Leonard Peikoff is Ayn Rand’s official intellectual heir and the foremost systematizer of her philosophy. He is also an educated professor who published an extensive lecture series covering the history of Western philosophy from Ancient Greece to the modern era. This series, though informative and entertaining, has many faults. My interest is particularly keen regarding certain figures, so I have greater awareness of the violence being done to their character. Heraclitus of Ephesus is most egregiously and creatively besmirched by Peikoff’s portrayal, though it is initially unclear from where precisely these mistakes originate. Fortunately, there is a printed and edited transcript of these lectures issued by Michael S. Berliner, who has taken the trouble to source Peikoff’s quotes and add clarifying notes where appropriate. It is from this version of the series that I will be critiquing the material, ensuring that I chase down the origin-point for the prevalent errors, misunderstanding, and misinformation propagated during this lesson. In choosing Peikoff as my target, I want to stress that he is merely emblematic of this issue, not uniquely bad, as we will discover when looking into the secondary sources. Heraclitus is routinely abused by academic philosophers who repeat the same distortions popularized since Plato’s dialogues, so it is little wonder that we find no exception here. I wish to discover to what extent Peikoff is honestly misinformed, and to correct the record for Heraclitus, the boldest Ionian. Without further ado, here is my analysis of the Heraclitus segment taken from Lecture One of Leonard Peikoff’s Founders of Western Philosophy series, as presented in print:
Charge 1 - Heraclitus Flouts the Law of Non-Contradiction:
Peikoff’s first order of business is to show that Heraclitus implicitly repudiates the as-yet-undiscovered logical laws of identity and non-contradiction.
[Heraclitus] said, everybody is so interested in change, I propose to show that the phenomenon of change is incompatible with these laws of logic. (2023, p. 31).
Due to this portrayal, the Aristotelian objectivists consider Heraclitus to be the first villain of western philosophy (p. 30). Peikoff launches into a series of examples, presumably his own, which attempt to illustrate the apparent contradiction inherent in change on this view, as the entity seemingly both is and is not “the same” throughout the process; it is both A and non-A, according to Heraclitus.
Readers familiar with the extant Heraclitean remnants may be left scratching their heads due to the format of this presentation, but my assumption is that the analysis is indirectly based on an interpretation of the following popular fragments which are quoted later in the same lecture, perhaps including any of the multitude that enumerate opposite qualities (the following are translated by Burnet, 1920):
(81) We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.
(41, 42) You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.
If these are in fact the basis of the argument, Peikoff is in trouble. In order to constitute a contradiction, you must fulfill the requirements of attributing contrary predicates to an object both at the same time and in the same respect, as Peikoff himself acknowledges (p. 31). The use of the term “same” above, in both formulations of the river analogy, makes no such stipulations. At worst, Heraclitus is guilty of using the fallacy of dropped qualification in order to yield an apparent paradox (Barnes, 1982). In the scheme of Heraclitus’s philosophy, these examples are in fact illustrations of change and identity co-existing: they are just another instance of the unity of opposites, which we will look at soon. It is precisely the continuous flow of fresh water that constitutes a river, as opposed to a relatively stable body of water such as a pond or a lake. In other words, it is precisely in not remaining materially identical that the endurance of the river as the same phenomenon is ensured, an argument which Aristotle concurs with: “Shall we say that … [a] city [remains] the same, although the citizens are always dying and being born, as we call rivers and fountains the same, although the water is always flowing away and more coming?” (Aristotle Politics 1276a34–39, revised Oxford translation).
Nevertheless, Peikoff bolsters his analysis with our first source, taken from the section on Heraclitus found in American philosopher B.A.G. Fuller’s A History of Philosophy:
[Reality’s] essential nature lay in being both the same as itself and different from itself. For in order to change, a thing must become different from itself. If it remains the same as itself, it hasn’t changed. But also, after it has changed, it must still be the same thing, otherwise there has been no change, but simply the substitution of one object for another. A changing thing then is an identity of opposites. It both is and is not what it was and what it will be. (Fuller, 1955).
