Heraclitus of Ephesus philosophy briefly. Brief biography of Heraclitus. The influence of Heraclitus on the further development of philosophy

The main ideas of Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, the founder of the first historical or original form of dialectics, are presented in this article.

Heraclitus: basic ideas

The ancient sages stood at the origins of wisdom and the birth of many sciences. Heraclitus was no exception. Philosophy owes its origin and development. He put forward many main theses. Among them are the following main ideas:

• Fire is the origin of everything. In the understanding of the scientist, fire acts as energy. It was he who was considered the fundamental principle of the creation of the world.
• Space and the world are periodically destroyed in a powerful fire in order to be restored again.
• Invented the concepts of circulation and flow. He is the author of the immortal thesis "Everything flows, everything changes." Heraclitus discovered the essence of the flow of time and life, changeability.
• The law of opposites (on the difference of concepts). The ancient Greek philosopher cites the sea as an example. It gives life to all marine life and, at the same time, brings death to people. Modern scientists believe that this idea of ​​Heraclitus is the progenitor of Einstein's theory of relativity.
• Heraclitus deduced a special universal law - the law of unchanging fate, Losog or Heimarmen. It represents the eternal wisdom that brings order to the current of change, to the process of struggle between emergence and destruction.
• The philosopher believed that the main task of the philosopher is not a simple contemplation of inert, motionless forms of the surrounding world and being, but penetration into the essence of the world's living process through deep inner intuition.
• According to Heraclitus, the human soul is made of dry warm steam. The soul is a pure manifestation of divine fire. She feeds on the warmth that she receives from this fire and absorbs it with her senses and breath.

We hope that from this article you have learned what are the main ideas of Heraclitus.

The great dialectician of the ancient world is Heraclitus of Ephesus(c. 520-460 BC). “Everything that exists,” he taught, “is constantly moving from one state to another: everything flows, everything changes; the same river cannot be entered twice; there is nothing immovable in the world: the cold gets warmer, the warm gets colder, the wet dries up, the dry gets moistened. Appearance and disappearance, life and death, birth and death - being and non-being - are interconnected, they condition and pass into each other. According to his views, the transition of a phenomenon from one state to another is accomplished through the struggle of opposites, which he called the eternal "universal logos", that is, a single law common to all existence. Heraclitus taught that the world was not created by any of the gods and by any of the people, but was, is and will be an ever-living fire, naturally igniting and naturally extinguishing.

Heraclitus of Ephesus came from an aristocratic family, deprived of power by democracy, spent his life avoiding secular affairs, and by the end of his life he completely became a hermit. The main work "On Nature", which has survived only fragmentarily, was recognized during the life of Heraclitus as thoughtful and difficult to understand, for which the author received the nickname "dark".

In the doctrine of being (ontology), Heraclitus claims that the fundamental principle of the world is fire. Cosmos was not created by anyone, but was, is and will be an ever-living fire, now flaring up, now dying out. Fire is eternal, space is a product of fire. Fire undergoes a series of transformations, first becoming water, and water is the seed of the universe. Water, in turn, transforms into earth and air, giving rise to the surrounding world.

Heraclitus can be considered the founder of the doctrine of knowledge (epistemology). He was the first to distinguish between sensory and rational knowledge. Cognition, in his opinion, begins with feelings, but sensory data give only a superficial description of the knowable, therefore, they must be processed by the mind accordingly.

The social and legal views of Heraclitus are known, in particular, his respect for the law. “The people must fight for the law as for a city wall, and crime must be extinguished sooner than a fire,” he said. The dialectic of Heraclitus, which takes into account both sides of the phenomenon - both its variability and its unchanging nature, was not adequately perceived by contemporaries and was already subjected to the most diverse criticism in antiquity. If Cratyl called for ignoring the moment of stability, then the Eleatics (natives of the city of Elea) Xenophanes (c. 570-478 BC), Parmenides (end of VI-V centuries BC), Zeno (mid-V century BC), on the contrary, focused attention precisely on the moment of stability, reproaching Heraclitus for exaggerating the role of variability.

Heraclitus of Ephesus is an ancient Greek philosopher, the founder of dialectics. The doctrine is based on the idea of ​​the constant variability of everything that exists, the unity of opposites, controlled by the eternal law of the Logos-fire.

