Chapter 4 - Heraclitus

(Originally written July 1, 2006 in Book 2)

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1974

Chapter 4 - Heraclitus

The Greeks were fathers of theories, mathematics, deductive reasoning and Geometry. The error that the Greeks caused in the Ancient World and most of modern times is that they used deductive reasoning from supposed self-evident axioms rather than inductive reasoning from observed facts. The scientific method has slowly corrected this error.

"In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever" (Russell, 39). This is how to study philosophers and philosophy.

Xenophanes, while his dates are uncertain, followed Pythagoras, but preceded Heraclitus. Xenophanes was an Ionian who lived in Southern Italy. He believed that all things were made of earth and water. In regard to the gods he was a freethinker. He believed in one God, but that knowledge of god was unknowable. He criticized Pythagoras' mysticism and his view on the transmigration of the souls.

Heraclitus was an aristocratic Ephesian around 500 BC.

He believed that everything existed in perpetual flux.

Heraclitus was a mystic Ionian. He believed fire to be a primordial substance and that all things come to be by the death of something else.

He was pantheistic in his belief. "All things come out of the one, and the one out of all things... which is god" (Russell, 41) (A foreshadowing of Spinoza?)

Heraclitus was ill-tempered, mean spirited in argumentation and generally combative.

Heraclitus was a warmonger who believed war was both the father and king of all.

Strife is justice and the origin of all things.

He had a Nietzsche like ethic of proud asceticism.

Primordial Substances:

Thales - Water
Anaximenes - Air
Heraclitus - Fire
Empedocles - Earth, air, fire and water

Heraclitus believed the world to be eternal: ever was and is and will be.

Heraclitus' strife philosophy contains the same mess of synthesizing opposites as Hegel.

"Nothing ever is, everything is becoming" (Russell, 45).

Heraclitus' view of perpetual flux is painful and science has nothing to refute it. Philosophers have sought, tirelessly to find something not subject to time to refute the perpetual flux. THis search began with Parmenides.