As early as Homer and Hesiod the Greeks showed their awareness that the physical world is an orderly system. They did not then call it a kos- mos, but they envisioned it as a limited and tripartite structure of heaven, earth and seas, and underworld, with each of these three domains under its own divine manager.29They also envisioned the world and its inhab- itants as a regulated system, with its regulation sometimes assigned to Zeus and sometimes to Moira. Without sharply distinguishing these reg- ulative powers from one another, in referring to Zeus, they emphasized foresight and intelligence, while their references to Moira implied ne- cessity and an embryonic sense of causal connectedness.
This conception of the world, though imprecise in its details, was rationalistic in presupposing that events don’t happen for no reason. Myth and religion provided explanations, albeit personalist ones, such as the anger of Zeus or the resentment of Poseidon, or invoked vaguely impersonal agencies, such as fate. The conception was also rationalistic in the prudential sense reflected in the value of süphrosynÞ, which signi- fied the wisdom of self-restraint, especially with regard to one’s appro- priate attitude to the controlling divinities.
29 Cf. Il. 15. 187–189, the division of the world into three domains for Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; and Hesiod, Theog. 720, which makes heaven as high above earth as the underworld is below earth.
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What this archaic outlook completely lacked, so far as one can see, was the idea that human intelligence might be able to enter the orderly cosmos it already intuited and discover laws of nature for itself, gaining some authentic access, as it were, to the operations of the divine men- tality. Hence the epistemological pessimism we find in Hesiod, Solon, and Xenophanes. All three authors agreed that, while the supreme di- vinity itself is “far seeing” and controlling, human beings can achieve no “likeness to god” in these respects or gain a reliable measure of in- tellectual control over their own lives.
Heraclitus, by contrast, thought that human beings not only could but should acquire insight into nature, as he calls it; for, without that in- sight, they could not live wakeful, authentic and intelligent lives.30 Thus, probably with strong stimulus from Milesian cosmology, he set ancient philosophy on an epistemological course quite opposite to ar- chaic pessimism. He intuited the unifying power of structure, measure and proportion in the world’s physical processes; took these to be in- stantiated in the operation of divine intelligence; and, in his greatest and most far-reaching innovation, posited human capacity to think and speak commensurately – i.e. in accordance with nature, and there- fore rationally.
As I have written elsewhere: “Heraclitus’ relation to the world is, in a sense, an attempt to think the thoughts of god. This would be a very unsafe thing to do if you were dealing with Olympian Zeus.”31 Hera- clitus’ Zeus, by contrast, is only equivocally the Olympian deity (B 32). Non-equivocally, his Zeus is the deep structure of the world and the world’s predictable and regular processes, as manifested in the sun’s cycle and the alternation of day and night (B 67). As I have also proposed elsewhere, we may characterize the general project of early Greek philosophy as “accounting for all things” – accounting, not in the sense of enumerating facts, but giving a systematic explanation of why the world is the way it appears to be.32 Heraclitus did not invent the concept of the world as a bounded totality. Yet, he was the first
30 “The difference between the gods and humanity, traditionally almost unbridge- able, is for Heraclitus inessential”, Hussey 1999, 103. As Hussey observes (ibid. 104), in reference to such fragments as B 78–79, which contrast the di- vine and the human: this “is a matter of character not of nature … That human nature is perfectly capable of achieving real understanding is shown by … B113 and B116”.
31 Long 1992b, 273. 32 Long 1999a, 10–13.
thinker, so far as we can see, to engage in second-order reflection on the world, by which I mean reflection on what it means to account for that totality, the universe as such.
In this paper I have investigated the conceptual constituents of his idea of rationality, focusing on measure, proportion, and structure. I could have explored his applications of that idea, by studying his tech- niques for rousing his audience from their epistemological slumbers, such as his challenges to common sense distinctions between day and night, up and down, mortal and immortal, or his polemics against rec- ognized authorities. These techniques, no less than the material I have discussed, were a crucial part of his contribution to rational inquiry, but they are less directly relevant to the idea of rationality in the way it was pursued by Plato and later philosophers.
Given how little of Heraclitus we possess in sheer number of words, the challenge he presents to interpretation is quite remarkable. As is the case with Parmenides, or even more so, with Heraclitus there is always something else for a commentator to add. I have said nothing in this paper about his cryptic and aphoristic style. For anyone who finds these traditional marks of Heraclitus’ obscurity an impediment to my main argument, I respond as follows.
Obscurity just for its own sake is the enemy of reason, and clarity is a philosopher’s principal virtue. True enough. But there are no grounds, in my opinion, for thinking that Heraclitus is ever obscure purely for the sake of mystification. He often writes with such limpidity that his state- ments are memorable precisely because of that. When he is quite ob- scure – as for instance in B 62, “Immortal mortals, mortal immortals …” – I take it that the obscurity is philosophically motivated. He takes on the role of the Delphic oracle in order to challenge his audience to come up with their own interpretations of his remarks, and so ach- ieve not only critical distance from their unreflective preconceptions but also open themselves to rethinking the conventionally exclusive distinc- tion between mortal and immortal things.
In this latter respect, Heraclitus was the true precursor of Plato’s Socrates. Both thinkers require the persons they engage with to follow their respective logos wherever it leads. Again like Socrates, Heraclitus revels in paradoxes, meaning controversions of standard opinions. To his great credit, he does not claim to know much in particular detail concerning cosmology, as some Presocratics will do in ways that, though highly imaginative, are little more than hand-waving by later scientific standards. More importantly, his riddling statements, in their
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balanced structure, rhythms, and measures, are a representation of the rationality he finds at work in the cosmos and, mutatis mutandis, in him- self as the spokesman of its logos.