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

Odradek

This is literally one of the ~130 Heraclitus fragments surviving today. So glad we managed to preserve this gem of Wisdom for 2000 years.

Alduin

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

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

Vriska

Well, that is defin8ly a thing.

Tachyon

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

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

Odradek

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

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

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

Tachyon

Odradek said:

Anaxagoras invented quantum physics.

also evolution

Klinotaxis

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

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

I hold the torch ov Heraclitus

So I can shake the earth and move the suns