Page 11 - GALIET THE RIVERING WATERS: Heraclitus IV

to awakening, of water giving way to earth and to the soul,15 or as Empedocles would later claim, of love giving way to strife and strife to love.16 There is a feeling of things “scattering and gathering, coming together and dissolving”17 insinuating a constancy, a flow where being is always in-between things, dwelling always in-between the current of change. Being, in this sense, is the running stream where every contrary of Heraclitus’ gathers in unity: the ever flowing, ever filling and ever emptying river of the same thing that is and is not18 singing and mirroring the order of beauty and of harmony expressed in its sameness. Its waters beckon true being, that is, that the infinite flows into the finite, the atemporal into the temporal, and unity into separation.
The ever-flowing river seems to flow into the sameness of the same just as true being flows into the sameness of the soul. Being and soul are mirrors of each other and of the sameness of the same: unlimited, crystalline and pure. “You will not be able to discover the limits of the soul on your journey, even if you walk every path. So deep is the
15 F 44. “Death for souls is the birth of water, death for water is the birth of earth, and earth is the source of water, and water is the source of soul.
16 T7 Empedocles. In a way, Heraclitus’ flux and Empedocles’ dynamic love-strife cycles, are reminiscent of Anaximenes’ new world view. Anaximenes postulates that elements are not opposed but are at different stages of a continuum. Thus, he rejects Anaximander’s view that opposites are always unjustly in conflict. Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Pre-Socratics and the Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
17 F 34 Plutarch, On the E at Delphi 392b 10-c3 Babbit. 41
18 Aristotle. Metaphysics, Book 4, Chapter 3, 1005b, 25. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Metaphysics. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
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