Very little information has been preserved about the life of Heraclitus of Ephesus. The reliability of most of them is still debated by scholars. It is believed that Heraclitus had no teachers. Apparently, he was familiar with the teachings of many of his contemporaries and predecessors, but he said about himself that he was "nobody's listener" and "learned from himself." Contemporaries called him "Gloomy", "Dark". The reason for this was his manner of formulating his thoughts in a mysterious, not always understandable form, as well as a clear tendency to misanthropy and melancholy. In this regard, he was sometimes contrasted with the "laughing sage" Democritus.

Origin

It is known that Heraclitus was born and lived all his life in the city of Ephesus, located on the western coast of Asia Minor (the territory of modern Turkey). The time of birth of the philosopher is tentatively called 544-541. BC e. Such assumptions are built on the basis of information that during the 69th Olympiad, held in 504-501. BC e., Heraclitus has already entered the age of "acme". So the ancient Greeks called the period when a person reached physical and spiritual maturity - the age of about 40 years.

The genus of Heraclitus was of royal origin, in his family the title of basileus (king-priest) was inherited. There is a version that his father's name was Heracont, other sources (more reliable) call him Bloson. One of the representatives of the genus - Androclus - was the founder of Ephesus. Even in his youth, Heraclitus decided to devote his life to philosophy and resigned from his inherited high powers, voluntarily yielding them to his younger brother. According to the tradition of those times, he settled at the Ephesian temple of Artemis and daily indulged in meditation. By the way, it was this temple in 356 BC. e. burned by a certain Herostratus, who dreams of leaving his name for centuries.

Heraclitean dialectic, logos-fire

Closest of all, the views of Heraclitus converge with the ideas of representatives of the Ionian school of ancient Greek philosophy. They were connected by the idea that everything that exists is one and has a certain origin, expressed in a specific form of matter. For Heraclitus, the cause and beginning of the world was fire, which exists everywhere and in everything, constantly changing, "flaring up and fading according to measure." From time to time there is a "global fire", after which the cosmos is completely destroyed, but only in order to be reborn again. It was Heraclitus who first used the word "cosmos" in the meaning of the universe, the universe, known today.

The connection of everything with everything, the struggle of opposites and the constant variability of the world is the main idea of ​​the philosophy of Heraclitus, the foundation of the future development of dialectics. There is nothing permanent and absolute, everything is relative. The world is eternal and it is based on the cycle of substances and elements: earth, fire, air, water. It is Heraclitus who is credited with the authorship of the phrases that everything flows and changes, and about the river, which cannot be entered twice.

Opposites are identical, discord between them is eternal and through it they pass one into another every second: day into night, life into death, evil into good. Also vice versa. Thus, according to Heraclitus, war is the meaning and source of any process, "the father and king of everything." However, all this variability is not chaos; it has its limits, rhythms and measure.

The unchanging fate governs world processes, a special universal law, which Heraclitus recognizes as the value of all values. His name is Logos. Fire and logos are two elements of a single whole, the eternally living soul of nature, with which a person should be “conformed”. According to Heraclitus, everything that seems to people to be motionless, constant is just a deception of the senses. The philosopher says that in daily encounter with the Logos, people are at enmity with it; the truth seems foreign to them.

The structure of the human soul

The philosopher's misanthropy extended to people in general and to the citizens of Ephesus in particular: "they themselves are not aware of what they say and do." This gave him another nickname: "Weeping". He was so lamented, observing the stupidity around him, that sometimes he shed tears of impotent rage. Heraclitus considered ignorance to be one of the worst vices, and he called ignorant those who were lazy to think, easily succumbed to suggestion and preferred the pursuit of wealth to the improvement of the soul.

The philosopher believed that the path to wisdom lies through unity with nature, but very few are given to achieve the goal: “One is worthy of thousands for me, if it is the best.” At the same time, simply the accumulation of knowledge is not able to teach a person to think: "much knowledge does not teach the mind." Heraclitus explains the “barbarism” of human souls quite simply: they are vaporous and are fed by the warmth of the universal fire. According to the philosopher, the souls of bad people contain a lot of moisture, and the souls of the best people are extremely dry and radiate light, which indicates their fiery nature.

Political and religious views

Heraclitus was not a supporter of tyranny, just as he did not support democracy. He recognized the crowd as too unreasonable to be entrusted with the management of a city or a country. Despising human vices, the philosopher said that animals become tame while living with people, while people only run wild in each other's company. When the Ephesians turned to him with a request to draw up a wise set of laws for them, Heraclitus refused: "You have a bad government and you yourself live badly." However, when he was invited by the Athenians who heard about his glory or the king of Persia Darius, he refused them too, choosing to stay in his native city.

