Philosophers · 哲學家 · Greece and Rome
Heraclitus 赫拉克利特 · Ἡράκλειτος
The first philosopher of process, who wrote in riddles and held that the world is a fire kept alive by its own changes.
第一位談「過程」的哲學家；他用謎語寫作，主張世界是一團靠自身的變化維持不滅的火。
- Lived 生卒
- c. 535–475 BCE (uncertain)
- City 城邦
- Ephesus, in Ionia, under Persian rule
- Family 家世
- Aristocratic; said to have given up a hereditary office to his brother
- Wrote 著作
- One book, now lost; about 130 fragments survive
- Nicknames 綽號
- “The Obscure”; later “the weeping philosopher”
- Read by 讀者
- Plato, the Stoics, Hegel, Nietzsche
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all. 每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
Life · 生平
A life in three scenes 三幕人生
A proud man in a great city 大城裡一個高傲的人
Almost nothing is known of Heraclitus’s life, and most of what is told about it was invented later out of his own sayings. He belonged to Ephesus, one of the largest Greek cities of the eastern Aegean, which in his day was subject to the Persian king. He came from the old ruling family and is said to have handed its ceremonial office to his brother. He seems to have had no teacher and no pupils. “I have sought for myself,” he says in one fragment.
赫拉克利特的生平幾乎無從得知；流傳下來的說法，大部分是後人從他自己的格言裡編出來的。他是以弗所人；以弗所是愛琴海東岸最大的希臘城邦之一，在他的時代臣屬於波斯國王。他出身古老的統治家族，據說把家族世襲的祭儀職位讓給了弟弟。他似乎沒有老師，也沒有學生。他在一條殘篇裡說：「我探求過我自己。」
What the fragments do show is his temper. He had a low opinion of his fellow citizens and of nearly every famous name in Greece. When the Ephesians banished his friend Hermodorus, he wrote that they “would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them, and leave the city to beardless lads.” Of the learned he said: “The learning of many things teacheth not understanding, else would it have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras.” He thought that most people go through life like sleepwalkers, each in a private world, while the order of things lies open in front of them.
殘篇確實顯示出來的，是他的脾氣。他瞧不起自己的同胞，也瞧不起希臘幾乎每一個響亮的名字。以弗所人放逐他的朋友赫爾謨多羅斯時，他寫道，他們「最好全都去上吊，每一個成年人都去，把城邦留給還沒長鬍子的少年」。對於博學的人，他說：「博學並不能教人有見識，否則它早就教會了赫西俄德與畢達哥拉斯。」他認為大多數人像夢遊者一樣過完一生，各自活在私人的世界裡，而事物的秩序明明攤開在他們面前。
The book in the temple 神廟裡的書
He wrote a single book and, according to the tradition, deposited it in the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was famous for its difficulty. Antiquity called him “the Obscure,” and a story has Socrates say that what he understood of the book was excellent, and so, he supposed, was what he did not understand, but that it would take a diver from Delos to get to the bottom of it. The style was deliberate. Heraclitus admired the oracle at Delphi, which “neither utters nor hides his meaning, but shows it by a sign,” and his own sentences work the same way. They are balanced, compressed, and often turn on a pun, and they make the reader do the work.
他只寫了一本書；照傳統的說法，他把書存放在以弗所的阿提米斯大神廟裡。這本書以艱深聞名。古人稱他為「晦澀者」；有一個故事說，蘇格拉底表示，這本書他讀懂的部分好極了，所以他猜想沒讀懂的部分也一樣好，只是需要一位提洛島的潛水夫，才潛得到它的底。這種文風是刻意的。赫拉克利特欣賞德爾菲的神諭，它「既不說出、也不隱藏他的意思，而是用徵兆顯示它」；他自己的句子也是這樣運作的。它們對稱、濃縮，常常靠雙關語轉折，並且要讀者自己下工夫。
Legends of his death 關於他死亡的傳說
The ancient biographer Diogenes Laertius reports that Heraclitus ended as a hermit in the hills, living on grass and herbs, fell ill with dropsy, and tried to cure himself by lying in the sun covered with cow dung, where he died. Scholars regard the story as a malicious fiction built from his own doctrines: the philosopher who said that it is death for souls to become water dies of too much water in his body. The later picture of him as “the weeping philosopher,” set beside the laughing Democritus, has no better basis. The real Heraclitus is the voice in the fragments, and there is nothing tearful about it.
