Chapter III: Herakleitos of Ephesos (3)

The few fragments which deal with theology and religion hardly suggest to us that Herakleitos was in sympathy with the religious revival of the time, and yet we have been asked to consider his system “in the light of the idea of the mysteries.”[419] Our attention is called to the fact that he was “king” of Ephesos, that is, priest of the branch of the Eleusinian mysteries established in that city, which was also connected in some way with the worship of Artemis or the Great Mother.[420] These statements may be true; but, even if they are, what follows? We ought surely to have learnt from Lobeck by this time that there was no “idea” in the mysteries at all; and on this point the results of recent anthropological research have abundantly confirmed those of philological and historical inquiry.

Footnote 419:

E. Pfleiderer, _Die Philosophie des Heraklit von Ephesus im Lichte der
Mysterienidee_ (1886).

Footnote 420:

Antisthenes (the writer of _Successions_) _ap._ Diog. ix. 6 (R. P.
31). Cf. Strabo, xiv. p. 633 (R. P. 31 b).

[Sidenote: Ethics of Herakleitos.]

83. The moral teaching of Herakleitos has sometimes been regarded as an anticipation of the “common-sense” theory of Ethics.[421] The “common” upon which Herakleitos insists is, nevertheless, something very different from common sense, for which, indeed, he had the greatest possible contempt (fr. 111). It is, in fact, his strongest objection to “the many,” that they live each in his own world (fr. 95), as if they had a private wisdom of their own (fr. 92); and public opinion is therefore just the opposite of “the common.”

Footnote 421:

Köstlin, _Gesch. d. Ethik_, i. pp. 160 sqq.

The Ethics of Herakleitos are to be regarded as a corollary of his anthropological and cosmological views. Their chief requirement is that we keep our souls dry, and thus assimilate them to the one Wisdom, which is fire. That is what is really “common,” and the greatest fault is to act like men asleep (fr. 94), that is, by letting our souls grow moist, to cut ourselves off from the fire in the world. We do not know what were the consequences which Herakleitos deduced from his rule that we must hold fast to what is common, but it is easy to see what their nature must have been. The wise man would not try to secure good without its correlative evil. He would not seek for rest without exertion, nor expect to enjoy contentment without first suffering discontent. He would not complain that he had to take the bad with the good, but would consistently look at things as a whole.

Herakleitos prepared the way for the Stoic world-state by comparing “the common” to the laws of a city. And these are even more than a type of the divine law: they are imperfect embodiments of it. They cannot, however, exhaust it altogether; for in all human affairs there is an element of relativity (fr. 91). “Man is a baby compared to God” (fr. 97). Such as they are, however, the city must fight for them as for its walls; and, if it has the good fortune to possess a citizen with a dry soul, he is worth ten thousand (fr. 113); for in him alone is “the common” embodied.