In Our Time - Heraclitus

Episode Date: December 8, 2011

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. Writing in the 5th century BC, Heraclitus believed that everything is constantly changing or, as he put it, in flux. He expressed this thought in a famous epigram: "No man ever steps into the same river twice." Heraclitus is often considered an enigmatic thinker, and much of his work is complex and puzzling. He was critical of the poets Homer and Hesiod, whom he considered to be ignorant, and accused the mathematician Pythagoras (who may have been his contemporary) of making things up. Heraclitus despaired of men's folly, and in his work constantly strove to encourage people to consider matters from alternative perspectives. Donkeys prefer rubbish to gold, he observed, pointing out that the same thing can have different meanings to different people.Unlike most of his contemporaries he was not associated with a particular school or disciplinary approach, although he did have his followers. At times a rationalist, at others a mystic, Heraclitus is an intriguing figure who influenced major later philosophers and movements such as Plato and the Stoics.With:Angie HobbsAssociate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of WarwickPeter AdamsonProfessor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College LondonJames WarrenSenior Lecturer in Classics and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, University of CambridgeProducer: Natalia Fernandez.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, thought to have lived about 500 year 500 BC, Heraclitus is one of the most important and certainly the most intriguing of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.

He is well known in antiquity for cryptic utterances such as, you can never step into the same river twice, which earned him a reputation for obscurity. Another of his celebrated epigrams is, if you don't expect the unexpected, you won't find it out, since it's not to be found out and pathless. Heraclitus, Heraclitus, was known as the weeping philosopher, supposedly because of his melancholic view of life.

His philosophy is enigmatic, succinct, surprising and profound. With me to discuss Heraclides are Angie Hobbes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy, the University of Warwick, Peter Adamson, Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at King's College London, and James Warren, Senior Lecturer in Classics of the Fellow of Corpus Christi College, the University of Cambridge. Angie Hobbes, what do we actually know about Heraclitus? Well, he was born about 535 and lived to about 475 BC in Ephesus, so a Greek settlement on the coast of Asia Minor.

And though it was a Greek settlement, it was by this time part of the Persian Empire, though not happy about that. and in the four-nineties BC, Ephesus was at the forefront of a rebellion against Persia. So fairly turbulent times. He was born into an aristocratic family. As you said, he had a reputation for being dark or obscure and riddling and rather misanthropic. According to the legends, he didn't have much time for his fellow Ephesians and after a while went off to live in the hills and eat herbs. However, what he did do was lay a copy of his book on nature

in the famous Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World at Ephesus, and it quickly gained a cult following. So though he didn't have much time, allegedly, for humanity, he did have a lot of cult followers who called themselves the Heracleetians. These are the very, very early days, is you all the thing that's fascinating about philosophy.

Was there an academy that he went to? Was he on his own? Were the people he associated? Do we know anything about his life as a philosopher? Well, we know that he's part of the first wave of, they would have perhaps seen themselves as natural scientists on the coast of Asia Minor who are sort of starting to ask big questions about the cosmos

and what its basic constituents are and its origin and what the place of humanity is within it. So before Heraclitus, we have people like Thales, there's Anaxima, sorry, Anaximenes from my least, just along on the coast. No, they didn't form a school as such. There's no particular, you know, record of any connections between them, but they are part of this flowering.

And I think it's no accident that this part of the coast is on the hub of a lot of trade routes. So ideas are flowing between Greece and Egypt and the Babylonian civilizations and back again. And I think that's significant in why they stand. started to ask these questions at about this time. I'm going to press my extremely mundane question with some embarrassment. I'm not even looking at you, mind you? I'm saying this, but I'd really like to know. You mentioned he was a herocratic background.

Let's say it was well enough of. He just decided to be a philosopher and studied philosophy, and that was what he did off his own bat. There wasn't any structure for it. There wasn't any, did he, was there a group of them? I'm quite interested to know what they did. Well, I mean, later in the program, I'm sure Peter and James will be able to help me. I mean, no, as far as I'm aware, according to the anecdotes, he was pretty much on his own.