古代的傳記作者第歐根尼・拉爾修記載，赫拉克利特最後成了山裡的隱士，以草與野菜為食，得了水腫病，想用「全身塗滿牛糞躺在太陽下」的辦法治好自己，就這樣死了。學者認為這個故事是惡意的虛構，是用他自己的學說編出來的：這位說過「靈魂變成水就是死亡」的哲學家，死於體內的水太多。後世把他畫成「哭泣的哲學家」，跟大笑的德謨克利特擺在一起，這同樣沒有什麼根據。真正的赫拉克利特，是殘篇裡的那個聲音，而那個聲音一點也不帶淚。
- c. 535Born at Ephesus生於以弗所
- c. 500Writes his book寫下他的書
- c. 475Dies去世
- c. 380Plato puts the river into the Cratylus柏拉圖把那條河寫進《克拉底魯篇》
- c. 300The Stoics adopt his fire and his logos斯多噶學派採用他的火與 logos
- 1903Diels publishes the standard edition of the fragments第爾斯出版殘篇的標準版本
The central idea · 核心觀念
A world held together by tension 靠張力維繫的世界
The thinkers before Heraclitus had asked what the world is made of and had answered with a substance: water, air, the boundless. Heraclitus answers with a process. The world “was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out.” A fire is not a thing in the way a stone is. It exists only while it is consuming fuel, and it keeps its shape because what it takes in balances what it gives off. He says the same of a river and of the cosmos.
赫拉克利特之前的思想家問的是世界由什麼構成，回答的是一種實體：水、氣、無定者。赫拉克利特回答的是一個過程。世界「過去一直是、現在是、將來也永遠是一團永恆的活火，按一定的分寸燃燒，按一定的分寸熄滅」。火不是石頭那種意義上的「東西」。它只有在消耗燃料的時候才存在；而它之所以保持形狀，是因為吸收的與釋放的互相平衡。對於河、對於宇宙，他說的是同一件事。
The balance depends on opposition. “Men do not know how what is at variance agrees with itself. It is an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.” A bow is a piece of wood and a string pulling against each other. Remove the pull and nothing is left that could be called a bow. So conflict, for Heraclitus, is what holds the world together: “War is the father of all and the king of all.” Underneath the conflict is a single measure, the logos, which is the same for everyone and which hardly anyone notices. Wisdom is to understand it. “It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one.”
這個平衡靠的是對立。「人們不明白，相互乖離的東西如何與自身一致。那是一種相反張力的和諧，像弓與琴那樣。」一張弓，是一段木頭與一條弦彼此對拉。把那股拉力拿掉，就沒有什麼還能叫作弓的東西了。所以對赫拉克利特來說，衝突正是把世界維繫在一起的東西：「戰爭是萬物之父，萬物之王。」在衝突的底下有一個單一的分寸，logos；它對每個人都相同，卻幾乎沒有人留意。智慧就是理解它。「聽從的不是我，而是我的『道』（logos），並且承認萬物是一：這才是智慧。」
The way up and the way down is one and the same.上坡的路與下坡的路，是同一條路。
True of every road, and his shortest statement of the unity of opposites. 對每一條路都是真的；也是他對「對立的統一」最短的陳述。
The strongest objection · 最強的反駁
If all flows, nothing can be said 如果一切皆流，就什麼都說不出來
Plato took Heraclitus to mean that everything is changing in every respect all the time, and he argued that the view destroys itself. To say that a thing is white, there must be a white thing that stays white long enough for the word to apply. If the whiteness is itself flowing into another color while we speak, “white” was never true of it, and neither is any other description. Knowledge fares no better, since a known object would have changed before the knowing was complete. A doctrine of total flux cannot even be stated, because stating it requires words with stable meanings. This is why Cratylus fell silent.
柏拉圖把赫拉克利特理解為：一切都在每一個方面、每時每刻地改變；然後他論證說，這個看法會毀掉它自己。要說一樣東西是白的，就得有一個白的東西，白得夠久，久到這個詞用得上。如果在我們說話的當下，那個白本身正在流變成另一種顏色，那麼「白」從來就不曾對它為真，別的任何描述也一樣。知識的處境也好不到哪裡去，因為被認識的對象，在認識完成之前就已經變了。徹底流變的學說甚至無法被陳述，因為陳述它需要意義穩定的詞。這就是克拉底魯沉默下來的原因。
Aristotle added the charge of contradiction. If Heraclitus really means that the same thing both is and is not, he has denied the principle on which all reasoning rests, and there is no arguing with him. The defense in both cases is that the charges fit Cratylus better than Heraclitus. The fragments insist on measure, on a logos that does not change, and on opposites that are one in a definite respect. Whether the defense fully succeeds is hard to say when we have a hundred and thirty sentences from a lost book and no way of asking the author what he meant.
亞里斯多德加上了「矛盾」這項指控。如果赫拉克利特真的是說「同一樣東西既是又不是」，那麼他就否定了一切推理所依據的原則，跟他也就無從爭辯了。對這兩項指控的辯護是：它們用在克拉底魯身上，比用在赫拉克利特身上更貼切。殘篇再三強調的是分寸、是一個不變的 logos、是在某個確定的方面合而為一的對立。這個辯護是否完全成立，很難說；我們手上只有一本失傳之書的一百三十個句子，也沒有辦法去問作者他是什麼意思。
How we know · 史料
A philosopher in quotation marks 一位活在引號裡的哲學家
Everything we have of Heraclitus was copied out by someone else for a purpose of his own. Plato and Aristotle quote him in order to disagree. The Stoics quote him as their ancestor and may have adjusted him to fit. Christian writers such as Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus of Rome preserve many fragments, the first to show that the Greeks had glimpsed the truth and the second to show that a heresy was stolen from him. The quotations were first gathered and numbered in the nineteenth century, and the edition by Hermann Diels (1903) gave them the numbers still in use. We do not know the order of the sayings in the original book or how they were connected, and where two reports of one saying differ, as with the river, we cannot always tell which is closer to what he wrote.
