Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

But regardless of the source of his ideas, he deserves to be called the first philosopher in the modern sense, because along with proposing that fire was the central principle of the physical world, he considered abstract forces beyond the physical (the metaphysical), aspects of perception, and principles of human behavior. The challenge he faced in finding language to express his novel ideas meant that his books were far from easy reads. This first philosopher immediately gave philosophy its reputation for being abstruse and confusing. His fragments are sometimes maddeningly obscure, to the extent that the Greeks told a story in which the tragedian Euripides gave a copy of Heraclitus’s book—written several decades earlier—to Socrates to read; when asked his opinion of the book, Socrates replied, “The part I understand is excellent, and so too is, I dare say, the part I do not understand; but it needs a Delian diver to get to the bottom of it.” But Heraclitus, arcane or not, was the first man who thought hard about what philosophy entailed—a self-conscious process of inquiry into the nature of existence. The increasing breadth of his interests stemmed from his theory of permanent change, which helped him to explain the confusing tension between sameness and otherness in the universe and society. Things that are opposites at one time can become unities at other times or in other circumstances: “As the same things in us are living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old...