He wasn't a very clubbable kind of a guy, though he probably did go to the marketplace occasionally in Ephesus and sort of read bits of his book out, and he would have to capture the attention of the passing shoppers, and that might be part of the reason for his very vivid style. No, he is unique. Peter Adamson, we tell that Heraclitus wrote a book called On Nature, we then tell that. that title is given way after his death, but that's still more or less referred to us, these hundred or so aphorisms. Before we talk about that book,

this was a time, as I read, of a surge of literacy. Can you just give us that background? Yeah, that's right. So if we think about the sort of earliest texts to come to us from early antiquity, we think of Homer and Hesiod, for example, and people often talk about the fact

that this was presented in, oral form. In other words, it would have been recited. In fact, there were people who went around reciting Homer. And in the few centuries during which philosophy is emerging in ancient Greece. And of course, ancient Greece here means Greek civilization over the Mediterranean, not just Greece, because as Angie has just mentioned, actually Heraclysis is from Ionia, which is in modern day Turkey, not Greece. So across this culture, you have a move from orality to literacy, as we sometimes say. And it's interesting to notice that Heraclitus actually refers to several contemporaries as well as to Hesiod and Homer.

So, for example, he refers to Xenophonies, a slightly earlier pre-Socratic philosopher, and he refers to Pythagoras. But as Angie pointed out, he put his book in this famous temple, so who had expected enough people to turn up and want to read it? Yeah, I guess so. So that title, as you mentioned, is something we might be a little bit dubious about the title on nature is one that was, supposedly used by a lot of these pre-Socratic philosophers, I think we shouldn't be misled by that title. I mean, even if Heraclitus did use it, the word fusus, nature there, doesn't necessarily mean nature in a narrow sense. It might mean sort of everything that there is. And in fact, we're also told by a later source that this work was split into three sections

on the cosmos or the universe, on politics and on theology. But the fragments that we have don't necessarily fit very neatly into those three departments. In fact, a lot of them are about philosophical methodology and so on. Can you tell us what remains of Heraclitus? What are we going to be talking about? What's the basis of this following conversation? Right. So that's an excellent question to ask about all the Presocratics, because we do not have their complete works. What we have is what's usually called fragments and sometimes testimonia, in other words, reports of what they said. And with Heraclytus, in a way, we might regret that less than with the other. pre-Socratic philosophers because it's almost as if he wrote in fragments, right?

He writes these sort of oracular statements, their riddles, they're very carefully put together. They are structured with rhyme, assonance, wordplay, puns. And that was clearly supposed to be part of their appeal. It also made them very quotable. And so, I mean, it's not clear how on nature or whatever this book was was structured or exactly what was in it, but it may have been literally just. a collection of these, kind of aphoristic sayings. I've mentioned, and everybody,

many people know about you kind of walking to the same river twice. Can you give us one or two other examples which display what you talk about, the crafted nature of the use of it? Actually, so maybe I'll just start with that fragment, because I just wanted to quote it in Greek because you can really hear how nice it is. So I'll tell you what the Greek sounds like, and then I'll tell you the sort of strict translation. So it goes like this,

Poetomoisi. Toysin, Otoysen, and Beyn, hetera, and hetera, hudata, epiree. Which sounds quite nice, right? Do you want to do it again? But I didn't catch that, I didn't catch that properly the first time. So, to moisi, toysen, O'Te, and bayonusen, hetera and hetera, hudata epiree. So, I mean, you might also even think it sounds like babbling water, right? And the kind of strict translation, there, by the way, are several reports of this thought from Heraclytus.

this one would be translated over the same rivers stepping into them different and different waters flow or something like that. There's a very strict translation. So the thought is, famously, that you can't step into the same river twice because if you step into a river, step out, step back in again, it's different water.

Another example would be... But also, isn't it, you're supposed to be a different person? You too have changed. Yeah, right. In fact, one of the effects of the wordplay is that this idea about whether things are the same could refer to the river or to the person people sometimes say. I mean, all these things are very difficult to interpret, partially because he plays around with Greek word order.

