Heraclitus

Heraclitus himself was a native of Ephesus, an Ionian city some twenty-five miles north of Miletus and inland from the sea, and he is said by Diogenes Laertius to have flourished there in the sixty-ninth Olympiad, which would be roughly equivalent to 504-500 B.C. His family was an ancient and noble one in the district, and Heraclitus inherited from them some kind of office, partly religious, partly political, the exact nature of which is not clear, but it involved among other things supervision of sacrifices. Doubtless such an office was not congenial to a man of his impatient temperament, and he resigned it in favor of a younger brother. The banishment of his friend Hermodorus by a democratic government increased a natural antagonism to the masses and confirmed him in his philosophical withdrawal. So much is virtually all that can be known about Heraclitus with reasonable probability. Diogenes Laertius’ short essay on him in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers10 is a rather scatterbrained affair, and there is no reason to take seriously his fantastic account of the philosopher’s death by self-burial in a cow stall in a vain effort to cure an attack of dropsy. Such improbable tales were not uncommon about ancient “wise men,” and Diogenes provides more than his share of them; quite possibly their origin was aetiological in that they grew out of popular misunderstandings of something that the philosopher had taught. In the case of Heraclitus we cannot even know whether it is true that he died of dropsy; the story could easily have been a figment suggested by his remark, “It is death for souls to become water.”


In temperament and character Heraclitus was said to have been gloomy, supercilious, and perverse. Diogenes calls him a hater of mankind, and says that this characteristic led him to live in the mountains, making his diet on grass and roots, a regimen which brought on his final illness. Such an account, however, is of the sort that could easily have been invented out of a general view of the philosopher’s character. At any rate, Heraclitus was certainly no lover of the masses, and his declaration, “To me one man is worth ten thousand if he is first-rate” (Fr. 84), makes it evident that he was not one to suffer fools gladly. He would have understood and approved of Nietzsche’s definition of the truly aristocratic man as one whose thoughts, words, and deeds are inwardly motivated by a “feeling of distance.”11 However, to call him a pessimist and compare him to Schopenhauer, as more than one interpreter of his writings has done, is to treat him in a misleadingly one-sided manner. Pessimism, where it is a philosophy and not just a mood, affirms the doctrine that there is more evil in the world than good, or that the evil is somehow more fundamental or more real. Heraclitus does not commit himself to so partisan a statement. His doctrine is rather that good and evil are two sides of the same reality, as are. up and down, beauty and ugliness, life and death. The wise man attempts to set his mood by looking unflinchingly at both sides of the picture, not at either the bright or the dark alone.