From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 91
second part again alludes to the inability of ordinary people to detect the logos in
the everyday things they encounter. It seems that one aspect of the systematic
and coherent logos appears in the regularity of systematic change in the natural
world, even where discontinuity seems evident.
This system, one and the same system of all things, no god, nor any human
being made it, but it always was and is and will be an ever-living fire,
catching light in measures and extinguished in measures.
(B30) 60
Sea is poured off and is measured out to the same proportion [logos] as it
was formerly, before the birth of earth.
(B31b) 61
All things are in return for fire and fire for all things, like goods for gold
and gold for goods.
(B90) 62
Two important features emerge from these texts: first, there is a logos, a measure
or proportion, which is fixed and regular in the processes of natural change; and
second, this measure is independent of material continuity and is based on some
kind of continuity of exchange value, as in the image of the buying and selling of
goods for gold. When we purchase something for money we do not retain
anything of the same product that we owned before. We no longer have the gold;
we have the purchased item instead. But the purchased item can then be
returned, and we can get the money back. What remains through the exchange is
not the material item, but the value of the goods measured by an independent
standard. Thus Heraclitus can maintain that the discontinuity in the changes
observed in the world is structured by a system of measured proportion, the
logos that ensures that what we have after the change is, in the sense that
matters, the same value: it is measured to the same logos. He can affirm that
everything flows in radical change where no material substance remains, and yet
there is a coherence and unity to the changing world.
The suggestion that no material substance persists marks a radical break with
the older Ionian tradition which sought to find unity behind the changing
processes in the form of a single underlying stuff that was preserved through
change, manifesting itself in different forms but essentially retaining its identity.
For Anaximenes everything is a form of air, varying only in its density. For
Heraclitus it does not matter if air ‘dies’ completely and fire is born from its
ashes. We can still retain a sense that the world has a continuing identity, like the
identity of a river whose constant flow of new water is what makes it a river.
None of the fragments implies that fire persists through the changes. In B30
the fire is said to be regularly being extinguished in measures: presumably those
parts are then not fire. Thus to say that the system as a whole always is a fire is