Heraclitus — Fragments

notes

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535–475 BCE), called "the Obscure" by later Greeks for the density of his aphorisms, is one of the most philosophically ambitious thinkers of the pre-Socratic era. His work — a single book called On Nature (Peri Physeos), deposited in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus and now lost — survives only in some 130 fragments preserved in the quotations of later authors (Plato, Aristotle, Sextus Empiricus, Plutarch, Clement of Alexandria, and others). Heraclitus's central doctrines can be reconstructed from these fragments: the world is a rational unity governed by the Logos (Word, Reason, Ratio) which most men fail to grasp even though it is present in all things; the fundamental character of reality is process and flux ("everything flows"); apparent opposites — hot and cold, wet and dry, life and death — are unified by an underlying tension ("the bow and the lyre"); the elemental principle of the cosmos is fire, which transforms into all things and back again in measured cycles. The famous river fragment ("you cannot step twice into the same rivers") became the emblem of Heraclitean philosophy for antiquity. Plato and Aristotle read Heraclitus as the philosopher of universal flux, in opposition to Parmenides's philosopher of unchanging Being; the two together set the terms in which Greek philosophy would think for the following two millennia. Translation: John Burnet, "Early Greek Philosophy," 2nd edition, London: A. & C. Black, 1908, with reference to fragment numbering after Diels-Kranz. Public domain.

related texts