Ancient philosophy. Heraclitus - there is an eternal movement in the world, and what is always seen is deceit /part 2/
Heraclitus died in 475. There are 136 fragments of his work under the title "About nature" . According to Diogenes, it was divided into three parts:
- For the universe cosmological part.
- For human activity, especially in anthropological and political society.
- For the God-theological part.
The exhibition of Heraclitus is strictly aphoristic: tight, with an original construction, difficult to understand. Hence, in ancient times, Heraclitus is called the "dark". His thoughts are not free from a number of internal contradictions, as they are not given in a systemic statement but more as separate insights.
Like Parmenides and Heraclitus, it deals with the question of knowledge. It accepts first degree the sensory knowledge, what is obtained directly through our senses. "I prefer he says, what can be seen, heard and studied." In this respect, he categorizes the senses by saying that "eyes are more accurate witnesses than ears," but according to Heraclitus, the sense of knowledge is uncertain and inadequate. Its true price depends on the soul that directs the senses by associating and using the obtained by them. So he says straightway, "eyes and ears are bad witnesses to those people who have rough souls." In another case, he claims that "only thinking achieves the common foundations and laws of being and reason that moves everything." In this unity is consists the wisdom to know the mind who knows how to manage everything through everything. " "Thinking is the biggest asset." There is a common sense in the world and in the soul of man, and therefore the real knowledge is to know the laws of universal reason, which are also laws of one's own mind.
A fundamental position in Heraclitus' philosophy is the doctrine that everything is on the move, in the course of everything ("panta rei"). "Move the sky, move the elements," the generations of living creatures change one after another. In the eternal circle of the universe, nothing is invariable. "It is impossible twice to enter the same river; it is impossible twice to touch the same body; our bodies are flowing like a stream, exchanging them in them as the air when we breathe. " Changes, origins, destructions represent within themselves a profound transition from non-existence to being, from being to nothingness, something that did not exist and passes into anything that arises has been. Only on our external observable gross senses things are presented as lasting and immutable. In fact, everything arises and is destroyed: all things and the whole universe follow this law. The eternal change is due to the existence of opposites in world unity. They are in constant struggle and war among themselves. "So that war is mother and king of everything: some make rich, others - people, one right slaves, others - free." But opposites not only struggle with each other, they not only contrast, they are constantly moving to one another and mutually supposed and complementary. Day and night, cold and heat, winter and summer, hunger and saturation, sickness and health, pass from one to another, complement, they are supposed, so without one is not the concept of the other. Only two together form the integrity and completeness of being.
Everything is one and one is everything. Life and death, sleep and vigil, youth and old age, pleasure and suffering are a state of the same being and pass through one another (fragment 88). Even in the whole universe there is a circle, so the end is gathered with the beginning. Since, according to Heraclitus, God, the Godhead is immanent to nature itself, that is why it is unity, a coincidence of opposites. "God is day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, abundance and destitution. And everyone gives them, according to their desire, calling them something in part when it is actually all. "(Fragment 67). "By God, everything is good, good and just, and people are separated kingdoms, judging one to be just, and another to unjust. "
Ah, but how like the human animal is this. The contradiction of good and bad and right and wrong. One might love passionately one moment only to hate the next or worse, be indifferent, the truly wretched cruelty of the human animal.
And the rules of man's judgement of 'just or unjust' seems as maleable and changeable as a river's path. I wonder, could even God's be so fickle or do they laugh at their creations, running about calling out good or bad? :)
Sorry, just went off on a tangent there ;)
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