The foundations of the philosophy of Heraclitus. Heraclitus of Ephesus - biography

HERACLITE Ephesus  (lat. Heraclitus, Greek. Iraklitos) (about 550 BC, Ephesus, Asia Minor - about 480 BC), an ancient Greek philosopher, one of the largest representatives of the Ionian school of philosophy. The original creature considered fire. The creator of the concept of continuous change, the doctrine of the "Logos", which was interpreted as "God", "fate", "necessity", "eternity". Heraclitus was credited with the famous dictum "you can’t enter the same river twice." Along with and Heraclitus determined the foundations of ancient and entire European philosophy. Revealing the comprehensive mystery of the familiar world of myth, custom, traditional wisdom, Heraclitus reveals being itself as a riddle.

The indigenous resident of Ephesus, son of Bloson, Heraclitus belonged to an ancient aristocratic family dating back to the founder of Ephesus Androclus. Due to its origin, Heraclitus possessed a number of “royal” privileges and a hereditary priestly dignity at the temple of Artemis of Ephesus. However, in his years of life, power in Ephesus no longer belonged to aristocrats. The philosopher did not participate in the public life of the city, he abandoned his titles, spoke sharply negatively about urban orders and contemptuously belonged to the "crowd". According to him, "the Ephesians deserve to be outweighed by everyone" for expelling his friend Hermodor, "saying:" No one among us will be the best. " He considered the laws of the city so hopelessly bad that he refused to give fellow citizens a request to give them new ones, noting that it was better to play with children than to participate in government affairs.

Heraclitus did not leave Ephesus and refused to invite the Athenians and the Persian king Darius. According to some accounts, Heraclitus was a pupil of Xenophanes and Hippasus, the Pythagorean, according to others - he was no one's pupil, but he "learned from himself." Numerous jokes about the death of Heraclitus are based on some of his sayings, misinterpreted and transmitted firsthand.

The main work of Heraclitus - the book "On Nature" has been preserved in fragments, but is extensively cited in the works of later ancient philosophers (, and others). This book consists of three parts: about nature, about the state and about God, and is distinguished by original content, figurative and aphoristic language. However, the book is difficult to understand, for which already in ancient times Heraclitus received the nickname Skutinos (Dark).

The main idea of \u200b\u200bHeraclitus is that in nature there is nothing permanent. Everything in nature is like the movement of a river that cannot be entered twice. One constantly changes into another, changing its state. The symbolic expression of universal change for Heraclitus is fire. Fire is continuous self-destruction, he lives his death. Heraclitus introduced a new philosophical concept - the logos (word), implying by this the principle of the reasonable unity of the world, which orders the world through a mixture of opposite principles. Opposites are in eternal struggle, giving rise to new phenomena (“discord is the father of everything.”) The human mind and logos have a common nature, but the logos exists in eternity and rules the cosmos, of which man is a particle.

The tradition preserved the image of Heraclitus the sage, a highly intelligent loner who despised people (and those who were famous as wise men) for not understanding what they themselves say and do. Interpreting the teachings of Heraclitus in the spirit of the common world grief about the transience of life and everything in the world, popular philosophy saw in it a prototype of the “crying sage”, just as in Democritus found the type of “wise man laughing.” The wisdom of Heraclitus, estranged from the knowledgeable ignorance of people and living in the vicinity of the simple wisdom of being, is captured by a characteristic scene: some wanderers who wished to look at the famous sage, stop at the threshold of a wretched home, embarrassed by the sight of a nondescript person who is warming at the hearth. “Come in, they hear, and the gods also live here” (Aristotle, “On the Parts of Animals”).

Heraclitus spoke so concisely and ambiguously. His sayings are often similar to folklore riddles or oracle sayings, which, according to Heraclitus, "... neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs." Some believe that, having written his composition (“Muses” or “About Nature”) is deliberately dark and deposited in the temple of Artemis of Ephesus, Heraclitus seemed to want to protect him from an ignorant crowd. Others see here precisely the pronounced darkness and mystery of that which is to be said. Aristotle explains the darkness of Heraclitus's utterances by their syntactic uncertainty, as a result of which the utterance can be read in different ways. The sayings of Heraclitus in fact reveal a thoughtful structure, a special poetics. They are saturated with alliterations, puns, internally linked by chiasmas, inversions, unionless syntax or parataxis, characteristic of the structure of inner speech, speech addressed not so much to others as to itself, listening to itself, ready to rethink, to return to the element of thinking silence. When the tragedian Euripides asked Socrates about the work of Heraclitus, he replied: "What I understood perfectly, what I did not understand, I think, too, but by the way, I really need a Delos diver."

