From the Beginning to Plato

CHAPTER 3
Heraclitus
Catherine Osborne
No philosopher before Socrates can have had such a profound influence on so
many generations of subsequent thinkers as Heraclitus. Nor can any thinker,
probably in the whole history of philosophy, have inspired such a wide range of
different ideas, all claiming in some way to be true to his authentic genius. Yet
the sparsity of his written remains, and the richly obscure or even mystical style
of his sayings, leave us with no grounds for concluding that one, rather than
another of the great variety of Heracliteanisms on offer in the history of thought
is more accurate than another. This fact is probably as it should be; for if I am
right in the interpretation that I shall try to present in this chapter, Heraclitus’ most
important observation was that the significance of things changes with the time
and place and context of the observer, and of the speaker; that what is the same
differs from day to day; and that what one says, and the words one says it in, will
mean different and even opposed things to different people, and for different
purposes. Heraclitus, the purveyor of an eternal doctrine that is both familiar to
all and obscure to most, illustrates in himself the very doctrine that he tried to
present: that what counts as the same and what counts as opposed is decided by a
significance acquired in a social or temporal context, and is not determined
absolutely by a fixed nature or material constitution in the entities we observe.
PROBLEMS OF INTERPRETATION
The problems of interpretation that are characteristic of pre-Socratic thinkers are
all the more acute for Heraclitus. Firstly, we have little reliable evidence about
his life, 1 though much that is unreliable; but that scarcely seems to matter when
we consider the much more severe difficulties involved in reconstructing his
thought. None of his work is preserved directly in its own right, a situation that is
normal for thinkers of this period. The texts that we have are collected from the
quotations in later writers, some of them far removed in time from Heraclitus.
Although we have more of these ‘fragments’ than we have of any of the earlier
Ionian thinkers, two factors make Heraclitus’ work peculiarly difficult to
reconstruct, (1) Heraclitus seems to have expressed his views in the form of
short pithy sayings, largely disconnected, in prose rather than poetry. 2 The