From the Beginning to Plato

90 HERACLITUS
Heraclitus’ own views. But this need not mean that there was nothing
authentically Heraclitean behind the notion that everything flows.
The most obviously relevant texts are a set known as the ‘River fragments’.
These may be variants of a single Heraclitean saying or he may have said several
similar things.
For it is not possible to step twice into the same river, according to
Heraclitus, nor twice to touch a mortal being in the same condition…
(B91) 54
Onto those who step into the same rivers different and different waters
flow; and souls are exhaled from moistures.
(B12) 55
We step and do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.
(B49a) 56
The interpretations offered by those who quote the texts imply that Heraclitus
was making an observation about the continuing identity of the human soul;
there need not be material identity in the waters flowing down a river, yet we shall
say that it is the same river. There is a sense in which we encounter the same
individual twice, but if the individual is not in the same condition what is it that
makes it the same person? The point may not have been linked to other change,
but there is no doubt that Heraclitus also thought that other parts of nature
underwent similar processes of change:
Cold things warm up, the warm gets cold, the moist dries up, the parched gets
damp.
(B126) 57
In particular he focused on some changes in which the material components did
not remain:
Always remember Heraclitus’ view that the death of earth is to be born as
water, and the death of water to be born air, and of air fire, and the reverse.
Bear in mind as well the one who has forgotten whither the road leads; and
that people are at odds with the thing with which they are most constantly
associating, the logos that directs all things, and the things they encounter
daily seem strange to them; and we should not act and speak as if
asleep… 58
The first part of this extract seems to refer to processes of change in the natural
world, processes in which, to Heraclitus at least, it appeared that the prior stuff was
eliminated (‘died’) and a new stuff came into existence (‘was born’ 59 ); the