page_title: Heraclitus
section_title: Cycle
hierarchical_section_title: Heraclitus / Philosophy / Unity of opposites / Hodos ano kato, "the way up and the way down" / Cycle
caption_attribution_description: English: Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher. From Thomas Stanley, (1655), The history of philosophy: containing the lives, opinions, actions and Discourses of the Philosophers of every Sect, illustrated with effigies of divers of them.
context_page_description: Heraclitus of Ephesus son of Bloson, was a pre-Socratic Ionian Greek philosopher, and a native of the city of Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey and then part of the Persian Empire.
  Due to the oracular and paradoxical nature of his philosophy, and his fondness for word play, he was called "The Obscure" even in antiquity. He wrote a single work, On Nature, but the obscurity is made worse by its remaining only in fragments. His cryptic utterances have been the subject of numerous interpretations. He has been seen variously as a "material monist or a process philosopher; a scientific cosmologist, a metaphysician, or mainly a religious thinker; an empiricist, a rationalist, or a mystic; a conventional thinker or a revolutionary; a developer of logic or one who denied the law of non-contradiction; the first genuine philosopher or an anti-intellectual obscurantist."
  He was of distinguished parentage but eschewed his privileged life for a lonely one as a philosopher. Little else is known about his early life and education. He regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom.
context_section_description: Another is it illustrates the cyclical nature of reality and transformation, a replacement of one element by another, "turnings of fire". This might be another "hidden harmony" and is more consistent with pluralism, not monism.
  The death of fire is the birth of air, and the death of air is the birth of water.
  For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul.
  Cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; what is wet dries, and the parched is moistened.
  And it is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former.
caption: Heraclitus depicted in 1655.
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