And in fact, there's a passage in Aristotle's rhetoric where he kind of with crushing banality complains that an example of Heraclytus doing this is an example of bad Greek style because you can't tell which word is supposed to... There's this one word which you can't tell whether it's supposed to go with the claws before it or the claws after it. But of course, Heraclitus was doing that on purpose.

And Aristotle was wrong in this case? A rare event, but yes. Can you give us another? Can you give us the example of the bow and the arrow? And that's an example of his way he talked about tensions in everything, particles and in the whole of life. Yeah, there's actually two fragments about the bow, which is maybe telling because it may be that we're supposed to read fragments,

in light of each other. So one of them says, and again, you have to go to the Greek for this, the word beos means life in Greek, and the word beos, with the stress on the second syllable, means bow, as in bow and arrow. And so what he says is a kind of pun and almost a joke. He says, the bow, its name is life, its work is death. So you get this idea that we'll come across later

that opposite things are coinciding in the same. object. And there's another... And also with the bow now, he says the two things are happening, you're pushing it forward and you're pulling it back at the same now. You're pulling the string back and you're pushing the bow forward. So that's the other fragment. Yeah. The other fragment is that the bow turns back on itself. He also mentions a Greek liar, which has the same shape. So the idea is that it pulls in both directions at the same time. And in fact, if you think about it, it kind of consists in the fact that it's being pulled into two directions at the same time. James Warren, Heraclitus has been called a monist, and can you tell us what that means and what his interpretation of that was?

So to be a monist just means in this context that you think there's just one thing. And so there are different kinds of monisms. Some of these predecessors that Angie mentioned are thought of as being what are called material monists, which means that they think that everything that you see around you in the world is basically made out of one kind of matter. So Thales, for example, may have thought that everything was made out of water. Some people think Heraclitus is very similar because he might have thought that everything was basically constructed out of fire.

It's certainly the case that he says things like, listening not to me but to my account is one of his fragments. He says it's wise to agree that all things are one. Now whether that means that things are materially constituted out of one and the same element or that there's some other sorts of unifying nature to all things is something that we might want to talk about. But he's certainly a monist of the sort that he sees an underlying unity to the diversity and change that he sees around us in the world.

Why don't you talk about it? Okay. Well, I think the fragments point, as they often do, in different directions. So one fragment says that the cosmos is an ever-living fire, kindled in measures and going out in measures. And this sounds like good evidence for him saying, well, everything's basically made out of fire. It can be transformed into different things. So another fragment says fire turns first into sea, and then half of sea turns into Earth and half of Earth and then into storm or something. It's a very difficult word to translate.

So he sees, I think, a series of cyclical transformations between the basic constituents in the world. Fire turns into water, water turns into earth and so on. Is there any sense that he thinks of fire as the initial starter of the world, as the beginning of the world, the world began in fire? Is there a fragment that suggests that? That's less clear, in fact. There's some suggestion that he thinks that every so often the world might return to being,

completely consumed by fire, that it will just be fire. But he certainly thinks of fire as perhaps the most important of the elements, perhaps because it has this clear dynamism, and it's to do with his notions of constant change. Is he talking in fire in terms of flames leaping up, or is he talking of fire in terms of the sun and heat as well? Well, I would think he would take the sun and heat to be examples of something more basic and more fundamental.

So I think he would think the fire in your fireplace is just as much a bit of fire as the fire of the sun too. There seems to be a dispute about the ordering of these fragments, but people are fairly confident about the introduction. Can you tell us about an introduction? Well, we're confident about the introduction for two reasons. One Aristotle tells us it was the first part of the work, and also it just seems. like an introduction. It's the longest fragment, and I can tell you what it says, if you like. I would be very pleased if you did. So this is the bit that Peter mentioned Aristotle failed to understand properly. It starts like this. It says, this account, and the Greek word there is logos, which is an important word for Heraclitus that we'll come back to, I think.

