitus. So, all we can say it is it is likely that he was born around B. We do know that he was born to an aristocratic family in Ephesus , an important city on the Ionian coast of modern-day Turkey.

His father was named either Bloson or Herakon , and was a powerful figure in the city. As a youth, he was a prodigious intellect , and he claimed to have taught himself everything he knew by a process of self-questioning. Some sources also say that he was a pupil of Xenophanes - B. He was sometimes known as "the Obscure" or "the Dark" for the deliberate difficulty and unclearness of his teachings. He was also known as the "Weeping Philosopher" , and it is speculated that he was prone to melancholia or depression , which prevented him from finishing some of his works.

There is no record of his having traveled , even as far as the nearby learning center of Miletus , although he seems to have been familiar with the ideas of the Milesian School.

He was apparently something of a misanthrope and a loner , and he cultivated an aristocratic disdain for the masses and favored the rule of a few wise men. He was not afraid to scorn and denigrate in no uncertain terms, and in a characteristic shrill voice almost everyone from the Ephesians to the Athenians to the Persian leader, Darius.

He believed that the poet Hesiod and Pythagoras "lacked understanding" , and claimed that Homer and Archilochus deserved to be beaten. His years of wandering in the wilderness, resulted in an edema dropsy and impairment of vision. After 24 hours of his own idiosyncratic treatment a liniment of cow manure and baking in the sun , he died and was interred in the marketplace of Ephesus. Work Back to Top Heraclitus is recorded as having written a single book, "On Nature" , divided into three discourses, one on the universe , another on politics and a third on theology.

The book was deposited or stored in the great Temple of Artemis in Ephesus as were many other treasures and books of the time and made available to visitors for several centuries after Heraclitus' death. However, his writings only survive today in fragments quoted by other later authors.

The Heraclitus contributions To philosophy and science represented a precedent of importance that would give rise to the most important philosophical thought of Ancient Greece: the Socratic. Heraclitus of Ephesus was a Presocratic philosopher Considered one of the most somber in terms of his thinking and the complexity of his work; And yet of immeasurable importance.

It is estimated that lived between the years to a. He was considered a self-educated man, so he is not told in any school or current of philosophical thought or proto philosophical of the time. A native of the city of Ephesus, Heraclitus was thought of as one of the pioneers in exploring the human unconscious in relation to nature. Its main postulates focused on the movement and the constant change of all the elements and phenomena present; As well as in the duality and confrontation of the opposite as part of a universal equilibrium.

Like the Milesia School, whose thought attributed to Such , Anaximander and Anaximenes , Heraclitus also defined a primordial and original element for the material and existing: the fire, considered also part of the human soul.

Just as the philosophers of the School of Milesia developed in their works the existence of a natural element that serves as the essence and origin of all that exists, Heraclitus continued this line of thought and attributed this quality to fire. Heraclitus addressed the fire as a central element that was never extinguished, whose natural movements allowed a non-static existence, and which was in step with the rest of the natural mobility of the Universe. For Heraclitus, all the phenomena of nature were part of a state of movement and constant change on the part of this.

Nothing is inert, nor does it remain inert or endure forever. It is the movement and the capacity for change that allows the universal balance. Heraclitus is credited with some famous metaphorical phrases that expose this thought:"No one bathes twice in the same river".