The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (404-323 BCE) is usually described as a hermit, complete with representative anecdotes and ubiquitous lantern as a symbol of the search for knowledge and wisdom. There were no “official” hermits in ancient Greece, of course, but Diogenes captures the image of eccentric gadfly that is the “genre” of philosophical hermit in the Western world.
But overlooked as another potential hermit is the philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus (fl. 500 BCE).
Heraclitus wrote a long and complex tome titled On Nature. Here he presented his ideas of flux or flow and his idea of “unity of opposites.” Like so much of the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers, the work is now in fragments. The most familiar fragment is no. 12: “You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.” Another rephrased fragment (49) says: “We step and do not step into the same river; we are and are not.” These and other ideas expressed by Heraclitus were both quietly approved in part by contemporaries and later thinkers, including Plato, though opposing the basic notion of flux and the premises of the unity of opposites.
What annoyed contemporaries of Heraclitus — like those of Diogenes — was his outspoken criticism and disdain of others. His biographer Diogenes Laertius described Heraclitus as “hard to please,” “over-weening,” and “lofty-minded beyond all other men.”
Heraclitus did not think much of the classical thinkers: “Much learning does not teach understanding, else it would have taught Hesiod and Pythagoras, or, again, Xenophanes and Hecataeus.” Heraclitus went further, commenting that “Homer should be turned out of the lists and whipped, and Archilochos likewise.” He provoked and ridiculed his fellow citizens, as when he “would retire to the temple of Artemis and play at knuckle-bones with the boys, and when the Ephesians stood round him and looked on, Heraclitus would say to them “Why, you rascals, are you astonished? Is it not better to do this than to take part in your civil life?”
Finally, he dismissed his contemporaries peevishly: “Heraclitus am I. Why do you drag me up and down, you illiterates? It was not for you I toiled, but for such as understand me. One man in my sight is a match for thirty thousand, but the countless hosts do not make a single one. This I proclaim, you in the halls of Persephone.”
Heraclitus lived simply, in a rude hut. When a delegation of visitors came to see him one day, they looked about his quarters disdainfully. Heraclitus perceived their scorn and said quietly: “Here, too, the gods dwell.” (He used the term daimon, referring to spirits of beneficence). Finally, Diogenes Laertius tells us, Heraclitus in old age “became a hater of his kind and wandered in the mountains, and there he continued to live, making his diet of grass and herbs.”
Hut-dweller? Wanderer in the mountains? Eater of only plants — a vegan? These details alone may assure his status as hermit, a nay-saying, grumpy, but philosophical hermit.
Heraclitus was called the “dark” philosopher and the “weeping” philosopher beause of his philosophy of change, impermanence of self and universe, implying pessimism. In Raphael’s famous painting “The School of Athens, Heraclitus separates himself from all the assembled philosophers and thinkers, looking melancholy and aloof. But not far from him, also aloof but perhaps more defiant, is Diogenes of Sinope.