Episode 19: Riddle Me This: Heraclitus of Ephesus
Heraclitus of Ephesus made one well-known contribution to the history of western thought: his dictum that ‘nature loves to hide’ has been cited down the ages by philosophers, alchemists, mystics, and scientists, as the locus classicus of the inherent trickiness of nature, her ability to present one appearance to the everyday seeker and a radically different one to the thinker who penetrates more deeply into her depths. But Heraclitus also made important ‘secret’ contributions to the long history of western esoteric thought. We discuss the most important of these, his difficult-to-interpret idea of logos, which seems to have been the starting-point for a long evolution of this term from a complex word meaning ‘account, report, reckoning, speech, rational thought, solution’ to an even more complex term implying all of these meanings but also serving as a metaphysical principle, an occult property of things whereby they were informed by a divine plan or rational telos.
Along the way we don’t neglect some of the fascinating details of Heraclitus, not least of which are his propensity to speak in riddles, his general obscurity, and his overall esoteric approach to the open expression of the truth.
Works Discussed in this Episode:
- Aristotle, Metaphysics A 986a 22-b2
- Hadot, P., 2006. The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
- Kahn, C., 1979. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus. Cambridge University Press, London/New York, NY/Melbourne.
Recommended Reading and Listening:
The History of Philosophy Podcast’s episode on Heraclitus is a wonderful intro to the guy. See also the Stanford article on Heraclitus. The wikipedia article on riddles is really cool.
- Mortley, R., 1986. From Word to Silence. Hanstein, Bonn contains fascinating material on the rise of the idea of a metaphysical logos in Greek thought.
Bernie Lewin
September 15, 2019
In your survey of the meanings of ‘logos’ there is no mention of the one found in Pythagorean mathematics, which is ‘ratio’. This seems neglectful considering what happened between the 5th century and the stoic-Christianity logos. Eudoxus’s partial solution to the problem of the irrationals was to shift from the arithmetic ratio (1:2) to ratio in general (and so include 1:sqrt2 and 1:Pi). This is famously preserved in Euclid Defn 5, Bk 5. Eudoxus seems to have been working closely and esoterically with Plato when he came to this solution and Plato seems to have shifted the focus of research in accord with it. Subsequent esoteric Platonism and stoicism celebrated the logos as the principle of differentiation, as the original-one-becoming-two (this 1st born often called ‘Dyad’).
This is interesting for future development but it might also be important to a discussion of Heraclitus. Firstly, if we consider that Euclid preserves in a formalised manner the mathematical teaching of the Pythagorean up to his time (300 BCE), then the many theories concerning logos and ana-logia might suggest this as an important part of Pythagorean teachings already before Plato. Secondly, it might suggest a more general meaning outside Pythagoreanism. It might suggest that it concerned difference and differentiation, and in that way how things are related and bound to each other. This could also have a parallel in reasoning, as in ratio-nalisations of nature. Finally, Heraclitus has these series of opposites with a common ‘ratio’ for example (eg the ratio of ‘death’).