The question Heraclitus answers is, how is everything one, or what is the (one) being of the (plural) being? The most famous answer to this question is the thesis "everything flows, nothing rests." In the existence of much flows (flows, occurs) a single being. To be means to constantly become, to flow from form to form, to be renewed, just as the same river carries new and new waters. Another metaphor for being as constantly happening is Heraclitus burning, fire. The system of a self-sufficient world ("cosmos") is "an everlasting fire, gradually igniting, gradually extinguishing." The single being seems to flare up with a multitude of things, but also goes out in it, just as the being, flushed up in being, goes out in its unity. Another metaphor of the same is the game: each time a new batch of the same game. The formation and constancy, the multiplicity of existing and the unity of being are combined when the stream is thought to fall into itself, ignition and extinction, the beginning and the end coincide. The single being of the multitude, conceivable as a stream falling into itself, or burning, fading into the measure of flare-up, is more precisely (and more mysterious) conveyed by the clarification of the whole as an internal interconnection of the opposite: the being (flowing) of night and day is the interconnectedness and inner presence, life lives in confrontation death, but death lives the same; mutual immortality of immortals and mortality of mortals; opposing this very confrontation firmly linked into a single harmony of existence, which is similar to the "harmony of bow and lyre." The world as a confrontation of the opposite Heraclitus conveys in the image of a battle world, a battle world ("polemos"). "You need to know that the battle is universal, and litigation is true, and everything becomes litigation and mutual responsibility." "The war is the father of all, the king of all: she declares some to be gods, others to be people, some to be slaves, others to be free."

The image of the general battle, which embraces all that exists as a whole and in which each being is grasped in the fact that it is, is also a way of understanding everything and everyone. Such is the universal mind, in contrast to private misunderstandings, the one and only wisdom corresponding to the warehouse of the very being, to the way that the multitude of things is compiled into the unity of being. This warehouse, “syllable”, is similar to how a single word of a poem is composed of many words, the cosmos of speech bearing in itself a “image of the world in a word revealed” (). Hence the theme of the "logo", which, judging by some fragments, has special significance for Heraclitus. The work ("logos") of Heraclitus was opened with the words: "With respect to this logos of existence people are always incomprehensible ...". Aristotle explains in this example the “darkness” of Heraclitus: if “always” is attributed to “being”, it seems that we are talking about the “logos” of existence itself, but if it is “incomprehensible”, then we simply mean the work of Heraclitus. But it is precisely this ambiguity that is important for Heraclitus. The Greek word “logos” means “word”, “speech”, “composition”, “report”, but also the accountable itself, “state of affairs”, “balance of power”. “Logos” - the word about the whole is intended to convey how everything is folded into the integrity of the “logos” of being. "Not to me, but to the" logo "listening, wisely agree: everything is one." “Logos” is a form, then a general one, which allows you to convey a store of things with an appropriate warehouse of speech. Hence the "darkness" of the sayings of Heraclitus: being, occurring in the confrontation of things, is grasped by a thought living by the contradiction of speeches.

Heraclitus of Ephesus - approximately 540 - 480 BC

1.Life and writings.Heraclitus came from a noble family, one of his ancestors was the founder of Ephesus. He by birth belonged to the aristocratic party and, at maturity, was a fierce enemy of democracy developing in Ionian cities. The expulsion from the city of his friend Hermodor finally restored him against his fellow citizens. He did not consider it possible to participate in the legislation and administration of the city, the structure of which seemed hopelessly corrupted to him; yielding to his brother the dignity of basileus, he lived poorly and lonely. They say that he also rejected the invitation of the Persian king Darius to spend some time at his court. Heraclitus was consecrated to the Eleusinian Mysteries, studied under the magicians priests, followers of Zoroaster, and he himself was a priest. Towards the end of his life, he retired from Ephesus and lived as a hermit in the mountains, eating grasses.

