SOURCE: David Wiggins, "Heraclitus' Conceptions of Flux, Fire and Material Persistence," in Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen, edited by Malcolm Schofield and Martha Craven Nussbaum, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 1-32.

[In the following essay, Wiggins explores the context and meaning of Heraclitean theories of flux, fire, and material persistence, arguing that Heraclitus developed these concepts as a response to the natural philosophy of the Milesian thinkers Anaximander, Anaximenes, and Thales.]

Even when they are most worthy of amazement, things of daily occurrence pass us by unnoticed.

Seneca, Quaestiones Naturelles 7.1.1

It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of fact above specified. It has recently been argued that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers.

Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

1 Heraclitus and the Milesians

1.1 In recent decades there has been a tendency among scholars to question whether Heraclitus was, in the same sense as the Milesians were, a cosmologist: '[Heraclitus'] real subject is not the physical world but the human condition, which for the Greeks means the condition of mortality … Like [his] substitution of Fire for [Anaximenes'] Air, any changes in detail must have been designed not to improve the physical scheme in a scientific sense but to render its symbolic function more drastic.'¹

It would be foolish to deny that problems about mortality, fallibility and the human perspective were an important part of Heraclitus' main subject. But this is not inconsistent with his having seen himself as answerable in the first instance to the same questions as the Milesians, whatever his reservations about their would-be polymathi :

One thing is wisdom: to understand the plan by which all things are steered through all things (B41).

One from all and all from one (B10).

It is wise to hearken not to me but to my logos and to confess that all things are one (B50).

Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes had been concerned not only with particular phenomena that aroused their curiosity but also with the description and explanation of the world as a whole: How did the world come to exist and to be what it is? And now that it does exist, what sort of thing is it, and how does it maintain itself? Heraclitus inherited these questions from the Milesians, and he asked others of his own. about the soul, and about human destiny, cognition and language. I shall contend that the new problems were seen by Heraclitus as requiring an unconditional willingness on his part to attempt some better than merely symbolic response to those of the Milesians. Indeed, if the reading that I shall propose for certain passages is accepted, then it will appear that he saw himself as positively obliged to improve upon his predecessors' cosmological theories.

1.2 There is a second affinity I claim to find between Heraclitus and the Milesians. If we are to trace any pattern in the doctrines that have come down to us as his, we need to see him as exploiting just as recklessly as his Milesian predecessors did what is sometimes called the Argument to the Best Explanation:² If q is the best explanation why p holds, then, if p is true, q must be true too.³

Whatever G. E. L. Owen may make of the ascription of the method to Heraclitus, it is he who must bear some considerable part of any blame or credit that it provokes. For it is one of Owen's contributions to our understanding of Greek philosophy to have drawn attention to the central part (insufficiently remarked in modern times) that is played in Greek thought by the idea of Sufficient Reason.⁴ Owen has traced the idea from Leucippus, Parmenides and Melissus⁵ back to Anaximander, where Anaximander's mastery of Sufficient Reason is brilliantly demonstrated by his replacement of Thales' supposition that water is what holds the world up by the insight (cf. Aristotle, de Caelo 295b 11) that the earth is held up by nothing and simply stays where it is because it is in equipoise with other things, there being no reason for its shifting in any particular direction.

What is the connection between Sufficient Reason and the Argument to the Best Explanation? Suppose nothing holds true unless there is reason for its so holding. Then if p is true, something must be true which explains why p is true. But then it must be possible to argue backwards—albeit against the direction of implication—and infer from p's truth whatever best explains why p. The Principle of Sufficient Reason gives us the Argument to the Best Explanation⁶ then, and in doing this it suggests a research strategy—the same strategy which Charles Darwin seeks to justify in the passage of Origin of Species prefixed to this essay. Any phenomenon that is observed calls for explanation. But, wherever explanation is called for, one should postulate as true that which best explains the phenomenon, regardless of whether the putatively explanatory fact is in any way directly observable. Improving and amplifying the precept a little, it is natural to expand upon it as Plato did: when we have several explanations of distinct phenomena arrived at in this manner, we must test our explanations and the consequences of our explanations for consistency with one another and with everything else we believe. Then, in the light of our findings under that head, we must revise and modify or develop our explanations. Which being done, we must go on, find more phenomena to explain, use these explananda to gain favour for more hypotheses, and then collect all our hypotheses together in order to test the new accumulated total commitment for consistency, plausibility etc …

No articulate statement of this method is to be found in Greek philosophy before Plato reaches for the Method of Dialectic in Phaedo and Meno, and tries in the Republic to marry it up with the idea of ultimate explanation in terms of the Good, which Leibniz inherited from him and brought into a quite special relation with Sufficient Reason. Nor is there any fully explicit statement of the Principle of Sufficient Reason before Parmenides. So sceptics will say that primitive natural philosophers such as the ones we are concerned with could not possibly have engaged in reasoning that wants so sophisticated a description. But to this I would reply first that Anaximander and Heraclitus and their successors were not primitive thinkers; and, second, that even if they were, we should still need to remember that very simple patterns of reasoning can satisfy very complicated theoretical descriptions. (Think even of the syllogism in Barbara.) The sophistication of the description we have to give in order to see the argument from the best explanation as a rational argument is no reason not to credit the Milesians (however methodologically unconscious they may have been) with the corresponding procedure—or with the conviction that is made for the method, that we live in a universe (as Edward Hussey puts it) of 'order, lawlike regularity susceptible and of truly intellectually general, all-embracing satisfying construction',⁷ succeptible of truly general, all-embracing explanatory hypotheses that stand in no need of qualification or adjustment ad hoc. (Cf. B41 etc., quoted in 1.1.)

1.3 From the nature of the hypothesis, the claim that Heraclitus and the Milesians have a common method can only be judged by the coherence and order that it will eventually discover to us if we see these men as building up their world-picture in response to the demands made upon them by the principle of Sufficient Reason and in the light of the precept always to argue back to the best explanation. In the interim, some more immediate conviction of Heraclitus' continuity with the Milesians may be created by reconsideration of the familiar text where it seems that Heraclitus makes allusion to Anaximander. This is the correction that Heraclitus seems to offer of Anaximander's doctrine of mutual reparation. Anaximander had said:

Whence things originate, thither according to necessity they must return and perish [that is, back into the same components]; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice in accordance with the assessment of time (Bl).

It would appear that Heraclitus found much to agree with in this opinion, offering an excellent gloss on Anaximander's most probable meaning:

Cold things grow warm, warm cools, moist grows parched, dry dampens (B126).

But there was a fault that Heraclitus found with Anaximander:

One must understand that war is universal, strife is justice, and that absolutely everything happens by strife and by necessity (B80);

and he denounced Homer (cf. Aristotle, Eth. Eud. 1235a26 [+ scholiast on Iliad XVIII 107] = A22) for saying 'Would that strife would perish from among gods and men', complaining that Homer did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe.

Now it is scarcely denied by anybody that B80 is a clear and (by Heraclitean standards) respectful allusion to Anaximander.⁸ What has been insufficiently remarked is that such a disagreement between the two of them only makes sense against some background of agreement. What was this background? Only one answer readily suggests itself. They agree in wanting to explain the maintenance of the world order. Evidently they also agree that the maintenance of the world order (or the maintenance, had we better say in Anaximander's case, of this particular whorl off the Apeiron?) must be managed from within a definite store of something or other. Unless this were agreed, why otherwise should there be any need for what Anaximander calls requital for injustice and what Heraclitus prefers to see as mere exchange—one thing's superseding another, as one piece replaces another on a square in the game of pessoi? (Cf. B52) If the two agree that this sort of process must be postulated, the disagreement between them relates only to the proper view to take of the justice or injustice of the process they otherwise agree about.