This account being always the case, always men fail to understand it, both before they hear and when first they have heard. all things come to be according to this account, the men seem to be without experience of it, even when they try out all the words and deeds of the kind I set out when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and say how it is. Other men don't pay attention to what they do when they're awake, just as they don't pay attention to what they do when they're asleep. So he's telling them they're not going to understand what he's going to write about. This is a real come-on introduction, isn't it? It's not...

What follows you are not going to understand. Absolutely. So it's a sort of alienating introduction, you might think. It has a certain charm, isn't it? Well, it's not unusual for these philosophers to be somewhat condescending to a common opinion. That's relatively common that they will tell you that most people have no idea what the world's really like. Angie Hobbs, could you take that up and then move to the, this, want to be central ideas, which is the idea of flux. But would you like to take up what James has said about this introduction?

Well, yes, I mean, I think he's also selecting an audience. We might think that if people write books for absolutely everybody, but I think he's writing in a style which he hopes is going to appeal to the kind of people that he feels will be best equipped to hear this. Yes, we're going to come back to this notion of the Logos. As James said, it's often translated account, but as we're going to see, it has other meanings as well, and we're going to be asking, is Heraclitus talking just about his book

and people saying, you're not going to understand my book, or is he going to be saying, you're not going to understand the Logos, the sort of the order of the universe, which my book is about? And one of his orderings of the universe was through this notion of flux, which we now throw around, take for granted and so on. It must have been extremely radical, new, foreign, difficult to understand then. Can you tell us what he meant by it and how radical it was at the time? Yes, well, we've got the doctrine of everything flows, Pantéixé,

and the notion that everything in the world flows like a river, and he compares the universe to a river. So what we have, the notion here is that either everything is changing all the time, or that everything is changing intermittently, or everything is at least subject to change. And there is, as you might imagine, dispute about exactly how to interpret it. what is absolutely clear is that it raises really intriguing questions about the notion of identity because on the one hand you've got things like the river and fire and an example he uses of a particular kind of barley drink which you have to keep stirring so it doesn't separate

barley wheat and wine exactly so these are things that have to keep moving in order to retain their identity so on the one hand we have identities being created through flux because if the river wasn't flowing, it wouldn't be a river. It would be an immensely long lake. The fire has to fluctuate. And in that respect, fire is a wonderful sort of metaphor for his notion of flux. It's perfect. The barley drink, you have to keep stirring it. However, on the other hand, you get problems because at what point does something, call it X, change to such a degree that it's no longer X anymore? So at what point does flux not just create, identity, but actually start to destroy identity. And then you can go further, and one of Heraclitus's disciples Crattelus did go further, and say, well, actually, take flux to an extreme degree, and you don't just destroy identity. You can't form identities in the first place. So according to Aristotle, this disciple Cratulus said, well, Heraclitus was wrong to say you can't step into the same river twice. You can't even step into it once. You can't even name a river. And

Cruttallus is one of my heroes. Apparently he gave up speaking and would just raise... Angie, what are your heroes gave us speaking? I know, but a great ruse for students. He just wouldn't answer questions. He would just raise a finger because he thought words had no meaning and you couldn't name anything

because there was no fixed identity. So these are really profound questions. The flux goes to the heart of them. There was a philosopher around and about the same time, Peter Adipson. Permanides, who was putting forward a theory which was almost the complete opposite. Can you briefly say that? I'd like to bring him into the discussion before we move on with

Heraclyde. That's right. This is a traditional contrast, which goes back to Plato. So the thought is that Heraclitus thinks everything is changing. Permanides thinks that change doesn't happen at all. So James was talking about monism earlier, and Permanides is the ultimate monist. He thinks that there's being and that being is unchanging eternal and that it's impossible to talk about non-being because if you talk about non-being, you contradict yourself. So that you can't even say that one thing is different from another thing, because that would imply talking about non-being. So Plato and other philosophers seem to think they need to steer a path between Heraclytus,

and parmenities. To be honest, I think this is a little bit of a distortion, not of parmenities, but of Heraclitus, because it reduces, I think, what is a more general idea in Heraclytus, namely the unity of opposites, to just this idea about flux. And if you only have the idea of flux, if you only have the idea of things having different properties at different times, then you'll be led into this kind of cradalous thought that Angie was just talking about. Does this link up with his Herklyt's ideas of relativism? Yes. Can you give us an example of what he meant by relativism?

