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Heraclitus philosophy on the nature of things
Of all the sages of ancient Greece, none appear as a mysterious and as interesting as Heraclitus of Ephesus. The first thing that strikes Heraclitus, when he looks at the visible world, it is the universal change that is in the things. Everything changes and varies; everything crumbles; nothing remains. For Heraclitus, everything flows like a river: the universe is like a mass of water in incessant movement.
Heraclitus compares the universe to a huge home everything is made of fire because nothing is more mobile or more insane as fire. Fire is the primordial stuff of the universe. This common subject to all things are eternal: in this Heraclitus does not differ other wise men of antiquity. “This world," he says, "the same for all beings, no gods and men did not create it, but it was always, and it will always be a fire eternally alive, lighting up with measuring and extinguishing with the measure. "Indeed, inside this universe of fire, multiple transformations: "The transformations of fire are first the sea, and the sea is half land, and half wind." (Hussey88) So the sea is the first to come out of the fire, it is like the seed of all things, and it is she who, by successive transformations, will produce the earth and the sky and everything they contain.
This fixed law which governs the transformations of fire is the law of opposites because the birth of a being is the death of others, and the destruction of a thing is the production of another. Things are turning into their opposite: life becomes dead, the day becomes night. Heraclitus then clearly affirms the existence of a lying all beings (Kahn,127).
The universe is an immense river where everything starts and drowns in an endless whirlwind. Above, pre-sinking by his thought to the struggle of things, there is the immutable Wisdom. Between the divine world and the world of becoming, there has a multitude of other realities, extremely mysterious: the "daemons." (Stern603).
They do not understand how what is fighting can agree: movements in the opposite direction, as for the bow or the lyre. "Immortals, mortals; mortal, immortal; our death is the life of the first, and their life our death. "In other words, when we are born, an immortal die, and when we die, an immortal comes to life. Which is mortal, it is the man, but what is immortal ?( Minar323).
Heraclitus advocates that fire and everything can be transformed into each other. He believes that there are a certain scale and logos in the burning of fire. The reason is that the fire is the most refined of the elements and is the closest thing to the absence of form; more importantly, fire is both sporty and can move other things.
Finally, after a while, because, for Heraclitus, time is played just like a child and happens at the end of everything, the universe will return to its original form, by inverse transformations. Everything will return to the fire, and nothing cannot escape. The fire saw the death of the earth, and the air saw the death of fire; the water lives the death of the air and the earth that of the water.
Concludingly for him one thing leads to another thing, such as the fire turns into water, and the fire disappears into the new form of existence. Everything becomes its opposite, so everything is the unity of opposite nature. Nothing has the same nature, and nothing has an eternal character. In this sense, everything exists and does not exist. With this kind of opposition, there is a world. His attitude towards war is clear. Heraclitus emphasizes the variability of things. The movement of things is carried out according to some inherent law. Heraclitus calls this law "logos," which is the earliest thought of the regularity in the West. Heraclitus said that this "logos" is the inevitability of guiding and controlling everything, which is met by most people every day, and this inevitability is the law of movement of things.
Work cited
Hussey, Edward. "5 Heraclitus." The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (1999):
88.
Kahn, Charles H., ed. The art and thought of Heraclitus: A new arrangement and translation of
the fragments with literary and philosophical commentary. Cambridge University Press, 1981.127-130
Minar Jr, Edwin L. "The logos of Heraclitus." Classical Philology 34.4 (1939): 323-341.
Stern, David G. "Heraclitus' and Wittgenstein's river images: stepping twice into the same river."
The Monist 74.4 (1991): 579-604.
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