From the Beginning to Plato

FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO 93
downhill stroll; for the traveller at the bottom it is an uphill struggle: ‘The road
up and down is one and the same’ (B60). 64
It seems clear that Heraclitus’ interest in context-dependent significance is
linked to his interest in continuity and identity through change. In both he is
concerned to show that the kind of unity or identity that is determined by the
logos does not depend upon material continuity, nor does opposition or diversity
of significance depend upon material discontinuity. The same item, such as the
road, can carry a different significance to another observer, while on the other
hand a significant continuity can be preserved for two items that elicit varied
responses, such as the day and the night, or sea and earth. The explanation of
identity must be sought not in a material substrate, but in a more complex
account of observer-related or context-dependent significance.
Some of the opposites mentioned by Heraclitus are substantive nouns, such as
those attached to god in fragment B67 (day, night, winter, summer, hunger,
satiety); others are expressed as adjectives expressing relations or attributes or
evaluations of things, such as up, down, good, bad, pure, impure, straight,
crooked and the like. We might think that these were two different kinds of
items, since nouns name things while adjectives say something about the
properties of things, and it might be tempting to suppose that the kind of
opposites that are attributes or relations or values would be more likely to be
context-dependent. But it should be noticed that neither set is a set of material
entities; nor are the ones identified by nouns more absolute or objective than the
others: the classification of hours as day or night, or the classification of months
as winter or summer, implies a certain response or attitude to the significance of
those items for our own activities and for our lives. 65 The connection between
the two sets of opposites can be seen if we look at the notion of slave and free:
War is both father and king of all, and it has revealed some to be gods, some
human; it has made some slaves and some free.
(B53) 66
To be human is to be a slave or a free person. But which you are depends upon
your status, your position in society. In this respect you are made a slave or free:
it is war that makes us slaves or free. So does the term ‘slave’ identify what the
individual is, or some attribute or evaluation of the person? The term can be
either a noun or an adjective; it can point out a person, or it can say something
about the person. But what is there to the person, other than an identity within a
particular society? Where you belong and who you are seem to be defined by a
range of roles that acquire their significance in your relations to others. Indeed
perhaps we cannot ask who you are, or whether you are the same person, unless
we have in mind some society within which your identity matters. Thus your
identity is defined not by your physical constitution but by the significance of
your place in society. What and who you are is context-dependent, determined
by the circumstances of a human way of life, the conventions of warfare and of