Further reading of Fuller’s entry reveals a tangled mess of misinterpretation, dominated by an error which originates with Aristotle, who takes Heraclitus as essentially a Milesian promoting an identity of opposites, the sub-heading afforded to this treatment in Fuller’s book. Ironically, our author recognizes that Heraclitus’ provocative paradoxes have enabled over-zealous commentators to credit him “with much that never entered his head”. Barely a moment later he tells us that Heraclitus clearly proclaims the gist of his discovery, that “opposites are in reality identical and that “all things are one”” (1955, p. 49). A citation is provided, referring readers to Burnet’s translation of Fragment 1 (following Bywater), which corroborates only the uncontroversial latter half. A unitary whole, such as the universe (the referent of the Fragment 1’s “all things”), can accommodate countless attributes, some of which will be contrary without contradiction so long as they are not regionally simultaneous and/or coextensive (recall the criteria provided above). The issues with Fuller’s account are numerous, mostly Aristotelian in origin, and include attributing to Heraclitus an elemental substantialist ontology, a process-philosophy, a theory of “becoming” as opposed to “being”, and much else besides. As Peikoff is our focus here, I will only say a brief word about the central problem of the quoted material, and leave the rest for the latter portions of his own presentation. A careful reading shows that Heraclitus clearly describes a unity of opposites, pointing to their connection and interdependence, and is far from positing an “identity of opposites” tantamount to reductionism. Insofar as Fuller misleads Peikoff on this point, he is responsible for the belief that Heraclitus rejects the law of non-contradiction. This point is important enough to warrant a lengthy quote from G.T.W. Patrick, in refutation of proto-Hegelian nonsense (the underlining for emphasis is my own):
…there is something more to be said concerning the unity or sameness of opposites. This teaching is very prominent in the Heraclitic fragments (cp. frags. 35, 36, 39, 43, 45, 46, 52, 57, 58, 59, 67, 78)…But all the critics have failed to notice that we have in these fragments two distinct classes of oppositions which, though confused in Heraclitus’ mind, led historically into different paths of development. The first is that unity of opposites which results from the fact that they are endlessly passing into one another. It must not be forgotten that this is a purely physical opposition, as has been pointed out by Zeller, Schuster and others, in refutation of the opinion of Lassalle, who fancied that he had found here a Hegelian logical identity of contradictories. As examples of this class of oppositions may be mentioned the identity of day and night (frag. 35), gods and men (frag. 67), alive and dead, asleep and awake (frag. 78). The identity of these oppositions means that they are not in themselves abiding conditions, but are continually and reciprocally passing into one another. As Heraclitus plainly says, they are the same because they are reciprocal transmutations of each other (frag. 78). But now we have another class of opposites to which this reasoning will not apply. “Good and evil,” he says, “are the same” (frag. 57). This is simply that identity of opposites which developed into the Protagorean doctrine of relativity. The same thing may be good or evil according to the side from which you look at it. (Patrick, 2015).
Perhaps more revealing than the explanation of the Unity of Opposites is what we do not find here: any reference whatsoever to underlying “matter” undergoing “formal” change, possessing at one and the same time, in the same respect, an identity of opposite qualities. Heraclitus is innocent of any such notion, and it is anachronistic to foist it upon him. When the Ephesian discusses opposed pairs, he refers to them in the primary sense of brute physical phenomena, or else, as different perspectives on one and the same instance. Phillip Wheelwright concisely dismantles the hylomorphic assumptions fueling these incorrect interpretations:
Most persons are uneasy in contemplating change in so radical a manner as Heraclitus does. They require, as a conceptual prop, the idea of "something, I know not what" underlying the changing particulars. In this respect, although perhaps without knowing it, they are Aristotelians. Heraclitus, on the contrary, is not an Aristotelian: neither grammatically nor conceptually does he share Aristotle's need for "a third something that endures" in any alteration from opposite to opposite. To him every change is a knock-down battle between two ontological opposites, and there is no referee—neither a Platonic higher Form nor an Aristotelian "underlying substance"—that can be regarded as standing logically outside the process. (1964).
So much for B.A.G. Fuller.
Peikoff closes this initial attack with the allegation that the American Pragmatist F.C.S Schiller and the German Marxist Friedrich Engels are faithful inheritors of Heraclitus’ doctrine, providing quotes to illustrate their joyous celebration of contradictions. Peikoff later ends the lecture with a long list of disastrous philosophical trends that Heraclitus is apparently responsible for. I will not deal with Schiller here, whose origin-point for this explication is difficult to track, though there is no evidence to suggest a faux-Heracliteanism as the foundation. As for Engels, both Hegel and Lassalle are responsible for the most fantastic appropriations of Heraclitus, and Marxism is heavily influenced by the Hegelian school of thought, so this may indeed be an authentic genealogy, though certainly not an honest or accurate one. The Hegelian scholarship regarding Heraclitus is so impressively poor that it would require its own lengthy dismantling and is thus beyond the scope of this post, but curious readers are directed towards G.T.W. Patrick’s book for further information.
