Kosmology

At the threshold of the sixth and fifth centuries bc, there lived a philosopher named Heraclitus in the area of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, north of Miletus. We do not know much about him, but he was possibly of aristocratic descent, or sympathetic to the aristocracy. It is also said that he refused to take part in the legislature of Ephesus, or engage in politics (unlike, for example, Solon), instead at times preferring to play with children. Later sources record that Heraclitus was, in fact, the author of a book or treatise titled Πϵρὶ Φύσϵως (Peri Phuseōs), though this remains uncertain. For my purposes, Heraclitus is of particular interest not only owing to his surviving fragments about nómos, but also because one can observe in his thought uses of the term nómos that can be interpreted in an almost ‘philosophical’ manner. In this sense, Werner Jaeger perhaps exaggerated when he wrote that Heraclitus ‘is actually the first man to approach the problem of philosophical thought with an eye to its social function’, and that in him it is for the ‘first time that the idea of “law” has appeared in philosophic thought’ (1947: 115). Nómos, in Heraclitus, is of course neither an ideal nor an abstract concept, if these are what we are accustomed to designate as the ingredients of ‘philosophy’. Jaeger, further, maintained that not only is this ‘the first time that the idea of “law” has appeared in philosophic thought’, but ‘what is more, it is now regarded as the object of the highest and most universal knowledge; the term is not used in the simple political sense but has been extended to cover the very nature of reality itself’ (ibid. 115).

It is worthwhile noting that for Heraclitus there is not yet a division between phusis and reality, nor a distinction between ‘facticity’ and ‘normativity’.