WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:10.000 [MUSIC] 00:00:20.581 --> 00:00:24.830 Heraclitus was known in antiquity as the riddler. 00:00:24.830 --> 00:00:29.590 He had a reputation both for obscurity and profundity. 00:00:29.590 --> 00:00:35.201 The one book he wrote was widely quoted in antiquity, and from the evidence we have, 00:00:35.201 --> 00:00:39.482 it was full of oracular pronouncement and deliberate paradox. 00:00:39.482 --> 00:00:44.335 Socrates is reported to have said upon reading the book, the parts that I 00:00:44.335 --> 00:00:50.000 understood were very impressive, and so were the parts that I didn't understand. 00:00:50.000 --> 00:00:52.368 So, what was the book about? 00:00:52.368 --> 00:00:56.199 In a word, it is about the LOGOS. 00:00:56.199 --> 00:01:01.145 Now Logos is a term that we've noted has a range of meanings. 00:01:01.145 --> 00:01:05.510 From the very general sense in which a LOGOS is a word or anything said, 00:01:05.510 --> 00:01:10.247 to the more restricted sense in which it's a particular way of using words. 00:01:10.247 --> 00:01:16.469 Specifically, to give an explanation, or reason, or to figure something out. 00:01:16.469 --> 00:01:21.833 So, let's see where Heraclitus' LOGOS fits into this range of meanings. 00:01:21.833 --> 00:01:27.266 Not surprisingly, he turns out to have exploited most of them. 00:01:27.266 --> 00:01:33.884 Let's look at the opening lines of the book, which is 22B1. 00:01:33.884 --> 00:01:41.156 This LOGOS holds always, but humans always prove unable to understand it, 00:01:41.156 --> 00:01:46.740 both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. 00:01:46.740 --> 00:01:51.140 Now, here we might think the LOGOS is the book of Heraclitus itself. 00:01:51.140 --> 00:01:54.100 And, that the philosopher is making the perennial complaint of the misunderstood 00:01:54.100 --> 00:01:58.520 artist that his brilliant work is not appreciated by the general public. 00:01:59.670 --> 00:02:04.332 Now, there is some truth to this, I think, but as we read on, 00:02:04.332 --> 00:02:10.269 it seems that the Logos can't simply be the book that Heraclitus has written. 00:02:10.269 --> 00:02:14.292 For although all things come to be in accordance with this LOGOs, 00:02:14.624 --> 00:02:19.788 humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I 00:02:19.788 --> 00:02:25.267 set out, distinguishing each according to its nature and saying how it is. 00:02:26.072 --> 00:02:27.245 Heraclitus, here, 00:02:27.246 --> 00:02:28.328 distinguishes between 00:02:28.328 --> 00:02:29.471 the words he has written 00:02:29.471 --> 00:02:31.640 down and the LOGOS. 00:02:31.640 --> 00:02:33.949 The LOGOS is not what he says, but 00:02:33.949 --> 00:02:38.489 a principle that governs everything that comes to be or happens, 00:02:38.489 --> 00:02:43.459 even if people don't understand it when he tries to explain it to them. 00:02:43.459 --> 00:02:48.265 And that they don't understand is a constant refrain in the book. 00:02:48.265 --> 00:02:53.438 Our quote from the opening ends by contrasting Heraclitus' own insight 00:02:53.438 --> 00:02:58.969 with the stupidity of other people who fail to notice what they do when awake. 00:02:58.969 --> 00:03:02.823 Just as they forget what they do while asleep. 00:03:02.823 --> 00:03:07.743 Heraclitus regularly appeals to the distinction between sleeping and 00:03:07.743 --> 00:03:12.417 waking experience to make the point that those who do not understand 00:03:12.417 --> 00:03:17.010 the Logos are like sleepers who mistake their dreams for reality. 00:03:17.010 --> 00:03:19.921 So Heraclitus is giving a wake up call, 00:03:19.921 --> 00:03:25.054 inviting us to understand the true reality behind our experiences. 00:03:25.054 --> 00:03:29.210 That reality is expressed in the LOGOS. 00:03:29.210 --> 00:03:31.765 But what does the LOGOS say? 00:03:31.765 --> 00:03:36.692 Nothing very straightforward, obviously, or else it wouldn't be so hard for 00:03:36.692 --> 00:03:37.360 us to get. 00:03:37.360 --> 00:03:41.938 The closest thing we have to a clear statement of the LOGOS is in fragment B50. 