Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Heraclitus on measure and the explicit emergence of rationality 91
flection on Heraclitus. As I have argued elsewhere, they interpreted
Heraclitus with great skill and insight. 8 In the Stoic conception of a causally
coherent world, pervaded and guided by the divine and fiery logos
(of which we human beings are integral parts), the resonance of Heraclitus
is obvious, as it also is in the Stoic project of a “life in agreement
with nature”. In this paper, rather than looking to the Stoics, I propose
to approach Heraclitus from basic constituents of rationality as conceptualized
by Plato. It is Plato, I will argue, who retrospectively provides
us with the best conceptual threads, so to speak, for tracing and stitching
together the disparate components of Heraclitean rationality.
Plato and Heraclitus on sôphrosynÞ and measure
When scholars pair Plato and Heraclitus, they generally do so to contrast
them. “For Plato”, writes Kahn (1979, 4), “Heraclitus is the theorist of
universal flux”. This is quite right as a report on Plato’s statements about
Heraclitus in the Cratylus and Theaetetus. According to those dialogues,
Heraclitean flux excludes knowledge. I do not doubt that Plato interpreted
Heraclitus accordingly, as Aristotle says (Metaph. 1, 987a32 –4),
and that it was Plato’s interpretation of Heraclitean flux as the condition
of phenomena that strongly motivated his theory of changeless Forms.
In addition, I believe, like many scholars, that the reading of Heraclitus
as essentially a flux theorist who excluded all knowledge is quite mistaken.
9 Why, then, do I turn to Plato, to elucidate Heraclitus’ idea of rationality?
I do so not because I take Plato to have read Heraclitus directly as a
theorist of rationality, in the way that I shall advocate. My strategy, rather,
is to look to Plato for an idea of rationality that seems too strikingly
similar to what I find in Heraclitus to be accidental. Has Heraclitus,
then, influenced Plato after all? I do not know. Perhaps so, or perhaps
it is rather the case that Heraclitus has influenced the intellectual climate
in which Plato found himself. What matters, so far as I am concerned, is
not Plato’s actual interpretation of Heraclitus or the direct influence of
8 Long 1996b, which is a revised version of a paper first published in the Greek
journal Philosophia 5/6 (1975/1976), 132 – 153.
9 See Long 1992b for a detailed defence of this view.