Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Heraclitus on measure and the explicit emergence of rationality 107
What this archaic outlook completely lacked, so far as one can see,
was the idea that human intelligence might be able to enter the orderly
cosmos it already intuited and discover laws of nature for itself, gaining
some authentic access, as it were, to the operations of the divine mentality.
Hence the epistemological pessimism we find in Hesiod, Solon,
and Xenophanes. All three authors agreed that, while the supreme divinity
itself is “far seeing” and controlling, human beings can achieve
no “likeness to god” in these respects or gain a reliable measure of intellectual
control over their own lives.
Heraclitus, by contrast, thought that human beings not only could
but should acquire insight into nature, as he calls it; for, without that insight,
they could not live wakeful, authentic and intelligent lives. 30
Thus, probably with strong stimulus from Milesian cosmology, he set
ancient philosophy on an epistemological course quite opposite to archaic
pessimism. He intuited the unifying power of structure, measure
and proportion in the world’s physical processes; took these to be instantiated
in the operation of divine intelligence; and, in his greatest
and most far-reaching innovation, posited human capacity to think
and speak commensurately – i.e. in accordance with nature, and therefore
rationally.
As I have written elsewhere: “Heraclitus’ relation to the world is, in
a sense, an attempt to think the thoughts of god. This would be a very
unsafe thing to do if you were dealing with Olympian Zeus.” 31 Heraclitus’
Zeus, by contrast, is only equivocally the Olympian deity (B
32). Non-equivocally, his Zeus is the deep structure of the world and
the world’s predictable and regular processes, as manifested in the
sun’s cycle and the alternation of day and night (B 67). As I have also
proposed elsewhere, we may characterize the general project of early
Greek philosophy as “accounting for all things” – accounting, not in
the sense of enumerating facts, but giving a systematic explanation of
why the world is the way it appears to be. 32 Heraclitus did not invent
the concept of the world as a bounded totality. Yet, he was the first
30 “The difference between the gods and humanity, traditionally almost unbridgeable,
is for Heraclitus inessential”, Hussey 1999, 103. As Hussey observes
(ibid. 104), in reference to such fragments as B 78 – 79, which contrast the divine
and the human: this “is a matter of character not of nature … That human
nature is perfectly capable of achieving real understanding is shown by … B113
and B116”.
31 Long 1992b, 273.
32 Long 1999a, 10–13.