Heraclitus & Process Philosophy

.... The Greek theoretician Heraclitus of Ephesus (b. ca. 540 B.C.) -- known even in antiquity as "the obscure" -- is universally recognized as the founder of the process approach. His book "On Nature" depicted the world as a manifold of opposed forces joined in mutual rivalry, interlocked in constant strife and conflict. Fire, the most changeable and ephemeral of these elemental forces, is the basis of all: "This world-order . . . is . . . an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures" (Fr. 217, Kirk-Raven-Schofield). The fundamental "stuff" of the world is not a material substance of some sort but a natural process, namely "fire," and all things are products of its workings (puros tropai). The variation of different states and conditions of fire -- that most process-manifesting of the four traditional Greek elements -- engenders all natural change. For fire is the destroyer and transformer of things and "All things happen by strife and necessity" (Fr. 211, ibid). And this changeability so pervades the world that "one cannot step twice into the same river" (Fr. 215, ibid). As Heraclitus saw it, reality is at bottom not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes: we must at all costs avoid the fallacy of substantializing nature into perduring things (substances) because it is not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities which they produce that make up this world of ours. Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but an ever-changing flow; the sun is not a thing, but a flaming fire. Everything in nature is a matter of process, of activity, of change. Heraclitus taught that panta rhei ("everything flows") and this principle exerted a profound influence on classical antiquity. Even Plato, who did not much like the principle ("like leaky pots" he added at Cratylus 440 C), came to locate his exception to it -- the enduring and changeless "ideas" -- in a realm wholly removed from the domain of material reality.

Heraclitus may accordingly be seen as the founding father of process philosophy, at any rate in the intellectual tradition of the West.



Stanford Encylopaedia of Philosophy