The Psychology of Heraclitus: Episode 3 Diogenes and Friends

Hey everybody, we're back like we never left. And I'm here today to talk about a topic that I am quite excited about, which is the psychology of Heraclitus. Now, I think most people tend to conceptualize Heraclitus as a pre-Socratic philosopher, but I think that we need to consider that the role of a philosopher was more like the role of a thinking person in a really open landscape where anything was open to being thought about and one could make a lot of progress in these respects just by critically thinking about things. We can imagine somebody like Aristotle who was involved in an incredible amount of disciplines. He's done just about everything and he did all of it very well, and a lot of it lasted for quite a long time. So it's very much a possibility that somebody with a very keen mind and interesting insights into the world could sort of expose an entire new way of looking at the world that no one had ever thought about. So let's go to Fragment 47, which I think will frame the type of thinking that was undergirding the work that Heraclitus was doing and that gave rise to what I think is one of the first real accounts of psychology that I've come across. So in Fragment 47, he says, let us not conjecture randomly about the most important things. And right before that, he says that thinking is a sacred disease and sight is deceptive. So with these two sort of fragments in mind, I think we can sort of begin to think about how he wants to look at the world, which is not the way that it presents itself visually. It's the way that it presents itself when we think about things in a non-random way, when we're not conjecturing about the most important things just from the hip. We're really looking at the type of more or less empirical information that we can derive from observations and from careful thought and start to pull out something a little more meaningful than what sight might give you or something similar to it. If we want to look at it as a metaphor where we just stare at the thing, it reports itself as a red sphere and we see a red sphere or at least the portions of the red sphere and we fill in the rest of the information. And that's how that information comes to us. If we're looking at something like a human, we can't just stare at them and understand how they're operating or their basis. These are majorly important things about a person. We can't say that just how they look to us is what's actually important because it really isn't that important. So when we're talking about things that are complicated, it's not going to work to just use our senses in a first-order kind of way to understand how these operations are ordered. And I think that segues really nicely into fragment 123, which is that nature loves to hide. So with these fragments under our belt, I think that we can have a little bit of a discussion about how psychology and philosophy interact at this time period. And I think a good way to start is with some definitions. So both of these fields have a lot of different approaches and there's not going to be one definition that I think will fit everything. It's really just an issue of scope, not of veridicality. I think that you can certainly capture what a certain philosophical or psychological approach is. But when we try to broaden these things, it becomes a little muddy because there are things that we like to call psychology that might not look like the psychology that's done other places. Same thing with philosophy. But anyhow, so philosophy, in my view, or at least in a view that I'm very comfortable is that it's the art of making critical distinctions. And the place where I read about this first and was proposed this view was from a philosopher named Robert Sokolowski. He wrote a paper. It's short. I really recommend that you read it. It's called Making a Star. And he talks about how philosophy is the art of sort of drawing the meaning out of things by drawing fine lines based on things that actually distinguish between two different things. I know I use thing a lot of the time there, but it's a word that could stand in for just about anything, which is what philosophy allows us to talk about. So his example is that if we look at a star, initially, if you didn't know very much about stars, you would look at it as a bright light and perhaps add some content to it. And so the star would be that celestial body if we even had a concept of a larger universe or cosmos. And there'd be maybe some mythology attached to it. And so the way that we make this star, when we see it, we don't really just see a spot of light. We see a spot of light and it registers something that has a distinct meaning to us. And as we add more concepts to this, we can make it a finer thing, a larger thing, have much more content and distinguish between stars and, say, black holes or galaxies or other things that are of a similar scope. So it's that art of drawing lines between things that we think are significantly different, notifying why they're significantly different, and providing more depth about the predicates which we can assign to these objects. And I think that if we look at a definition of psychology, and I made one that I think was very broad, which is like the study of human behaviors, emotions, motivations, mental organization, implicit ethics, social organization, and more or less other operations of the mind and the social operations of a person, their perception of the world. So it's a pretty broad thing. But if we want to kind of narrow it down to something