Charge 2 - Heraclitus Flouts the Law of Identity:
Peikoff moves to the next major problem with Heraclitean philosophy as he sees it, claiming that the flux theory constitutes a rejection of the law of identity. The initial attribution of flux to Heraclitus is fairly uncontroversial, but error enters when Peikoff attempts to elaborate on this doctrine:
The word that he used is “Becoming,” usually spelled with a capital “B,” Becoming—everything is becoming, changing, evolving, developing, in process. Since he made this metaphysical, it follows that it applied to everything—not just to sticks and stones, but to sealing wax and kings and the whole works—and therefore, Heraclitus took the view that everything is changing, in every respect, at every instant. Change governs everything. Therefore, nothing remains the same for two consecutive instances in any respect.
Peikoff packs two common errors together with merciful brevity. Firstly, Heraclitus knows nothing of abstract “being” and “becoming”. Neither of these terms is present in the Fragments, contrary to what Hegelians would have us believe, as G.T.W. Patrick explains:
…we may say here in passing, that neither the expressions τὸ ὂν [being], μὴ ὂν [non-being], nor even τὸ γιγνόμενον [becoming], occur in any genuine saying of Heraclitus; although if they did occur, it would be easy to show that they could not mean at all what Hegel meant by being, non-being, and becoming. Even the Eleatic Being was not at all the same with that of Hegel, but was finite, spherical, and something very much like that which we should call material. But Heraclitus, who indeed preceded Parmenides, said nothing of being nor of non-being, nor did he speak of becoming in the abstract, although the trustful reader of Hegel, Lassalle, or Ferrier, might well suppose he spoke of nothing else. That which these writers mistook for becoming was, as we shall see later, only physical change. (2015).
Secondly, this notion of flux as absolute dissolution, functioning at every level, continuing at the same rate, morphing in every respect, is pure Cratylus, not Heraclitus, and serves only to rhetorically bolster Plato’s confident bifurcation of the universe into the ever-shifting world of appearance on the one hand, and the world of eternal perfect forms on the other. In the remains of Heraclitus, we find nothing of the sort:
[This] reasoning assumes that by absolute change is meant uniform change all in one way, which would not be change at all, but absolute fixity. Difference is the essential element in change, and difference is all that is necessary to the idea of change. (Patrick, 2015).
…there is no reason at all to ascribe a strong Cratylan Flux to Heraclitus. Cratylus did not sit at Heraclitus’ feet, nor did he parrot Heraclitean doctrine: his theory is explicitly presented as a development, not a restatement, of Heraclitean Flux. Cratylus is described as a Heraclitean, and that is intelligible enough: his doctrine, that everything is always flowing in all respects, is evidently a child of Heraclitus’ doctrine, that everything is always flowing in some respects. (Barnes, 1982).
There is no primary fragment nor reliable testimony to support anything like the maddening chaos that Peikoff attributes to Heraclitus. All we have are Plato’s Theaetetus and Cratylus dialogues, which nakedly use quasi-Heraclitean theories as stage props to contrast the author’s own resolution, and are quite obviously not an attempt to accurately illustrate the historical figure’s authentic beliefs. Lest it be alleged that this is not the source of Peikoff’s error, he confirms this theory shortly afterwards: “Heraclitus summarized [this position] in two famous aphorisms (which are two of his fragments), “Nothing is, everything is becoming.” Which is surely a paradoxical utterance. And the other famous one is panta rhei, in other words, “Everything flows and nothing abides.”” (p. 36). Incredibly, neither of these examples are authentic fragments! You need not take my word for it, I will let the objectivist editor Michael S. Berliner apologize for the oversight:
Note this caveat: “Πάντα ῥεῖ” (panta rhei), i.e., “everything flows,” seems either not to have been written by Heraclitus or did not survive as a quotation of his. This famous aphorism used to characterize Heraclitus’s thought comes from Simplicius, a Neoplatonist, and from Plato’s Cratylus where it is translated as “everything moves.” (p. 74)
As for the first “fragment”, I have no idea where it came from in this form, seemingly neither does Berliner who overlooks it, but it appears to be a paraphrase of the theory attributed to Heraclitus in Theaetetus, and we have already discussed how any attribution of “becoming” to Heraclitus is an impossibility. Regardless, Peikoff continues onward undeterred to the implications of such a theory: “From this point, Heraclitus drew a momentously important consequence: There are no things at all. No entities.” (p. 35). This is perfectly sensible as a criticism of Cratylus and the dizzying flux theory that Peikoff has presented us, but it simply does not touch Heraclitus.
