that relationships are made up of both love and strife, not in alternation but both, essentially, at the same time. Confusingly to modern readers, Heraclitus believes that paradoxes really exist, that what in this discussion we call "stable ambivalences" hold, e.g. The world is held together by tension the logos is force. The world's intelligibility-its singular logos-doesn't mean it's peaceful, though. His physics imagined a basic material (he calls it fire, but clearly doesn't mean the same thing as ordinary, visible fire) that transforms in lawlike ways (in definite ratios) into all the different parts of the world, and that it's these cycles of transformation, driven by the logos itself, that make the world the moving system it is. So the world is logos, in that it behaves in a lawlike manner so that mathematics and science can describe it.
What is the world like, and how can we understand it? Heraclitus thinks that the answer to both questions is found in "the logos," which is a Greek word with multiple meanings: it can be an explanation, a word or linguistic meaning, science, rationality (the Latin word is "ratio"), the principle of exchange between things. Or become a PEL Citizen for $5 a month, and get access to this and all other paywalled episodes, including 68 back catalogue episodes exclusive Part 2's for episodes published after September, 2020 and our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more causally.Įva Brann discusses her book The Logos of Heraclitus (2011).
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