Here of course I am guessing—as I believe everyone interested in either Heraclitus or Anaximander ought to be obliged to guess. And obviously the guess must be pitted against any rival suggestion about what the background of agreement was. But this particular suggestion, together with the special idea that it imports of the autonomie steering or regulation of the world order, has the signal advantage of engaging well with information that we have from Aristotle about his predecessors. Aristotle says that one of their concerns was that coming to be and passing away should not give out.⁹ On my reading, Anaximander and Heraclitus will be prominent examples of philosophers with this preoccupation.

1.4 Such familiar reflections will lead into others. In Anaximander certain questions appear to have been left open about the origin and continuous renewal of the world as we know it. Presumably Bl was his most striking contribution to the problem. But Heraclitus himself closed these questions. Not only was

this cosmos made neither of god nor of man, but always has been, is and always will be, an everlasting fire going out in measures and kindling in measures;¹⁰

the steering too (or the governance of the world as we know it) is said by Heraclitus to be from within, not, as it may have been for Anaximander, by the Boundless from without. (Cf. on Anaximander, Aristotle, Physics 203b7ff.) For whatever Heraclitus' thunderbolt is, whatever his Zeus may be, and whatever the relations may be between thunderbolt and Heraclitean fire (perhaps these things can be debated), thunderbolt is or stands for something inside the world; and

Thunderbolt steers all things (B64).

But then, if the steering of the kosmos was from within and if the maintenance of its order and vital activity was a question that required an answer, the idea of autonomie regulation that appears in the Anaximander fragment was exactly the idea that Heraclitus needed. One can scarcely imagine a more natural continuity between the doctrines of two independent thinkers, where the second knows the work of the first and improves or simplifies or develops it.

2 A hypothetical reconstruction of the scaffolding of Heraclitus' theory of flux

2.1 I embark now on the hazardous and experimental work of the reconstruction of the philosophical motivation for Heraclitus' world view—a necessary task, but one that was speculative even in early antiquity. So far I have credited him with a Milesian method—the method of postulating whatever appears the best explanation of a phenomenon. I have quoted his conviction of the unity of things (which, as the reader will have guessed, I want to see as related to one consequence of that method). And I have implicated him in what I argue to have been a Milesian question about the maintenance of the world's motion, order and vital activity. To complete that stage of the reconstruction I have to ask what observations or phenomena can be expected to have given him the question of the constant renewal of the world and made it as pressing as the fragments cited in 1.4 above have suggested to me that it was. The most natural answer would appear to be:

(a) the everyday observation of the conspicuous but not manifestly ubiquitous disintegration of terrestrial order, and the observation of the constant transmutation and decay of terrestrial substances;

(b) the equally familiar observation of the habitual tendency of terrestrial motions to run down;

(c) the observation of the continuation, in spite of all this, of the world that we know, replenished by creation, growth, and new motion. When one substance ceases to exist another takes its place. When one motion is spent, others appear and inherit its impetus.

Observations (a) (b) (c) suffice to justify the postulation of a theory of reparation. But what else beside these things did Heraclitus observe and seek to explain and bring into harmony with them? He is credited with all sorts of hypotheses about sun, moon and stars as bowls of fire, and about the periodic and regular inclinations of these bowls. Such hypotheses, if Heraclitus really propounded them, were evidently designed to explain differences of night and day, or the warmth and coolness of the seasons. I am disposed to agree with the sceptical historian of science D. R. Dicks¹¹ that it is 'doubtful whether any of this [would-be astronomical detail] represents even approximately what Heraclitus thought'; but the detailed accuracy of the reports matter far less than a presumption which they help to sustain, that such celestial happenings were among the phenomena that Heraclitus treated as explananda. Dicks is surely right again when he declares, on the basis of fragments such as B94,

The sun will not transgress his due measure: otherwise the Erinyes, the ministers of justice, will find him out¹²

and B 100

… the cycles the sun presides over, in order to determine and adjudicate the changes and seasons that produce everything,

that 'two things in particular struck [Heraclitus] when he contemplated [the cosmic] order, first the fact of its continuity, and second its periodicity'. But if this is what impresses about the heavens, then how is the apparent anomaly, diversity and small-scale disorder of terrestrial phenomena and the limited persistence of ordinary continuants to be subsumed under one order of nature with celestial imperishability, continuity and periodicity? Surely what underlies celestial stability must be some regular lawlike process or processes. Nothing less will suffice to explain celestial phenomena. But if so, then, despite appearances, regularity of process must underlie terrestrial phenomena too—unless we are to breach the a priori requirement of unity (see B41 etc. quoted in 1.1). In the name of unity, which is only another aspect of Sufficient Reason, the orderly process that is manifest in the heavens must be something that the natural philosopher can recklessly hypothesise to hold absolutely everywhere, and so upon earth—in spite of the apparent contrast between the perishability of terrestrial bodies and the apparent imperishability of heavenly ones. The conviction of unity ('one from all and all from one') forces us to see the terrestrial order as continuously renewed in spite of disintegration and change; and the celestial order as subject to continuous processes of change in spite of its regularity, periodicity and everlastingness. But if unseen elemental processes are uniformly regular and directed, then anomaly is an illusion that results from our imperfect understanding of their interaction, and, if all involve change, then permanence or apparent cessation of activity represents equilibrium (temporary equality, not armistice) between unseen forces that are opposing one another actively.

2.2 When he reaches this point Heraclitus has advanced well past the observational-cum-hypothetical stage of scientific theorising that I began by describing. He is offering redescriptions of phenomena themselves in terms more theory-contaminated than any that our senses could offer, and then reconceptualising the classes of terrestrial and celestial phenomena in defiance of observed differences.

The hidden joining/harmony is stronger than the visible one (B52).

One hypothesis leads to the necessity for another. Inasmuch as every one of the elemental processes hypothesised must, unless resisted by others, take over the whole world, the belief in the continuance of the world obliges him to believe in the irresolubility (by treaty, by exhaustion, or by any other means) of the struggle in which they are locked. Strife is ubiquitous and universal. But being the instrument of renewal and restitution, it is also just.

2.3 So much for a first attempt at reconstruction of how we may find it intelligible that Heraclitus makes perpetual process or change the model by which to redescribe everything. We have motivated the idea of a flux that is ubiquitous, incessant, exceptionless and all-embracing, and in virtue of which not only all living things flow but absolutely all perceptible things—stones, rocks, even the sun (cf. B8)—flow (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics 987a33, 1078b 14, Melissus DK B8). And, seeing Heraclitus in this light, we find nothing to astonish us in Plato's report that:

Heraclitus said that everything is in a stage of change and nothing stays stable, and likening things to the flow of a river he says that you could not step twice into the same river (Cratylus 402A)¹³

or in Aristotle's testimony:

And some say that all existing things without exception are in constant movement, but this escapes our perception. Supporters of this theory do not state clearly what kind of motion they mean or whether they mean all kinds (Physics 253b9-12).

It is plain that those physicists who assert that all sensible things are always in motion are wrong … They mostly conceive this as alteration (things are always in flux and decay, they say), and they go so far as to speak even of becoming and perishing as a process of alteration (ibid. 265a2-7).

It is true that someone may still ask why we should believe that everything in heaven and earth is in flux and participates in a hidden harmony of opposites. But the ready answer to that question is that Heraclitus' argument or doctrine is simply a bold generalisation from certain special cases or phenomena. It was the height of madness to extend his theory from these phenomena to absolutely everything. But before one derides the theory for that reason one should ask how else Sufficient Reason is to be reconciled with the convictions that our senses make it nearly impossible for us to abandon, about earth and sky and the seemingly continuous motion and renewal of the kosmos. (And how else, we can then reflect, is the ordinary behaviour of colliding bodies to be explained, unless all bodies contain opposing processes?)

