SOURCE: Edward Hussey, "Epistemology and Meaning in Heraclitus," 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. 33-59.

[In the following excerpt, Hussey examines several rules for the interpretation of sense-experience which he contends Heraclitus followed. The editors have included only those footnotes which pertain to the excerpt.]

1. Epistemology: the programme

1.1 The hypothesis to be explored claims that at the heart of Heraclitus' thought there lies a remarkable and characteristic epistemology, and that it is this above all that must first be grasped if his account of the world is to be understood. It will help to begin with a statement of what would be agreed about Heraclitus' epistemology by many scholars.

I shall treat as non-controversial the position summarised in the rest of the present paragraph. Heraclitus is deeply interested in the problem of knowledge. He sharply rejects the claims to be guides to knowledge of (a) ordinary common sense; (b) popular and traditional beliefs; (c) much of traditional Greek religion; (d) the older accepted authorities, Homer and Hesiod; (e) more recent claimants of such diverse kinds as Archilochus, Xenophanes, Hecataeus and Pythagoras. Against all these, and in support of his own account of the world, Heraclitus appeals in the first place to the evidence of the senses. 'All of which the learning is seeing and hearing, to that I give preference' (B55).² But sense-perception by itself is not enough; to suppose that it is is according to Heraclitus the mistake of some of those he attacks. 'Much learning does not teach the mind; otherwise it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, as also Xenophanes and Hecataeus' (B40). At least one further step is necessary if we are to know anything: we must interpret sense-experience. 'Bad witnesses to human beings are eyes and ears, when those human beings have alien souls' (B107). The word rendered here by 'alien', barbarous, has the literal meaning of 'non-Greek-speaking'. The soul of the perceiver must understand the language in which sense-information is expressed—how far this is a metaphor is not said—and must step from the message as presented by the senses to its meaning. Many fragments of Heraclitus may be fitted comfortably in with this notion of interpretation as the necessary condition for understanding: human failure to know is like the failure to solve a riddle (B56); the Delphic oracle is where the Lord Apollo 'neither speaks nor conceals, but makes a sign' (B93); the nature of things 'loves to hide itself (B123), and 'latent structure is master of manifest structure' (B54). People in general are vehemently criticised for their failure to understand how things are, and again the forms of the criticism suggest that they fail to interpret what is given them in sense-perception.

In all this, Heraclitus is not obviously at variance with the Milesian cosmologists. It is probably significant that none of them is attacked by name in the surviving fragments.³

1.2 There have always been people claiming to have found a hidden meaning in ordinary experience. Some have been great prophets, sages, philosophers or scientists; others, mere eccentrics or charlatans, and others, a mixture. It must not simply be assumed that Heraclitus belongs in the first class, nor can it be proved just by the fascination of his prose style or by the fact that he is reported to have propounded a cosmological theory. Some ancient writers do in fact put Heraclitus down as little more than an eccentric: Aristotle, followed by Theophrastus, seems to have seen him as a deranged denier of the law of non-contradiction, who in more lucid moments sketched an incomplete cosmology in Milesian style. On the other hand, the Stoics, followed by some early Christian writers, saw Heraclitus as a sage and a precursor. Neither set of testimonies can simply be discarded; no more can the more oblique and nuanced testimony of Plato and Plutarch.⁴ But ultimately it is the fragments which must be the ground of any decision to take Heraclitus seriously as a thinker or a sage, or not to do so.

If Heraclitus is indeed to be taken seriously, it is reasonable to suppose that there must be more to his epistemology than has so far been stated. For the notion of interpretation, which plays the central role, is, unless further determined, so elastic as to give no guidance. I propose, as a hypothesis, that Heraclitus' notion of interpretation was implicitly determinate, in ways that are natural consequences of taking seriously the analogy of language.

In full, the hypothesis is as follows:

(1) Heraclitus follows (though he may never have formulated) rules for the interpretation of sense-experience, including at least the four following:

(a) Rule of No Cancellation: Nothing may be rejected that is given by ordinary sense-experience; just as the words of a sentence are not cancelled or superseded by the meaning of the sentence. Interpretation adds to what is given, but may not take away from it or alter it.

(b) Rule of No Extra Sensibles: To what is given, nothing may be added (in interpretation) that is itself of a kind to be the object of sense-experience; just as the meaning of a sentence does not consist (even partly) of extra words, nor does understanding the sentence involve the introduction of extra words.

(c) Rule of Holism: Sense-experience, when being interpreted, must be taken as a whole, or at least in naturally determined chunks; just as we can properly interpret only whole sentences, or at least phrases.

(d) Rule of Intrinsic Meaning: The interpretation, once found, must be seen as 'given' by and in the sense-experience, not imposed from outside it; just as the meaning of a sentence lies in the words and is determined by them, not imposed on them from the outside.

(2) These rules determine the characteristic shape of Heraclitus' system, which is to be seen as the product of the systematic application of the rules to Heraclitus' own experience.

In the rest of this chapter I try to work out the consequences of this hypothesis and thereby to exhibit the hypothesis as convincing. In sections 1.3 to 1.6, the 'four rules of interpretation' are further considered. In section 2 Heraclitus' view of the world is accounted for as an outcome of the epistemological programme. Section 3 explores briefly the style of Heraclitus and his use of the word 'logos ', both of which, it is claimed, are essentially related to the epistemology. Section 4 offers some general reflections in conclusion. Particularly in sections 2 and 3 the exposition is, of necessity, rather abbreviated and dogmatic; many details are neglected. The interpretation offered has to be judged by its success or failure in accounting for Heraclitus as a whole.

1.3 Rule (a) above, the Rule of No Cancellation, immediately suggests the question: how much of what we ordinarily take as given really is given by ordinary sense-experience? It would be impossible to attribute the rule to Heraclitus unless there were signs, as there are, that he was interested in the distinction between data and interpretation. That interest might have been expected. The Milesians' proto-scientific theorising had produced two or three dramatic reinterpretations of ordinary experience; their strangeness, and their natural incompatibility, would force the distinction upon the notice of any contemporary with philosophical sensitivity.

Here Xenophanes is a useful 'control' for comparison and contrast with Heraclitus. Xenophanes reacts to the same situation in a partly similar way, though with less coherence and determination. He appears to want to preserve the unity and lawlikeness of the Milesians' universe, but at the same time to protest against their theorising in the name of a rudimentary empiricism. His own world-view therefore falls apart into (a) a transcendental monotheism, which he himself admits cannot be verified by sense-experience; (b) a bitty cosmology having no overall coherence and no connection with the theology.⁵ As Hermann Frankel has pointed out, the remnants of the cosmology strongly suggest a deliberate 'not going beyond sense-experience', which may be taken as summed up by the Rule of No Cancellation and its stable-mate the Rule of No Extra Sensibles.

