Appearance and Reality in Heraclitus’ Philosophy

The questions that occupied early Ionian philosophers are very general in nature, and are not linked to the various skills and crafts that surface ear ly in Greek civilization.1 The awe and wonder fuelling these questions were directed towards large scale phenomena, and?according to the interpreta tion presented in this essay?called for more than mere re-descriptions or re-labellings of various features of reality. They called for explanations, but the notion of an intellectually adequate explanation took a long time to develop. Conceptions of adequate explanation were changing throughout Pre-Socratic philosophy. It was left to Aristotle to attempt to capture the various models, and give them a unifying structure within an explicit theory.2 Explanations in modern philosophies are often thought of as human constructions. We explain one thing in terms of something else to a certain audience. But within Greek thought, up to and including Aristotle, we can detect another conception that to some extent can be still seen in our own thinking as well. According to this view, some elements of reality explain or account for others. An obvious illustration of this conception is the appearance-reality distinction. We construe some entities as appearances of some other, more fundamental, underlying ones. According to the view of this essay, this way of interpreting experience is very deep-seated, and can be seen in every phase of Greek thought, including the pre-philosophical, Homeric one. The appearance-reality distinction, especially when extended to cover cosmic phenomena, calls for three conceptions: a conception of the nature of the appearances, a conception of the nature of the underlying reality, and a conception of the relation between the two. This essay places Heraclitus' thought within the framework of a general conception of Pre-Socratic thought that interprets this as a succession of proposals for what should be our main explanatory structure; i.e., our main conception of what is ap pearance, what is reality, and how the two are linked. There are many ways in which one can speculate about the natures of what one takes to be elements of reality. For example, one might want to ex plain why something appears to our senses the way it does; why the sun shines. One might also want an account of what enables some humans to