Heracleitus

For more information on Heracleitus, visit Britannica.com.

Heracleitus . (c.540–c.480 BC), 1. Greek philosopher who was born and lived his life at Ephesus. He came from a royal family but surrendered his hereditary privileges to his brother. He was notorious for misanthropy, and for arrogance towards the reputations of those who were generally admired for wisdom: Homer, Hesiod, Archilochus, Hecataeus, Xenophanes, Pythagoras. Although he is said to have written a book entitled ‘On Nature’, many of the eighty or so fragments that survive in quotations rather suggest a collection of aphorisms, striking and paradoxical, but, lacking a context, difficult to interpret. The Greeks themselves complained of the obscurity of his writings. He believed that it is impossible to comprehend fully the reality of things and that appearances are unreliable, but nevertheless that some sort of knowledge is attainable. Wisdom lies in understanding that the world has an underlying coherence and is a unity; this unity depends upon a balance between opposites; change in one direction leads to change in the other. Therefore ‘all things are in a state of flux’ (panta rhei). The essential stuff of the universe is pure fire, of which some is always being kindled and some being extinguished to form sea and earth; the soul too is composed of fire, and after death the souls of the virtuous join the cosmic fire. In Roman times Heracleitus became known as ‘the weeping philosopher’ (in contrast with ‘the laughing philosopher’ Democritus), weeping at the spectacle of human life.

2. Of Halicarnassus, a poet and friend of the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, who wrote a famous epigram on his death.