2.4 What further ancient evidence can be adduced for Heraclitus' involvement in this way of thinking? Two points at least can be confirmed, one being general and the other an indispensable point of detail.

First, the reconstruction makes goodish sense of a report of Plato's that is certainly intended to collect up Heraclitus' as well as other philosophers' opinions:

Coming to be, and what passes for being, are produced by change, while not being and ceasing to be are produced by inactivity. For instance, the hot, or fire, which we are told actually generates and governs everything else, is itself generated by means of movement and friction; and these are changes. Moreover the class of living things is produced by means of those same processes … The condition of the body is destroyed, isn't it, by inactivity and illness but to a great extent preserved by exercise and change … States of inactivity rot things and destroy them whereas states of activity preserve them … So long as the heavenly cycle and the sun are in motion, everything is and is preserved, in the realms of both gods and men; whereas if that motion … were brought to a standstill, everything would be destroyed (Plato, Theaetetus 153A-D, trans. J. H. McDowell).

In the second place, confirmation is to be found in Diogenes Laertius for the way in which I have claimed that Heraclitus combines an ontology of substances—the belief in what we should call substances—with his belief in universal flux:

The totality of things is composed out of fire and is dissolved into it. Everything comes to be in accordance with fate, and the totality of things is harmoniously joined together through enantiodromia (running in opposition) (D.L. IX 7 [=DK A1]).

The word enantiodromia—whatever it was that prompted it to Diogenes—is tailor-made for the account that our reconstruction has been forced to give of continuants, of permanency, and of the appearance of cessation of activity.

2.5 And here at last we arrive at the river fragment. For reasons that will become more fully transparent in 5.1 below and following, the version that I accept as likely to be closest to Heraclitus' official statement of his doctrine (no matter what other poetical or rhetorical effects he may have attempted) is Kirk's reconstruction:

Upon those who step into the same rivers different and again different waters flow. The waters scatter and gather, come together and flow away, approach and depart (Fragments 12 and 91; text, contamination and translation after Kirk, Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge 1954), 367-84).

The river is at once an eminent and observable instance of flow and a metaphorical hostage for myriads of invisible cases of heavenly and celestial flux.¹⁴ It is also an eminent instance and metaphysical hostage for processes of renewal which Heraclitus sees as resulting from the equilibria or superpositions of opposing forces that underlie substance. In this reconstruction the fragment will remind one forcibly that Heraclitus' thinking is untouched by Parmenides. Heraclitus is not concerned with how it is conceptually possible for a substance to survive through change as that very same substance.¹⁵ Why (unless one is sophisticated enough or muddled enough to be confused by identity and persistence) should that be a problem? What he asks is how a thing could survive unless it did change. A substance can persist through time, but only by virtue of constant process, and if work is done:

The barley drink disintegrates if it is not constantly stirred (B125).

The barley drink was a drink made of barley-meal, grated cheese and Pramnian wine (to which on one well known occasion when Odysseus was her guest, Circe added honey and magical drugs).¹⁶ Being neither a mixture nor even a suspension it separated and reverted rapidly to its constituents unless it was stirred vigorously. What the barley drink stands for is at once conditional persistence and the tendency towards disintegration which Heraclitus sees as so general that order, renewal and arrest of disintegration are what need explaining. He explains them without explaining them away, however; and if we accept that, with the barley drink as with everything else, what work explains is renewal and persistence, and if we also remember the correction to Anaximander, then we shall be led to one more reflection that belongs here: wherever one substance does persist by work and through process being set against process, there will always be other substances which, for just that reason, did not benefit by the application of work, or had it withdrawn from them.

2.6 I shall return in section 5 to the misunderstandings that Heraclitus' doctrine has provoked in the minds of those who have been schooled to put strange constructions upon ordinary descriptions of change and find philosophical difficulty in the idea of a changing substance. But in the interim, let us complete the first statement of the Heraclitean doctrine that persistence and numerical identity require change. It is important that this is not the doctrine that some continuant substance or stuff persists through every change—a Milesian idea which the Heraclitean doctrine of process is in flight from. Nor is it the doctrine that an individual substance can persist provided that just any change befalls it. Admittedly, there is a great need for an account of what changes promote or allow the survival of a particular sort of continuant and what changes will entail destruction. This really is a good problem. (My own answer to the problem would depend on the natural distinction between answer to the question what a thing is and what it is like.¹⁷ I claim that once we focus on the foundations of this distinction, which is almost the same as that between substantive and adjective (cf. Aristotle's Categories 1-5), it will appear plainly that particular concepts of continuants of this or that natural kind both require of their compilants certain sorts of change and also delimit the changes that such compilants can undergo except on pain of extinction: see below, 5.3.) But it is not clear that Heraclitus himself, enjoying the good fortune of writing before the waters had been muddied, saw any of this as an urgent or intractable problem, or even as a problem.¹⁸ He takes the concept of change for granted. But he does not therefore misconceive it.

3 Fire

3.1 If 2.5 is correct, we must expect that, as one force or another force temporarily prevails in the struggle at any place, there will be a shift in the locus of equilibrium. And wherever this shift occurs we have seen that we must expect a gradual but continuous run-down of substances going past their acme in favour of others that are in progress towards their acme. We must expect this because Heraclitus supposes that there is a limited store of that in virtue of which there can be any processes at all. If, however, we now speculate with Heraclitus about the long-term general tendency of the struggle of elemental processes and of everything that depends on this struggle, then we have a chance to plait together at last the following ideas: the unity of things, perpetual flux, the just or equitable replacement of one thing by another thing, and fire.

The interpretation of Heraclitus' theory of fire that I want to propose rests on the following fragments:

This world or world-order, which is the same for all, no one of the gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be, an ever-living Fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures (B30).

Fire lives the death of earth and air lives the death of fire, water lives the death of air, and earth of water (B76).

The turnings of fire are first sea; and of sea half is earth, half whirlwind (B31A).

Earth melts back into sea and is measured by the same tale as before it became earth (B31B).

All things are an exchange or requital for Fire, and Fire for all things, like goods for gold and gold for goods (B90).

B30 appears to assure us that the kosmos is a perpetual fire. Yet fire is extinguished. So fire itself is not the only elemental form. B31A and B31B tell us about fire's particular turnings or transformations into other things, e.g. into sea and earth. But B90 encourages us to suppose that, when sea changes into earth and back again, there is something that is not lost at all. And surely Heraclitus thinks the same applies in the cases where fire is condensed into sea or sea congeals into earth as when earth melts back into sea and sea evaporates back into fire (which Diogenes Laertius says Heraclitus says is the process by which fire is nourished). If so, then Heraclitus must think that, whatever happens, no fire is ever lost in the cycle of transformations ('Beginning and end are shared in the circumference of a circle', B103). If everything else is to fire as goods are to gold, then that cannot help but mean that the total fire-value of fire, sea and earth (plus prēstēr, plus whatever else) taken together is constant. Suppose then that we were to try to think of Heraclitus' fire not as a particular form or stuff but as the agent of all process—or as the determinable of process itself. If we give in to this temptation, we are not the first to do so. See the discussion of the etymology of 'Zeus' and 'dikaion' in Plato's Cratylus 412D:

Those who suppose all things to be in motion conceive the greater part of nature to be a mere receptacle, and they say there is a penetrating power which passes through all this and is the instrument of creation in all, and is the subtlest and swiftest element … this element which superintends all things and pierces all (diaion) is rightly called just (dikaion) … [When] I begin … to interrogate [these philosophers] gently … they try to satisfy me with one observation after another … One says that justice is the sun … [one says] it is fire itself … another says, No, not fire itself but the hot itself that is in the fire (quoted by Kirk, Heraclitus, 363.).