The philosopher resolutely rejected the polytheistic beliefs and rituals customary for those times. The only deity he recognized was the eternal fire logos. Heraclitus argued that the world was not created by any of the gods or people, and in the other world people expect something that they do not assume. The philosopher believed that he had achieved fiery enlightenment: he discovered the truth and conquered all vices. He was sure that, thanks to his wisdom, his name would live on as long as the human race existed.

Reasoning about the nature of things

The only work of Heraclitus, which is known to scientists - "On Nature". It has not been preserved in its entirety, but descendants inherited in the form of about one and a half hundred fragments that were included in the works of later authors (Plutarch, Plato, Diogenes, etc.). The essay contained three parts: about the universe, about the state and about God. It was common for Heraclitus to speak metaphorically, he often used poetic images and allegories, which often makes it difficult to understand the deep meaning of his scattered quotations and paraphrases. the best research work in this direction is considered to be published at the beginning of the 20th century. the work of the German classical philologist Hermann Diels "Fragments of the Pre-Socratics".

Reclusion and death

Once the philosopher went to the mountains and became a hermit. Herbs and roots served as food for him. Some evidence indicates that Heraclitus died of dropsy, smearing himself with dung in the hope that its heat would evaporate excess fluid from the body. Some researchers are inclined to see in this a connection with the Zoroastrian traditions of burial, with which the philosopher was allegedly familiar. Other scholars are of the opinion that Heraclitus died later and under different circumstances. The exact date of the philosopher's death is unknown, but most assumptions converge on 484-481 BC. e. In 1935, one of the craters on the visible side of the Moon was named after Heraclitus of Ephesus.

Heraclitus of Ephesus had practically no followers; "Heracliteans" in most cases are called people who unilaterally accepted the ideas of the philosopher. The most famous is Cratyl, who became the hero of one of Plato's dialogues. Bringing the thoughts of Heraclitus to the point of absurdity, he argued that nothing definite could be said about reality. In antiquity, the ideas of Heraclitus had a noticeable influence on the teachings of the Stoics, Sophists and Plato, and later on the philosophical thought of modern times.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 535 - 475 BC)
An ancient Greek materialist philosopher, one of the largest representatives of the Ionian school of philosophy. Fire was the origin of all things. Creator of the concept of continuous change, the doctrine of "logos", which he interpreted as "god", "fate", "necessity", "eternity". He owns the famous saying
"You can't step into the same river twice."

Along with Pythagoras and Parmenides, Heraclitus determined the foundations of ancient and all European philosophy. Heraclitus considered being itself as a mystery, a riddle.

A native of Ephesus, he belonged to an ancient aristocratic family, dating back to the founder of Ephesus, Androclus. Due to his origin, he had a number of "royal" privileges and a hereditary priesthood at the temple of Artemis of Ephesus. However, at that time, power in Ephesus no longer belonged to aristocrats.

The philosopher did not participate in public life, abandoned his titles, spoke sharply negatively about the city's order and contemptuously treated the "crowd". He considered the laws of the city so hopelessly bad that he refused his fellow citizens a request for new ones, noting that it was better to play with children than to participate in public affairs.

Heraclitus did not leave Ephesus and refused the invitations of the Athenians and the Persian king Darius

The main work of the philosopher - the book "On Nature" has been preserved in fragments. It consists of three parts: about nature, about the state and about God, and is distinguished by originality, figurativeness and aphoristic language. The basic idea is that nothing in nature is permanent. Everything is like the movement of a river that cannot be entered twice. One constantly passes into another, changing its state.

The symbolic expression of universal change for Heraclitus is fire. Fire is continuous self-destruction; he lives by his death.

Heraclitus introduced a new philosophical concept - logos (word), meaning by this the principle of the rational unity of the world, which orders the world by mixing opposite principles. Opposites are in eternal struggle, giving rise to new phenomena (“discord is the father of everything”). The human mind and logos have a common nature, but the logos exists in eternity and governs the cosmos, of which man is a particle.

Tradition has preserved the image of Heraclitus - a lonely sage who despised people (and those who were famous for wisdom) for not understanding what they themselves say and do.

His sayings are often like folklore riddles or the words of an oracle, which, according to Heraclitus, "does not speak, and does not hide, but gives signs." It is believed that by writing his work deliberately obscure and giving it to the temple of Artemis for safekeeping, Heraclitus seemed to want to protect him from the ignorant crowd.