He actually gives us a whole range of cases where opposites or contraries are unified in the same thing. And Flux is one example, right? So he says the same people go from being asleep to being awake. The same things go from being dead to alive, maybe because things die and fertilize other things. But he also talks about relativism. For example, that we value gold. Donkeys don't value gold, but they value trash, which we don't value because they like to eat it.

Another famous example is that he says seawater is simultaneously the purest and most polluted of things because it's poisonous to us but healthy for fish. The idea seems to be that from two different points of view, the same object has two different features, but it doesn't have to be only in terms of change or flux or this relativism idea. There's also more kind of intrinsic unity of opposites. We already talked about the bow. Another good example is a fragment which just says the road up and down, one and the same. And ancient authors took that to be a reference to the cosmology that James was describing earlier,

that the elements change into one each other, into one another in a cycle. And although that might be right, I think it's also worth thinking about the possibility that he just meant, look, think about a road. The road up is the road down, right? And the fact that it's going up means that it's also going down if you go in the other direction. People would say that's obvious. Where is he getting to by saying that? What he's getting to is the idea that in general there's a principle that explains the existence and in fact the purpose. and in fact the perseverance of everything,

namely that things survive by being intention in some way. And so he obviously, he picks convenient examples like the barley drink, right? So the barley drink, what he says is the barley drink stands still when it moves. That's what the fragment is. The point, and it's sort of like a salad vinaigrette, for example. So if you don't keep stirring it, it will separate and it will lose its identity. Right. So the idea that identity is common.

compromised by change, which is the inference that Cradalus draws and also the accusation that Plato throws against Heraclytus in a dialogue called the Cytis. I think Heraclitus would say back to that, no, no, identity is secured through the unity of opposites. So think of the bow, think of the barley drink. Can you take up this notion of the unity of opposite, James Warren, and develop it, please? Well, we've got two kinds of opposition, I think. You've got... some of the examples that Peter was just giving you were suggesting there's some things display opposite properties at one and the same time. So at one in the same time, seawater is both unhealthy for humans to drink, but wonderfully healthy for seafish to live in. At other times you have oppositions like that of the river or other fragments where things display opposed properties at different times.

and these are both supposed, I think, to give us the notion that that these kinds of differences in perspective are part and parcel of the nature of the world that we shouldn't be alarmed by the thought that one and the same thing can display these opposite characteristics. In fact, coming, as he said in the first fragment, describing the nature of each thing and saying how it is, just involves us recognising the very fact that item

around us in the world might display these oppositions and that's just how they are. We'd be wrong, for example, to neglect the fact that sea water is wonderfully excellent for seafish to swim in. Now that doesn't mean we can go and live in the sea because we're not seafish, we're humans. But we should recognise that our human perspective is just one perspective on the world

and that world will display opposite properties according to different other perspectives that other animals might have. So there's a wholeness about the way he looks at the world, isn't that? Yes, absolutely. It's a wholeness that he's drawing our attention to, but simultaneously drawing our attention to the fact that we are, we adopt a certain particular perspective on that world, given our human nature and so on,

that's just one of the perspectives available. So he contrasts that perspective with the perspective of different kinds of animals. So we've had the donkeys and there are pigs and there are fish in his fragments. but also perhaps a divine perspective, according to which all of these oppositions are somehow resolved and in God's perspective, these oppositions come together in the greater unity. Angie Hobbes, the word logos came up earlier

and it seems to be very important, if not critically important, to an understanding of Clidas. Can you tell us what he meant by it? From what I've read, there are several interpretations. So if you go through the several briskly and then tell us the one that you rest on. Okay, so we know it's foundational to his philosophy because his opening fragment is of the Logos,

which is thus always uncomprehending a humans, both before they've heard it and after they've heard it. It can mean a rational ordering and unifying principle of the cosmos. It can mean human reason and the products of human reason, such as books, words, accounts, and so on. I think he means both.

