Helen asked:

What is a philosopher?

Can it be said that Heraclitus was not one?

============

A philosopher, according to my nine-year old daughter, is "an argument waiting to happen". Though
one might quibble with this definition, on the grounds that it would make my wife a philosopher (only
kidding!) it has more than a germ of truth. Philosophers are aficionados, critics and practitioners of
argument. That is what they do. To have 'a philosophy' is not to be a philosopher, if you are not
prepared to argue your case. Moreover, to argue philosophically implies an interest in truth, rather
than mere persuasion. An argument should persuade because it is valid.

The problem with Heraclitus is that knowledge of the Greek philosophers before Socrates (the
'Presocratics') has come down to us via reports and surviving fragments of their works preserved by
students and commentators. The result is that we have to make do with a patchwork quilt of snippets,
rather than completed works. This has had a particularly unfortunate effect in the case of Heraclitus,
whose highly quotable epigrams were preserved at the expense of the surrounding context in which
he laid out his ethics and philosophy of nature.

Many of these saying do indeed sound obscure, earning Heraclitus the nicknames, 'The Obscure' and
'The Riddler':

Of the Logos which is as I describe it men always prove to be uncomprehending, both before they
have heard it and when once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this
Logos men are like people of no experience, even when they experience such words and deeds as I
explain, when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is; but the rest of
men fail to notice what they do after they wake up just as they forget what they do when asleep.

And as the same thing there exists in us living and dead and the waking and the sleeping and
young and old; for these things having changed round are those, and those having changed
round are these.

Things taken together are wholes and not wholes, something which is being brought together
and brought apart, which is in tune and out of tune; out of all things there comes a unity, and
out of a unity all things.

Upon those that step into the same rivers different and different waters flow...They scatter
and...gather...come together and flow away...approach and depart.

This world-order did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an ever
living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.

(Taken from The Presocratic Philosophers2nd Edn Kirk, Raven and Schofield Cambridge 1983 pp.
181ff.)

An important clue that Heraclitus was not content to speak in riddles comes from the first of the
fragments: "...when I distinguish each thing according to its constitution and declare how it is..". One
can only assume that this analytical process of carefully 'distinguishing each thing according to its
constitution' occurred in works which have been lost.

From the many preserved fragments of Heraclitus I believe it is possible to reconstruct a coherent
and powerful philosophical theory, as well as the arguments for that theory. Of course, there is always
room for disagreement over interpretation. My feeling (which, it should be noted, Kirk et al. do not
share) is that Plato was right in his interpretation of the famous river saying. As Plato reports in his
dialogue Cratylus,"Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are in process and nothing stays still,
and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step twice into the
same river."

The main advance Heraclitus made over his predecessor Anaximenes, who said that the universe
was made out of a single material, 'air' in different stages of 'condensation' or 'rarefaction, was in his
denial that there exists any permanent substancethat continues from one moment to the next. In
place of substance, there is simply the Logos,the law governing all appearances. Heraclitus was the
first process philosopher.Every existing thing — the table I rest my hands upon, the houses and trees
outside my window, the earth itself — is like a flame, or a river. Continuity of form is a mere
appearance, which hides the realty of constant renewal and change.

Geoffrey Klempner