Dike eris, “strife is justice”
If objects are new from moment to moment so that one can never touch the same object twice, then each object must dissolve and be generated continually momentarily and an object is a harmony between a building up and a tearing down. Heraclitus calls the oppositional processes ἔρις eris, “strife”, and hypothesizes that the apparently stable state, δίκη dikê, or “justice,” is a harmony of it
We must know that war (πόλεμος polemos) is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being through strife necessarily.
As Diogenes explains:
All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things (τὰ ὅλα ta hola, “the whole”) flows like a stream.
In the bow metaphor Heraclitus compares the resultant to a strung bow held in shape by an equilibrium of the string tension and spring action of the bow:
There is a harmony in the bending back (παλίντροπος palintropos) as in the case of the bow and the lyre.
Tagged: philosophy