The same 'primitive' and 'impoverished' aspect is shown by the cosmology of Heraclitus, though not to the same degree, because there is evidence of a general theory of transformations. It is worth trying out, therefore, the possibility that Heraclitus too followed the Rule of No Cancellation. The report that he said that the sun had 'the width of a human foot' (B3) is not in itself very impressive. But it can be combined with the fragments exhibiting some sort of 'unity in opposites' in situations of ordinary life; the interpretation is controversial (see 2.2 below), but on any tenable interpretation the moral Heraclitus intends is not that the different sense-experiences are mistaken or merely relatively true, but that every experience contributes an essential part of the truth.

From acceptance of the Rule of No Cancellation it follows that all sense-experience is equally good and true so far as it goes. ('Eyes are more exact witnesses than ears' (BIOla)—but this is either a statement of the fact that hearsay is not directly given in sense, or makes the point that seeing gives more detailed information than hearing.) Sceptical doubt is allowed no place. Scepticism has a long and honourable part in the history of Greek philosophy, but at the time of Heraclitus there is no evidence that it had as yet gathered and sharpened its weapons. In supposing that Heraclitus accepted the Rule of No Cancellation, one is not therefore obliged to find him defences against scepticism. Still, it is interesting to note that Heraclitus did have a first line of defence against some obvious sceptical arguments. Dreams, for instance, do not have to be admitted as valid sense-experiences by Heraclitus, because they occur when the senses are 'quenched' (B26). To be sure, dreamers may think that they are actually seeing and hearing things; but Heraclitus is not committed to saying that what anyone thinks is true. Indeed, dreamers here provide him with a valuable analogy for the common misinterpretation of experience. As for the sceptical arguments from relativity and illusion, they were, if known to Heraclitus, turned into arguments for the unity in opposites.⁶

1.4 Rule (b), the Rule of No Extra Sensibles, is suggested, as already said, by the furniture of Xenophanes' and Heraclitus' universes, which goes nowhere beyond the observable. Here there is a striking contrast with the Milesians (at least Anaximander and Anaximenes), who in postulating infinite stretches of perceptible stuff outside our cosmos, and infinitely many cosmoses, violated the rule in a prodigal way. The attribution of the rule to Heraclitus, then, has some initial plausibility.

1.5 Rule (c), the Rule of Holism, is, unlike the first two rules, fully in accord with Milesian ways of thinking, and indeed with all scientific theorising. There is at least a strong presumption, then, that it was a principle implicitly governing Heraclitus' thought, since as much as the Milesians he aims to exhibit the world as a unity and a system.

It is even possible to argue that Heraclitus himself came close to formulating the rule explicitly. In one fragment he describes himself as 'according to its nature delimiting each thing in turn and showing how it is' (B1). And, once again, part of the moral of the doctrine of the unity in opposites is certainty that one will go wrong, as Hesiod did about day and night (B57), if one considers one aspect or one opposite in isolation.

1.6 Rule (d), the Rule of Intrinsic Meaning, will be the pivot upon which the whole interpretation turns. It is the most far-reaching and, if Heraclitean, the most peculiarly Heraclitean. There is admittedly no evidence for anything like it in any of Heraclitus' predecessors, nor is it easy to argue directly for its presence in Heraclitus himself, except by means of the fragments mentioned in section 1.2 above. B107, in particular, has suggested to many students of Heraclitus that the analogy with language must be followed rather closely. To quote the recent commentary of Charles Kahn, for example: 'The world order speaks to men as a kind of language they must learn to comprehend. Just as the meaning of what is said is actually "given" in the sounds which the foreigner hears, but cannot understand, so the direct experience of the nature of things will be like the babbling of an unknown tongue for the soul that does not know how to listen' (The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, p. 107…).

What follows is an attempt to think out and press the analogy rather more closely than Kahn, or any other scholar, seems to have done. The Rule of Intrinsic Meaning says at the very least that interpretations of sense-experience may not be arbitrary: it cannot be that any arbitrary interpretation is correct. For Heraclitus it would be a criticism of the Milesians that they theorised in an essentially arbitrary way. This criticism must have occurred to many Greeks of the period when they observed the grandiose but unfortunately conflicting interpretations of experience offered by Thaïes, Anaximander and Anaximenes. What would be immediately suggested was the need for stronger restrictions on what was to count as a good interpretation. Part of the answer ought to be to stick closer to sense-experience, as Xenophanes and Heraclitus tried to do. But that alone could not solve the problem of interpretation.

The Rule of Intrinsic Meaning in its positive aspect presupposes, at least, that there does exist a single correct interpretation, of sense-experience as a whole and derivatively of naturally chosen bits of sense-experience. It presupposes, further, that this interpretation is 'given' in some natural way in experience, and is therefore in principle discoverable by human intelligence. So far these presuppositions are familar as part of the faith of the natural scientist, and presumably of the Milesians too. Modern scientists would agree, too, that finding out the meaning of sense-experience is a process rather like that of learning a language. So far, then, the Rule of Intrinsic Meaning may seem to contain no unfamiliar or implausible implication.

Where Heraclitus differs both from the Milesians and from the modern scientist, I suggest, is that for him the language 'spoken' by sense-experience is not one that has to be learnt laboriously by means of empirical investigation. Heraclitus did not reject empirical investigation as useless, but thought that any amount of it would not necessarily by itself lead to any interpretation. Accordingly its results could be anticipated by reflection on what would count as an interpretation satisfying the Rule of Intrinsic Meaning. The most far-reaching implication of that Rule is that if the message of sense-experience is to be seen as indubitably meaningful, it must be expressed in some language which we can know independently of sense-experience.

What sort of language could this be, and where could it be learnt? The only realm to which we have direct access without sense-perception is the inner realm of our selves revealed by introspection. Within that realm, we have privileged access to the meaning of our ordinary actions, which may remain uninterpreted for someone else. And if anyone else wishes to interpret them, he must do so in terms of thoughts, desires, emotions and so on, which he can understand from the inside because he himself has had or might have them. Moreover, to be able to interpret the more long-term and large-scale aspects of the behaviour of some human being, we must refer to some very general principles of behaviour, and we can understand them as possible principles of behaviour only by seeing, from within somehow, that they might give a 'meaning' to life as a whole. There is a continuum between the meaning of a particular action and the meaning that some person gives to, or finds in, life as a whole.

