From the Beginning to Plato

96 HERACLITUS
We cannot imagine what it would be like to be dead, placed as we are in the
context of a life in which all the thoughts and experiences have their significance
defined by that life, the absence of which would be death.
While life and death are contrasted in this way there is still, for Heraclitus, a
fundamental connection between them. This connection is expressed in the
structure of language, in the fact that the word for life (bios) is also one of the
names for the bow, an instrument of death. The coherence of these opposites is
thus evident in the systematic ambiguity of language, one of the shared practices
that expresses the systematic logos: ‘The name of the bow is life, its function
death’ (B48). 76 Whether the word carries implications of life or death will be
determined by its context in language, and that fact reflects the context-dependent
significance of life and death as features of our human ethos.
Aristotle knows of a tradition which suggests that Heraclitus denied the law of
non-contradiction:
It is impossible for anyone to suppose that the same thing both is and is
not, as some people think Heraclitus said. For it is not necessarily the case
that what someone says is what he supposes. 77
In Aristotle’s view it is not possible seriously to believe in a contradiction. He
does not deny that that might be the effect of something Heraclitus says, but he
denies that Heraclitus could seriously have held it to be so. Subsequently
Heraclitus seems to have been adopted as an authority by the Sceptic
Aenesidemus, and although it is unclear exactly what Aenesidemus found in
Heraclitus that led him to suggest that the Sceptical method of doubt led ultimately
to Heracliteanism, it is possible that his point was that the Sceptic will ultimately
need to question even the law of non-contradiction, on which all earlier doubts
were founded. 78 What these traditions draw on seems to be the sayings we
possess that stress the importance of seeing one and the same thing under
opposed descriptions. Heraclitus was indeed concerned to draw attention to the
contrasting significance of words and practices, and to say that we need not then
suppose that what we thus perceived as opposed was not a unity. But Aristotle
was probably right that, in stressing that aspect, he did not mean to say that there
was a contradiction involved; rather he wants to say that the context is sufficient
to give us opposition; indeed that it is the sole source of the contrasting
significance of what is in other respects one and the same. 79
HARMONY AND THE RECOGNITION OF WHAT IS
OBSCURE
The internal relation between features of apparently opposite significance is
sometimes linked to the notion of ‘agreement’ and ‘logos’: