Heraclitus

Heraclitus was born around 535 BCE into the noblest house of Ephesus and was to inherit the office of priest-king. He renounced it in favour of his younger brother, went up into the mountains, and lived alone on grass and roots. He despised people on principle. "Most men behave as though they had a private intelligence of their own," he threw out; the crowd, he thought, neither needs the truth nor could bear it. Antiquity gave him two names and both stuck: the Obscure, for the deliberate riddling of his speech, and the Weeping Philosopher, for the temper of a man who looks at humankind and does not smile.

He wrote his one book the way oracles write: short, compressed, without connecting words, each phrase shut tight as a nut. Then, the story goes, he did not carry it to the marketplace; he laid it up in the temple of Artemis – so that only the worthy few would reach it and the rest would turn away. The calculation was cruel and it came true: we have no whole book, only some hundred and fifty fragments, each quoted by some later hand. And those fragments were enough that, twenty-five centuries on, Heidegger could say that all of Western philosophy is a long footnote to Heraclitus.

Behind the riddles lies one of the most influential thoughts in history. Reality for him is sheer process; no thing stands still in itself, everything flows. You step into the river, and it is the same river only because its water is each time different: identity holds by motion itself. For an image of that motion he chose fire – nothing is so much itself through ceaseless change as a flame. Opposites – day and night, winter and summer – hold the world in tension the way a drawn string holds the bow; at war with each other, they have no intention of destroying each other. His darkest saying is about exactly this tension: "war is the father of all and king of all," he said, and the West argues with that line still. And under all of it lies the logos – the rational order by which the world coheres; most people, Heraclitus says, live as though asleep to it, though they meet it at every step.

Plato would spend his life recoiling from Heraclitus, afraid of a world in which nothing stays put. Hegel would make that motion his own method and agree with him to the end. Nietzsche would love him the way one loves a man who dared to look without consolation. Twentieth-century process philosophers quote him yet. Few thinkers have written so little and echoed so long. He handed forward no system, only a temper and a handful of dark lines that will not let the mind settle – and that turned out to be exactly enough to become the one philosophy footnotes without end.