Questioning about the meaning of life as a whole was certainly a feature of Greek culture in the sixth century. It is clear that by that time many Greeks felt partly alienated from the Homeric ideals and the Olympian religion in which they had been brought up. The appeal of exotic and esoteric wisdom and cult is shown by mystery-cults, orgiastic religion, Pythagoreanism, and perhaps Orphism.⁷ The search for the meaning of life may present itself naturally, to someone partly alienated from his own traditions, as a search for one's own true self. It was a search that Heraclitus also made: 'I looked for myself (B101). And more encouragingly 'It belongs to all human beings to be acquainted with themselves and be of sound mind' (B115).⁸

Heraclitus' views on the meaning of human life, which diverge widely from traditional Greek ones in spite of an affinity with those of Homer, will be considered later (section 2.4). What is claimed at present, as the final implication of the Rule of Intrinsic Meaning, is that the experience we have of the cosmos, via the senses, has for Heraclitus to be interpreted in the light of the experience we have of our own selves, via introspection. And in giving a long-term, overall interpretation to the behaviour of the cosmos as a whole, we can invoke only the kind of meaning that any human being can see in his existence as a whole. 'What is the plan of the cosmos?' and 'What is the meaning of life?' must be in essence the same question.

In particular, the 'meaning' given by an interpretation of the cosmos must, on this account of Heraclitus, be one that is wholly and directly intelligible from a human point of view. There is no superhuman perspective on the world, and if there is a divine or cosmic intelligence it must be in essence human, and see the meaning of its work in just the same terms as a human being would. If this is right, Heraclitus is here too insisting, as with the Rule of No Cancellation, on the validity of ordinary human perceptions. Just as sense-perceptions are not to be set aside by some higher truth, so too the meanings and values that people 'see' in their experience are not to be set aside or reworked in the name of some higher purpose.

So to interpret the cosmos it is necessary to study one's own self, and apply what one finds there to explain the world. Once again, this has been recognised to some extent as a Heraclitean principle by a number of scholars. According to Diels, Heraclitus 'seeks to discover the world-soul from the human soul, and metaphysics from physics. This is the core of his philosophy.' Reinhardt claims that in Heraclitus 'the comparison of the microcosm with the macrocosm … confronts us here for the first time as a method, a principle'. Kahn speaks of the 'identity of structure between the inner, personal world of the psyche and the larger natural order of the universe'.⁹ None of these scholars, However, has applied the principle in quite the way in which I shall apply it, as a principle of identity of meaning rather than simply of structure.

2 Meaning in the cosmos: the programme realised

2.1 What evidence there is about the furniture and general shape of Heraclitus' cosmos allows it to be seen as derived from direct observation by the application of the rules of interpretation. The cosmos is of limited extent, as we see it to be, and nothing was said about what, if anything, lies beyond it (A 1, Diogenes Laertius IX.9.). Nor about what keeps the earth from falling. These two points already signal a radical difference from Milesian thought, caused by the rules of No Extra Sensibles and of Intrinsic Meaning. The former prevents the postulation of any sense-perceptible stuff beyond the limits of our observation, the latter makes pointless the postulation of anything whatever that is not to be discerned at work within the sphere of our observation. Anything there might be beyond the finite cosmos, then, would be totally inaccessible and totally irrelevant to human experience.

The whole cosmos is many miles in length and breadth, but perhaps not many miles high. Its furniture is as observed: a fixed and roughly level earth; large stretches of sea; atmosphere; sun, moon, planets and stars. The earth and sea are inhabited by animals, including human beings.

The earth and sea, and the moon and sun, are involved in short- and long-term periodic oscillations between opposite states. The short-term oscillations, of day and night, the phases of the moon, and the cycle of the seasons are directly observed; the long-term expansion of earth at the expense of sea is inferred from observations as the Milesians and Xenophanes had inferred it.

There is a radical difference observable between sun and moon, on the one hand, and the stars on the other. Sun and moon are theatres of oscillation between opposites, and their movements, though following a fixed pattern, are not absolutely uniform and are determined by the fuel supplied by earth and sea. The stars, on the other hand, are invariant in appearance, movements and arrangement; they are seen by everyone as an army of impassive watchers, and that therefore is what they must be. The sun and moon need not even be materially continuous from day to day, and they are not independent of the cosmic oscillations; the stars must be persisting, intelligent beings and though affected by the cosmic cycles they are not essentially changed by them.¹⁰

2.2 The first step in the further interpretation of this impoverished and primitive-looking cosmos is supplied by the doctrine of the unity in opposites. This doctrine, cardinal in Heraclitus' thought, is itself one of the first fruits of the epistemological programme.

The examples on which the doctrine rests are drawn from common experience. Take sea-water. 'Sea: purest and most polluted water, for fish drinkable and life-sustaining, for human beings undrinkable and deadly' (B61). The facts are well-known, and the conclusion intended by Heraclitus does not seem to be a merely relativist one. Rather, the wording itself, and the Rule of No Cancellation, both suggest that both human beings and fish experience a different part of the essential truth about sea-water.

It has often been thought that this way of reading this and the related fragments leads Heraclitus into absurdity and self-contradiction. If sea-water is 'life-sustaining', without qualification, then (a) it is life-sustaining for human beings, which is contrary to experience; (b) it is equally 'deadly' without qualification, and hence life-sustaining and deadly at the same time for the same creature, which is a contradiction. If we water down the reading by taking 'life-sustaining' as 'life-sustaining for some creatures at some times', the contradiction is avoided at the price of banality.

Most interpreters, from Aristotle onwards, have rightly sensed that Heraclitus is likely to be everything but banal; many have concluded that he is therefore self-contradictory. But this conclusion is not only inherently implausible, it is not required by any of the fragments. There is no necessity to draw it, if we can only remember that here it is a matter of interpreting, of uncovering the 'latent structure' of sea-water. The Rule of No Cancellation assures us that the experiences of human beings and fish correspond to things actually there, independently of them, in the sea-water. These things must be what, with Aristotle, we may call powers or potentialities. These are not to be explained as undetected kinds of stuff working in the water. The Rule of No Extra Sensibles rules that possibility out. They are, however, just 'powers'; and the general doctrine of unity-in-opposites, neither self-contradictory nor banal, is that it is in the essence of things to have an ambivalence in their powers: they possess no characteristic potentiality without admitting also the opposed potentiality. To put it in a slogan, 'essences are ambivalent'.¹¹

The application of the doctrine to the cosmos is clear enough in outline. The number of cosmically important pairs of opposites is very limited, and some may be intended to be reducible to others. Hot and cold, dry and wet, appear in B126 and are presumably basic: 'quenched' and 'kindled' (of the cosmic fire) in B30, and of the soul fire, in B26. Other obviously important pairs appear in B67: day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, famine-glut; and the opposition death-life plays a part in several fragments. In general, it is the ambivalence of the contents of the cosmos between the opposed potentialities represented by these pairs that underlies and explains the rather limited catalogue of types of physical process. All the observable cosmic periods are oscillations between members of these pairs, and are thereby partly explained.¹²

Not even the fixed stars are exempt from ambivalence of essence and its consequences. They are quenched every sunrise, and they sometimes set (except for a few privileged ones) during the night. Their immortality is genuine, but it is a half-time immortality, exemplifying the general truth (on which see section 2.8 below) that life needs death to keep it going. 'Immortals are mortals, mortals are immortals, living the others' death, dying the others' life' (B62).