Sayings of Heraclitus reveal a thoughtful structure, a special poetics. They are saturated with alliterations, a play on words, characteristic of the structure of inner speech, addressed not so much to others as to oneself, ready to return to the element of thinking silence.

To be, according to Heraclitus, means to constantly become, to flow from form to form, to be renewed, just as the same river carries new and new waters. Another metaphor for being is in Heraclitus burning, fire. A single being, as it were, flares up with a multitude of things that exist, but it also goes out in it, just as the things that exist, flaming up with being, go out in its unity. Another metaphor for the same is the game: every time a new game of the same game.

Heraclitus belonged to the royal city of Ephesus, but he renounced the throne, built a hut in the mountains and devoted his life to philosophy. Heraclitus is called crying philosopher, because, according to giving, he could not look at the bustle of people without tears. He is also called the Dark One, because his aphorisms were not always clear to his contemporaries. Works about nature are attributed to him, but only minor fragments have come down to us.

Philosophical ideas of Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus, a younger contemporary of the Ionian philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, a man of a noble family, an aristocratic way of thinking and a sad temperament, prone to melancholy, built a system based not on experience, but on speculation, taking fire as the source of material and spiritual life, which , in his opinion, should be considered the origin of all things. Heraclitus expounded his teachings in the book On Nature; ancient writers say that his exposition was very obscure.

According to Heraclitus, fire is a natural force that creates everything with its warmth; it penetrates all parts of the universe, we accept, in every part of it special property. These modifications of fire produce objects, and its further modifications destroy the objects produced by it, and thus the universe is in an eternal cycle of changes: everything in it arises and changes; nothing is lasting, immutable. Everything that seems to a person constant, immovable, seems so only through deception of the senses; everywhere in the universe every minute everything takes on different qualities: everything in it is either composed or decomposed. The law by which changes occur is the law of gravity. But the eternal process of changing matter is governed by a special universal law - an unchanging fate, which Heraclitus calls the Logos or Heimarmene. This is the eternal wisdom that brings order into the eternal current of change, into the process of the eternal struggle of emergence with destruction.

Heraclitus is the first ancient Greek philosopher known to us, who believed that the main task of the philosopher is not to contemplate the inert, motionless forms of the surrounding being, but to penetrate the essence of the living world process through deep inner intuition. He believed that in the universe, this eternal unceasing movement is primary, and all the material objects participating in it are only its secondary tools. The teachings of Heraclitus are at the origins of the ideological current, which gave, among other things, the modern Western "philosophy of life."

The human soul, according to Heraclitus, consists of warm, dry steam; she is the purest manifestation of divine fire; it feeds on the warmth received from the fire that surrounds the universe; she perceives this warmth with her breath and sense organs. That soul is endowed with wisdom and other good qualities, which consists of a very dry vapor. If the vapor that makes up the soul becomes damp, then the soul loses its good qualities and its mind weakens. When a person dies, the divine part of him is separated from the body. Pure souls become in the afterlife beings higher than humans (“demons”). Heraclitus seemed to think about the fate of the souls of bad people in the same way as folk beliefs about the afterlife kingdom of the god Hades. Some scholars believe that Heraclitus was familiar with the Persian teachings of Zoroaster. They see his influence in the fact that Heraclitus considers everything dead to be unclean, gives an extremely high value to fire and considers the process of life to be a universal struggle.

Sensual knowledge cannot, according to the teachings of Heraclitus, lead us to the truth; it is found only by those who try to penetrate into the divine law of reason that governs the universe; whoever obeys this law receives peace of mind, the highest good of life. Just as the law rules in the universe and should rule over the soul of man, so it should rule over public life. Therefore, Heraclitus hated tyranny, hated democracy as well, as the dominion of an unreasonable crowd, which obeys not reason, but sensual impressions and is therefore worthy of contempt.

He boldly rebelled against Greek worship and rejected the gods of popular religion. The scientist Zeller says about him: “Heraclitus was the first philosopher who resolutely expressed the idea that nature is imbued with the original principle of life, that everything material is in a continuous process of change, that everything individual arises and dies; He contrasted this process of eternal change of objects with the unchanging sameness of the law of change, the dominion of rational force over the course of the life of nature. The idea of ​​Heraclitus about the dominion of an unchanging, rational law-Logos over the process of change was apparently not accepted by those of his followers, who are ridiculed by Plato for not recognizing anything permanent, they spoke only about the continuous variability of everything according to the internal law of the universe .