Chapter 8 06 HERACLITUS Ⅱ The world of "one is many"

6.1 Comprehension of "one is many" When the imagination of Heraclitus, with the eyes of a blissful spectator, surveys the world in motion, "reality," and sees countless pairs of happy competitors competing under the watchful eye of a strict referee, a higher The feeling hit his heart.He was no longer able to separate the opponent and the referee in the contest, the referee seemed to be competing himself, and the contestants seemed to be judging—yes, now he was not aware at all of the eternally dominating public. so that he dared to declare: "The struggle of the 'many' is itself justice! And in the end the 'one' is the 'many'. For what are all those qualities in essence? Are they immortal gods? They But the separate essence that is active for itself from beginning to end? If the world we see only knows becoming and passing away, but does not know rest, then all those qualities may constitute a metaphysical world of another form, although it is not like this. It was a monistic world as Naximander glimpsed behind the elusive veil of multiplicity, but a world of eternal and intrinsic pluralism!" Had Heraclitus, in a devious way, fallen back into the double world order, However vehemently he denies it: on the one hand he admits an Olympian world composed of innumerable immortal gods and demons (i.e., many realities), and on the other hand an Olympian world consisting only of Olympian battle dust. And the human world made up of the magical flash (which means generation)?

Anaximander fled determinate qualities into the arms of the metaphysical "uncertain"; since determinate qualities were constantly being produced and passed away, he denied them to be real and central existence; now, then, Doesn't it seem that "becoming" is only the struggle between eternal qualities manifested and made visible?Perhaps, there is no becoming in the essence of things, but only the mutual coexistence of many real realities that are not born or destroyed. Then, can it be said that "becoming" is just a product of insufficient human perception. However, this is a devious path and a wrong path that goes against Heraclitus' original intention.He declared repeatedly: "One is many." That many perceivable qualities are neither eternal essences nor illusions of our senses (later Anaxagoras held the former, Parmenides the latter view); they are neither static autonomous beings nor fleeting figments of the human mind.No one can rely on dialectical thinking and clever calculations to guess the third possibility reserved for Heraclitus.For what he discovers here is a rare exception even in the realm of mystical wonders and unforeseen cosmic metaphors. — "The world is the game of Zeus," or, to put it more concretely: "The self-play of fire, in the sense alone that 'one' is at the same time 'many.'"

6.2 "The world is a self-play of fire" In order to explain the doctrine of fire as a creative force, I would like to call the reader's attention to the manner in which Anaximander derived his theory of water as the source of all things.In essence, although Anaximander trusted Thales and further confirmed Thales' observation, he still could not convince himself that there is no other level before water—or beyond water. quality.On the contrary, in his view, moisture itself is formed by heat and cold, so heat and cold should be a level prior to water and a more original quality.Becoming begins when they are separated from the original matrix of the Undetermined.

As a physicist, Heraclitus belonged to Anaximander's thought, but he gave a new meaning to Anaximander's heat, interpreting it as breath, hot breath, drying The steam, in short, is interpreted as fire.What he said about this fire is the same as what Thales and Anaximander said about water. Fire goes through countless changes, first of all three basic states of heat, moisture and hardness, and traverses the way of becoming. .For, water turns into earth when it descends, and turns into fire when it rises.Or, as Heraclitus seems to express it more precisely, from the sea rises only pure steam, which feeds the fire of the stars in the sky, and from the earth rises only a gloomy misty steam, which feeds moisture.Pure steam is the transition from sea to fire, and impure steam is the transition from earth to water.In this way, fire continuously goes through its two ways of transformation, up and down, forward and back, alternately and concurrently, from fire to water, from water to earth, from earth back to water, from water back to fire .

If the ideas of Heraclitus, such as, for example, that fire is maintained by vaporized gases, and that earth and fire are separately separated from water, in the most important aspects of these ideas, he was a follower of Anaximander. , then his conception is unique and contradicts Anaximander: he excluded cold from physical processes, while Anaximander equated cold with heat in order to allow moisture to flow from generated from both.Heraclitus, of course, had his own reasons: since everything must be fire, there can never be an absolute opposite of fire in all possible transformations of fire; can be explained as a degree of heat, and can defend this explanation without difficulty.

Much more important than this departure from Anaximander, however, is a broader agreement: he believed, like Anaximander, that the world decays cyclically and In the conflagration of the world, another world is constantly reborn.He emphatically emphasizes that the cycle of throwing the world into that world fire and dissolving it into pure fire can be seen as a desire and need, or a lack, while being completely engulfed by fire is a fulfillment. We still have one question left to ask, which is how he understood and named the reawakening of the world-making impulse and the act of refilling the form of "many".There is a Greek adage that seems to help our thinking: "Satisfaction begets crime (blasphemy)." In fact, one could ask whether Heraclitus drew the return to "plentiful" from blasphemy.People should take this idea seriously. Under its candlelight, Heraclitus suddenly changed his face before our eyes, his proud eyes were extinguished, and his face showed the wrinkle of resignation and powerlessness.It seems that we know why later generations called him "the philosopher who shed tears".Now, isn't the whole world process a punishment for blasphemy? Isn't "many" the result of a crime?Is not the transformation of purity into impurity the result of injustice?Is not evil now placed at the heart of things, so that, while the world of becoming and the individual is absolved of responsibility for it, it is at the same time continually re-judged to bear its consequences?