[MUSIC]

Heraclitus was known in
antiquity as the riddler.

He had a reputation both for
obscurity and profundity.

The one book he wrote was widely quoted in
antiquity, and from the evidence we have,

it was full of oracular pronouncement and
deliberate paradox.

Socrates is reported to have said upon
reading the book, the parts that I

understood were very impressive, and so
were the parts that I didn't understand.

So, what was the book about?

In a word, it is about the LOGOS.

Now Logos is a term that we've
noted has a range of meanings.

From the very general sense in which
a LOGOS is a word or anything said,

to the more restricted sense in which
it's a particular way of using words.

Specifically, to give an explanation,
or reason, or to figure something out.

So, let's see where Heraclitus' LOGOS
fits into this range of meanings.

Not surprisingly, he turns out
to have exploited most of them.

Let's look at the opening lines
of the book, which is 22B1.

This LOGOS holds always, but humans
always prove unable to understand it,

both before hearing it and
when they have first heard it.

Now, here we might think the LOGOS
is the book of Heraclitus itself.

And, that the philosopher is making the
perennial complaint of the misunderstood

artist that his brilliant work is not
appreciated by the general public.

Now, there is some truth to this,
I think, but as we read on,

it seems that the Logos can't simply be
the book that Heraclitus has written.

For although all things come to
be in accordance with this LOGOs,

humans are like the inexperienced when
they experience such words and deeds as I

set out, distinguishing each according
to its nature and saying how it is.

Heraclitus, here,

distinguishes between

the words he has written

down and the LOGOS.

The LOGOS is not what he says, but

a principle that governs everything
that comes to be or happens,

even if people don't understand it
when he tries to explain it to them.

And that they don't understand is
a constant refrain in the book.

Our quote from the opening ends by
contrasting Heraclitus' own insight

with the stupidity of other people who
fail to notice what they do when awake.

Just as they forget what
they do while asleep.

Heraclitus regularly appeals to
the distinction between sleeping and

waking experience to make the point
that those who do not understand

the Logos are like sleepers who
mistake their dreams for reality.

So Heraclitus is giving a wake up call,

inviting us to understand the true
reality behind our experiences.

That reality is expressed in the LOGOS.

But what does the LOGOS say?

Nothing very straightforward, obviously,
or else it wouldn't be so hard for

us to get.

The closest thing we have to a clear
statement of the LOGOS is in fragment B50.

Llisten not to me but

to the LOGOS; it is wise to
agree that all things are one.

Now when he says don't listen to me but

to the LOGOS,
he means look I'm not making this up.

When he says it is wise to
agree that all things are one,

he is telling us what the LOGOS says.

So, the LOGOS is that all things are one.

But what does that mean,
that there is only one thing?

How could that be true?

I'm here, you're here, and
that makes at least two things.

Or, will Heraclitus roll his
eyes at this objection and

say that's just the sort of response you'd
get from people who can't tell that they

are dreaming rather than awake.

You see inviting us to wake up and realize
that there really is no difference between

the things that seem pretty obviously
different and distinct to us.

Well, at least for some things, yes.

For instance, here's some more quotes.

The road up and
the road down are the same, hint.

The track of writing is both straight and
crooked.

That's one of my favorites.

The beginning and the end are common
on the circumference of a circle.

These are just a few of the many
fragments in which Heraclitus proclaims

what people call the unity of opposites.

Now we might say, okay,
so what's the big deal?

The same thing can have opposite
properties depending on your frame of

reference.

What's so hard to understand about that?

But consider another unity that Heraclitus
invokes when he castigates Hesiod as,

quote, a man who could not recognize
day and night, for they are one.

What does it mean to say that day and
night are one?

When it's day here,
it's night in Australia?

My apologies to anyone who is
taking this course from Australia.

More likely, he meant that day and night
are different phases of the same thing,

where that thing is the complex
system comprising the Earth,

the Sun, and the other celestial bodies.

Even though night and day are completely
opposite in our experience of them,

as different as night and
day, as we would say,

we can understand them as expressions
of a deeper underlying regularity.

On this way of understanding
Heraclitus' Logos, his point in claiming

that all things are one is not to
deny that there is multiplicity and

variety in the world, but rather,

to insist that there is an underlying
order to that multiplicity and variety.

This is what is not obvious.

And what most people,
the sleepers fail to see.

What the sleepers fail to understand
is a deep truth about the world that

though at variance with
itself It agrees with itself.

It is a backwards-turning attunement
like that of the bow and the lyre.

Now this attunement is what he
calls the unapparent connection

that he says is stronger
than apparent connection.

Now connection and attunement
translate the same Greek term here.

It's harmonia, which is the root,
of course, of our term for

musical harmony, but
it also means a joining together, as

when a cabinet maker fits tongue-in-groove
when constructing a piece of furniture.

The important point here is that
the unity involved in harmonia, and

hence in the Logos,
is a matter of order and structure.

But does the world have a LOGOS?

Now you might ask, what reason
does Heraclitus have for being so

confident that there is such an underlying
order or Logos to the world?

We can grant him the order
behind night and day.

But, why should we suppose that the whole
world follows some underlying order?

Recall that Heraclitus says
that everything comes to be

according to the Logos in
the opening lines of the book.

Why not conclude that the world, or maybe
large pockets of it, are just chaotic?

That's certainly what our
experience often tells us.

But, Heraclitus tells us not
to just trust our experience.

He says, eyes and ears are bad witnesses
to people if they have barbarian souls.

And the soul, he says, has its own LOGOS.

In one place he calls it a deep LOGOS.

In another he calls it
a self-increasing LOGOS.

Here is where I would want to translate
LOGOS as reason or reasoning.

When Heraclitus says, I searched myself,
or alternatively, I looked into myself.

He means he used his critical faculties.

His power of reasoning.

But, what chain of reasoning would
support the conclusion that there is

an underlying unity and
order to the world?

That's a pretty tall order.

If Heraclitus produced such an argument,

he hasn't shared it with us or
no one saw fit to quote it from his book.

But, even if he doesn't have a proof that
there is an underlying order to things,

his conviction that there is such an order
isn't idle dogmatism or table thumping.

For the belief that the world
is ultimately understandable or

explicable is a presupposition behind the
whole enterprise of scientific inquiry.

To search for explanations is to try
to uncover hidden connections and

unifying principles that explain
the variety of phenomena that we observe.

Heraclitus belief that
the world has a LOGOS

may simply express his conviction that
the world is ultimately understandable.

If so, it is a conviction that he shares
with the Melanesian Naturalists, Thales,

Anaximander, and Anaximenes,
each of whom also insisted on a single

explanatory principle
of the natural world.

It is their shared assumption that
the world is ultimately explicable,

more than their specific
proposals about how to explain it,

that have earned them a place in
the history of natural science.

It is also what earns them the title
that Aristotle gives them,

phusiologoi, which we can now understand
in a slightly different twist,

as those who believe with Heraclitus, that
there is a LOGOS to the natural world.