An abysmally poor explication of similar quality to what preceded it is provided by Peikoff at this point. It comes from the historian Gordon H. Clark. I will not bother reproducing it here because it is not worth the space, but the upshot is summarized by Peikoff immediately afterwards, his takeaway being that,
The Heraclitean view is that all that exists is change—a stream of shifting, restless, transitory, seething, boiling, bubbling, melting, fusing, swirling activity, riddled with contradictions, as though the whole universe were plunged in a kind of cosmic food blender, and just flowed in all directions (and didn’t flow, because … you know). (2023, p. 37).
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I will end this section with a quote from Barnes, who notes: “the Theory of Flux does not imply the Wittgensteinian thesis that ‘the world is the totality of facts, not of things’. Nor does it imply the different theory that the world is the totality of changes. Rather, it suggests that the world is a mass of things—stuffs and substances—which are subject to constant change.” (1982). This thesis of Heraclitus’ is completely comprehensible to ordinary sense, and is the obvious interpretation of his work, especially if we understand his mode of thinking and the way he arrived at these sweeping observations. Unfortunately, and this may be the crux of the issue, Peikoff is horrendously misled regarding Heraclitean epistemology, which we will now address.
Charge 3 - Heraclitus Repudiates the Senses:
Worse perhaps than any other false accusation levied at Heraclitus thus far is the charge that he repudiated sensory experience in favor of rationalistic inward contemplation or proto-Socratic pure reason. If this wasn’t egregious enough, Peikoff springs from that initial claim to a portrayal of the famous monist as an archetypical model for what would later become Platonic dualism! Peikoff does not mince words or leave any room for doubt:
[Heraclitus is] the first man in the history of philosophy to regard the senses as invalid. The reason is very simple: By the evidence of our senses, it appears that there are permanent, motionless, unchanging things. And yet, he says, we know that that’s not true. We know that everything is changing, and so we must say that our senses are deceptive, they’re invalid, they are too gross to detect the degree of change that is actually taking place. (p. 38)
This is where our charity must terminate. No secondary sources are provided in this section, no fragments are quoted, and there is seemingly nobody else to blame for this diabolical reversal of the facts than Peikoff himself, who is readily convinced, based on the counterfeit picture he has painted so far, that this simply must be the Ephesian’s attitude towards sense-experience. Since there is no evidence or argument provided, we rely for the force of this assertion only on Peikoff’s intuitive inference. He continues,
Therefore, an earthshakingly important distinction is implicit in Heraclitus, the distinction between two realms—reality and appearance. Reality is that which really exists. In Heraclitus’s view, it’s a mass of change. His “reality” is very often referred to as “Heraclitean flux,” that being a way of describing nothing but change, which is riddled with contradictions besides. So, there’s reality and, on the other hand, there is the world as it appears to us, the world that the Greeks called “the world of appearance.” Reality is known by reason, reason apart from the senses, reason in contradiction to the senses. And the world of appearances is the world as given to us by the deceptive senses. This duality between reality and appearance, and its corresponding epistemological duality of reason versus the senses, runs all through Greek philosophy with one or two exceptions. And Heraclitus is the first in which you find it. Anyone who subscribes to this view and who says that reason is what we should follow (reason in this sense of the term, reason as opposed to the senses) is called a philosophic rationalist. Therefore, Heraclitus can be regarded as the first Greek rationalist. That’s obviously not “reason” in any Objectivist or Aristotelian sense of the term, but that’s the way the terms are used. You will see that Plato is a rationalist in this sense also. (p. 39).
Peikoff is perfectly incorrect here and in fact reports the exact opposite qualities of Reality and Appearance as Socrates and Plato genuinely contend with them, for the pair of Athenians were disturbed by the lesson they took from Heraclitus, that the world of appearance, the world of sensible objects, was where we find constant alteration, and there was, for these two idealists, nothing sufficiently permanent in the universe to ground human conceptions such as Justice or Goodness. Peikoff would have us believe that instead, as a matter of empirical observation, Heraclitus finds overwhelming concrete fixity, that this is what he rejects as “illusory”, and he urges us to ignore the evidence of the senses, turn our attention inward, and loyally adhere to the a priori doctrine of absolute flux that pure reason assures us must exist. In actual fact, this rationalistic program is the exact pattern used by the first objectivist “hero” in Western thought, Parmenides of Elea, who reached the inverse conclusion and stressed that change was logically impossible, that the motion we believe we observe in everyday life was non-existent.
