Today, I want to tell you about a guy; a really old, really smart guy who wrote a lot of really cool stuff. His name was Heraclitus, and his philosophy is very legit. We don’t really know too much about it because a lot of these old philosophers’ works are lost, so we only have the bits and pieces that got quoted by other thinkers throughout the ages. Nevertheless, we do know some things about him and his philosophy. He said that the world was in constant state of change using aphorisms like, “A man never steps in the same river twice.” He takes it to a real extreme, though. He takes it to such an extreme that he actually became the first person to think of relativity. His idea was that the world was in such constant flux that everything both is and isn’t at the same time. He even rejected the idea of existing, insisting that everything is in a constant state of changing from one thing into another, so no one thing actually exists as we might think of it existing, it is only an expression of constant change. It’s kind of a weird thought, but it’s a really cool to think about the notion that we only exist as motion. I’m paraphrasing horribly right now, but you should read his stuff. He was a smart guy.
On the other hand, Heraclitus was also a spoiled rich kid who hated everything and everyone. He was born in Ephesus to a really wealthy family and he spent his entire life as a philosopher looking down on people. This is why, while he does have really beautiful and mysterious quotes like “the upward-downward path is one and the same,” he also has quotes like “Everyone is too stupid to understand my philosophy, everyone who tries makes themselves look stupid, and everyone else doesn’t ever understand what’s going on” (I paraphrased). He also came up with classics like “Pigs delight in mire more than clean water” and “Asses love straw more than gold,” which I have to admit, are pretty good insults. Still, quotes like that ended up earning him the nickname “He who rails against the people,” and probably have something to do with why Heraclitus spent the majority of his life alone. Don’t live your life like Heraclitus. He wasn’t a nice guy.
By reading Heraclitus I’ve received a couple things: one, some really cool proverbs about the world and two, thoughts that you shouldn’t think if you don’t want people to hate you. The thing that strikes me about him the most is that he could be so incredibly smart, write such incredibly beautiful and mystical things, but then just be so unapologetically pretentious about what it is that he wrote. His shortcomings can teach you about as much as his philosophy can. His big shortcoming is this: he’s obviously a really smart guy who is thinking on a really high level, but the piece that he missed is that the writer is never the one who decides how good their stuff is, and frankly in life, how good you are and how well you do isn’t something that you get to tell other people. It’s something other people get to tell you.