Heraclitus set out his teaching in a book "About nature",which he deposited in the temple of Artemis of Ephesus. From this work, divided into three parts - natural philosophical, political and theological - a lot of aphorisms have come down to us, reminiscent of the sayings of oracles, who usually communicated only with those who deserved it, and stayed away from the crowd. And Heraclitus hid his thoughts in order to avoid the ridicule of fools who believed that everyone understood, passing off ordinary common sense as deep truths. For this, he was nicknamed "dark," although some parts of his composition were distinguished by strength, clarity and contraction.

2. Dialectics as a doctrine of the unity and struggle of opposites. Heraclitus claimed: everything flows, nothing remains motionless and constant, everything develops and turns into another. In two of his famous fragments we read: “You cannot enter the same river twice and you cannot touch something mortal in the same state twice, but, due to the irrepressibility and speed of change, everything dissipates and gathers, comes and goes.” "We enter and do not enter the same river, we are the same and not the same." The meaning of these fragments is clear: outwardly the river is the same, meanwhile, in reality it each time consists of new water that arrives and disappears, therefore, entering the river a second time, we wash ourselves with other water. But we ourselves are changing: at the moment of full immersion in the river, we are already different, not the ones we were. Therefore, Heraclitus says that we enter and do not enter the same river. In the same way, we are and are not, to be what we are at a certain moment, we must not be what we were at the previous moment. This aspect of the teachings of Heraclitus led some of his students to extreme conclusions, such as Kratila, who asserted: we can’t not only swim twice in one river, but we can’t even once, when we enter and plunge into the river, other water arrives, and we ourselves are different even before complete immersion.

For Heraclitus, the assertion about the variability of the world around us was a statement of an obvious fact for everyone, starting from which, we need to go to deeper questions: what is the source or reason for the constant change in the world; what is the basis of the world, for one cannot think of becoming without being !? There are two sources of movement and change: external and internal. The first source is the existence and interaction of opposites. Becoming is a continuous transition from one opposite to another: cold things heat up, hot things cool, wet ones dry, dry ones get wet, a young man becomes decrepit, a living person dies, another youth will be born from a mortal, and so on. Between the opposing sides there is always a struggle. "The struggle is the mother of everything and the master of everything." The eternal flow of things and universal formation are revealed as a harmony of contrasts, as the eternal pacification of the warring parties, the reconciliation of the debaters and vice versa. “They (the ignorant ones) do not understand that what is excellent is according to oneself; the harmony of differences is like the harmony of lyre and bow. ” Only in alternating opposites give each other a specific meaning: “Disease makes health sweet, hunger gives the pleasantness of satiety, and hard work gives you a taste of relaxation.” Opposites come from the One and come together in harmony: “The road up and the road down is the same road.” The same thing - living and dead, awake and sleeping, young and old, because some things, changing, become different, and those and others, changing in turn, become the first. Philosophy is a reflection on the great contradictions that the mind everywhere encounters in the reality that it cognizes. Opposing principles of unity and multitude, finite and infinite, peace and movement, light and darkness, good and evil, active and passive, are mutually exclusive, and at the same time, they are united in the source and the whole system of the Cosmos is kept in harmonic combination. Thus, Heraclitus claimed Cosmic Law of Polarity:  the manifested world exists due to the bifurcation of the One into opposites, which are one in essence, but different in manifestation. Hence, the knowledge of the world consists in the knowledge of opposites and finding their unity.