00:03:41.938 --> 00:03:45.610 Llisten not to me but 00:03:45.610 --> 00:03:49.600 to the LOGOS; it is wise to agree that all things are one. 00:03:49.600 --> 00:03:52.810 Now when he says don't listen to me but 00:03:52.810 --> 00:03:56.770 to the LOGOS, he means look I'm not making this up. 00:03:56.770 --> 00:04:01.830 When he says it is wise to agree that all things are one, 00:04:01.830 --> 00:04:05.246 he is telling us what the LOGOS says. 00:04:05.246 --> 00:04:09.843 So, the LOGOS is that all things are one. 00:04:09.843 --> 00:04:14.023 But what does that mean, that there is only one thing? 00:04:14.023 --> 00:04:15.532 How could that be true? 00:04:15.532 --> 00:04:19.084 I'm here, you're here, and that makes at least two things. 00:04:19.084 --> 00:04:22.281 Or, will Heraclitus roll his eyes at this objection and 00:04:22.281 --> 00:04:27.109 say that's just the sort of response you'd get from people who can't tell that they 00:04:27.109 --> 00:04:29.022 are dreaming rather than awake. 00:04:29.022 --> 00:04:33.642 You see inviting us to wake up and realize that there really is no difference between 00:04:33.642 --> 00:04:37.474 the things that seem pretty obviously different and distinct to us. 00:04:37.474 --> 00:04:41.259 Well, at least for some things, yes. 00:04:41.259 --> 00:04:44.330 For instance, here's some more quotes. 00:04:44.330 --> 00:04:49.305 The road up and the road down are the same, hint. 00:04:49.305 --> 00:04:53.206 The track of writing is both straight and crooked. 00:04:53.206 --> 00:04:54.970 That's one of my favorites. 00:04:54.970 --> 00:05:00.334 The beginning and the end are common on the circumference of a circle. 00:05:00.334 --> 00:05:05.035 These are just a few of the many fragments in which Heraclitus proclaims 00:05:05.035 --> 00:05:07.787 what people call the unity of opposites. 00:05:07.787 --> 00:05:11.525 Now we might say, okay, so what's the big deal? 00:05:11.525 --> 00:05:14.935 The same thing can have opposite properties depending on your frame of 00:05:14.935 --> 00:05:15.930 reference. 00:05:15.930 --> 00:05:19.549 What's so hard to understand about that? 00:05:19.549 --> 00:05:26.345 But consider another unity that Heraclitus invokes when he castigates Hesiod as, 00:05:26.345 --> 00:05:32.087 quote, a man who could not recognize day and night, for they are one. 00:05:32.087 --> 00:05:36.452 What does it mean to say that day and night are one? 00:05:36.452 --> 00:05:39.380 When it's day here, it's night in Australia? 00:05:39.380 --> 00:05:42.982 My apologies to anyone who is taking this course from Australia. 00:05:42.982 --> 00:05:48.398 More likely, he meant that day and night are different phases of the same thing, 00:05:48.398 --> 00:05:52.540 where that thing is the complex system comprising the Earth, 00:05:52.540 --> 00:05:55.427 the Sun, and the other celestial bodies. 00:05:55.427 --> 00:06:00.928 Even though night and day are completely opposite in our experience of them, 00:06:00.928 --> 00:06:04.312 as different as night and day, as we would say, 00:06:04.312 --> 00:06:09.660 we can understand them as expressions of a deeper underlying regularity. 00:06:09.660 --> 00:06:14.495 On this way of understanding Heraclitus' Logos, his point in claiming 00:06:14.495 --> 00:06:18.934 that all things are one is not to deny that there is multiplicity and 00:06:18.934 --> 00:06:21.311 variety in the world, but rather, 00:06:21.311 --> 00:06:27.350 to insist that there is an underlying order to that multiplicity and variety. 00:06:27.350 --> 00:06:29.580 This is what is not obvious. 00:06:29.580 --> 00:06:32.680 And what most people, the sleepers fail to see. 00:06:33.740 --> 00:06:39.110 What the sleepers fail to understand is a deep truth about the world that 00:06:39.110 --> 00:06:43.660 though at variance with itself It agrees with itself. 00:06:43.660 --> 00:06:49.210 It is a backwards-turning attunement like that of the bow and the lyre. 00:06:50.570 --> 00:06:54.970 Now this attunement is what he calls the unapparent connection 00:06:54.970 --> 00:06:58.890 that he says is stronger than apparent connection. 