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Heraclitus's name hides source built arches
A Three-Month Deep Dive
Chris Begg, who runs East Coast Asset Management and teaches security analysis at Columbia Business School, was in the middle of a three-month deep dive on Heraclitus. He was reading the philosopher's fragments in different translations while a second study of arches ran alongside it. Heraclitus was known as the Obscure because he worked with paradoxes, holding several truths at the same time.
The Hidden Anagram
Staring at the letters of Heraclitus the Obscure, he suddenly saw the word arches. The word the was sitting right beside it. Then he spotted built, and the letters that remained, rearranged, spelled source.
Source built arches is an anagram of Heraclitus the Obscure, and he literally fell off his seat. He wondered whether source built was even a word, since it sounded like purpose built. It means something deeper: a thing built from first principles and aligned with how the world works, following a thread that runs back through biology, chemistry, and physics to the beginning, thirteen point seven billion years of data. The phrase became the working title of his essays.
Why was Heraclitus called the Obscure?
Ancient Greek writers called Heraclitus ho skoteinos, the dark one, because his sayings read like riddles. Aristotle noted in his Rhetoric that Heraclitus's sentences were hard to punctuate, since it was unclear which words a phrase belonged to. Cicero, writing in the first century BC, still referred to him as the one nicknamed the Obscure.
How did Heraclitus's writings survive?
His book does not survive whole. What remains are about 130 short fragments quoted by later writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Clement of Alexandria, and Hippolytus. Diogenes Laertius, a biographer of the third century AD, reported that Heraclitus left the original book as an offering in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The scholar Hermann Diels gathered the fragments into the standard edition in 1903.
Why do rivers appear in his paradoxes?
Plato's Cratylus has Socrates report that Heraclitus said everything moves and nothing stays still, comparing the world to the flow of a river. The river works as a paradox because the water is always different while the river keeps its name and its place. Pairs like that recur through the surviving sayings. One fragment holds that the road up and the road down are one and the same.
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