3. Doctrine of Fire.The internal source of development of all forms of the world is the Spiritual Beginning. Heraclitus claimed that the One Principle, which lies at the base of all phenomena in Nature, is Fire, all are manifestations of this Divine Substance. “All things are exchanges of fire, and one fire changes all things, just as commodities are exchanges of gold, and all things change to gold.” “This order, one and the same for all things, was not created by any of the Gods, nor by any of the people, but has always been, is and will be the eternal living Fire, igniting measures and decaying measures.” Fire is Spirit or All-Life, all other elements and forms are only transformations of Fire, everything that we see is only a dying, hidden Fire. Fire, according to Heraclitus, Hippocrates and Parmenides, is the Divine Principle, the teachings of the Zoroastrians, Plato and the Stoics that everything in the world, including the human soul and body, evolved from the Fire, the thinking and immortal Element, are identical. If Fire is Spirit, animating everything, then earthly matter is extinct spirit; human souls, on the contrary, are “flaming lights,” an ignited substance. The Universe arises from the One Element, Fire, this primary Substance is transformed from the state of Fire into Air, then into the state of Water, then Water becomes the Earth, and then everything returns to the source. The path from Fire to Earth is the path of extinction - Heraclitus calls it "the way down," the reverse process of ignition - the "way up." He recognized the world year, consisting of two periods: the period of the depletion of the Divine, corresponding to the formation of the world, and the period of fullness, excess, saturation, corresponding to the ignition of the Cosmos. Thus, Heraclitus claimed Cosmic Law of the Cycle:everything begins with a fiery divine state and ends in a dense one, and then the process unfolds to the beginning, the material becomes spiritual again.

4. The doctrine of the Logos and Cosmos.In the philosophy of the ancient Greeks, the word Logos had several meanings: law, word, dictum, speech, the meaning of words and the content of speech, finally, thought and its carrier mind. As a result, the Logos is the Cosmic Mind, God is the Creator and Ruler of the Cosmos. Logos - Fiery Being; The Mind moving the Cosmos is Fire and Fire is Mind. The Logos of Heraclitus periodically creates the Cosmos from Fire and destroys it again after all the lives in it have passed the cycle of existence laid down by him. Nothing will escape and escape from this fiery Logos, he will come suddenly, he will judge everything and take everything; the world should ignite and all the elements will again plunge into the Fire, from which they once arose. By Cosmos, ancient philosophers meant our Solar System, knowing the Infinity of the worlds, they studied our cosmos, the house in which the evolution of minerals, plants, animals, people and gods. Cosmos includes various spheres with different densities of matter, in Heraclitus we find mention that Cosmos is at least divided into two parts: the upper, the heavenly - the sphere of the divine, pure and intelligent Fire, and the lower, the sublunar - the sphere of the extinct substances cold, heavy and damp. Thus, the Cosmos for the philosopher seemed united and animated, full of souls, demons and gods.

5. Teaching about a person. Heraclitus fully accepted the Pythagorean and Zoroastrian views on the human soul and its properties. Man is the unity of body and soul, in addition, man has two souls: one fiery, dry, wise, immortal; the other is wet, unwise, blind, mortal. Condemning the popular religion, especially in the gross forms of its cult, Heraclitus, however, was a religious thinker who affirmed the above-ground existence and the law of reincarnation. He believed that the souls of people, before descending "into generation" or the lunar existence, live on the "Milky Way". He revived the idea of \u200b\u200bOrphics that bodily life is the mortification of the soul, and the death of the body brings the soul to life, he affirmed the idea of \u200b\u200bpunishment and rewards after death: "After death, people overtake what they did not expect, which they could not imagine." He recognized the individual immortality of the Supreme Soul and its evolution: Gods are immortal people, people are mortal gods; the death of a deity is the life of man, the death of a man is the birth of a deity, the resurrection of true life. "Immortals are mortal, mortals are immortal, these live the death of those, and they die the life of these." Between man and the deity there is constant communication, since man cognizes the divine, and the divine is revealed to him.