Suppose now that we see some trace here of a Heraclitean conception of Fire, or of something that those who had the whole text of Heraclitus found that they had to say in order to sustain their stance as Heracliteans. Then what I believe we shall conclude is that, without having any notion of how the relevant measure of process would be constructed, Heraclitus committed himself to the idea that the total quantity of process is constant. I do not mean that he had the conceptual resources to make this last claim explicit. He has to prefer such expressions as the metaphor we encounter in B90. But if we try to transpose what he says there into something more literal, and then collate that with B31B, no smaller claim will do justice to the advance he has made from the Milesian standpoint. Fire is no more that out of which all things are made than gold is a constituent of all the things that buy and sell in the market place. Gold is one stuff among others. But it is that by reference to which, or that in terms of which, all other stuffs can be measured there. Fire is for the world order, then, what gold is for the agora—the measure. Extending Heraclitus' metaphor, one may go on to say that, notwithstanding the local extinguishing of fire, and notwithstanding temporal variation in the proportions of the elemental forms (see below, section 4), the great cosmic enterprise as a whole trades neither at a loss nor at a profit; but, in virtue of a reciprocity between processes that are getting their way and processes that are falling back, the books always balance exactly. However much the assets are redeployed or transformed, the capital is constant as measured in measures of fire.

A comparison between fire, conceived as Heraclitus conceived it, and energy, as that was conceived in eighteenth-nineteenth century physics, would be anachronistic, but perhaps only relatively mildly so. Many plain men have scarcely any better idea of what energy is than Heraclitus had of what fire was. But most of us have some conception of energy. The common idea, and the idea that holds our conception of energy in place and holds Heraclitus' conception of fire in place, is the idea of whatever it is that is conserved and makes possible the continuance of the world-order. 'Fire' is Heraclitus' counter for that, 'energy' (or energy plus matter, conceived independently of energy in nineteenth-century fashion) is ours. A physicist would be needed to take the point further. But that does not mean that Heraclitus cannot have taken it this far.

3.2 This sort of reading of B90 and B31A, B is not new. I find that Vlastos and others¹⁹ have anticipated it:

[B90] identifies fire as the thing that remains constant in all transformations and implies that its measure is the same or the common measure in all things … The invariance of [fire's] measure is what accounts for the observance of the metron in all things, and fire is therefore that which 'governs' or 'steers' all things (G. Vlastos, 'On Heraclitus', American Journal of Philology 76 (1955), 360-1).

But the very mention of energy in the modern sense will prompt others to remind me that it took European science two hundred years from the death of Galileo and at least one long and vexatious metaphysico-scientific controversy concerning vis viva to assemble the ideas of work and of potential energy (as distinct from kinetic energy), to gather the other fruits of the conceptual labours of Leibniz, Bernouilli, Helmholtz and others, formulate the principle of the conservation of energy, and then at last see the principle of the conservation of the sum of kinetic and potential energy tested by the efforts of Joule. I also expect to be informed that by the importation of the idea of energy one lays oneself open to the charge of systematic falsification of Heraclitus, a thinker much more primitive (it may be said) than any who can be recognised in this portrait.

Such a charge would rest on a misapprehension both of what I am saying, and of the conceptual provenance of the conservation principle. To make out my interpretation I do not have to credit Heraclitus with any conception at all of that which is the sum of kinetic and potential energy, where kinetic energy is 1/2mv², or even to credit him with our conception of energy as the power of doing work, where work is conceived as force times distance moved (or whatever). Nor do I have to credit Heraclitus with any cleverness that would have carried him any great distance in physics itself. I have only to credit him with having asked a question and then conceived of there being something or other whose conservation would help to answer that question. So far as I am concerned there is nothing more than this to the rapport between the energy that modern science has established to exist in the world and the thoughts of Heraclitus. I cannot forbear however to add that, whatever the complexities of arriving at an idea of energy sufficiently precise for the conservation principle to be tested and proved, one part of what eventually and painfully discovered it to human beings was a stubbornly ineradicable prejudice that is even older than philosophy:

An effect is always in proportion to the action which is necessary to produce it. René Descartes (Oeuvres I [A. T.]. See pp. 435-448)

There is always a perfect equivalence between the full cause and the whole effect (Leibniz, Reply to Abbé Catelan in Nouvelles de la Republique de Lettres, Feb. 1687, quoted in Hide Ishiguro, 'Pre-established Harmony versus Constant Conjunction', Proc. Brit. Acad. 63 (1979), 241).

No working cause can be destroyed totally or in part without producing an action equal to a decrease in the cause (Johannes Bernouilli, Opera Omnia Vol. 3, p. 56, Essay no. 135, ch. 10, §1).

The author [Clarke] objects that two soft or non-elastic Bodies meeting together lose some of their Force. I answer, No … The Forces are not destroyed but scattered among the small parts; but the case here is the same as when men change great Money into small (Leibniz: Fifth letter to Samuel Clarke).

Why are Leibniz and Bernouilli so sure? Though they proved to be right, they have no empirical evidence that it was so. Maybe the answer to this question has to do with the ultimate unintelligibility of the idea that anything could come from nothing. But the most striking demonstration of the naturalness and simplicity of this underlying thought can be found in the words that Joule spoke in St Anne's Church Reading Room, Manchester, in the 1847 address in which he first described for the world at large his experimental demonstration of the conservation principle:

You will be surprised to hear that until very recently the universal opinion has been that living force could be absolutely and irrevocably destroyed at any one's option. Thus, when a weight falls to the ground, it has been generally supposed that its living force is absolutely annihilated, and that the labour which may have been expended in raising it to the elevation from which it fell has been entirely thrown away and wasted, without the production of any permanent effect whatever. We might reason, a priori, that such absolute destruction of living force cannot possibly take place, because it is manifestly absurd to suppose that the powers with which God has endowed matter can be destroyed any more than that they can be created by man's agency; but we are not left with this argument alone, decisive as it must be to every unprejudiced mind. The common experience of every one teaches him that living force is not destroyed by the friction or collision of bodies. We have reason to believe that the manifestations of living force on our globe are, at the present time, as extensive as those which have existed at any time since its creation, or, at any rate, since the deluge—that the winds blow as strongly, and the torrents flow with equal impetuosity now, as at the remote period of 4,000 or even 6,000 years ago; and yet we are certain that, through that vast interval of time, the motions of the air and of the water have been incessantly obstructed and hindered by friction. We may conclude then, with certainty, that these motions of air and water, constituting living force, are not annihilated by friction. We lose sight of them, indeed, for a time; but we find them again reproduced. Were it not so, it is perfectly obvious that long ere this all nature would have come to a dead standstill.

How much of this would be unintelligible to a Presocratic philosopher?

4. Periodicity and variation

4.1 Among the many loose ends I have left hanging here (many of which would still hang loose, I fear, even if we had the whole book instead of fragments), let me attend to just one. What in this picture will explain periodicity, and night and day and the seasons? It seems clear that Heraclitus thought of these as corresponding to variations in the quantity or distribution of elemental forms air, sea, prēstēr, earth, etc. Diogenes Laertius reports Heraclitus as maintaining that the earth gave off bright exhalations which nourished fire and produced day by igniting in the circle of the sun; whereas the sea gave off dark exhalations which nourished moisture and by their periodic increase produced night. But luckily there is nothing to force me to try to adjudicate upon the accuracy of this report. For however it is interpreted, the report (like the verbatim fragments themselves) leaves unanswered what is the most pressing and interesting question: what causes or steers or controls these variations themselves?

Perhaps we can supply the deficit in our evidence here (or in Heraclitus' own book) by adducing the words of the zealously Heraclitean author of the Hippocratic treatise de Victu, which Bywater had the happy idea of printing with his collection of fragments of Heraclitus:

Fire can move all things always, while water can nourish all things always; but in turn each masters or is mastered to the greatest maximum or the least minimum possible. Neither of them can gain the complete mastery for the following reason. The fire as it advances to the limit of the water lacks nourishment, and so turns to where it is likely to be nourished. The water as it advances to the limit of the fire finds its motion to fail and at this point falls back (de Victu 1 3).

