>Justin Schwartz:
> > Heraklit is Herakleitos, an important pre-Socratic philosopher probably
> most
> > famous for his dictum that change is all ("Panta rheia"), and the remark
> > that you cannot step in the same river twice; he contravened the more
> usual
> > view that there is an unchanging unity underlying the world. He left no
> > writings and is known only from quoted fragments. --jks
>
>He would disagree about the two realms mentioned by our war
>fan: "The way up and the way down are one and the same." In
>this, of course, he appropriately contradicted himself, both
>as to the _panta_ and the river.
Not actually, as I see it. To claim that a given trajectory is the same, whatever end you view it from, does not contradict the idea that any flowing water you step into will not hang around long enough for you to step into it twice ("On those who step in the same river, different and different waters flow . . " (fragment 12); "In the same river we both step and do not step, we are and we are not" (frag. 49a); "It is not possible to step twice into the same river" (frag. 91) -- in other words, that actions are never performed in the same set of circumstances. "The way up and down is one and the same" (frag.60) is about perspective; the river comments are about time (points in a continuum). Though he certainly didn't think there was anything steady about the latter: "Time is a child playing a game of draughts" (frag. 52).
There's no fragment in which Herakleitos said "change is all" nor even that "everything flows" (panta rhei), though Plato's Socrates claims he said "all things move (ienai) and nothing remains still" (Cratylus, 401d). Anyway, when he talked about change it was often to point out its stable aspects: "As a single, unified thing there exists in us both life and death, waking and sleeping, youth and old age, because the former things having changed are now the latter, and when those latter things change, they become the former" (frag. 88) -- in other words, perhaps, there's a kind of power exchange between living and dead, what goes around comes around, and change happens in relation to a merely imaginary fixed point. "Night and day, which Hesiod had made parent and child, are, and must always have been, essentially connected and interdependent (frag. 57); "Beginning and end are general in the circumference of the circle" (frag. 103). Not for nothing ole' Harry was nicknamed "the dark one."
Even god is reliably inconstant: "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, fullness and hunger; he changes the way fire does when mixed with spices and is named according to each spice." (frag. 67)... (which, for my money, is good, but not as good as Xenophanes': "But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give them bodies in form like their own -- horses like horses, cattle like cattle." (frag. 15)).
Might be good to understand H's words on war (or "strife") in light of another of his epigrams, which has an almost dialectical ring to it: "That which is opposition is in concert, and from things that differ comes the most beautiful harmony." (frag. 8). Or, in a similar vein on a mellower note: "They do not understand how that which differs with itself is in agreement: harmony consists of opposing tension, like that of the bow and the lyre" (frag. 50).
Btw, according to Aristotle, H's student Cratylus, "criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once" (Met. 1010a 13-15). There's gratitude forya.
cheers Joanna
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