6. Teaching about knowledge.Comprehension of the Truth is difficult to find a grain of gold, a lot of land needs to be blown up; to find the Truth, we must examine everything by personal experience and work, believing our eyes more than our ears, ascending from the known to the unknown, expecting the unexpected. We must learn from Nature itself, comprehend secret unity and harmony in the visible struggle, hidden harmony, triumphing over its opposite; we must in Nature itself seek the Law, the Logos. The weakness of the human mind, its delusions, the inability to know the Truth are determined by the sensuality of a person, obscuring this light. It is necessary to be alert to feelings, since the latter are satisfied with the appearance of things. A man comprehends the Truth, partaking of the wisdom of the Logos,which involved his divine soul. Sensual passions and desires that defile the soul, self-conceit, arrogance and wisdom, addiction to private people's opinions - all this alienates the soul from the Logos, the source of Wisdom. Must follow Reasonwhich is one and universal, people live, as if having each their own mind, and therefore not knowing what they are saying and what they are doing. Any reasonable reasoning should be affirmed on what has the universality and necessity of the Law, and, moreover, the Law of the divine, and not a conditional decree of any state. Only reasonable knowledge has full certainty; only Mindcan discern the true in perception, find identity and agreement in the visible difference. The noblest of the senses - sight and hearing - lie to a person who is not enlightened by the Reason and does not know how to understand their instructions. Truth is reached by the mind beyond senses. “Eyes and luscious witnesses for people, if their souls are barbaric.” In this sense, Heraclitus considered himself a prophet of the comprehensible Truth, hence his oracle tone as a specific way of expression. The highest goal of human knowledge for him is the knowledge of the purpose of the Logos.

7. "The Crying Philosopher."Any legislation regulating human relations should be based on the Law that governs the Cosmos. However, the moral and religious concepts of modern society, just like the laws of his hometown, seemed to Heraclitus not only conditional, but directly false, fundamentally corrupted. The deep pessimism of the "crying" philosopher had a cosmological and ethical foundation. The world is a faded, deserted Deity, individual souls are the flooded particles of the divine Fire, who have forgotten their divine origin. From childhood, people learn to do lawlessness according to the law, untruthfully the truth, they learn to deceive, steal and lack of religion, worshiping the one who has the most time for injustice and violence. Everyone indulged in madness and greed, everyone pursues illusory happiness, no one hears the law of the Logos-God, does not know the word of Truth. Whether people hear him or not, they don’t understand him and, like donkeys, prefer straw to gold. The very knowledge they seek is vain knowledge, for their hearts do not have in themselves the pursuit of truth. People seek healing from the evils of their lives, but their doctors are worse than disease. Do any of them get sick, they call doctors: they cut, burn, deplete a sore spot and demand a bribe for the same thing that diseases do. Whether anyone sinned, they make bloody sacrifices, thinking they should wash their mud with their mud; they pray to the walls on which the images of the gods are written, not knowing what these Gods and Heroes really are.

All human social laws and moral requirements are relativehowever, their foundation is absolute divine Laws. For example, war is evil, but war is also a necessity at this stage of human development: it makes some heroes and even gods, others simple people, some free, others slaves. The visible disasters and suffering caused by it are not evil in the absolute sense of the word, for as a doctor sometimes torments the body that he heals, how woolly beats beat, tear and crush their wool to make it better and stronger, so people suffer sorrows, without understanding their necessity. There are many opinions, but Reason is one, the divine Law is one, and all Human laws on which human society is based must be fed by this Law. Justice is known in them, for their protection it is necessary to stand, as for the walls of their native city. But people are reluctant to obey this Law, they cannot stand superiority either, they reject teachers, not recognizing that one sometimes costs thousands if he is the best and most knowledgeable.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (Herakleitos Ephesios)

oK. 540 - 480 BC

The ancient Greek materialist philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus was born and lived in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus. He belonged to the Basileus family, but voluntarily refused the privileges associated with the origin, in favor of his brother. Diogenes Laertius reports that Heraclitus, having hated people, withdrew and began to live in the mountains, feeding on past and grasses. Most likely, he did not have direct students, but his intellectual influence on subsequent generations of ancient thinkers is significant. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were familiar with the ideas of Heraclitus, his follower Kratil becomes the hero of the Plato dialogue.

The only work of Heraclitus "On Nature" has not survived to the present day, however, later authors have preserved numerous quotes and periphrases from his work. The style of Heraclitus is distinguished by poetic imagery. The ambiguous symbolism of its fragments sometimes makes their inner meaning mysterious, as a result of which Heraclitus was called “dark” even in antiquity.

Heraclitus belonged to the Ionian school of ancient Greek philosophy. Heraclitus considered the beginning of existence to be fire, an element that seemed to the ancient Greeks as the most subtle, light and mobile; by condensation from the fire all things appear and by rarefaction return to it. Fire thickens into air, air turns into water, water - into the earth ("way down", which is replaced by "way up"). The Earth itself, on which we live, was once a red-hot part of the universal fire, but then it cooled down. This world fire “flares up and goes out” with measures, and the world, according to Heraclitus, was not created by any of the gods or people.