The explanation is thoroughly Ionian in spirit and it fills a gap in the Heraclitean theory. If we wished, and if we trusted Diogenes Laertius enough, it could be complicated and diversified by deployment of the two sorts of exhalation he mentions. But what matters is the leading idea. Every elemental process or force wants to take over the whole world, but, the closer it comes to that objective, the harder it finds it to follow up its victories, and the better conditions then become for the forces that are ranged against it to rally themselves. If we see this as a sort of feedback arrangement, then we have only to suppose that the requisite and inevitable adjustment is always slightly delayed, or that there is always overcompensation in the adjustments, in order to explain periodicity. We can see periodicity as resulting from a kind of 'hunting' between opposite and equally unstable or unmaintainable states of an unceasing struggle.²⁰

4.2 The de Victu certainly fills out the Heraclitean world-view. But more still needs to be said about periodicity. It has often been supposed that there is a conflict here between the testimonies of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle says in the de Caelo 279b 12:

That the world was generated they are all agreed, but generation over, some say that it is eternal, others say that it is destructible like any other natural formation. Others, again, with Empedocles and Heraclitus believe that there is alternation in the destructive process, which takes now this direction now that and continues without end.

There is other evidence of a complementary kind that is hard to dismiss. Simplicius says (de Caelo 94, 4):

And Heraclitus says that at one time the kosmos is burned out and at another it rises again from fire according to certain definite cycles of time in which he says it is kindling in measures and going out in measures. Later the Stoics came to be of the same opinion.

And again in in Physica 23, 38 Simplicius quotes Heraclitus as saying that:

There is a certain order and determined time in the changing of the kosmos in accordance with some preordained necessity.

There is also DK A13, which consists of passages of Aëtius and Censorinus and amounts to the claim that Heraclitus thought that there was a great year whose winter was a great flood and whose summer was an ekpurōsis (conflagration). It appears that Heraclitus and Linus supposed that the cycle consisted of 10,800 years. This is a not inconsiderable body of evidence. But many have felt that there was some conflict between all this and what Plato says in Sophistes:

The stricter Muses [e.g. Heraclitus] say 'in drawing apart it is always being drawn together.' The milder [e.g. Empedocles] relax the rule that this should always be so and speak of alternate states, in which the universe is now one and at peace through the power of love, and now many and at war with itself owing to some sort of Strife (Sophistes 242E).

What scholars have concluded from these testimonia is that we have to choose between an oscillatory or Aristotelian interpretation of Heraclitus and a Platonic interpretation in terms of instant reciprocal tension between opposites. Heraclitean scholarship itself has long oscillated between the two interpretations. Tension theorists have ignored or sought to discredit A13 and Aristotle de Caelo 279b 12, while oscillationists have even supposed that they had to tinker with the interpretation of what seems to me to be one of the clearest of Heraclitus' fragments. This is B51, a fragment whose proper paraphrase is surely:

They do not grasp how the discord of things is in fact a perfect accord. [What we have here], as with a bow or lyre, is the harmonious reciprocation of opposites, or opposing tendencies.²¹

Now anyone who sees a conflict here should start by noting that there is in fact no consistent opposition between Plato and Aristotle in this matter. In another place Aristotle confirms a steady state reading of B51:

Heraclitus says that 'it is what opposes that helps' and that 'from opposing tones comes the fairest harmonia' and 'that everything happens in accordance with strife' (EN 1155b4).

And, so soon as we understand the doctrine of fire properly, I suggest that there need be no real conflict at all between oscillation and reciprocal tension. The world is in a steady state of rapid flux;²² but this steadiness simply consists in the conservation of process or fire. Heraclitus' theory of the world requires reciprocal tension if it is to accommodate substance; and it requires oscillation if it is to accommodate periodicity. But there is simply no problem in combining both features, or in allowing continuous variation in the overall proportions of the elemental forms, if we will only see the conservation of fire in terms that are abstract enough. What then about ekpurōsis, which oscillationists like Charles Kahn now admit into Heraclitus (in reaction against Burnet and Kirk)? The idea of periodic annihilation of everything by fire is rationally objectionable (how can fire differentiate itself again?), and it spoils the accord with the de Victu passage. But nor is it forced upon us by textual evidence. For there is nothing in the conservation of fire, seen now as the conservation of quantity of process, to exclude the possibility that Heraclitus thought that every 10,800 years (or whatever) the sea rises to its maximum possible extent and takes over all it can, provoking an equal and opposite reaction in which fire conceived as an elemental form reaches out to its maximum extent, scorching almost everything.

5 Identity through time

5.1 Finally I turn to flux and identity through time. In point of general Heraclitean doctrine I have accounted Plato a reasonable witness.²³ But as a critic I think he was less excellent; either that, I would claim, or his influence has been pernicious.

An entirely typical statement of the mental condition into which we have lapsed in certain matters ever since Plato is to be found in Frege's introduction to Foundations of Arithmetic:

If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know anything about the world and everything would be plunged in confusion (p. vii).

The general context is of course arithmetic but the assertion itself carries no such restriction, and the confusion it evinces between flux and chaos echoes a well known argument in Plato's Theaetetus 182. This argument distinguishes between two kinds of change—moving in space and undergoing alteration—and it then claims that nothing can be involved in both simultaneously:

Socrates: Let us ask them 'Are all things, according to your doctrine, in motion and flux?'

Theodorus: Yes.

Socrates: Have they then both kinds of motion which we distinguished? Are they moving in space and also undergoing alteration?

Theodorus: Of course; that is if they are to be in perfect motion.

Socrates: Then if they moved only in space, but did not undergo alteration, we could perhaps say what qualities belong to those moving things which are in flux, could we not?

Theodorus: That is right.

Socrates: But since not even this remains fixed—that the thing in flux flows white, but changes, so that there is a flux of the very whiteness and a change of colour, so that it may not in that way be convicted of remaining fixed, it is possible to give any name to a colour, and yet to speak accurately?

Theodorus: How can it be possible, or possible to give a name to anything else of this sort, if while we are speaking it always evades us, being, as it is, in flux?

(Translated H. N. Fowler)

The standard interpretation of this passage reads the argument as pointing to a precondition of identifying or individuating anything through time. Thus Owen wrote in his article on Plato's Timaeus:

Plato points out that if anything … were perpetually changing in all respects, so that at no time could it be described as being so-and-so, then nothing could be said of it at all—and, inter alia, it could not be said to be changing. If an object moves, we can say what sort of thing is moving only if it has some qualitative stability (182C9-10); conversely, to have complete qualitative flux ascribed to it, a thing must have location …²⁴ So no description of any process is possible if we can say only that its constituents are changing from or to something and never that they are something (cf. Tim. 37E5-38A2, where it is allowed to say only what a gignomenon was and will be; the White Queen offered Alice jam on the same terms).²⁵

On the basis of Theaetetus 182 it has seemed that Plato either concludes that knowledge of material particulars is impossible (a familiar nineteenth-twentieth century interpretation) or concludes that, if there is to be intelligible description of perception and the objects of perception themselves (which are never this or that in themselves,²⁶ but only becoming), then the contention that 'everything flows' or 'everything constantly changes' must be mitigated somehow.²⁷ And here the enemies of Heraclitus have rejoiced in Plato's supposed refutation of him, and the friends have either (Kirk, Reinhardt) sought to deny that Heraclitus ever said that 'everything flows' or (in the case of Guthrie) acknowledged their embarrassment but sought other Heraclitean concessions to stability and permanence (e.g. the doctrine of fire).

