The following sentence in ancient Greek was the first in book by Heraclitus that has since been lost: τοῦ δὲ λόγου ἀεὶ ἄνθρωποι γίγνονται ἀξύνετοι ἀκούσαντες τὸ πρῶτον πρόσθεν ἀκοῦσαι. It’s translated in modern English as something like, “Though this discourse is true evermore, men are as unable to understand it when they hear it for the first time as before they have heard it at all.” The reason we know about this fragment at all is because Aristotle wrote about how frustrated it made him.
Aristotle was a pedant, and dismisses Heraclitus as not being very clear about whether the word ἀεὶ (“evermore”) is modifying the phrase that comes before it or after it. Does it mean that what is stated in this book is “eternal truth”, or that what is stated is one of those ordinary truths but men are too “eternally ignorant” to get it, Aristotle wonders. To the ancient Greek reader, it could go either way.
Heraclitus did this on purpose, though, precisely to get under the skin of people like Aristotle. Really smart people never seem to see the meaning through the words. They never catch the meaning of what people convey to them because they are too concerned with trivial things like grammar and standardized dictionary entries. Heraclitus made sure to write in a way that disturbed their sensibilities.
Many people know him as the guy who said you can’t step in the same river twice. We’re told by translators that he means we can’t step in the same river twice because the river is always changing as it flows. Could Heraclitus really have been so dull as to make such a pseudo-profound point? Let’s look at his sentence closer: potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei. He places the word for river (potamoisi) at the beginning of the sentence – which is irregular for Greek prose – so that he can pull the same stunt as before, placing the modifier “the same” (toisin autoisin) between the river and “those standing” in it (embainousin) . Some translators are certain that it’s saying that the person is the one who remains the same because the rest of the sentence says, “different and different waters flow.” Certainly, he is saying the river is constantly changing.
This interpretation goes against the overall theme of Heraclitus’ writings. The river and the person standing in it are one thing, he’s trying to teach us. To say that a person stepping into the river for a second time is the same person he was when he stepped into the first time is absurd. Matter is constantly flowing in and out of his body, being metabolized and transformed. Everything does this – rivers and people do it, and if you scale out enough, even solid rocks and mountains are behaving like a fluid. The whole universe is just one fluid – a giant fire, actually – according to Heraclitus.
We are blind to this because we process our experience though language (λόγου). Language arbitrarily projects an image of stability and solidity onto the flux and fluidity. The really smart people – the scientists and the scholars – insist that there is some solid ground that all our knowledge stands on. They prove this by showing how extensive their vocabulary is. They can describe to us trees and rocks and rivers and people with evermore precise terminology, all the way down to the molecular level. And then they describe those molecules with evermore precise terminology. All they are doing here is making more and more articulate noises at us. They’re just babbling. Speaking of babbling, say the sentence “potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei” out loud once.
