Heraclitus on life and change

Heraclitus (c.536-470 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher from Ephesus. He is one of the most important pre-Socratic philosophers who tried to understand our world and the beginnings of the Being.

For Heraclitus, life started with fire. This seemingly simplistic phrase could definitely raise some eyebrows-- at least of the people who don’t know what the ancient Greek philosophers did for humanity.

But fire is the best element to denote the beginnings of the world because it is an element of constant motion. It signifies fluidity, change, the eternal force that unites the opposites.

Heraclitus believed that opposites were fundamentally part of a whole. Reality for him was an eternal flow and change, a mutual collision of everything. Opposites for Heraclitus are the governing principle of all things. The philosopher from Ephesus was the first to question binaries and he affected extensively the work of modern philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche.

So, fire indicates constant motion, fluidity. It is no coincidence that he also said that the only constant thing in life is change. What Heraclitus didn’t give us, in all his wisdom, was a solution to the problems change causes.

It is a violent force of the universe that changes everything, even us. That is why in an extract he names war as the father of all things: collisions of opposite forces that are deep down the same shape the world.

How are we to deal with this constant motion? How do we accept change? At least that’s what a friend once asked me when I quoted Heraclitus saying that you cannot step in the same river twice.

There is no simple answer to this. The only thing I could think of is to make peace with the fact that the world is built that way. Change is constant and we have to learn how to adapt. Otherwise, we will be broken. Or even worse fossilized.