2.3 To see cosmic processes as examples of the working-out of unity-in-opposites is, however, only a first step. The 'latent structure', the ambivalent essence, has, merely as such, no meaning. The Rule of Intrinsic Meaning has not yet been invoked. At this point, therefore, we must consider Heraclitus' conception of the self, since that is what is claimed to provide the fulcrum for the application of that rule. 'Psuchë', traditionally translated 'soul', is in Homer and other early Greek writers the word for the self, the bearer of personal identity. It is always a disputable question how much necessarily goes along with identity; Homer seems to doubt whether the self in Hades retains much intelligence, though it is capable of emotion. In the lyric poets, too, 'psuchë'denotes the emotional side of the personality. In Heraclitus, for the first time, the 'soul' is clearly thought of as being the locus of intel ligence and rational, effective action. It functions well when dry, badly when moist. 'A dry beam of light is soul at its wisest and best' (B118); 'Whenever a man gets drunk, he is led by a young child, stumbling, not realising where he is going, his soul moist' (B117). Here there are the beginnings of a theory of psychology, but there is nothing to make improbable the view that for Heraclitus, as for Homer, the psuchē is basically the bearer of personal identity, and that it is that self which is discovered by introspection.¹³ It is, of course, important for Heraclitus that it is also the psuchē which is properly said to be intelligent or the reverse, and effectively active or the reverse. The relation of the psuchē to emotion seems to be equally direct, though the fragments are less clear.

The self that becomes known to a human being through introspection is, like Heraclitus' cosmos, something at once comfortingly familar and disconcertingly odd. It is both unitary and multiform, liable to give itself in succession or even at one and the same time to a variety of incompatible needs, desires, plans and ideals. It is known with great directness, yet is constantly revealing new and unsuspected aspects. 'The limits of soul you will not find out in going about, though you travel along every road: so deep is the account of it' (B45). The search for oneself is slow, unmapped, unending, and contains surprises for the most successful: 'Those who seek gold dig much ground and find little' (B22); 'If one does not expect the unexpected, one will not find it out, untrackable as it is and pathless' (B18).

The Rule of Intrinsic Meaning directs that the understanding of the cosmos must be found by giving it a meaning. The meaning must be found by seeing it as a human self, and interpreting its behaviour as that of such a self. But this in turn is not enough: the whole business will still be meaningless unless each human being can see, within himself, an overall meaning in his individual existence. So Heraclitus needs, to underpin the whole structure, some conception of what it is for an individual existence to have an overall meaning. In one word, the answer to the question is: 'War'.

2.4 The answer 'war' needs some explanation. Heraclitus takes it that the self has a best state (Bl 18, see section 2.3 above). He sees the meaning of its existence as given by its attempt to be always, or for as long as possible, in the best possible state. Here he is on common ground with the aristocratic warrior-ideal of Homer. But the best state of the self is that in which it is dry, and therefore most capable of intelligent thought and action. So a meaning in existence is found in the developing and exercising, to the utmost possible, of the capacities for intelligent thought and action.

Obviously there are, according to the particular circumstances, different lives which might result. But in general Heraclitus holds that the best life must be a life of active struggle, in two senses. First, there is the internal struggle to keep one's self in the best possible state in the face of all sorts of pressures towards the worse. Second, the exercise of the good capacities demands external obstacles to be overcome, and the most testing exercise is a conflict against an able and active opponent. Moreover, in the world of human affairs the same struggle between good and bad opposites reappears: certain types of people, certain political groups, and perhaps certain peoples or races, represent the good and the bad, the 'dry' and the 'wet', the followers of glory and of sensual satisfaction.¹⁴

So the best life is to be a warrior on the side of human excellence. This need not involve actual fighting: Heraclitus himself can hardly have had much opportunity to appear on the battlefield, unless he fought in Darius' army on some of its campaigns. Heraclitus' own warfare is conducted in words. But he too followed his own prescription: 'The best choose one thing in exchange for all else: glory ever-flowing among mortals; the many are glutted like beasts' (B29). The choice of glory is the external aspect of the pursuit of self-perfection, as in Homer, where the warrior has no other reward for his deeds, and no other consolation for his mortality, since existence after death is a miserable affair. For Heraclitus, though, the after-life may well have more to offer. The fragments indicate that a dry soul, after death, will rise into an honoured position in the skies, and perhaps achieve definitive immortality as a star.¹⁵ Even if one becomes a star, of course, the struggle is not necessarily over: stars too may be liable to fall (literally), and there is some evidence that good souls after death have anyway a role to play in the cosmic struggle, as 'guardians' (B63), fitting the watchful guise in which we see the stars. Being a star is itself, of course, a kind of glory.

For Heraclitus, then, the only meaning of existence is given by the long-term ambitions of being a dry soul and becoming a celestial watcher. Existence has a meaning just because such ambitions are capable of fulfilment without being easy to fulfil. There is constant choice required ('The best choose … ' B29), and a need to shape one's whole life and character: 'It is character (ēthos) that is one's guardian spirit' (B119); and, from the nature of the soul, a constant internal struggle.

2.5 It is now possible to return to the interpretation of the cosmos. So far it consists of a cosmic substratum which is ambivalent between the potentialities for being hot or cold, wet or dry, etc. The changes that occur express these ambivalences. The next interpretative step is to take the opposites as opposed, not merely in the sense of having opposed and mutually exclusive effects, but in the sense of being live forces, with some kind of independent existence, which are engaged in all-out war against each other. In the war, each side aims at the total destruction of the other (though this is never achieved, at least permanently). Only such a reading will account for the emphasis in the fragments on 'war' and 'strife'—(unless we are to take these as tired clichés merely denoting regular transitions between opposite states). More, only such a reading preserves the required interpretative parallel between the struggles of the self and those of the cosmos.