00:07:00.350 --> 00:07:05.200 Now connection and attunement translate the same Greek term here. 00:07:06.320 --> 00:07:10.080 It's harmonia, which is the root, of course, of our term for 00:07:10.080 --> 00:07:13.680 musical harmony, but it also means a joining together, as 00:07:13.680 --> 00:07:17.640 when a cabinet maker fits tongue-in-groove when constructing a piece of furniture. 00:07:19.700 --> 00:07:23.920 The important point here is that the unity involved in harmonia, and 00:07:23.920 --> 00:07:28.380 hence in the Logos, is a matter of order and structure. 00:07:30.930 --> 00:07:32.690 But does the world have a LOGOS? 00:07:34.240 --> 00:07:38.384 Now you might ask, what reason does Heraclitus have for being so 00:07:38.384 --> 00:07:43.002 confident that there is such an underlying order or Logos to the world? 00:07:43.002 --> 00:07:46.183 We can grant him the order behind night and day. 00:07:46.183 --> 00:07:51.523 But, why should we suppose that the whole world follows some underlying order? 00:07:51.523 --> 00:07:55.729 Recall that Heraclitus says that everything comes to be 00:07:55.729 --> 00:08:00.000 according to the Logos in the opening lines of the book. 00:08:00.000 --> 00:08:04.450 Why not conclude that the world, or maybe large pockets of it, are just chaotic? 00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:10.000 That's certainly what our experience often tells us. 00:08:10.000 --> 00:08:14.010 But, Heraclitus tells us not to just trust our experience. 00:08:14.010 --> 00:08:20.550 He says, eyes and ears are bad witnesses to people if they have barbarian souls. 00:08:21.770 --> 00:08:25.774 And the soul, he says, has its own LOGOS. 00:08:25.774 --> 00:08:29.512 In one place he calls it a deep LOGOS. 00:08:29.512 --> 00:08:33.947 In another he calls it a self-increasing LOGOS. 00:08:33.947 --> 00:08:39.890 Here is where I would want to translate LOGOS as reason or reasoning. 00:08:39.890 --> 00:08:46.540 When Heraclitus says, I searched myself, or alternatively, I looked into myself. 00:08:46.540 --> 00:08:47.800 He means he used his critical faculties. 00:08:49.600 --> 00:08:51.310 His power of reasoning. 00:08:51.310 --> 00:08:56.400 But, what chain of reasoning would support the conclusion that there is 00:08:56.400 --> 00:09:00.600 an underlying unity and order to the world? 00:09:00.600 --> 00:09:03.349 That's a pretty tall order. 00:09:03.349 --> 00:09:06.326 If Heraclitus produced such an argument, 00:09:06.326 --> 00:09:11.128 he hasn't shared it with us or no one saw fit to quote it from his book. 00:09:11.128 --> 00:09:16.354 But, even if he doesn't have a proof that there is an underlying order to things, 00:09:16.354 --> 00:09:21.762 his conviction that there is such an order isn't idle dogmatism or table thumping. 00:09:21.762 --> 00:09:25.486 For the belief that the world is ultimately understandable or 00:09:25.486 --> 00:09:30.650 explicable is a presupposition behind the whole enterprise of scientific inquiry. 00:09:31.920 --> 00:09:36.630 To search for explanations is to try to uncover hidden connections and 00:09:36.630 --> 00:09:40.979 unifying principles that explain the variety of phenomena that we observe. 00:09:43.160 --> 00:09:46.270 Heraclitus belief that the world has a LOGOS 00:09:46.270 --> 00:09:51.080 may simply express his conviction that the world is ultimately understandable. 00:09:52.510 --> 00:09:57.130 If so, it is a conviction that he shares with the Melanesian Naturalists, Thales, 00:09:57.130 --> 00:10:01.750 Anaximander, and Anaximenes, each of whom also insisted on a single 00:10:01.750 --> 00:10:04.169 explanatory principle of the natural world. 00:10:05.200 --> 00:10:09.144 It is their shared assumption that the world is ultimately explicable, 00:10:09.144 --> 00:10:12.443 more than their specific proposals about how to explain it, 00:10:12.443 --> 00:10:15.954 that have earned them a place in the history of natural science. 00:10:15.954 --> 00:10:20.340 It is also what earns them the title that Aristotle gives them, 00:10:20.340 --> 00:10:25.556 phusiologoi, which we can now understand in a slightly different twist, 00:10:25.556 --> 00:10:31.302 as those who believe with Heraclitus, that there is a LOGOS to the natural world.