Both these reactions are equally mystifying. How could Plato's demonstration, however it should be interpreted, possibly prove the incoherence of the claim that 'everything flows' or 'everything constantly changes', which is all that Plato says that Heraclitus said? The accepted answer seems to be that for a world to be rationally intelligible there must be some landmarks, and for there to be landmarks there must be some continuants. But continuants have to be individuated (the argument continues) and under conditions of Heraclitean flux it is impossible that there should be any rational basis in the properties or behaviour of things for a difference between good and bad hypotheses about which changeable continuant x, included in an inventory of items existing at one time, should be counted as coinciding with which changeable continuant y, included in an inventory of items existing at a later time. Heraclitean flux, it is then said, removes the whole point of the questions that these hypotheses set out to answer. But if that is the argument, it is unconvincing. Only if one confused flux with chaos could one possibly suppose that this basis was lacking in the world that Heraclitus describes. Why should not the principle that 'steers all through all' and the unending and irresoluble struggle of opposites furnish us with a natural order in which there is a sound, non-arbitrary basis on which to distinguish between good and bad hypotheses about which perishable continuant coincides with which? Heraclitus' kosmos is lawlike, and lawlike at several levels of description. There is constant change, and most substances eventually perish. But the perishable changeable substances are continuants, which can be traced through time so long as they persist—right up to the moment when they are replaced by other things.

5.2 A logical difficulty may perhaps seem to lurk in elucidating how exactly we understand as readily as I think we do understand the phrase 'all the time everything is changing in all respects'. There are puzzles of what Russell called impredicativity to be uncovered here. But these are not the difficulties that Plato and his latter day followers are urging; and 'all the time everything is changing in all respects' is not quite what Plato reports Heraclitus as having said. Plato says that Heraclitus said that everything was on the move, was in a state of change, or flowed. But even if Heraclitus had said that all the time everything was changing in all respects, we could still dispel impredicativity in the natural way (whatever that is) that controls our manifest intuitive understanding of the claim (e.g. reading Heraclitus as saying that all the time everything there is at that time is changing in respect of all its completely determinate qualia in every empirically definable property range): and it would then be hard to see why, even in a world satisfying this stringent specification, a persisting thing should not remain for the while within the set limits of transformations that preserve its integrity, and be reidentified there through simultaneous continuous change of position, continuous motion, continuous replacement of its constituent particles and continuous change of qualities. What is the difficulty supposed to be?

'If anything … were perpetually changing in all respects, so that at no time could it be described as being so and so, then nothing could be said of it', Owen wrote (in a sentence that only the occasion of the present volume can excuse or explain my picking out for such disobliging, officious and pedantic treatment). But I protest that 'man' or 'river' or 'barley drink' or whatever does not stand for a respect of change in which a thing 'perpetually changing in all respects' changes. That is not what we let ourselves in for when we say that a thing is changing in all respects. And that is not what we ought to mean by such a respect—or what Heraclitus would have meant if he had said this (see below 5.3). Indeed, if we say of an individual thing that it is changing all the time, then we must already have excluded counting 'man' or 'river' as a respect in which that thing changes. It is true that the objection might give trouble if Heraclitus wanted to assert of rivers and men and such things that they only come to be (become) and never are anything. But there is no evidence that he did want to confine the being of rivers and men to 'becoming'; and it is evidence against his having had this desire that there is no trace of the Cratylean denial of substance in Heraclitus' writings. Heraclitus writes happily of 'rivers', 'souls', 'the barley drink'—of continuants, that is. To insist that he really thinks of these things as processes, not as continuants, is to try to make a contrast that is quite anachronistic—and, on top of that, a category mistake. Processes are regular or gradual or fitful, take time, have temporal parts. None of this holds of rivers, even if rivers correspond to a certain class of processes, or supervene (as Heraclitus could be paraphrased as saying) upon certain classes of processes. In fact the rubbish that philosophers have sometimes talked about rivers or men not being but only becoming seem to be entirely of Plato's and other post-Parmenidean philosophers' confection. If (as I suppose) there is no clear trace of such linguistic revisionism in Heraclitus, then we should not carry this post-Parmenidean philosophical hang-up to the fair-minded assessment of the claim which is the strongest claim that anyone can prove Heraclitus to have made about flux, viz. that everything is on the move or flows.

5.3 Aristotle derides Heraclitus; but there is an Aristotelian insight from which any even-handed critic might see Heraclitus' doctrine as properly entitled to benefit.²⁸ 'River' or 'man' answers in the category of substance the question 'What is it?', and this is a question that Aristotle found good reasons of theory to contrast with the question 'What is it like?' The two questions correspond to a categorial distinction among predications of substance and predications of quality, and our very identification of continuants depends on our distinguishing the first sort of predication from the second. Surely this is the distinction that we have just seen to be presupposed to the proper understanding of the claim that individual substances are changing all the time in all respects. No doubt there are many changes which aren't any substance's changing. But every time some substance does change, what we typically have is a qualitative change. (When a thing ceases to exist, that results from a change in it. But existing and then ceasing to exist, though a change, is surely not itself a respect in which the thing itself changes.) To change is to come to deserve a different description in respect of what one is like, not to become different in respect of fundamental predication in the category of substance or in respect of what one is. Thinking that substances supervened upon universal process, Heraclitus is not charitably interpreted by anyone who accepts or understands Aristotle's distinction as maintaining that at every moment every substance changes in respect of its being this or that very supervenient substance.

Conclusion

6.1 It is sometimes claimed nowadays (by Michael Dummett, for instance, in Frege: Philosophy of Language) that the proper foundation of philosophy is not the theory of knowledge but the theory of meaning. The theory of meaning, as we have got it, was born out of the theory of logic, which is a subject that pre-Socratic speculations such as Parmenides' played their indispensable part in bringing into existence. Except perhaps by serving as a butt for Aristotle, who needed to find a philosopher open to the charge of denying the Law of Non-Contradiction, Heraclitus contributed nothing to these speculations. Nor did logical or semantical puzzles impinge upon Heraclitus. They were not the sort of thing to engage with the intellectual passions of such a man. A fortiori, Heraclitus did not have the logical equipment to distinguish opposition from contradiction (say), or identity from exact similarity. But so far from concluding from this that he must then have been tempted to confuse them, I have drawn the conclusion that, not having the equipment to distinguish them, he did not have the logical equipment to confuse them either. (Just as he lacked the equipment to formulate the absurd hypothesis that a thing's principle of individuation is a respect in which that thing can change.)

A finished philosophy of logic will be an instrument of special philosophical power. Removing all distortions and obstructions that now impede us from getting a clear view of this aspect of ourselves, it will purify our understanding of our own beliefs; and, working in this way, it may one day reveal to us, as through a medium of utter transparency, a world of wonderful plainness. But, as the long history of the manufacture of lenses and other magnifying instruments might prompt one to suppose, such a philosophical instrument (however easy it is to describe) is neither easily invented nor easily manufactured. After the logical labours of many men of genius and good sense, our philosophy of logic and language is scarcely in sight of partial completion; and even now the colours of the rainbow vexatiously and constantly obtrude themselves in the philosophical magnifications that have been achieved. One need not deny that, if philosophy needs any foundation, then its ultimate foundation is the theory of logic and meaning. But so long as such instruments only approximate to perfection, it is no bad thing if at least some philosophers proceed as if philosophy needed no foundation. And one such philosopher is Heraclitus, a thinker best seen as relying on the language itself (not on a philosophy of logic or language or some theory of names or reference or predication) to fix the meaning of what he says.

6.2 It would be an error to suppose that a reliance like Heraclitus' on natural language as non-philosophically construed will automatically entail naïveté, or will carry with it any insensitivity to the question how, if the kosmos is as unlike the vulgar conception as Heraclitus says, a human being can think or give expression to the thought that matters are really thus or so. Nor need this reliance entail some blindness to the problem of how the initiated theorist can express his new thoughts in the very same language that the ignorant employ (and he himself employed when he was ignorant of the unity of things). Heraclitus knew that there were those problems. Since the theory of meaning or philosophical logic (as many now call it) has just got us to the point where we can appreciate his contribution to their solution, I shall conclude with some account of this.