very simple, it's more or less the study of the way that people behave and operate and how their minds work. And depending on how you look at it, if you want to look at psychology as a proper science like chemistry or biology, then perhaps we might want to make a critical distinction between that and philosophy, because philosophy is not using data for the most part or conducting experiments while psychology does do this. But I think that at the very basic level, psychology is really just an arm of philosophy. And before the scientific revolution, people really were not doing psychology the way that we think of it now. And I think that that work is what undergirded the work that's being done now. Because the concepts which we want to talk about in psychology, say emotional states or behaviors or conditions or any of these other things that we like to talk about, are all really rooted in observations and making critical distinctions between the way that things operate, people seem to think, people seem to behave, people seem to feel the world, people seem to organize themselves, the way that people think about right and wrong, the way that they behave in connection with other people. All these things were initially mined out via observation. And that method is, in my view at least, pretty much exactly the same as philosophy. We looked at something, we started trying to understand what seemed to be true about it, what seemed to be different between this thing and other things in a significant way. And then we drew a little circle around predicates which we think correspond with some object so that we can talk about it in a way that is distinct from other things, add more content to it. And through this process, something like, if we want to talk about fear, perhaps fear might have been something that we started noticing in other people during different scenarios which were scary. And we called it fear, we started associating things with fear, understanding it a little better, knowing when people were likely to be fearful, knowing how to comfort people who were in fear. And that understanding stuck with us for a while. It was a useful concept, it seemed to map onto the world and it's relatively universal. And as time goes on, we start realizing that, hey, maybe this fear is not something that's ephemeral, it's something that's really in us. And as things like neurology have come to light, we can actually add content to this idea of fear, that it's a sympathetic nervous system reaction a lot of the time and there's neurotransmitters which are associated with it, there's the anxiety hormones. So we can understand this thing at a much deeper level, add content to it. But all of that content would be very hard to add if we didn't have something that we called fear that we understood very well. And that's what the early psychologists who were really properly philosophers were up to. So having laid out a little bit of an understanding about how philosophy and psychology interact, at least in my view, in a period of time like this, we can start to talk about how Heraclitus was one of the first psychologists and how, in the sense that I was talking about before, not in the experimental sense, but more in the theoretical sense, a lot of the ways that he thought about people really undergirded and influenced a lot of important thinkers in the history of philosophy and perhaps in the history of psychology, depending on how much credit you give philosophers for influencing psychologists and vice versa. Alrighty, so let's hop into some fragments which will help frame a basic view of psychology, which I think will have a lot of commonalities with the way that we think about psychology today. So Heraclitus does something really interesting, and even as somebody who's very interested in the universal logos, what I think we'd now consider kind of a logical view, he is very quick to dismiss the idea that people really properly operate from a position of reason. I think one of Heraclitus' most interesting and fun fragments, something that you could imagine hearing in some sort of movie, will really bring us out. He says, It is hard to fight with one's heart's desire. Whatever it wishes to get, it purchases at the cost of the soul. Now, we could talk about this forever, really. I think that it's a really interesting fragment. It's one of the first instances of somebody admitting that there are two sort of disjunctive forces inside of you that help inform your decision-making process. There's the way that we logically think about things. We can do some sort of Ben Franklin analysis and perform a cost-benefit analysis, weigh things, which is something like the logical view. This might, of course, be influenced by the popular view of consequentialism today, which influences the way that I think we like to think about things that are logical. Perhaps there's other ways of doing this, but just as an example, we do these sorts of things. Then we can also have a feeling-based way of making a decision. We feel a certain way. We want something very bad. We have a deep desire, and we're just going to do it. It doesn't make sense. Sometimes it doesn't always benefit us in a way that we can really understand. We might even see that there's almost no way that this will work out for us. We are certainly going to lose here, but we will do things that don't add up. They're not supposed to make sense. They can't make sense. We have these feelings which guide the way that we think, and they're not working in concert with our logical selves a lot of the time. This