The dialectic of Heraclitus is the concept of continuous change, formation, which is thought within the limits of the material cosmos and is basically a cycle of substances, elements - fire, air, water and earth. Here the philosopher speaks of the famous image of the river, into which you can’t enter twice, because at every moment it is all new. Formation is possible only in the form of a continuous transition from one opposite to another, in the form of the unity of already formed opposites. So, Heraclitus has one life and death, day and night, good and evil. Opposites are in eternal struggle, so "discord is the father of all, the king of all." Heraclitus’s dialectic also includes the moment of relativity (the relativity of the beauty of a deity, a man and a monkey, human affairs and deeds, etc.), although he did not lose sight of the one and the whole, within which the struggle of opposites takes place.

In the history of philosophy, the greatest controversy aroused the doctrine of Heraclitus about the Logos, which was interpreted as “god”, “fate”, “necessity”, “eternity”, “wisdom”, “general”, “law” and which, as a world-organizing and ordering principle, can be understood as a kind of universal law and necessity. In the mainstream of the doctrine of the Logos, Heraclitus coincides with fate, necessity and reason. In the theory of knowledge, Heraclitus began with external feelings. Eyes and ears for Heraclitus are the best witnesses, moreover, "eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears." However, only thinking, which is common to all and reproduces the nature of everything, leads to wisdom, that is, to knowledge of everything in everything.

The sayings of Heraclitus were subsequently of interest to many and often cited. In the Christian tradition, the teachings of Heraclitus about the divine Logos were received with great sympathy. In antiquity, his philosophy influenced primarily the teachings of the sophists,

The wisdom is

to speak the truth and,

act in accordance with it.

Heraclitus (approximately 540 - 480 BC) - an ancient Greek thinker, natural philosopher, elemental materialist and dialectician. Fellow citizens called Heraclitus "Dark" for mystery and thoughtfulness. Heraclitus received the nickname “Weeping” because he could not remain indifferent and cried every time he looked at people and their affairs, because they seemed to him miserable.

From the works of Heraclitus (according to some sources - "On Nature", according to others - "Muses") 130 - 150 fragments are preserved. Ancient philosophers often mentioned the name of Heraclitus, commenting on his teachings and fragments from it.

The ontology of Heraclitus is based on fundamental natural philosophical assumptions about the essence and nature of being. The material essence of the world is fire. "Cosmos, one and the same for all, was created by none of the gods and none of the people, but there has always been, is and will be forever a living fire, fires and extinction measures." The cycle of the existence of the world is defined in 10800 years. Then the world turns into fire and arises again from fire.

Fire is the image of the changing and active essence of the world. Being is constantly changing. "Everything flows" is an attribute (integral property) of being. "You can’t enter the same river twice and you can’t touch something mortal twice in the same state, but, due to the irrepressibility and speed of change, everything is scattered and collected, leaves and comes." His disciple Kratil absolutized volatility, believing that "you cannot enter the same river once." It was clear to Heraclitus himself, as a true dialectic, that change exists in stability, movement in peace, identity in discernment, eternal in transient, unity in multitude. Change itself occurs according to an invariable law - the “logos”, which is based on the interaction of opposites as the causes of movement, development and harmony of being.

The harmony of opposites in Heraclitus is divine. God is the personification of the driving force, the impulse of movement and development in a certain direction. "God is day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety and hunger." "Fire death is air birth, air death is water birth. Water is born from the death of the earth, air from the death of the water, fire from the death of the air, and vice versa."

Heraclitus introduces the principle of determinism into nature (in nature, everything is causally determined). He for the first time affirms in philosophy the concept of “logos” to denote a general global necessity (pattern). The Logos is inherent in the divine intelligent guiding ability to change, develop and order. Subsequently, under the logo in ancient philosophy they began to understand the spirituality of the world, its mind, necessity (like a logical one), orientation toward expediency and orderliness of it.

