Heraclitus Influence On Life

Heraclitus was born in Ephesus, Greece, and was born between 500 and 400 BCE/BC making him a 6th century philosopher. Heraclitus was more than just a cosmologist, but someone who tried to see what to most cannot be seen. He was a man of thought, and lived life by pursuing experiences, which he perceived to be his only path to find what he observed as nature in his idea of the self vs. nature.

When talking about the self and its partner nature, the deepest idea you can take away from the self is more of a task, but not an accomplishment. An example of this ideology is thinking of the task as parenting, using a set of skills to raise a child from infant to adult. The accomplishment side is much like graduating college, is finite, once its happened

Heraclitus says, “… day and night: for they are one” (F11) a statement both contradicting and bringing two things together to form a whole. This concept is better known as “harmony of opposites”, the day and the night together come together to create one full 24-hour day. In the case that you can’t have one without the other, Heraclitus introduced Life/Death, where he entertains the notion that we the people who are living and breathing are the slash in between life and death. The feelings of life are the feelings that truly make life worth living. Whether that be something as simple as the wave of relaxation that flows over you from a morning cup of tea, that is up to the individual. Its that feeling that perpetuates our lives forward toward life, the opposite end of that would be death. A bad day, a loved one passing away, failing and exam, these are examples of reasons leading to the feeling of death, not just its action. The thought doesn’t necessarily have to be suicidal, but at some point, we all as humans can’t help but wish we didn’t have to deal with the tribulations of life, and simply succumb to death. Aristotle assigned fundamental tools to the way philosophers philosophized, with Heraclitus he assigned fire. “The world-order, the same of all, no god nor man did create, but it ever was and is and will be: everlasting fire, kindling in measures and being quenched in measures.” (F29)

“As the same thing in us are living and death, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and those in turn having changed around are these.” (F54) With fire you have the exchange for that it presents constant change in and out of itself. That which flows into the river with is also like the fire, changing and adapting, but through this change finding new identities to grasp upon to. Finally, within conflict, you have changed a simple string and piece of wood into a weapon (the bow), for now these have become those, two separate identities become one new