'War is father of all and king of all: some he sets up as gods, some as men, some he makes slaves, some free' (B53). The second part of this will refer both to ordinary human wars, and to internal human struggles; the first part is quite general. 'But one must know that war is general (xunor), and that justice is strife, and that all things come to be according to strife and necessity' (B80). In all kinds of struggle there are constraining laws, determined by the nature of things and not convention, governing the possibilities and restricting but not abolishing rational choice. The situation is analogous to that of a formalised struggle such as a board game played according to rules. Not very much can be learnt about the rules of the cosmic struggle, though certain 'measures' and 'proportions' (B30, 31) were preserved, and a fixed exchange-rate in physical conversions existed (B90); certain temporal lengths, too, were fixed for cosmic periods. The details are not here important: what is important is that the rules are not imposed from outside, but determined by the very nature of the struggle, and therefore an essential part of it, so that (correcting Anaximander) Heraclitus can say with emphasis 'Justice is strife.'¹⁶

2.6 In the struggle, the cosmic substratum plays the role corresponding to that of the self. The self has not only the passive function of serving as substratum for the opposites, but the active functions also of reasoning and choosing and constructing a way of existence out of the materials to hand. These two aspects of the self reappear in the cosmic substratum, which is also the cosmic intelligence. The struggles of the opposites are, from a different point of view, the struggles of the self (or cosmic intelligence) to constitute itself and plan its existence.¹⁷

Heraclitus' preferred name for the cosmic substratum, considered as such, is 'fire'. 'Neither any god nor any man made this cosmos, but it was always and is and will be, an everliving fire, being kindled in measures, and being quenched in measures' (B30). From this it is clear that 'fire' here indicates, not actual manifest fire, but a cosmic 'bonfire' serving as substratum to actual fire or to other states. 'Fire' indicates also that the best state of the substratum is the hot, dry, fiery state—it is then that it is 'most itself, just as the self is most truly itself when it is intelligent and active: for its other function positively requires intelligent choice, and action to reinforce that choice. The substratum appears also as 'God' in B67: 'God: day, night; winter, summer; war, peace; glut, famine; but he becomes of another kind … '

The name 'God', equally, indicates some kind of intelligent and active being, and points to the substratum as intelligent. That there is intelligence at work in the cosmos is also indicated fairly clearly by other fragments: (B64) 'Thunderbolt steers all things'; (B41) there is a steering of all things through all, and (probably) a plan governing this; (B78) 'Human character has no knowledge or plan (gnōmas), but divine character does'; (Bl 14) there is one divine being or law which 'nourishes' human laws. The whole relationship of cosmic intelligence to the struggle between the opposites is captured by Heraclitus in a brilliant image: that of a boy playing both sides in a board game. 'Everlasting Time (Aiōn) is a child at play, playing draughts: a child has the kingly power.'¹⁸ The contest is real, and law-like; the two sides are genuinely opposed and aiming at total victory; and yet one and the same person is playing both sides, and the keener the contest the more the child exercises and develops his intelligence.

The cosmic intelligence is the central point of the whole construction. Such a being is perfectly at home in Milesian cosmology, but may seem difficult to reconcile with the epistemology attributed to Heraclitus in this chapter. In particular, a wise God must presumably have a superhuman, transcendent and privileged way of knowing the world, which would contradict the Rule of Intrinsic Meaning. We seem to have come back to Xenophanes' transcendent divinity, after all.

The way out of this difficulty has already been suggested. The cosmic intelligence is in all essential respects human, just as human 'as you or me'. In particular, it is not something perfect and static, but repeatedly changing, making progress and sometimes regressing, in the process of self-creation. It is therefore a human being of an exceptional kind. The contrasts Heraclitus makes between 'human' and 'divine' in point of wisdom and intelligence (particularly B78: 'Human character has no knowledge or plan, but divine character does'; B79: Ά man is called foolish by a god, as a child by a man') are not concerned with the differences between ordinary human beings and the cosmic intelligence, but with the differences (more important for Heraclitus) between the average run of human beings, and the exceptions, whether 'human' in the ordinary sense or not.¹⁹

2.7 The cosmic struggle, on this interpretation, is intelligible as the struggle of a human self. Conversely, an individual human self has, in choosing the better side, the hope of a cosmic reward. It is natural to guess that there is a closer connection, in the sense that individual human intelligences are component parts of the cosmic intelligence, and that the cosmic struggle is the summed outcome of many individual struggles of individual intelligences, whether these latter are in human or stellar or some other form. The fragments offer little direct evidence either way as to the truth of this guess, but it is still worth considering.

Is there any evidence, in the first place, that good men naturally co-operate? (In some societies with warrior ideals it has been thought that good men achieve most glory by fighting and killing other good men.) Since Heraclitus sees value in civic life, and criticises political acts of his fellow-citizens of Ephesus, it would seem likely. 'Law' (nomos)—which would cover constitutional arrangements as well as civil and criminal law—is what Heraclitus sees as the indispensable unifying element in a city: 'The people should fight for the law as for the city-wall' (B44). In B114 this kind of law is compared with and related to 'the one divine (law)': 'All human laws are nourished by the one divine one.' Just what relationship is intended here is obscure; and in any case the cosmic 'justice' or 'law' is not obviously on the side of either the better or the worse forces in the cosmos. When good men become, after death, 'Guardians of living and of corpses' (B63) some kind of cosmic collaboration is suggested, as it is also by the orderly army of the stars. The cosmic intelligence might be constituted, along the lines of a city, as a collectivity of individual intelligences, with 'better' and 'worse' parties as in a Greek city.²⁰

The same tentative conclusion is supported from another direction by the consideration that the vehicle of intelligence is language, and that Heraclitus, in his war against lack of understanding, uses and appeals to the language and the culture that he shares with his audience.

In second place, it is worth asking whether there are any individual intelligences at work in the cosmos apart from human beings and perhaps stars. But here again good evidence is hard to find. At any rate, the changes due to human activity are much swifter and more dramatic than any others in the cosmos.

It is on the earth's surface and on the sea's that the decisive parts of the cosmic drama are played out. The sun is not an independent or continuing participant, but merely a device for reflecting back onto earth and sea and atmosphere some of their own potentialities for change. Its movements and power are determined by the 'exhalations' from the earth and sea below it. So, too, probably, for atmospheric phenomena. What is fundamental is the struggle between earth and sea. But this is a struggle in which men can and do intervene; though as yet only on a puny scale. It is not impossible that Heraclitus envisaged, and hoped to help to create, an international alliance of dry souls, which would fight and defeat the resistance of wetter souls, and help the earth to dry up the sea.