I think he is saying there is a rational, regulating order or ratio to the universe, which regulates the change, which regulates the tension between opposites, which creates, or indeed is, the unity out of these opposing surface tensions. That's an organising principle, ordering principle. Exactly. Humans, as James has been saying, don't have a full grasp of this unifying order. God does. We have the quota, for God, all things are good and beautiful and just. Humans see some things as just and others as unjust.

We see the surface flux and tension and oppositions, but there is an underlying unity formed by the Logos. However, because we're not completely disconnected from it, because we do contain within us human reasons. and the products of human reason in books and words and language and so on. So through perfecting our powers of reason, we can get a bit closer to the cosmic logos. We are in a sense a microcosm of the macrocosm. And this is an idea we're going to see that the stoics and indeed early Christian writers taking up.

So there is a connection between what humans say and write, logos in that sense, the cosmic order. Peter Adamson, Angi's mentioned religion. What kind of religious beliefs, if any, did Heraclitus hold? Well, he certainly has some religious beliefs, if by that we mean believing in God. There are several fragments about God, as Angie's just mentioned. What sort of God did he believe in? Well, I think he's in some ways reacting negatively to traditional Greek ideas about the gods, such as you would find in Homer and Hesiod. And here he's picking up something we already find in an earlier philosopher named Xenophonies, who had complained that in Homer, for example, we find that

gods committing adultery and getting into fights. And Schenophonies said that that can't be right, because if there were more than one gods, they'd share the same nature, and in fact, they'd just be one. And I think Heraclitus would certainly have agreed with that. What powers did he think that his God had? Well, it's a little bit hard to say. I think... Did this God personally involved with people? Did he promise eternal life? Eternal life, the sort of things that later Christianity promised?

I think it's more like a cosmic ordering principle. So he says, at one point he says, Thunderbolt steers all things, which seems to associate God with fire, something the Stoics will pick up on. But I think usually when he talks about God, he's contrasting the divine point of view to the human point of view. And it's this point that Angie was just making,

which is that God sees all of these opposites as unified, whereas we don't, right? We see it only from one perspective. We do see it from one perspective, but there is room for improvement. I think this is one of the things that Heraclitus is trying to do through his work. He's not just saying, yes, you're humans, you have mortal limitations. You're never going to get the whole picture. I think he's also saying, but you can make progress towards it.

And one of the ways you can do that is through recognizing the connection between your human reason and capacity for language and the divine ordering Logos. and the more you work on your reason and your linguistic capacities, perhaps through studying my paradoxes in depth, the closer you can get to God. And maybe one of the reasons he's choosing to write in paradox is because he is forcing us to think for ourselves and improve our own rational powers.

Before we move across to James Warnage, I'd like to do in a moment, can you tell us that there seems to be a clear connection between something that Heraclitus writes and the Gospel of St. John, of five, six centuries, later. Can you just tell us that and then we'll move on? Yeah, well, in the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God.

That's Heraclitus? That's the beginning of St. John's Gospel. I know, but is that also Heraclitus? No, but of course we have seen that Logos is absolutely foundational to his view of the... But did he write anything like that? He didn't, but, via the Stoic philosophers,

this notion that the Logos is this ordering, regulating, unifying, principle and that humans have a sort of spark of it within themselves, a sort of scintilla of the divine rational fire, if you like. That idea via the Stoics feeds into early Christian writers. You've got people like Clement of Alexandria who's often trying to see Heraclitus as anticipating various aspects of the Gospels. Now, there's one very beautiful aphorism of Heraclitus which intrigues me. And it puts me in mind of St. Mark's Gospel, though I,

