"If there were no sun, it would be night" - Heraclitus

Comments

• Alduin

  2013-12-19 11:30:05 edited 2013-12-19 11:31:56

  Maybe it's symbolic. The sun represents the platonic World of Ideals, and the lack of ideals ushers in a metaphorical "night" of ignorance.

  
  

  
  

  ...Nah, it's just a dumb quote.
• Imipolex G

  2013-12-19 12:16:38 edited 2013-12-19 12:17:04

  Touch the cow. Do it now.
  

  "It's always night, or we wouldn't need light." - Thelonious Monk
  
• Vriska

  2013-12-19 12:19:57

  8luh 8luh.

  Well, that is defin8ly a thing.
  
• Tachyon

  2013-12-19 16:26:45

  ^{i will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch}
  

  i really doubt this was anything whatsoever to do with Platonism
  
  and i would also be very surprised if it was meant literally, any more than he was making observations on the differing habitats of men and fish, or writing instructions on how to mix drinks
  
• Klinotaxis

  2013-12-19 16:30:31

  kill living beings
  

  considering heraclitus was presocratic talking about plato would be a hell of a trick
• Odradek

  2013-12-19 16:34:34

  My dreams exceed my real life

  There's a theory that a negative was dropped and Heraclitus's statement was actually "If there were no sun, it would NOT be night"

  
  

  Which fits in with his view about opposites defining each other.

  
  

  Anyway, it survives because it was quoted by Plutarch here.

  
  

  [The sea] makes for collaboration and friendship. Heraclitus indeed says that if the sun did not exist it would be dusk [B99]; but we may say that if the sea did not exist man would be the most wild and destitute of animals. - Plutarch, Is Fire or Water the More Usefull? 957A

  
  

  It's possible Plutarch was misquoting, or quoting a trivial line that was only important in a chain of reasoning, or something else. We can't know, really. What amuses me is that this banal observation is one of the few things we have left from an early attempt to understand the world. I imagine Heraclitus would have been unhappy with this.

  
  Or not. Heraclitus was an odd one.
• Tachyon

  2013-12-19 16:34:42 edited 2013-12-19 16:35:02

  ^{i will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch}
  

  Klinotaxis said:

  considering heraclitus was presocratic talking about plato would be a hell of a trick

  
  well, i suppose he could have been anticipating him
  
  it's not really too far-fetched to infer a belief in the Platonic form of 'river' in the suggestion that there is such thing as 'the same river' but that you cannot step in it twice, especially if that statement is taken in the context of Heraclitus' claim that all things are one, which it seldom is for some reason (i blame Cratylus)
  
• Odradek

  2013-12-19 16:36:57

  My dreams exceed my real life

  Pre-socratic philosophers had time machines. That's why Democritus invented classical physics and Anaxagoras invented quantum physics.
• Tachyon

  2013-12-19 16:38:04

  ^{i will watch the heck outta this pumpkin patch}
  

  Odradek said:

  Anaxagoras invented quantum physics.

  also evolution
  
• Klinotaxis

  2013-12-19 16:38:13 edited 2013-12-19 16:38:38

  kill living beings
  

  Odradek said:

  Plutarch, Is Fire or Water the More Usefull? 957A
  

  i looked it up and this is an essay about whether fire or water is more useful. i love greekz

  
  

  and romanz
• Odradek

  2013-12-19 16:42:50

  My dreams exceed my real life

  Also explains why the IEP article on Diogenes Laertius seems very angry at the man personally.

  
  

  Also Meillasoux once wrote an article as an experiment to pretend Deleuze was a pre-socratic with a few remaining fragments and then to interpret him on that basis.

  
  

  I'm surprised no one else has tried a follow-up, even as a party game.
  
  
• Obā-san

  2013-12-19 17:06:54

  
  

  I hold the torch ov Heraclitus
  
  So I can shake the earth and move the suns