Nature loves to be hidden (B123), Heraclitus says, but there are places where the working of the cosmos will peep out. What can be seen in these places may be interpreted by anyone who has the sense to heed and reflect upon such clues as the river, the barley drink, or the motion of the heavens. If he will attend then, just as the Delphian Apollo 'neither speaks nor conceals but makes a sign', these phenomena can exemplify for him the whole nature of things. He must lay himself open to such eminent instances.

Now it is only by a transaction between things and minds, or designata and their designations held together by a practice, that language itself, not excluding vulgar prephilosophical language, has come into being and been invested with sense, reference and denotation. It is no accident even that bios means 'life' and 'bow', and again no accident that ergon can mean 'work' or 'thing' or 'reality' and that these ambiguities all combine in such a way that the same set of words can mean either

The name of the bow is life but its work is death (B48)

or

Life is the name assigned but the reality [to which we give it] is the process of dying (cf. B21).

These are bizarre instances, but what they exemplify is the general process by which language comes into being.

When we ask how the logos of the world can be grasped by the soul, we must remember that the soul itself is not for Heraclitus something that is alien to reality; it is all of a piece with what it seeks to interpret,²⁹ being fire or air (and, like all fire or air at hazard from the peril of too much wetness).³⁰

Heraclitus lived before the moment when concepts became ideas and took up residence in the head. But, even if concepts had by then taken up residence in the head, Heraclitus' view of the psuchē might have saved him from the absurdities of psychologistic accounts of concepts that seek to identify a concept by reference to some mental state somehow annexed to it, and specify the mental state itself not de re but in isolation from any outward feature of reality that impinges on the mind or serves as the intentional object of the state. Unlike most philosophers in our tradition, then, Heraclitus cannot even be tempted by the theory that Austin parodies in 'Pretending' (Philosophical Papers, 2nd. ed. by J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford 1970), 254 n. I):

It is only the hair on a gooseberry that stops it from being a grape: by a 'gooseberry' then, we may mean simply a hirsute grape—and by a 'grape' likewise simply a glabrous gooseberry.³¹

If one element in that which identifies the concept of what it is to be a gooseberry (which is what the predicate 'gooseberry' stands for) is what the predicate is true of (viz. gooseberries, as they are out there in the world, ready and waiting for us to find out what they are and what they are like);³² and if the predicate's denominating what it in fact denominates is determined not by the match between a mental content and certain objects but by some causally conditioned, practically reliable lien that ordinary men can depend upon without knowing what they are depending upon or knowing the nature of the terms of this relation; then it follows that what the thinker who follows Heraclitus' way to truth must refine is not language per se or predicates such as 'gooseberry' but conceptions—conceptions of the very same concepts as are unavailable to ordinary men who use predicates like 'gooseberry' without true understanding.

Reading Heraclitus' several fragments about sleeping and waking and grasping how things are, one is struck by the similarity between the state of ordinary men as Heraclitus conceives them and men sleep-walking. If one sleep-walks one finds one's way without knowing what one is doing. Similarly, ordinary men conduct the business of everyday life without getting lost or suffer ing the sad fate of Elpenor. But they do not grasp properly what they encounter, nor understand what things are, even after they learn to recognize and re-identify them (B17, 26). Here once more, Heraclitus would appear to be in a fortunate position. He does not have the theory and technical vocabulary that it requires to confuse the concept of gooseberry—what it is in nature to be a gooseberry—with thinkers' conceptions of gooseberry. (What I mean by the conception of gooseberry is a rudimentary recognitional capacity of ours that may or may not mature into distinct theoretical knowledge of gooseberries.³³) But, had he possessed the technical vocabulary required to enter into these matters, and had he wished to pronounce on the issue, it would have been open to him (at least in cases like these) to agree with Frege's declaration that 'what is known as the history of concepts is really a history either of our knowledge of concepts or of the meanings of words'.³⁴ The man who has awoken and learned to expect the unexpected (B18) and to exploit whatever signs nature does afford to him, gains new understanding of what, without thinking, he did already in the world at large. It is in gaining this that he transcends the valueless subjective opinions he once entertained about the world and its contents:

So one must follow what is public, that is what is common and universal to all. For what is public is what is common and universal to all. But, although the logos is something common and universal to all, the many live as if they had their very own private wisdom (B2).

It is the universality and publicity of the logos and of the reality that the logos ordains that makes the philosopher's or scientist's task possible:

Of the logos that is given in my book, men are always uncomprehending. They do not understand it before they hear it from me, or when they first hear it. For, although everything happens in accordance with this logos, men have no cognizance of this, even though they have encountered the words and things I put before them, as I dissect each thing according to its real nature and show forth how it really is. Other men are not aware what they do when awake, just as they are forgetful of what they do in their sleep (B1).

As for those men who can see no unity and no connections between different phenomena even when they are afforded clues in perception, Heraclitus likens them to the deaf. Because they understand as little of the working of their own language as a Greekless foreigner understands of Greek among Greeks,³⁵ the senses of ordinary men deceive them instead of informing them.³⁶ For so long as they use their language only by habit, bad testimony is all they will ever be able to get. Yet even this does not mean that the human condition is simply hopeless, closed in upon its own hopelessness. What determines the identity of concepts and attaches common nouns to their denominata is what men always did—even before some men awake from their deafness to their own language. Practice is the anchor (and practice, I would add, can only be adequately described if we describe the objects³⁷ themselves which men uncomprehendingly responded to in perception and action, and spoke of without knowing what they were saying).

All this, in his own special way, Heraclitus understood. But we have only just begun in philosophy to understand the significance of the thing that he understood. We have found it so hard to understand that thing ourselves that we have never seen that Heraclitus understood it.

6.3 Parmenidean puzzles of being and non-being were no doubt as indispensable to the infancy and maturation of the philosophy of logic and language as the alchemical speculations of some of Aristotle's scientific successors were to the development of chemistry. But the power of Heraclitus—his claim to be the most adult thinker of his age and a grown man among infants and adolescents—precisely consisted in the capacity to speculate, in the theory of meaning, just as in physics, not where speculation lacked all useful observations, or where it needed more going theory to bite on, but where the facts were as big and familiar as the sky and so obvious that it took actual genius to pay heed to them.

Notes

¹ Charles Kahn 'A New Look at Heraclitus', American Philosophical Quarterly, 1 (1964), 189-203. It would be wrong for me not to qualify the disagreement I shall note in the text by the acknowledgment of how much I have found both to agree with and to admire on the subject of Heraclitus in Kahn's book Anaximander and the Origin of Greek Cosmology (New York and London 1960), esp. 187-97.

Kahn's new book, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge 1979), came to hand as this essay was reaching its penultimate draft; but it has enabled me to make a number of improvements in detail. I have also taken over from Kahn the felicitous (and felicitously ambiguous) expression 'elemental form'. Since Kahn's new book is not a repudiation of the doctrine I have quoted from his 1964 article, I have ventured to let section 1.1 of this essay remain as it was before I saw the new book.

I seize the first opportunity to thank the editors and Edward Hussey and Richard Sorabji most sincerely for the efforts that each of them has made at various stages to save me from the errors born of amateurish enthusiasm. I wish I could now blame them for every howler that remains.

² See Gilbert Harman, 'The Inference to the Best Explanation', Philosophical Review, 74 (1965), 88-95; Paul R. Thagard, 'The Best Explanation: Criteria for Theory Choice', The Journal of Philosophy, 75 (1978), 76-92, to whom I am indebted for the initial quotation from Darwin. Thagard mentions the Peircean and Leibnizian parallels. There is also an interesting affinity waiting to be drawn out with Collingwood's doctrine that 'questions are the cutting edge of the mind'.