is pretty interesting because there's a big tradition in the later Greek period, the Socratic period, where people start, or really the post-Socratic period with Plato and Aristotle, but especially Plato has a view which is very, very similar to this. He has this view of the tripartite soul, which more or less is conceptualized as having the reasons, pride, and the emotions more or less in battle with each other. Reason is supposed to be trying to reign in these two other forces, but it has a very hard time. He likes to use the analogy of a charioteer with two horses trying to reign these things in and make them go where they want. I think that Heraclitus does kind of subscribe to a very similar view where I think he wants to privilege the logos and he wants to privilege the rational self as the thing that's most likely to really guide us somewhere valuable. As he says, let's not conjecture about the most important things randomly. But at the same time, he acknowledges that we are human all too human and things certainly happen that will not ever line up with what we think we would do if we were unemotional beings. And so I think that that's certainly a psychological move. He's moving away from this world which can be broken down into truths and things that make sense and logical arguments. And he's kind of deviating from that and saying that it's really muddy on the ground. We don't always operate like that. And I think that segues well into another view that he has, which also really influences I think a lot of other philosophy and psychology that happens in the future, which is that we operate from a position of ignorance. We really don't know much. I think that he's epistemically not very convinced. I think that in general, he doesn't think that our capacity to know things is that great. A lot of the time he compares humans to gods as a reference point where there might be a knowledge out there and there might be an understanding which is comprehensive, but we don't have it. In their eyes, we are babies. And that we also don't really know ourselves and what we do today. I think that he is one of the first people to take a look at the operations of the social world and the way that it's organized and see that we are kind of like worker bees in a hive. We do what we do and we do it well sometimes, but what is motivating us and why we're doing it and our understanding of what we're doing is not as clear as we'd like it to be. We don't properly understand how we fit into this thing and we don't properly understand the account that governs the universe. And I think that to him, these are big problems that start to kind of create this schism that I think that we'll talk more about that's pretty interesting. And I think I'd like to make it or call it something like the distinction between the sage and the common man. And it's something like a Heideggerian or Nietzschean concept of authenticity or maybe something like an Aristotelian perfection of virtue where there are some people who do have an account that governs the universe. They understand the thought that guides things and they might have a better shot at understanding what's going on. But most people are, they're the mob. They don't understand things very well. They don't know what they're doing. They are acting like they're asleep even though they're awake. And so we have some fragments that will back all this up that will be fun to get to. I think we'll start with number 70. So fragment 70 says that human opinions are children's toys, which I think is an interesting way to illustrate that these things are not, they're fickle. They're not something that we really hold on to very long. We abuse them. We can shift them around. They're things that are not, they're not stable. They're not to be respected. And that's kind of an interesting view. I think that he doesn't have very much faith in the way that most people like to think about things. And he doesn't trust our opinions because we don't have that corner on the truth that the gods have. In fragment 72, he says that most are at odds with what they most constantly associate. They account which governs the universe and what they meet with every day seems foreign to them. So I think this is tying in with the idea that there are, there's really only one way to make sense of the world, and that's to understand how everything is organized and the thought through which everything flows. And Heraclitus says that if you don't understand that or something like it, you're really not going to ever be able to fit everything into place. The world just won't make very much sense to you. And you'll kind of stumble through it because the world works that sort of way. And it's not like you're going to die tomorrow because you don't understand how things are ordered, but you won't really understand what it is that you're doing every day. In fragment 73, he likes to compare these ignorant people, which are really most people, and I think he'd probably include himself in this for the most part. In fragment 73, he says, we ought not to act and speak as if we were asleep. So here he's saying that this is talking about the bumbling through the world. I think that one of the analogy he uses all the time, which is instructive, is that the sleep-awake distinction, where he sort of thinks that a lot of us have, we all have a case of sleepwalking, more or less, where we're bumbling around the world. It might look like we're operating with things in a way that makes sense, but we don't properly understand what we're doing. We are more or less