In epistemology, Heraclitus finds himself one of the first rationalists. The essence (logos) can be understood only by the mind. Sensory knowledge gives only opinion, but not knowledge. It is associated with the ordinary vision of the world, with "knowledge" that is different from true wisdom. “Mnogoznanie does not teach the mind,” Heraclitus claimed. Heraclitus was one of the first to point out the relativity of our knowledge of the world: "The sea is filled with the purest and dirtiest water: suitable for fish and useful, dirty and destructive for people." Sensory knowledge can be true if guided by a worthy mind. "The eyes and ears of people are bad witnesses if they have barbaric souls."

3. Elea school

In the western part of Ancient Greece, in the city of Elea (Southern Italy), a philosophical school emerges that continues the traditions of Ionian philosophers, many of whom emigrated from the cities of Ionia. One of them was Xenophanes from Colophon (565 - 470 BC), who is often called the founder of the Elean school. Others consider him the ideological predecessor of the Eleatics, which is more consistent with the philosopher's lifestyle. He himself called himself a vagabond, having spent almost 70 years in wanderings, and, having lived to the age of 92, did not have a permanent home.

Name:Heraclitus (Heraclitus)

Date of Birth:  544 BC e.

Age:   61 years

Date of death:  483 B.C. e.

Activity:  ancient Greek philosopher

Family status:  was not married

Heraclitus: biography

Heraclitus is a favorite object of research both among ancient biographers and among modern scientists. They tried to separate the dark philosophical teaching from an equally dark and mysterious biography. Hence the nickname of the philosopher - Heraclitus the Dark or Heraclitus the Gloomy. The key moment in the study of life, and especially death, of this philosopher was an extraordinary antipathy, turning into the hatred that he arouses in the hearts of readers and biographers.

Hostility, understandable to a certain extent, reaches unprecedented heights when Heraclitus dies, buried in excrement. To understand this death, one should consider in detail the traditional biography of Heraclitus, since the biographers' reaction to the interpretation of the philosophical works of Heraclitus and their interpretation for a true understanding of the life and details of the death of this mystery man is important.

Childhood and youth

Heraclitus was born in the city of Ephesus (land belonging to present-day Turkey). The exact date of birth of the philosopher is unknown, approximately 540 BC. Traditionally, Heraclitus is considered a descendant of the ruling Androclus family, according to other sources, the name of the father of the philosopher is Heracon or Bloson. In childhood, the boy was no different from his peers; he played grandmothers with other boys (an analogue to the game of dice).

That's just the prospect of inheriting the power of the father, the young man was not happy. According to the testimony of historians, he refused the right to inherit in favor of his brother, and he lived and indulged in philosophical thoughts in the temple of the goddess Artemis, continuing to periodically play dice with the children.

Information about the life and teachings of the philosopher from Ephesus came to our time from works that acted as a biographer of ancient philosophers. Diogenes in the early texts interpreted this act as evidence of the generosity of Heraclitus, and later called it pride, arrogance, arrogance or even contempt.

Thanks to these character traits, Heraclitus subsequently became a misanthrope. Thus, the understanding of the works and philosophy of Heraclitus begins with these personal qualities. Heraclitus had no teachers or followers, except Kratil from the city of Athens.

Heraclitus often said that teachers would not teach students wisdom, otherwise they would teach Xenophanes and. Another adage is that Homer deserved to be chased and beaten with a stick at poetry contests. This demonstrates the dominant character and personality of Heraclitus - arrogance and contempt for people. The reason for this attitude is simple - these people did not achieve wisdom, according to Heraclitus.

A philosopher from his youth considered the people around him uneducated and stupid. I did not take part in conversations of other philosophers, I had my own views on everything with a clear extremist bias, as evidenced by the expressions of the philosopher that have reached us. The main ideas of the philosopher that the source of development in the world is war, and the death of one being gives life to another, also confirm this. Later, the melancholic Heraclitus was put in contrast to the laughing sage.

Philosophy and teaching

The views of Heraclitus are mysterious and ambiguous. Almost all of his work has an ambiguous interpretation. In addition, the originals of the works have not reached the present, the worldview is known only from the works of other philosophers and scientists. Heraclitus had his own understanding of wisdom. He did not express his thoughts directly - only in the form of riddles or hints. From here came the second nickname of Heraclitus - a philosopher-poet, he did not write in poetry, but his thoughts were so metaphorical that they resemble a poetic syllable.