2.8 Seen either from the point of view of the opposites or of the substratum, the cosmic process has two opposed aspects: freedom and regularity. This opposition is the ultimate one in Heraclitus' view of the world. As strife, or as self-determination through struggle of the cosmic intelligence, the process is free; as justice, or as the working out of the continual ambivalence of the substratum in endless oscillations, the process is regular and predictable. The opposition is captured by the remark that 'justice is strife' (B80), by the image of the board game, and by the fact that the Sibyl, a prophetess 'with mad mouth', is able in her apparent ravings to 'reach across a thousand years' (B92), i.e. to make correct predictions about the remote future. Heraclitus was aware of this opposition too.²¹

A related problem is: how is a meaning to be given to the everlasting existence of the cosmic intelligence? Its existence must be given meaning by an everlasting struggle towards its best state. But the struggle cannot be endless, for then it would be hopeless and pointless. So it must be crowned with success after a finite time; after which, of course, the struggle must begin all over again, in order to renew the meaning of life. It is clear that Heraclitus saw a general pattern here too: continuing life means repeated self-renewal, and self-renewal requires rest, which is a partial dismantling, a sleep or a death. 'It is the same thing which is present as living and dead, as waking and sleeping, as young and old; these change state to become those, and those again change state to become these' (B88). 'In alteration to a different state, it rests' (B84a). The requirements of meaningfulness and of freedom in existence concur to produce a regular and predictable pattern.²²

3 Language, meaning and logos

3.1 Nothing is more needed at present by students of Heraclitus than a commentary on the fragments applying all the resources of literary scholarship. Such a commentary would approach Heraclitus in the way he himself intended. Valuable preliminary work has been done, most notably in the studies of Snell and Hôlscher and in the commentary of Kahn. My aim in this part is to provide a rapid survey of Heraclitus' use of language, and to show how it is related to the theses of sections 1 and 2. In conclusion, his use of the word 'logos' is considered in the same context.²³

3.2 Heraclitus addresses himself to anyone who will listen. But not in a spirit of cool exposition. As has often been recognised, his relationship to his audience is that of a preacher. It is the preacher's style that shows itself in the mixture of plainly-worded descriptions and denunciations of ordinary people's behaviour, pregnantly-phrased aphorisms, images and illustrations from ordinary life, and cryptic formulations of higher truths. These are the means by which he tries to win human beings to the insights and the inner state he has himself attained. As has been suggested already, Heraclitus sees the human race as a battleground disputed by the forces of active intelligence and those of weakness and stupidity. He himself is a warrior on the side of active intelligence, and his words are his weapons, designed to have maximum impact over the widest possible range.

Seers, prophets and oracles existed in archaic Greece as in the ancient Near East, and their style of delivery in some cases is recorded and can be compared with that of Heraclitus. So too can that of two great poets, Heraclitus' near contemporaries, in whom the prophetic tone and style sometimes predominates: Pindar and Aeschylus.²⁴ Heraclitus differs from the average prophet in the important respect that he does not rely on an essentially private revelation. But the needs of the situation as he sees it force him to adopt the same style.

3.3 As a first approximation we may distinguish four principal components in Heraciitus' style; they cannot, of course, always be clearly separated.

(A) The plain style in which he describes and denounces human lack of understanding. The language is straightforward, ordinary and syntactically simple. The tone may be scornful.

(B) Aphorisms in ordinary language, tersely phrased but immediately intelligible in ordinary terms.

(C) 'Parables' or images drawn from ordinary life, again economically phrased, in ordinary language, but with a significance not necessarily even partly obvious.

(D) The cryptic style: a deliberately chosen formulation of important truths using unusual words and elaborate syntax, with one or more meanings more or less concealed.

All of this can be paralleled from the language of prophets, seers and oracles.²⁵

3.4 It is the cryptic style that promises to have the closest connection with the thought of Heraciitus as interpreted in the previous sections. For sense-experience presents itself, as an oracle to be divined, in a way that leaves the important structure hidden and only obscurely hinted at. It would not be surprising if Heraciitus expressed himself in a similar way when he had important truths to convey.

The devices used are various. First, there are those that centre on single words. Each single word normally has one ordinary meaning: but it may have two or more. And by its internal phonetic structure or by its phonetic similarity with other words, further meanings or connections may be suggested. In this way, what we would call facts about language and relationships between words are used to indicate more general truths. In some fragments the intention is manifest: (B48) 'The name of the bow is "life" (bios) but its work is death'—the linguistic facts make the word an example of unity-in-opposites and thereby show that the thing signified is also an example. Only slightly less obvious are, e.g., B94 (the Erinyes, from Eris= strife, as the assistants of Justice) or B32 (the name Zēnos, popularly connected with zēn 'to live' is and is not appropriate for the one wise thing). Many other examples of latent etymologies could be given. One has even helped to befog the textual criticism of a fragment: in B118 the phrase 'augēxērē' (dry beam of light) suggests the etymology auē (dry) for 'augē', and this resemblance has in fact misled scholars into reading 'auē' for 'auge' and deleting 'xērē' as a gloss.²⁶

Continuous with etymologies of single words are 'puns', in the sense of manifest verbal resemblances which Heraciitus uses to suggest a relationship of meaning. So in B15 the words aidein 'sing', aisma 'song', aidoia 'private parts' (from aidôs 'shame'), anaidēs 'shameless', and Aides 'Hades' are strung together to suggest an accumulation of esoteric connections. Perhaps more important is the resemblance of xunos 'common', key word in B2, 80 and 114, to axunetos 'lacking understanding' and xun noōi 'with mind'. The common element is xun 'together with'. The verb xunienai 'understand', which occurs in another key fragment, B51, has a transparent etymology: it means 'to put together'. To understand is then to reconstruct in one's mind a significant unity, re-assembling it from the pieces given in experience.

In some cases, there are grounds for suspecting that concealed etymologies or puns are in play. In these cases, the keyword does not necessarily occur in the fragment at all, but 'clues' to it are given. To read Heraciitus in this way is to risk reducing him to a crossword puzzle; nevertheless I shall present two examples for consideration. B94: 'The sun (Helios) will not transgress measures.' Another name for the sun is Huperiôn, which can be read as a present participle, 'transgressing', of the very verb used in 'will not transgress'. B26 is a remarkable assemblage of artfully arranged contrasts and puns, on any reading: Ά human being in the night kindles a light, being quenched in sights: alive, he touches the dead, awake, he touches the sleeping.' Manifestly, the verb 'haptetai ' is used in different senses ('kindles', 'touches'), yet the original connection between the senses is suggested. Beneath the first clause, there is a latent structure given by the various meanings of the word phaos or its other form phōs: 'man', 'eye' or 'light'….

The other leading device of the cryptic style is ambiguity of syntax and construction. This has often been remarked on, from Aristotle down, and is properly appreciated and thoroughly and sensitively explored in the recent commentary of Kahn. For this reason it need not be considered further here.