In contrast, Heraclitus is more accurately described as a proto-empiricist, though this terminology is anachronistic and does not quite capture his multi-faceted approach, which included natural rationality. Neverthless, the Ephesian’s entire philosophy is based on observation of the same phenomenal reality found in common experience, open to investigation by all conscious beings, and he repeatedly urges men to pay attention to this world in front of us, rather than turning to private imaginings. Heraclitus endlessly bemoans the ignorance of the multitude who he denigrates for failing to pay attention to the manifest facts they encounter on a daily basis, likening them to sleep-walkers. The counter-evidence in the Fragments is so tediously overwhelming that I will list out the clear examples just so readers can understand the willful ignorance on display:
(4) Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men if they have souls that understand not their language. (5) The many do not take heed of such things as those they meet with, nor do they mark them when they are taught, though they think they do. (6) Knowing not how to listen nor how to speak. (13) The things that can be seen, heard, and learned are what I prize the most. (15) The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears. (20) This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made… (37) If all things were turned to smoke, the nostrils would distinguish them. (49) Men that love wisdom must be acquainted with very many things indeed. (91b) Those who speak with understanding must hold fast to what is common to all as a city holds fast to its law, and even more strongly.(92) So we must follow the common, yet though my Word [account] is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. (93) They are estranged from that with which they have most constant intercourse. (94) It is not meet to act and speak like men asleep. (95) The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own. (Burnet, 1920).
Peikoff’s charge of mystical rationalism, though apparently original, is not altogether unique, and fortunately the German scholar Edmund Pfleiderer (approvingly) attributes a similar approach for Heraclitus, one which G.T.W. Patrick readily dismantles:
Heraclitus seemed to think that it [rationality] was partly apprehended through the senses, that is, the most perfect condition of receptivity to truth was the condition in which a man was most awake. The stupidest man is he who is asleep, blind, self-involved, and we may add, self-absorbed (cp. frags. 95, 90, 77, 3, 2, 94). Hence, if we have rightly interpreted Heraclitus here, a man might wrap himself in thought forever and be no nearer to truth. The source of knowledge did not lie in that direction to any pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Absorption into one’s inner self, which Pfleiderer thinks was Heraclitus’ source of absolute knowledge, was the one thing he most despised. (2015).
It was the occupation of Socrates and Plato to turn away from the evidence of the senses, the unacceptable transience of the world it revealed, and turn inwards in favor of uncovering eternal inner-truths:
The determinative ideas of the Ephesian may be summed up in a word by saying that they represent all that way of thinking against which Socrates and Plato raised the whole weight of their authority. […]Socrates said he could not understand the book of Heraclitus. That was not strange. The Ephesian could have told him the reason why. The man who could learn nothing from the fields and trees (see Plato’s Phaedrus, p. 230), who spent all his time in the Agora conversing with other men about virtue, and who never seemed to realize that there was a world above the heads and under the feet of men, was not likely to understand the book of Heraclitus. Could the Ephesian philosopher have taken the Athenian logician out and given him a few lessons from Nature at first hand, could he have induced him to desist for a while from his boring into human intellects in search of a definition, and got his gaze lifted up to the clouds and stars, and put him in actual contact with the περιέχον, he would have been an apter scholar with the book. (Patrick, 2015).
There is much more that I would like to add from Patrick’s book to fill out the immense opposition between Heraclitus’ monism and Platonic/Socratic transcendental dualism. Instead, I will refer readers to the “Reconstructive” section of his book, an audio-recording of which I have made available here. What has been supplied above should be more than enough to rebuff Peikoff’s hasty assertion and fabricated narrative.
Concluding Remarks:
My hope is that this post serves as a useful reference-point refuting the most common and widespread erroneous beliefs philosophers propagate about Heraclitean philosophy. Professor Peikoff’s brief explication provided me with a perfect example of all the “facts” those with a passing familiarity with pre-Socratic philosophy are likely to associate with Heraclitus if they know him at all. There are no shortage of ideologies that interpret the faults and flaws Peikoff ascribes to the Ephesian, and I have take pains to reject, as really meritorious, proudly inducting Heraclitus as an ancient forefather of their irrational cults. Whatever the motivation may be, positive or negative, these distortions demand to be combatted.
Heraclitus ought to speak for himself.
Sources:
Barnes, J. (1982). The Pre-Socratic Philosophers. Routledge.
Burnet, J. (1920). Early Greek Philosophy. Adam & Charles Black.
Fuller, B.A.G. (1955). A History of Philosophy. Holt, Rinehart & Winston Inc.
Patrick, G.T.W. (2015). The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature; Translated from the Greek Text of Bywater, with an Introduction Historical and Critical. Digireads.com Publishing.
Peikoff, L. & Berliner, M.S. (2023). Founders of Western Philosophy. Ayn Rand Institute Press.
Wheelwright, P. (1964). Heraclitus. Princeton University Press.
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