From the Beginning to Plato

102 HERACLITUS
Honour is the best thing to choose precisely because it escapes from the contextdependence
of other values, which are desirable only by contrast with some
painful alternative and are confined to the temporal life of an individual with
desires. Ordinary people, as Clement observes in interpreting this saying,
measure their happiness by food and sex, the values of non-human animals. But
virtue achieves a different kind of reward, one that extends beyond human
recognition: ‘Gods and humans honour the war-dead’ (B24). 107
Thus although Heraclitus certainly does not regard the values of the multitude
as worthy of pursuit, he will not easily find anyone who is qualified to rule.
Aristocracy, in place of democracy, will be the rule of the ‘best’, but the best are
defined by their choice of honour or virtue as the only lasting value worthy of
pursuit. ‘It is customary to respect the advice of one’ (B33); 108 ‘One is ten
thousand if he is the best’ (B49). 109
Honour transcends context and the limitations of a single human life. What is
morally right, on the other hand, seems at first to be defined by contrast with
wrongdoing; Heraclitus observes that we use the term of approval (‘right’) in a
context where we imply a contrast with some alternative:
They would not have known the term ‘right’, if there were no such things
as these.
(B23) 110
‘These’ are, we presume (following the suggestions offered by Clement when he
quotes the text), examples of wrongdoing or misdeeds. But Heraclitus is not
content to leave morality in the same position as the utilitarian values of health,
food and rest. Mortals may in practice define their notion of what is morally
right by contrasting right with wrong, but in some sense this is an error. We can
notice the reference to ‘they’ again, which generally accompanies a disparaging
remark on the confusion of ordinary mortals. Perhaps, then, what is morally right
does have absolute value that is not dependent upon a respite from an alternative
range of evils, but mortals only learn to see it as the notion abstracted from the
absence of certain identifiable wrongs. Yet there would, presumably, be a
meaning for the word ‘right’ even were there no wrongs in the world at all. That
seems to be so for god, because there are no such things as wrong for him.
‘Everything for god is noble and good and right, but humans have taken some to
be wrong and some right’ (B102). 111 Indeed this fragment suggests that our
perception of evils as evils is observer-related: they are evils for us; and we
confine the word ‘good’ to what is good for us. But that is to make goodness a
merely human value. That mortal usage of right and wrong is out of line with the
absolute value perceived from the god’s eye view. So whereas it may seem to us
that we could not appreciate the value of goodness in itself without the presence
of evil, that is not how things appear to one who correctly perceives what the
absolute value of morality is. Like honour, then, what is absolutely right escapes