我們手上赫拉克利特的一切，都是別人為了自己的目的抄錄下來的。柏拉圖與亞里斯多德引用他，是為了反對他。斯多噶學派把他當作祖師來引用，而且可能為了合用而調整過他。亞歷山卓的克雷孟、羅馬的希波呂托斯這些基督教作者保存了許多殘篇：前者是為了證明希臘人曾經瞥見真理，後者是為了證明某個異端是從他那裡偷來的。這些引文到十九世紀才第一次被蒐集、編號；第爾斯的版本（1903）給了它們沿用至今的編號。我們不知道這些格言在原書裡的次序，也不知道它們是怎麼串連的；當同一句格言有兩種不同的記載時——就像那條河——我們不一定分得出哪一個更接近他寫下的原樣。
Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學
Heraclitus and the Buddha 赫拉克利特與佛陀
The two were contemporaries, and each made change the central fact about the world. Each used the river and the flame. Each said that people fail to see what is in front of them, and each compared them to sleepers. A reader who comes to Heraclitus from the Buddhist discourses will feel at home in sentence after sentence.
這兩個人是同時代的人，而且各自都把「變化」當作關於世界的核心事實。兩人都用了河與火焰。兩人都說人看不見擺在眼前的東西，也都把這些人比作睡著的人。從佛經過來讀赫拉克利特的讀者，會在一句又一句話裡感到熟悉。
Three differences should be kept in view. First, Heraclitus’s world has a permanent ground. The fire is ever-living and the logos is fixed, and the Stoics were not wrong to make a god of them. The Buddha points to no such ground. Second, Heraclitus praises strife. Conflict is the father of all things, and a world without it would fall apart. In the Buddhist analysis the corresponding fires are greed, hatred, and delusion, and the aim is their going out. Third, the unity of opposites is a doctrine about how contraries make one whole. The Buddhist middle way steps back from pairs of opposites, existence and non-existence, eternalism and annihilation, as two extremes that both miss how things arise. Heraclitus asks us to hear the harmony in the tension. The Buddha’s advice is to stop pulling on the string.
有三個差別要放在視野裡。第一，赫拉克利特的世界有一個恆常的根基。那團火是永恆的活火，logos 是固定的；斯多噶學派把它們奉為神，並不算錯。佛陀沒有指向任何這樣的根基。第二，赫拉克利特讚美鬥爭。衝突是萬物之父，一個沒有衝突的世界會分崩離析。在佛教的分析裡，與之相應的火是貪、瞋、癡，而目標是讓它們熄滅。第三，「對立的統一」是一個關於「相反者如何構成一個整體」的學說。佛教的中道則是從成對的對立——有與無、常見與斷見——退後一步，把它們看成兩個極端，兩者都沒有看到事物是怎麼生起的。赫拉克利特要我們聽出張力裡的和諧。佛陀的建議是：別再拉那條弦了。
Terms of art · 哲學術語
Words that come with him 跟著他一起來的詞
Gk. ‘word, account, measure’
The common, rational order according to which all things happen.
萬事萬物據以發生的、共通的理性秩序。
L. fluxus ‘a flowing’
Continuous change.
持續不斷的變化。
The doctrine that contrary things form one whole and depend on each other.
主張相反的事物構成一個整體，並且彼此依賴。
L. frangere ‘to break’
A piece of a lost work, preserved as a quotation in a later author.
失傳著作的片段，以被後世作者引用的形式保存下來。
A Greek philosopher who worked before, or apart from, the influence of Socrates.
在蘇格拉底之前、或不受其影響而從事思考的希臘哲學家。
Gk. ‘a fitting together’
Heraclitus’s word for the attunement produced by opposed tensions.
赫拉克利特用這個詞指相反張力所產生的調和。
Reading check · 理解測驗
Did it land? 讀懂了嗎
1. Why does Heraclitus compare the world to a fire?
2. What does the image of the bow illustrate?
3. Why is it hard to know what Heraclitus wrote?
Go further · 延伸
Where he appears 他出現在哪幾課
- John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy, chapter 3, “Herakleitos of Ephesos” ↗All the fragments in English, with commentary. Public domain. 全部殘篇的英譯，附評述。公版。
- Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book IX, chapter 1The ancient gossip, including the dung. 古代的八卦，包括牛糞。
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Heraclitus” ↗