asleep. And in fragment 74, he nails down this idea that we're given the world and we're not often thinking about it for ourselves. And this is one of the things that makes us ignorant. He says, we ought not to behave like children who learn from their parents. And in fragment 75, to illustrate who these people who are asleep are, he says, those who are asleep are fellow workers in what goes on in the world. So the world is really operated in sleep-teraclitus. People go to their daily jobs. They do the things they need to do for the world to continue to operate and keep spinning on its axis. But these things are, they're not things that we're doing cognizantly. We didn't really choose them. We sort of fell into these habits and nobody thinks twice a lot of the time. That's why he's a philosopher and they're not. He chose to cast off being the crown prince of Ephesus to pursue the truth. And he really lived by that ethos from what it sounds like. And I think that this tone of condescension, it can be picked up a lot of the time as just that condescending. But I think that when I read Heraclitus, I don't really think of it as necessarily condescending. He had some saving graces here. I think he wants to elevate everyone to looking at the world in this critical way. But the way that he wants to do that is to sort of give us a bucket of cold water to the face while we're sleeping. And we might not like it. We might not enjoy that brutal wake-up call, but perhaps we need it. I think the reason why he thinks that we need this is really interesting. And it's illustrated very well in Fragment 89, where Heraclitus says that the waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside into a world of their own. So Heraclitus' view here is actually a bit radical, that this numbing of your involvement in the world, this lack of understanding, is really causing people to separate into their own little monads where they're in their own world. They don't properly interface with the actual world that exists. And the only people who really do are the people who are awake. And I think that that segues pretty well into an interesting distinction that I think is a bit controversial and fun and difficult. So a lot of good adjectives there. And that's the distinction that Heraclitus makes between those who are sort of authentically engaging in the world and the people who are asleep. So I think that in broad strokes, we can say that Heraclitus thinks that not all people exist equally. I think that I would resist to say that not all men are created equally. I don't know if Heraclitus is really furthering that view, because I don't think that there's enough evidence to support whether or not he thinks that people are made this way, the gods choose great men. Or if it's something that's more personal, where people spend their time differently and look at the world differently, and some people will come into the truth and other people won't. And it's the duty of the people who know the truth to help guide the people who are sleeping into a more waking state. So we can get right into it. Heraclitus says that one man is 10,000 to me if he be the best. So we can see right here that Heraclitus is definitely privileging people who are the best, who understand, who know the world. And we can kind of safely say that when he's speaking about the best, perhaps he's speaking broadly, but I think that he makes it very clear that thinking clearly and knowing the account that governs the universe is what is best. So if you're best at what is best, at least you would be a very wise sage person, and Heraclitus would value you much more than 10,000 people from the mob. And this is kind of interesting. He also says that the fool is fluttered at every word. So there's a bit of a dichotomy emerging here between a sort of higher class of people who are privileged in Heraclitus' view and a class of people who are to be pitied and don't properly understand things and need help, really. So now I think it'd be important to talk about how Heraclitus claims people come to be in these disparate states. And I think that Heraclitus uses himself as a model a lot of the time for this, which is not optimal, but it is the case. And he says that he dove into himself famously, which is how he came to understand this. So I think that Heraclitus wants to make the claim that we all have the tools to elevate ourselves into this higher understanding of the world. And we can mine this out in a few of his fragments here. He says that thought is common to all, which I think is a basis of understanding that it's not going to be technically impossible for people to think for themselves. This is something that he thinks that people can do. And he also says that recognizing oneself and being of sound mind are for all men. So Heraclitus here wants this for everyone. I think that recognizing yourself and being of sound mind are more or less criteria of elevating yourself from this state of sleep. And he also says that a man's character is his fate. So I think that Heraclitus here is calling people to elevate themselves out of sleep because they can and define their character and make their fate. While he is doing this, I think that he will maintain throughout that though people have the capacity to change themselves and become aware of what's going on, there still is an existing disparity between the many and the few, and the many are not good. We can see this in Fragment 104 very explicitly. He says, for what thought or wisdom have they? They follow the poets and take the crowds as their teacher, knowing