Reviews and Comments

I really need to re-read this at some point, but this is probably the best interpretation of Heraclitus written so far, since it departs from the physicist interpretation of Heraclitus's text regarding fire as the primal element and it proves how opposites and dialectics intertwined in the obscure and riddle filled understanding of a universal theory of things in motion in its most early stages.

If you are interested in Dialectical Materialism, Marxism, Hegelian philosophies and the like, Heraclitus is a must read that can help you understand the dialectical method of thinking in its most natural and everyday form.

The advance requisite and made by Heraclitus is the progression from Being as the first immediate thought, to the category of Becoming as the second. This is the first concrete, the Absolute, as in it the unity of opposites. Thus with Heraclitus the philosophic Idea is to be met with in its speculative form; the reasoning of Parmenides and Zeno is abstract understanding. Heraclitus was thus universally esteemed a deep philosopher and even was decried as such. Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic.

— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Lectures on the History of Philosophy)