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Heraclitus
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Heraclitus was born in Ephesus, a Greek colony in Asia Minor. Heraclitus was called the 'obscure philosopher' because of his often cryptic style. For him the essential substance that unites all things was fire. He wrote that the world order was an 'ever-living fire kindling in measures and being extinguished by measures'. He taught that all things are in eternal flux, because of opposites and that 'reality' becomes 'harmony'. He explained his doctrine of eternal change with the remark that 'one cannot step twice into the same river'.
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The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was born in Ephesus around 535BC into an aristocratic family. His enigmatic style and the difficulty of his works led him to be characterized as 'the obscure' and 'the riddler', and his unpopularity and misanthropy resulted in his being called the dark or weeping philosopher. Only fragments remain of his great work, On Nature, and these only survive as quotations and attributions by later authors. Heraclitus postulated a universal principle, the Logos (Greek for 'reason'), through which all things are interrelated and all natural manifestations occur. He ... proposed that the essence of everything is fire, and he wrote that the world is an 'eternally living fire, kindling in measures and being extinguished in measures.'
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Little is known of Heraclitus' life; most of what has been handed down consists of stories apparently invented to illustrate his character as inferred from his writings (Diogenes Laertius 9.1-17). His native Ephesus was a prominent city of Ionia, the Greek-inhabited coast of Asia Minor, but was subject to Persian rule in his lifetime. According to one account, he inherited the honorific title and office of “king” of the Ionians, which he resigned to his brother. He is generally considered to have favored aristocratic government as against democracy, based on his own political observations.
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Heraclitus is above all a materialist. No clear and explicit statement of pantheism has survived. But Heraclitus ascribes to God the same characteristics that he ascribes to fire [B67]. His statement that the cosmos is ever-living fire [B30] carries a religious tone as powerful as any scripture.
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In this statement Heraclitus reviews the leading authorities of his day, living (the last three) and dead, dealing with religious and secular knowledge, and finds them all wanting. They spend too much effort in collecting information and not enough in grasping its meaning. “What intelligence or understanding do they [the people] have?” asks Heraclitus. “They follow popular bards and treat the crowd as their instructor, not realizing that the many are base, while the few are noble” (B104). He criticizes Hesiod on specifics: “The teacher of the multitude is Hesiod; they believe he has the greatest knowledge–who did not comprehend day and night: for they are one” (B57). In his myths, Hesiod treats Day and Night as separate persons, taking turns traveling abroad, while one remains at home.
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