I haven't read about it. It's eternity is a child at play playing drafts. The kingdom is a child's. Now that, I immediately thought of St Mark's Gospel when I read that, this sort of notion that you need this open, fresh, childlike attitude to get closer to God. So I think it's not surprising

that early Christian writers thought they could see some connections. James Warren. Well, I think we need to be a little careful here that not to interpret too heavily Heraclitus in the light of the later sort of stoic perspective on these things. He certainly does have a view that there's a kind of wisdom that we humans can attain. But I think it would be a rash perhaps to think

this is a way of our approximating to a kind of divine perspective on the world. I think the better idea would be that we can come to appreciate the fact that we have a human perspective and appreciating it as such. rather than thinking that we can somehow attain a godlike view of the world. Just a second, can we develop this a bit more? So can you develop that a bit more?

Because it's an interesting point here. Well, there are two possibilities here. One idea is that through coming to think carefully about the sorts of provocative statements that Heratitis is giving you, you may come to view that unity of the world that perhaps he suggests that a divine, perspective on the world might comprehend. In that way, as some later ancient philosophers say,

we can come to approximate divinity and we can come to adopt a kind of godlike stance. Peter Amson, he was, I want to move on now, and Heracly was notoriously critical of others, and he went for the greats. I mean, he lambasted Homer and Hesiod and his near contemporary Pythagrass was brutally dismissed. What was going on now?

Yeah, he actually says Homer, be beaten with a stick and thrown out of the contests, the dramatic contests. And it's interesting because I was just suggesting that he agreed. Why did he consider that punishment due to Homer? Right. Well, I think he groups in Homer along with Hesiod and some other people we think of as pre-Socratics, like Xenophonies, even though he probably agreed with him about God. And I think the criticism he makes of them that's most dominant in the fragments

is that they are people who acquire lots of laws. learning. And I think he associates that with the idea of sort of believing whatever you hear. So his view is that there's kind of what people usually do in order to become wise, which is just listen to the traditional teachings, which of course are very strongly associated with Homer and Hesiod. Or you can think for yourself, which is what Heraclytus says he has done and what he wants you to do. There's another fragment actually which says that eyesight is a better witness than hearing. And it's not quite clear what that means, but I think maybe what he means is, you know, look for yourself. Don't just listen to what other people think. There's a cutting edge,

isn't it? I can't remember accurately. But is it, does he say learning doesn't make you wise, look at Pythagoras? He says, if lots of learning made people wise, then it would, or gave you understanding, or it is noose, then it would have made these people wise. And he names, he see it, Pythagoras, Xenophonis, and Hecateus, who's a, who's a, historian. Was he known as a castigator of his contemporaries? Well, he was certainly known as a castigator of the people in his hometown. So he got along with them very badly. There's a story that he was offered the chance to write laws for the city and he said, this is such a badly run city that I'm not interested. There's the story about him going off into the wilderness, which

supposedly led to his death because he acquired dropsy, which means the build up a fluid in your body. Should we do his death? No, we'll do his death. We're going to go in if you don't mind. I don't want to kill him off too soon. And you want to come in. Angie Hobbs. Oh, you didn't? Oh, I thought you did. No, I was going to pick out something James said earlier, but it would fit here.

I think we need to be clear. I don't think anybody's suggesting, and I'm certainly not suggesting that Heraclitus ever thinks that we can become God. He's always very clear that we are mortals and have this mortal perspective. But I do think he thinks that we can make improvements and there are better and worse ways of having a mortal perspective.

And so to sort of put James and Peter's points together, I think he thinks that by rejecting this sort of learning by rote, which he is not in favour of, and exploring yourself, I looked into myself, he says, and trying to examine your own soul, your own little fragment of the Logos, I think he does believe that though we can never imitate God or get that close, we can make him, improvements. Otherwise, why is he

bothering to critique all the authorities who've gone before? Peter, briefly, I want to move on now. I'm going on from God. Just before we move away from God and religion, I just wanted to point out that there's strong evidence that Heraclitus did believe that souls survive death

and that they'll be punished for what they've done. So maybe by God. So it does make a big difference to you, whether you're good or bad. James Rohan, this is a big bundle of a question, and I Well, I don't apologise. It's worth now.