3.5 The conclusion suggested by these features of style is that Heraciitus wishes to use language to 'show how [each thing] is' (Bl). For this reason, language properly used is cryptic to the uninitiated, just as sense-experience is. Both contain indications pointing in different directions, and both have to be interpreted. The interpreting consists in the finding of a meaning which casts a unifying light, and enables the different parts to be understood as parts of a structure intended by an intelligent being. To understand is literally to 'assemble' the parts. For this reason it seems likely that Heraciitus' own work was meant to be read as a whole, though the individual sayings were clearly almost completely disjoint from one another.²⁷

A related problem, which may serve as a final test of the line of interpretation that has been offered, is that of Heraclitus' use of the word 'logos'. The most controversial cases are in Bl and B50: 'Of this logos as it is always men prove to have no understanding, both before hearing it and when they have heard it. For though all things came to be according to this logos they are like people of no experience when they experience such words and deeds as I set forth, delimiting each thing according to its nature and showing how it is' (Bl). 'Listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to concur that all is one' (B50). It has often been remarked that Bl, coming as it does at the beginning of Heraclitus' work, presupposes a standard sense of logos: 'statement, account', applied to the prose works of the Ionian thinkers, story-tellers, travellers and historians (in this sense, in B108, 'All whose logoi I have heard'). In B1 and B50 the fragments themselves show that 'the logos' is some account of the nature of things in general terms. Since Heraclitus' work supplied just such an account, it is tempting to suppose that in those fragments 'the logos' is just Heraclitus' account of the universe.

Even if we consider only the wording of Bl and B50, however, this interpretation is hardly satisfactory. 'Listening to the logos' is distinguished from 'listening to me'; and the logos is said to be (or be true) always. This shows that the logos exists and has authority independently of what Heraclitus may happen to say; so that it is not in virtue of being Heraclitus' account that it has the properties mentioned. It would be odd, then, if Heraclitus here used such an accidental characterisation of this important entity as that it was the account given by himself.

The conclusion that the logos is meant to be a permanent feature of the universe is reinforced by comparing another part of Bl with B45: 'The limits of soul you would not find out by going about, though you travelled every road: so deep a logos does it have.' The true account of 'soul' is undiscoverable; to discover it would be to discover the 'limits' (peirata) of soul. So, in B1, Heraclitus describes his own activity as 'delimiting each thing according to its nature, and showing how it is'—giving its logos, evidently. The logos is again conceived as inherent in the thing delimited: a statement of its essence.²⁸

The evidence of these fragments, then, without any further interpretation, suggests that 'the logos' is a statement about the essence of the universe, and that this statement is to be considered as a permanent feature of the universe. But how can a statement be a permanent feature of the universe? On the interpretation I have been trying to expound, the answer is straightforward. The manifest parts of the cosmic process are an unending, ever-repeated statement specifying the nature of the process as a whole. What Heraclitus specifies in words, the cosmic intelligence states in 'deeds'.

To interpret 'logos ' in this way is not, of course, to exclude the possibility that the other senses of the word (e.g. 'proportion', 'reasoning' in particular) may also be in play here.

4 Conclusion

Heraclitus assumes the tone and the style of a prophet. But his appeal is not to his private revelation, but to common-sense experience. It insists that men could, but mostly do not, interpret that experience aright. What prevents them from doing so, in his view, is presumably habit and mental inertia, which in turn must be presumed to be due to their insufficiently dry souls. His sayings are clarion calls to wake them from their dogmatic slumbers.

Sense-experience rightly interpreted is sufficient for a complete knowledge of the world, its nature and meaning, to be reached. But in order to interpret, we must pay attention to the realm which we know directly but not by sense-experience: the realm of our own selves. We must 'look for ourselves' and construct a phenomenology of our own inner experience. In doing so, Heraclitus becomes aware of his self as something that continually creates and re-creates itself by its own choices, and yet also is an unbounded reservoir of possibilities opposed to the ones it realises. He becomes aware of the strangeness of the selfs contemplation of itself. These and other features of his inner life he uses to interpret the cosmos.

Heraclitus' cosmos corresponds to the structure discovered by introspection (so that, as Bruno Snell has noted, even his generalising statements about the cosmos are conveyed in the vivid language of felt experience).²⁹ It has its changeless essence, which contains opposed potentialities. It chooses now this, now that, in a process which is a struggle and a continual oscillation between opposite states. The course of the struggle is predictable, at least in outline, because it is determined by the law of oscillation, to which all essentially ambivalent things are subject. But the struggle is not a meaninglessly mechanical one: it is illuminated from inside and given meaning by the effort of the cosmic 'self to realise its best state, that of unmixed activity and intelligence, of pure dryness and heat. This is the struggle for each individual self as well. The paradoxes of individual 'weakness of will' recur in the cosmos: the self intends to choose the better, and yet often freely chooses and identifies itself with the worse.

The cosmic self is fully human in the sense that it is structurally identical with a human self. Moreover, individual human selves seem to be fragments, probably the most important fragments, of it. Human wars, and even the internal psychological struggles of single human beings, are cosmically significant. The reward of the best human selves is that at death they become stars, and as such enjoy a permanent if interrupted individual existence. The others presumably lose all individuality.

This reading of Heraclitus presents him as attempting to overcome some uncomfortable divisions of which Greek writers in the Archaic age show themselves aware: the division between the self and the world as given in sense-experience, the division between the way things are as a matter of brute fact and the meanings that human beings see in them. Awareness of such divisions is present implicitly in Homer, being indeed a precondition of the grandeur and pathos of his warrior-heroes.³⁰ In the same era as Heraclitus, they are part of the stuff of the great lyric and tragic poetry of Pindar and Aeschylus.

Heraclitus is, secondarily, in reaction against 'science' as represented by the proto-scientific theorising of the Milesians. But he deals gently with these men, no doubt respecting their intellectual vitality and their opposition to traditional and popular ideas. For Heraclitus, these men had at least tried to interpret their experience along what were partly the right lines, but they had disregarded some canons of interpretation and as a result their systems were arbitrary.

Heraclitus presents clear parallels with later thinkers, notably with Hegel and Wittgenstein. Any fuller study would have the duty to elucidate these parallels. But Heraclitus deserves study not only for the sake of later thinkers, or for his historical importance as the first metaphysician, but for his own sake: the first metaphysical system is also one of the most fascinating and most philosophically fertile.

Notes

² References to Heraclitean material will be given in the standard A- and B- numeration of the later editions of Diels-Kranz. (H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th and later editions ed. W. Kranz, Berlin 1952, etc.).

³ Thales was mentioned by name (B38, see Kahn [The Art and THought of Heraclitus (Cambridge 1979)], p. 113).

⁴ The treatments of Heraclitus by later ancient philosophers, particularly Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus and the Stoics, are difficult topics which have not been adequately treated in detail. For the early Stoic view, see the useful summary in A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy (London 1974), 145-7. Heraclitus as 'melancholic', i.e. manic-depressive: Theophrastus (Diogenes Laertius IX 6).

⁵ On Xenophanes' empiricism see Hermann Frânkel, Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens (2nd ed. Munich 1955), 338-49; an English translation of these pages, by Matthew R. Cosgrove and Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, appears in Alexander P. D. Mourelatos (ed.), The Pre-Socratics (New York 1974), 118-31. Heraclitus' closeness to Xenophanes is rightly seen (perhaps exaggerated) by Olof Gigon, Untersuchungen zu Heraklit (Leipzig 1935), 76-8, 149-59.

