Herclitus' View of Reality

“All things come out of the One and the One out of all things. ... I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! It is the fault of your limited outlook and not the fault of the essence of things if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming and Passing. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before.” (Heraclitus, 500 B.C.)

For Heraclitus, reality is something that moves, making any fixed, abstract identity impossible. Things are always becoming and so they must contain within themselves that which they are not. Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.

His central idea is the dynamic unity of reality, 'All is Becoming', and 'All is Opposites'. This basically means that reality and identity are always changing and that identity contains contradictions because the attributes of a thing change over time.

Heraclitus argued that since things changed, they had to contain what they were not. Only such contradictions could account for the change. As Heraclitus says, "Cold things grow warm; warm grows cold; wet grows dry; parched grows moist."

He teaches that all things are flux; nothing is permanent, but everything is constantly becoming something else or going out of existence. "All things flow and nothing stands"

Heraclitus’ Monistic views led him to believe that the �One’ thing that stemmed reality was fire... But where does �Fire’ come into all this?

Believing that all things were flux, Heraclitus discovered �The Logos’; the principle according to which all things change, which determines the nature of the flux that resides in all human beings. According to Heraclitus, all human beings possess reason, or, Logos, although they may not make much use of it.

The Logos possessed by all human beings is actually universal Logos or Mind; which is intelligence at work amidst all the flux, this intelligence is identical to human intelligence.

Heraclitus later presents Logos as unifying all things so that all things are one and belong to one. He identifies the Logos as fire, an eternal spirit