not that the many are bad and the few good. So he's pretty explicit here that if you're part of the crowd and you're not the individual, you're not on the right side of this fence and it'd be best for you to skip over there. And how ought you do that? Well, Fragment 112, he'll tell you what the goal is. He says, thinking well is the greatest excellence, and wisdom is to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature. So we need to wake up and see the world according to their nature. And I think that Heraclitus has a view that there are some people who are in that world and there are some people who are not. And while I think that it might be a little jarring to court a view that says that there are some people who are awake and some people who are asleep, this doesn't sound very good to us. Heraclitus does think that the people who are awake ought not to remember where they came from, presuming that they came from that state of sleep. And he urges them to think too if he doesn't know the way. So I think that while it might be a bit of an elitist view in a sense that there are some people out there who have got it and other people don't and they're ignorant and it's bad to be them and it's good to be the others. He does want to say that the good state of being in his mind is something that is available to everyone and that the people who have gotten there should strive to work towards. I think this is one of the reasons why we see a lot of parallels between Heraclitus and the Buddha. People talk about that sometimes as he's somewhat of a Western analog for the Buddha because he takes on this sort of enlightenment view that there's a way that's right and there's a way that's wrong. We shouldn't pity people too much. We should just try to help them see the light, see the way, and see the world in a way that's more authentic and stop suffering so much. Speaking of happiness, another interesting thing that Heraclitus likes to talk about, which I think is fun, is that perspective is something that will undergird this transition between a person who might know a lot and a person who is wise. Now, to finish up this understanding of how Heraclitus sort of distinguishes between the two groups of people and why there are few and not many people in the category of the few, because I don't think that the reason why the many are bad is because there's many of them. I think that if the many were awake, they would be good, but the many just happen to be asleep. I think that Fragment 18 might help shed some light on this. He says, "...if you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it, for it is hard to be sought out and difficult." I think here he's saying that if you're not looking to see the world in a way that is authentic and is contrary to this sleeping metaphor, you're not going to get there. It's not something that will just appear to you. There's no divine revelation here. This is careful consideration about something very specific. Unless you are looking for something, you're not going to find it in Heraclitus's view. I think that segues into another very fun Heraclitus fragment, which you might hear again or you might like to use just for fun. It's Fragment 22. "...those who seek gold dig up much earth and find a little." I think Heraclitus is saying that if we combine these two fragments in a sense, if you're looking for gold, you might find it, but if you're not looking for gold, you're not going to find it. No one really finds gold on their walk to the mall. And even if you are looking for gold, you are going to have to move a lot of earth and you probably won't find it or very much of it. So I think that one of the reasons why Heraclitus thinks that this wisdom, which distinguishes between these two groups of people, the stages and the normal people, is the reason why this disparity exists is that this is a very hard thing to find. You'd have to seek it out. And even if you seek it out, you may not find it. Some people are better at digging for gold than others. Some people are lucky. Some people get struck by lightning. These things happen. So I think that Heraclitus is, if we look at Heraclitus through this light, we can soften this view a little bit, that there's this distinction which is, it doesn't seem to be from birth. He's not saying that the gods ordain people to be higher or lower men. And I don't think he's really even making a value judgment in the sense that these people are bad for being asleep. I think he's just saying that, in a sense, it would be less desirable to be asleep than to be awake, knowing the two options. It's sort of a Nietzschean idea that we don't really properly, like pity is not great, I don't think, in this view. He doesn't want to say that we think that you're bad in a value sense. We just prefer not to be you. It's sort of like the master morality. Of course, there is a very good chance that this view actually influenced that view. Nietzsche does claim to be influenced by Heraclitus in the pre-Socratic period, like most other interesting philosophers, I feel like at least. It's an interesting psychological view, which I think a lot of people have picked up over the ages. So exploring it in its early stages is quite fun. And I think that it is interesting to see that the way that I think Heraclitus takes this does really undergird the way that a lot of other people like to think about an authenticity and authenticity schism, where usually we don't see a value claim being made about the quality of these two things in a sense that we usually do. We usually see people