Thank you. He influenced Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics. This is the beginning of the firm stem of Western philosophy to which somebody said

We're all footnotes or you lot have been all footnotes. So this is a powerful influence on powerful people. Can you just give us some central notion as to why what he said

was so influential on these people? Well, the Let's take Plato and the Stoics, perhaps. I think Aristotle had less time for Heraclitus than these other two. For Plato, what struck Plato about the Heraclytean insight was this idea that certainly the sorts of things you encounter in your everyday life, the sort of perceptible world, is subject to displaying these opposing properties at different times, maybe at the same time.

And this worried Plato because he wanted things that you can know to be stable and not displaying this kind of intrinsic opposition. So in some moods, Plato thinks that that will rule out lots of the sorts of things you might come across in everyday life as proper objects of knowledge. If you combine that with the thought that there might really

be proper objects of knowledge that don't change and so on, then you're beginning to move towards a sort of platonic notion of the forms to contrast with this world of perception. For the Stoics, I think they took

from Heraclitus, and we know Cleanthes, the Stoic, wrote works on Heraclitus, so they were very interested in him. They took two principal ideas, I think. First of all, this idea of, I think, Angie mentioned it before, a rational principle governing the world, an active rational, causal principle. And secondly, this notion of fire as a kind of foundational element, and the Stoics more or less identified these two in various moods and saw a rational principle built into the very foundations of the world, guiding it along everything it does, and eventually, after so many years,

returning it all to a great conflagration. And Angie Hobbes, as I understand it, Heraclitus' influence, was still powerful when we go to Hegel and Nietzsche, and it's still... Oh, yes, I mean, Hegel likes the idea of opposites and apparent tensions combining to form, you know, a greater harmonies and unity, and the importance of resolution through conflict.

He writes about that at the beginning of his logic, for instance. Nietzsche's profoundly influenced. In Eke Homo, Nietzsche says that in some ways the doctrine of Zarathustra, and thus spake Zarathustra and about the importance of becoming and so on, is anticipated by Heraclitus. And I think in Ekehomo, Nietzsche also says that he feels a deep proximity to Heraclitus and that he feels warmer. I think he says he feels warmer.

when he's in proximate to Heraclitus than to any other philosopher. And then for Heidegger, again, Heidegger loves the pre-Socratics, as we call them. Not as Heidegger will call them as we'll see in a minute, particularly. Because for Heidegger, things go wrong in Western philosophy with Plato and Platonic metaphysics. So he wants to go back to a time, particularly the time of Heraclitus, when philosophy is, in Heidegger's view, uncontaminated by Platonic metaphysics. and he believes that Heidegger writes about the experience of being as becoming and the experience of being as something in history,

which is then messed up by Plato. I think Heidegger would like us to get rid of the whole label pre-Socratic. Socrates is the problem and Plato is the problem. Can we talk about the man finally, Peter, and the death of Heraclitus? What sort of real evidence do we have for it before? you tell us the story. Oh, probably no real evidence, but the story is really good. So we'll end with a little tail. The tail's probably fabricated out of his thoughts and fragments. So he's said that the soul is fiery, right? So my favorite fragment is that the reason people act the way they do when they're drunk is that their souls are wet.

So the story is that he acquired dropsy because he was out in the mountains eating herbs. He came into the town and said to the doctors in the town in a riddle, can you make a drought out of a rainstorm? And they didn't know what he was talking about. So there's a joke about him being obscure. So he buried himself in the dung in a cow stall in order to evaporate off the water through the heat. And this didn't work. And so he died there in the cow stall.

So there's obviously a kind of jokey story, making fun of his philosophical teachings and weaving that into an anecdote about his death. But it's a good anecdote. Well, it is. Thank you very much. Thank you, Angie Hobbs, James, Warren, and Peter Adamson. next week we'll be talking about the concord out of worms in 1122,

and thank you very much for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as The Forum, the discussion programme about global ideas. To find out more, visit BBCworldservis.com slash forum.