³ The 'must' has 'if p then q' as its scope here; and of course it does not connote the metaphysical necessity of q.

⁴ See, for instance, 'Plato & Parmenides on the Timeless Present', The Monist, 50 (1966), 317-40. I understand that Owen has developed the theme further in his Sather Classical Lectures and in other recent work with which I am not acquainted.

⁵ For various statements of the principle or approximations to it, see Xenophanes A28; Parmenides B8, 9; Melissus B1-2; Leucippus A8, B2. See also Plato, Phaedo 98-9, 108E-109E; Timaeus 62E12ff.

⁶ There are doubts about the opposite dependency—doubts that one may suppose can only be cleared up by an elucidation of 'reason' diverging from, e.g., Leibniz's interpretation of what counts as sufficiency. A full treatment of all this would divorce teleological conceptions of sufficient reason (Socrates, Plato, Leibniz) from anti-teleological conceptions. For Heraclitus' anti-teleological stance see B52, B124 ('The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings').

⁷ Edward Hussey, The Presocratics (London 1972), 17.

⁸ Cf. Vlastos, 'On Heraclitus', American Journal of Philology, 1955.

⁹ Cf. Ph. 203b15-30, 208a8-9; GC 336a14-18; Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy (London 1908²), 60.

¹⁰ B30 (in part). Aristotle is thought to have been the first to assert that the kosmos was not created. But B30 suggests that he was anticipated in this not altogether satisfactory move by Heraclitus.

Aristotle asserts (Cael. 279b12) that all his predecessors believed that the kosmos had a beginning, though many denied (280a11) that matter had a beginning. To reconcile B30 with Aristotle it seems best to locate the difference Aristotle sees between himself and Heraclitus in the periodicity of things. Aristotle contemplates little or no variability from the kind of world order that is familiar to us, Heraclitus an orderly eternal periodicity. See 4.1, 4.2.

¹¹ D. R. Dicks, Early Greek Astronomy to Aristotle (London 1970).

¹² Cf. B120, on which see Kahn, Anaximander, 197.

¹³ In 'Natural Change in Heraclitus', Mind, 60 (1951), 38-42, G. S. Kirk has sought to cast doubt on Plato's testimony here. He has done this in the name of doctrines of measure and reciprocity between opposites whose attribution to Heraclitus he has made very persuasive. My exposition of these doctrines is indebted both to this article and to Kirk's Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge 1954). I also believe Kirk reconstructs the river fragment correctly. (Cf. 2.5 below: if Heraclitus also said that you could not step into the same river twice, that is a hyperbolical restatement of what is said soberly and correctly in B12.) But against Kirk, I should claim that, on a more correct understanding of change than Plato achieved when he departed from the everyday conception to which Heraclitus was party, there is no conflict of any sort between the measure doctrine and the doctrine of universal flux.

¹⁴ For the idea of a phenomenon going proxy for a whole class to which it may itself belong, I am greatly indebted to Edward Hussey ["Epistemology and Meaning in Heraclitus"]. Cf. also here Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Oxford 1959), 44, from whom I borrow the Goethean phrase 'eminent instance'.

¹⁵ One of the editors has informed me that, in his courses of lectures on the Presocratics, Owen has expressed a similar opinion.

¹⁶ Cf. Homer, Odyssey, 10, 234 and 326.

¹⁷ See my Sameness and Substance (Oxford 1980), especially chs. II-III.

¹⁸ Martha Nussbaum has put it to me that B36 and Heraclitus' other remarks about watery souls indicate an interest in this problem, and that the river fragment does too, though less clearly.

¹⁹ E.g. Kahn, in his Anaximander, and J. L. Mackie, in an unpublished paper of 1941.

²⁰ We can take this idea over from the author of the de Victu as a complementation of Heraclitus' doctrine. But of course we should note that he has resolved in an overdefinite way certain difficulties—most notably Heraclitus' apparent need for a matter-principle quite independent of fire. Anticipating Aristotle's criticism of monistic condensation and rarefaction theories (GC 330b10), this author allows water to enjoy an autonomy for which we have no Heraclitean authority. Insofar as Heraclitus himself offered any account of the differentiation of kinds of process or kinds of thing, he seems to have explained differentiation of things by reference to the difference of the processes underlying them, and differentiation of processes simply—alas—by a metaphor: 'God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, surfeit and hunger, but he takes various shapes, just as fire, when it is mingled with spices, is named according to the savour of each' (B63, trans. Burnet).

²¹ Whether we read palintonos or palintropos—whether we consider the lyre or bow in repose, strung in tension against itself (palintonos), or consider the bow or lyre's tendency to return into that state after the withdrawal of the interfering force of the archer or lyre player (palintropos)—it makes little difference, I believe. Either way, this is a steady state theory, presented in a manner consistent with a potentially very abstract account of what the steadiness consists in (it is a steadiness such as to require a total balance of universal agitation), and consistent also with periodicity or seasonal variation.

²² A phrase I steal from Rudolf Schoenheimer (one of the founders of modern biochemistry; see The Dynamic State of Body Constituents (Cambridge, Mass. 1942)).

²³ Even though he offers us a misstatement of the river paradigm. But here there is interaction between the virtues of the witness and the vices of the critic.

²⁴ The omitted passage reads: 'Nor can any quality of the object, such as its whiteness, be claimed as a subject of this unqualified change: any change would be "change to another colour", and to apply "whiteness" to a colour-progression is to deprive it of determinate sense' (182D 2-5). This anticipates a variant interpretation offered by John McDowell at pp. 180-4 of his annotated translation (Oxford 1973).

²⁵ G. E. L. Owen, 'The Place of the Timaeus in Plato's Dialogues' Classical Quarterly, n.s. 3 (1953), 85-6; cf. I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato's Doctrines (London 1962-3), II, 27.

²⁶ Cf. Plato, Timaeus 49D7-E6.

²⁷ At least for instance to the extent of according sufficient stability to a class of qualia in terms of which the perception and description is possible gignomena (cf. McDowell, op. cit.).

²⁸ Which makes it all the worse that Aristotle was simply helping himself in his Meteorologica (357b28-358a3), without acknowledgement of any sort, to the thoughts and perceptions of the philosopher he belittled so frequently.

²⁹ Cf. Hussey, chapter 2 below; Martha Nussbaum, 'Psuchē in Heraclitus, 1', Phronesis, 17 (1972), 1-16.

³⁰ Kahn argues that air, not fire, is the stuff of the soul in The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 238-40, 248-54, 259.

³¹ These theories stem from Locke, but Locke's own opinions are too complex, too highly elaborated and too much of a compromise between empiricist and rationalist elements to be fairly parodied. For a perfect statement of a sub-Lockean model, richly deserving such parody, see e.g. James Mill Analysis of the Human Mind, ch. IV, section 1.

³² Cf. chapter 3, section 1 of Sameness and Substance, cited at note 17 above.

7³³ Cf. Leibniz. Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideis (Gerhardt IV) on clear but non-distinct ideas.

³⁴ G. Frege, Foundations of Arithmetic, preface—adjacent to the sentence criticized in section 5.1 above. For the Fregean theory of predicates' sense and reference here espoused see especially Frege's letter to Husserl, 24 May 1891, and again Sameness and Substance, chapter 3 ad init. (with note 2).

³⁵ Cf. Nussbaum, op. cit.

³⁶ Cf. Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais (Gerhardt ν 252): '[Les hommes] sont empiriques et ne se gouvernent que par les sens et exemples, sans examiner si la même raison a encor lieu.'

³⁷ For this reading of the doctrine that meaning is use see Sameness and Substance, 1-4.