Heraclitus’ Logos (And How it Powers Your Computer)
Heraclitus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from the Persian-ruled Ionian colony of Ephesus (on the coast of modern day Anatolia) — he was alive around approximately 535 BCE. As the above painting suggests, he was known as the “weeping philosopher” — don’t be mislead by the whole sadness motif; he’s weeping because he’s offended by how stupid you are (he was a bit of a grump).
With Heraclitus we have the first mention of the notion of logic in the Western tradition. It’s likely that there was earlier activity concerned with logic in India — Hinduism exhibits logical thinking, and Buddhism will later be founded on the logical principle of dependent origination — but Heraclitus is the first Western thinker (ironically never setting foot in “the West”) to use the word.
That word is: λόγος — pronounced “logos”. The ancient Greek can be translated as: word, principle, sentence, reason, rationality.
For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the Logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding. (DK 22B2)
Although ancient Greek is very contextual, as Heraclitus uses the term in many different ways (perhaps intentionally and ironically), it is used as a technical jargon. We know that λέξις — speak — was used for the grammatical sense of the term. When Heraclitus uses the term logos as “word”, he means something like the faculty that produces meaning in language , that allows for understanding in the first place— an underlying logical principle.
First we have this distinction between mere grammatical technicality, and then we have the consideration of ratio and rationality. Latin translators rendered the Greek logos into ratio, as a translation for the interpretation of logos as meaning “reckoning” — to account, to calculate. “Ratio” was a Latin stand-in for logos as reason, and was at the time not used to refer to the mathematical ratio, which would have been called a “proportio”.
Very little of Heraclitus’ work still exists — although Diogenes Laertius claims that he wrote an entire scroll titled “On Nature” and deposited it at the Artemision, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus.
What exist now are fragments of suspicious origin, but whether or not most of the fragments are forgeries or not, they are probably very close to what Heraclitus originally intended. It was a common practice at the time to embed the work of the person you intended to quote into your own work, un-cited. So while it may seem to us marred by history, it’s probably not the intent of the ancient plagiarizers to engage in subterfuge.
Heraclitus’ usual claim to fame is the supposed philosophy of panta rhei or “everything flows”. From Plato’s Cratylus:
τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
Ta onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden
All entities move and nothing remains still
“Rhei” is the name for river, as well as a sort of Gaia figure in Greek mythology (in fact she’s the daughter of Gaia). Alternately the phrase is recited as “You can never step in the same river twice”. This is usually interpreted as meaning that Heraclitus ascribed to a doctrine of flux and impermanence — but I don’t believe he intended to be so wishy-washy.
Instead, he’s probably trying to relate that things can be two ways at once. A river is both defined geographically by the path it takes and by the water that actually constitutes it. At any moment the water is flowing and changing, but over a longer period the path through which the river winds will change. The river is not just a thing, per se, but is a delimited body of water. Moreover this means a “river” is also a concept — one we might apply to any one and all rivers.
This fits well with Heraclitus’ oft-mocked substrate monism, where he claims that fire is the foundation of all things. Dry things are good and clear-headed, while wet things are soggy and dim. But again there is a better interpretation, if we are to take it that Heraclitus was not exceedingly dim himself. Fire is a material representation of change — fire is energy flickering this way and that way. Likely, Heraclitus meant to use fire as an analogy for the generative principle of reason.
The Stoics certainly took it this way, as their conception of “nous” or “world-mind” is described as a sort of living fire, intelligent in a mechanistic way and responsible for fashioning all of life from the ground up. If we want to be anachronistic, a helpful analogy might be to imagine that the Stoics interpreted this concept of Heraclitus’ as being like DNA.
Another vital point is the theory of the “unity of opposites”.
God is day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger . . . (DK22B67)
As the same thing in us is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old. For these things having changed around are those, and conversely those having changed around are these. (DK22B88)
Heraclitus generally seems to believe that, as with the river example, definitions and boundaries of description are arbitrary — because while things change state, this is not really “what they are”. What is interesting to him is the transformation, not the static state.
To be more extreme, some scholars such as Eva Brann see Heraclitus to be taking the position that these things in opposition really constitute the thing — the difference maintains the identify of the opposing states. Day is only meaningful in opposition to night and vice versa, living is only meaningful in relation to being dead and vice versa, and so on.
This is, I believe, where Heraclitus’ influence on the logic developed by future thinkers like Aristotle stems from. Logic is found in language but it is not language — so you’ll find that most philosophers of language are logicians. Though they study language they are not studying linguistics — rather they are examining the seemingly necessary relations that only happen to be expressed in human language.
Aristotle develops a deductive logic, syllogisms, which formalize Heraclitus’ notion of logic being a common language. A syllogism might look like this:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal
This infers a universal from a particular [edit: In fact this seems to be an example of what is called “universal instantiation”, since the inference is really that what is true for a member of a class is also true for a particular individual who belongs to that class as a member. Aristotle also claims that in order to reach a universal conclusion via deduction, both premises must be universals to begin with; my confusion was that there is still a universal claim that is axiomatic, but the inference is not in fact from a particular to a universal]. More formally it is represented as “All M are P. All S are M. All S are P.” Because of necessary relations which are independent of the semantics — are formal, of form, syntactical — Aristotle also begins to define logical “laws” such as the law of identity, the law of excluded middle, and the law of non-contradiction.
George Boole will later develop Aristotle’s logic into a conditional true/false algebra, later mapped to transistors and allowing modern computing. Because computation is, at least at the level of physical hardware, inherently binary, logic in general has had a foundational influence on computer science.
In Boole’s “Laws of Thought”, Chapter XV: The Aristotelian Logic and its Modern Extensions, he writes:
The logical system of Aristotle, modified in its details, but unchanged in its
essential features, occupies so important a place in academical education, that
some account of its nature, and some brief discussion of the leading problems
which it presents, seem to be called for in the present work.
…
That which may be regarded as essential in the spirit and procedure of the
Aristotelian, and of all cognate systems of Logic, is the attempted classification
of the allowable forms of inference, and the distinct reference of those forms, collectively or individually, to some general principle of an axiomatic nature, such
as the “dictum of Aristotle:” Whatsoever is affirmed or denied of the genus may
in the same sense be affirmed or denied of any species included under that genus.
Although programming languages are closed systems — essentially closed ontologies — they still follow logical rules. In this way, paradoxically, computer programs while not interpreted by humans as “natural”, are still governed by the classical laws of logic for the fact that computers are still conglomerations of physical switches (whether they be represented by electrical charges or not).
In a way, then, Heraclitus is himself representative of some generative principle, a germ of an idea which sprouts into all kinds of applied work, from language to mathematics to computer science. Philosophy isn’t dead — in fact, it is your computer.
