Two Sides of the Same Coin

The early philosophers were obsessed with nature. They would sit all day, staring outside and watching how seasons change. After the sunset, it becomes dark. After winter comes spring, then summer, autumn, and winter again. After a good olive harvest or two, a poor one usually follows. It was as if a pendulum was swinging back and forth, providing the energy for things to transform the way they do.

For Thales, this constant pendulum was water. Water is all around us, we need it to survive, and it takes all sorts of different forms depending on the temperature. Two of Thales' students, Anaximander and Anaximenes, developed his thinking and under the banner of the Milesian School. Anaximander focused a lot of his thoughts on a universal principle that must govern them all, but he wasn’t sure what it was. Anaximenes thought that all answers could be found in the air that we breathe.

Heraclitus turned the Milesian’s early theories upside down. He didn’t believe that all things went back to one source (like water or air), because those things themselves are constantly changing. They are in a state of flux. Their identity is change. A coin that is being flipped has two opposite sides, but it is still one coin, not two. Similarly, a dice has six different sides.

Heraclitus is famous for saying that a man ‘cannot step in the same river twice’, because he is not the same man and the river is also different by the time he goes in again. That is because the river is defined by constantly flowing water.

Furthermore, he also noticed that one opposite gives meaning to the other. To understand what cold is, you must be familiar with being hot. You cannot be ‘happy’ if you have never been ‘sad’. The word ‘day’ would probably not exist if there was no ‘night’. There is a constant battle between the two opposites, with one giving ‘energy’ to the other.