saying that this is bad in sort of an absolute sense, and this is good in a sort of absolute sense. And I think that for the most part, the way that people like to frame these discussions, this is preferable and this is less preferable, but not really bad and good. Heraclitus does use the words, which doesn't really help him very much, but I think that if we read a little closer into this next segment of Fragments, which I picked out, we'll see that Heraclitus doesn't really look at the good as over and above the bad. He really looks at them as people who are in a position to help the people who don't see the world in the same way, to bring them where they are. So as we've already mentioned, Heraclitus says that we ought to remember he who forgets the way. I think that's the first fragment that we should remember here. I think this is a calling for the duty of people who see the world in a way that I think Heraclitus associates with to help other people see it the same way. And I think one thing that Heraclitus likes to harp on a little bit is that this isn't really an easy thing. It's more of a burden because he says that the mysteries practiced among men are unholy mysteries. So I think that for the most part, people are confused in a set of activities and discourses which really don't have some sort of divine order to them. So the world is in a state of confusion and you have to pull people out of it. And he says in fragment 19, knowing not how to listen, they do not know how to speak. So people espouse a lot of craziness, basically, in Heraclitus' view. This is what most people are consuming all the time in the masses. We're hearing all sorts of madness because these people don't know how to listen, which is something that I think that Heraclitus laments. And in fragment 17, he says, the men do not take heed of such things as those which they meet with, nor do they recognize them when they are taught, though they think they do. So I think he's saying that the real hard task, I think, a lot of the time, if you're somebody who's awake and sees the world and wants to help a person who doesn't see the way, is that even when you try to show somebody the way, they might go off walking in the general direction which you pointed and not really understand the directions that you gave them. They'll think that they know where they're going and they might even arrive at a place and to them it could be all the same. They might think for sure that they have been taught and have internalized the thing that you were trying to teach them, but you'll realize that it isn't really the case. So I had a lot of fun doing that. I think that there's a lot of interesting tidbits in there, and especially as somebody who's a big fan of the history of philosophy, there's so many things that Heraclitus does here which I think are revolutionary and which really influence the way that a lot of other people who read his work in later periods make their work, and a lot of that work is really fascinating and hopefully we'll get to talking about that in the podcast at some point and we can draw it all together. But I think that some big takeaways here are that Heraclitus was a philosopher and potentially, depending on how you look at psychology, a proto-psychologist, and he influenced a lot of really seminal thinkers on the way that they draw a schism between people who are basically sleeping while awake and people who are properly awake in the world. And he also brings to bear that there are things outside of the rational and the logical which influence the way that we think. He also introduces the concept of the mob, in a sense, and the larger social structure influencing the way that people think and operate. He introduces the idea that we're not really in tune with our world and we're compartmentalized we do things without properly internalizing them and just sort of putz about our lives and that that's the natural state of being. And that there is another way of doing things in a sense, sort of a Western enlightenment ethos, which I think we see a lot in a lot of ethical systems and a lot of systems which describe how people are going to be happy. So I did glimpse over some of Heraclitus' views on happiness and pleasure. Just in brief, I think he ties everything back to that concept of perspective. These things are all going to be individually laden and if you're a human certain things will be, you know, pleasant to you and they'll be different than those for other animals and between people will also see that pleasure and happiness are going to be things that are really dependent on how you look at things, whether or not you call things good or bad and whether or not you see the world in the way that Heraclitus does as a unitary thing. Which I think is fun because that is a very similar way to some basic thoughts about Buddhism and their fundamental tenets that sort of stripping these value-laden concepts and stopping seeing the world as so atomized is one of the first steps to ceasing your suffering. So I think we'll end it with that. Heraclitus is a very interesting guy. I think there's some more stuff that we can do here. I'm not quite sure where to go from here if I am completely honest. I would love any suggestions if anybody has them and would like to give them to me. So with that, thank you for listening and especially if you stuck through to this point, I really appreciate you. I've been having a lot of fun doing this and it's been great knowing that there are some people tuning in. So I wish you the best and until next time, that will be all.