The ability to understand the work of the philosopher was only deeply educated and analytically thinking people. He even wrote that he dismantled only a small part of the ideas of Heraclitus, but found them beautiful. In addition, the Ephesus philosopher invented a unique approach: to convey complex ideas in the form of extremely simplified examples, as a rule, these were processes taking place in nature.

So the followers independently came to the thought conceived by the philosopher, or even their own unique conclusions. The contribution of Heraclitus to the development of ancient Greek philosophy was the introduction of the universal “logos”. Initially, the term was understood as “saying”, as well as “meaning”. Now the logo reflects the meaning of being and the laws of all that exists.

The Heraclitian doctrine of the Logos is a reflection of the picture of the world, where harmony is maintained along with dynamism. So, in the teachings of the philosopher, world harmony is a cosmic Logos. But man is not able to understand it and considers his word, his own Logos, above universal.

Harmony, on the other hand, is one-oneness: as Heraclitus said, “everything flows,” matter is transformed into various forms, but the Logos remains constant. A continuation of this thought was the quote “You Can’t Enter One River Twice”. In our time, this expression has acquired a new meaning, but still reflects the philosophical thought of the author.

Heraclitus called the constant change and transformation of matter and substances the world current and believed that everything in the world not only undergoes constant transformations, but also has opposites. The philosopher presented the dialectics of the human soul as follows: the soul consists of two components - the noble (fire) and the non-noble (water). It was the fire of Heraclitus that was the beginning.

Heraclitus also introduced the concept of "world fire" in which space is destroyed in order to be reborn again. The theory of the destruction of space was refuted in the 18th century, and Schleiermacher did not recognize fire as the original element. In contrast to the Heraclitian laws of the transformation of matter, the main ideas of another ancient Greek philosopher - Parmenides, who lived in the same period of time, consist in the fact that matter is unchanging, constant and homogeneous.

In the IV century BC supporters of natural philosophy, put a new meaning in the term “logos”, depriving it of its ontological meaning. And the followers of the school of stoicism returned to Logos a cosmic essence. By the way, the term "space" also introduced Heraclitus. Some researchers attribute Heraclitus to natural scientists, not philosophers. This is due to the fact that the only work of Heraclitus that has survived to this day is called "On Nature."

The work takes the form of hundreds of individual fragments of statements, the interpretation of which was carried out by philologist Herman Diels. In the work On Nature, Heraclitus laid the foundations of the theory of atomism. Contribution to the science of Heraclitus has become premature, according to some authors. The scientist introduced the concept of the atom as the smallest structural element, resolving the paradoxes of the Eleatics, the philosopher developed the concept of differential calculus.

According to his ideas, even the human soul consists of atoms, which after physical death are transformed into another matter - the so-called theory of atomism. The Heraclitian human anatomy corresponds to the structure of the world: the body is built of the same atoms as the world around, and the main organ of the human body is the stomach. The laws of nature of the physical world and the human soul, discovered by Heraclitus, formed the basis of the Milesian school, whose representatives were Pythagoras, Thales.

Personal life

The problems of Heraclitus in relations with society, consisting in his contempt for people, left an imprint on the personal life of the philosopher. Heraclitus did not have a wife and children, since he spent his life in the temple of the forever young and innocent goddess of fertility Artemis. Heraclitus also did not have students, as such - the problems of cognition of the world, which he touched on in his works, scientists evaluated only after the death of the philosopher.

The death of Heraclitus

Contemporaries and scholars of Heraclitus are outraged not so much by the lifestyle, worldview and views of Heraclitus, as by the details of the death of the philosopher. According to legend, Heraclitus died, having been spread with manure, other stories say that dogs broke his body.

The most reliable source of information are records that say that the cause of death of the philosopher was dropsy of the abdomen (a disease in which excess fluid accumulates in the abdominal cavity due to diseases of the kidneys and heart).

Bibliography

• Natural philosophical theory of atomism
• The original form of dialectics
• Muses
• "About nature. Part 1. About the Universe "
• "About nature. Part 2. About the state ”
• "About nature. Part 3. About the gods "
• "The rule is indelible to the charter to live"