⁶ It is perhaps more likely that later scepticism derived some of its arguments from Heraclitus. The Rule of No Cancellation is expressed later in the Epicurean principle that 'every perception is true', on which see C. C. W. Taylor, 'All Perceptions are True', in Doubt and Dogmatism, Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, ed. Schofield, Burnyeat and Barnes (Oxford 1980), 105-24.

⁷ On all this, see particularly the classic treatment by E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1951), chs. II-V. Heraclitus is notably savage in his attacks on mystery-cults, Dionysiac religion, and Pythagoras.

⁸ See on this fragment Kahn's commentary…, 116-17 and 119-20, where its authenticity is defended.

⁹ Hermann Diels, Herakleitos von Ephesos (2nd ed. Berlin 1909), x; Karl Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (Bonn 1916), 193; Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 20.

¹⁰ The evidence for which this section aims to account is presented in the standard works: it cannot here be discussed in detail. I see no good reason to doubt that the report (Diogenes Laertius IX.9-11) of Theophrastus about the heavenly bodies is substantially correct, in spite of some difficulties. Direct evidence for the stars as intelligent watchers is admittedly slight, but there are no contrary indications.

¹¹ A full development of this interpretation of unity-in-opposites would require far more space. One important objection is: if the doctrine of unity-in-opposites is really as Aristotelian as is claimed, why should Aristotle himself have misunderstood it so badly? The objection is blunted by the observation that Aristotle all too frequently fastens on and criticises the terminology rather than the substance of his predecessors' doctrines—a practice admirable for the conduct of a dialectical encounter, but deplorable in the writing of the history of thought. Thanks in large part to Gwil Owen, we are coming to see how thoroughly dialectical Aristotle's treatment of his predecessors always is.

¹² The vexed question of flux in Heraclitus, and related controversial matters, need not be discussed here. On these questions see the standard works, e.g. G. S. Kirk, Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments (Cambridge 1954), and W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1 (Cambridge 1962), 449-54; also Kahn's commentary (note 1 above). A new approach to these problems is provided by David Wiggins in 'Heraclitus' Conception of Flux, Fire and Material Persistnece']. I am indebted to Wiggins for showing me the importance for understanding Heraclitus of the concept of essence, a point also suggested by Jonathan Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers (London 1979), vol. 1, 77.

¹³ On psuchē in early Greek, Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 136-90, partly corrected by Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 126-27, and n. 112. But Kahn seems to me to go astray (a) in supposing that for Heraclitus 'the psyche is primarily a principle of rational cognition'—a view out of line both with early Greek usage and with the totality of the relevant fragments; (b) in consequently rejecting the correct insight of Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes, 3rd edn (Hamburg 1955), 36-9, that Heraclitus' concept of psuchē marks an awareness of the distinction between the realm of sense-experience and that of introspection. Snell in turn, I believe, exaggerates the contrast between Homer and Heraclitus in this respect; see section 4 below. On psuchē in Heraclitus the best treatment is Martha Nussbaum 'Psuchē in Heraclitus, 1' Phronesis, 17 (1972), 1-15.

¹⁴ Some fragments reveal political ideas; see the wellbalanced remarks of Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 177-81. The extension to a 'geopolitical' theory is unsupported by direct evidence. See, further, section 2.7…. I think it likely that Heraclitus admired the Persian monarchy of his time and the Zoroastrianism which Darius had adopted as its state religion, but there is no space to discuss the question here.

¹⁵ For the rewards after death, see esp. G. S. Kirk, 'Heraclitus and Death in Battle, fr. 24D', Amer. Journal of Philology, 70 (1949), 384-93; Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 245-59.

¹⁶ On the laws of the cosmic changes, see the works referred to in n. 11 above.

¹⁷ There are a few fragments relating to the selfs internal struggles: B110 'It is not better for human beings to get all they want'; B43, the wanton exercise of strength and power (hubris) is a deadly danger to the soul; B85, it is hard to fight against thumos (anger and related passions); B117 on drunkenness.

¹⁸'Draughts' is a conventional translation; the game of pessoi was more like backgammon. The interpretation given here (the boy plays both sides) was (according to Bruno Snell, 'Die Sprache Heraklits', Gesammelte Schriften (Göttingen 1966), 145 n.2, who rejects it) given by Leisegang in 1925 (in Literarische Wochenschrift, 1 (1925), 51, which I have not seen).

¹⁹ The ambiguity, as between God and human beings, of the wisdom attributed in the difficult B41 is well brought out by Kahn in his book, pp. 170-2. The only fragment that seems to attribute a special perspective to God is B102: 'For God all things are beautiful and good and just, but men suppose some things just, some things unjust.' I am not sure that this is even a paraphrase of a genuine sentence of Heraclitus, but if it is it should be dealt with in the same way as B78 and B79.

²⁰ In international politics, Heraclitus may well have seen the efficient empire of the fire-worshipping Persians as the representative on earth of the 'good' party. The whole topic of Heraclitus' attitude to the Iranian peoples and their religion deserves careful re-examination.

²¹ Also perhaps B124 (order out of disorder) belongs here.

²² The 'river' and 'barley-drink' fragments (B12, 125) are obviously related—they give examples of identity preserved by continual change. But they introduce additional complications which are here not relevant.

²³ On Heraclitus' language: Snell, see n. 17; Uvo Hölscher, Anfängliches Fragen (Göttingen 1968), 'Heraklit' particularly 136-49; Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus.

²⁴ The comparison with Pindar and Aeschylus was made by Diels, Herakleitos von Ephesos (n. 8 above), VII; also Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 7. A good characterisation of Heraclitean style is in W. Schmid and O. Stählin, Geschichte der griechischen Literatur, 1 i (Munich 1929), 751-3.

²⁵ For (A) see the material collected by M. L. West, Hesiod: Theogony (Oxford 1966), 158-67. For oracular elements see Hôlscher (op. cit. n.22), 136-41. Kahn, op. cit., 91, objects that whereas an oracle has only one correct interpretation, Heraclitus intends many; the contrast seems to me more apparent than real. Useful material in W. B. Stanford, Ambiguity in Greek Literature (Oxford 1939), chs. VII-X.

²⁶ See the vigorous and convincing defence of augē xērē by Kahn in his commentary, 245-6.

²⁷ Kahn, op. cit., 87-95, makes valuable remarks about the unity of the whole work and other questions of interpretation.

²⁸ The meanings of 'peirata' and of'defining' (diaireōn) need more discussion than they have received here or elsewhere. Bl 15, also referring to the logos of the soul, is of dubious authenticity.

²⁹ Snell, 'Die Sprache Heraklits' (above n. 17), 132.

³⁰ See now the admirable exploration of this aspect of Homer by Jasper Griffin, Homer on Life and Death (Oxford 1980).