The weeping philosopher who said you never step in the same river twice
Around 500 BC, Heraclitus of Ephesus wrote a single book, now surviving only in scraps, so cryptic that ancient readers nicknamed him the dark. His core claim was bold: the world never simply is, it is always becoming, and conflict between opposites is what holds it together.
Ephesus was an Ionian port on the Cayster River in what is now western Turkey. After Cyrus the Great toppled the Lydian king Croesus around 547 BC, the city stayed close to Persia; when Darius crushed the Ionian revolt in 494 BC, Ephesus was spared while Miletus, home of earlier philosophers, was sacked. Heraclitus was a son of Blyson, and a story that he handed a hereditary kingship to his younger brother hints at an aristocratic family.
Earlier thinkers from Miletus had each named a basic stuff of the world: Thales chose water, Anaximander the boundless, Anaximenes air. Heraclitus chose fire. He also spoke of the logos, a word meaning reason or account, as an ordering principle or divine law. His slogans about everything flowing set him against Parmenides, who held that true reality is unchanging being, and he found harmony and justice inside strife itself.
He was famously prickly. He called himself self-taught, attacked Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras and others, scorned mystery cults and prayers to statues, and complained that although reason is common to all, most people behave as if they owned a private understanding. The sceptic Timon of Phlius dubbed him a mob-abuser. His gloom earned him the label weeping philosopher, set against Democritus, the laughing one.
Almost everything told about his life comes from Diogenes Laërtius, whose stories are largely thought to be later inventions spun out of the fragments. Even his dating is shaky: tradition places his prime in the 69th Olympiad, 504 to 501 BC, which may simply echo the reign of Darius. His influence nonetheless runs from Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics to Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Source: Heraclitus
