Essay Filosofie Olympiade - Heraclitus

“Although the logos is common, most people live as though they had their own thought.”

Heraclitus (6th – 5th c. BC), fr. DK B2, in Early Greek Philosophers, ed. A. Laks and G. Most [slightly modified]. Cambridge, MA: HUP, 2016, p. 138. 

Heraclitus is an early Greek philosopher who was busy with thinking about thinking all day. He had found a word to describe the universal truth; he calls it the logos. By spending your time with deep thinking you could find the logos. He sees the world as a moving system, and the ratio is a cycle of transformations in this system. The ratio or logos isn’t just the thinking of someone, but the nature itself and the vibrations of nature. Heraclitus thinks facts will change depending on perspective. When people live in a society with authority, their perspective will change drastically, it’s impossible to reach the logos, because authorities indoctrinate their people with ideas and dogma’s, this will cause that people can’t have free and self made ideas that belong to the universal truth. 

Today, capitalism plays a major role in society, you could almost see it as an authority.Trough advertising, sponsored news and television, the ideas that underlie capitalism come into the heads of the people. Those ideas are greed and appropriation of cultural and emotional concepts. The capitalist system thereby controls their thoughts and lives. This is an obstacle on the path of the logos, named by Heraclitus. “Although the logos is common, most people live as though they had their own thought.” In the capitalist system people can’t think by the logos anymore, because they don’t have their own thoughts, but people and companies do think they have their own thoughts. Companies try to make profit out of their ideas and ideas of others. Capitalism disturbed the path to the logos, because ideas and thoughts belong to the logos, therefore to nature and therefore to everybody and aren’t just a sellable product. Mcdonald's just released their new campaign with pictures of people smiling and a price tag by their mouth. Mcdonald try to sell their food and promises that you will smile after buying. With this campaign they influence consumers by thinking that they will only be happy when they eat a burger at McDonalds. They even try to sell human emotions, but human emotions are also part of the logos, and not a sellable item. 

Although Heraclitus was more focused on the knowledge of nature, other philosophers from the Early Greek time period, thought about knowledge as a virtue. Only if you lived by the path of the logos, you could become virtuous. Another obstacle to getting to the logos and its virtues is organized religion. Religion proclaims the truth and tells people how to live a virtuous life. Especially evangelical religion tells people what to do or not do. Heraclitus' goal is searching for ultimate knowledge. In this process it’s important to ask questions and don’t follow proclaimed dogma’s. Religion is a proclaimed truth, where it’s not possible to ask questions, because everything is proven by God, say religious people. From the period of the ancient Greek until now people followed organized religions like a sleepwalking mass. The logos cannot be found in religion or God, but only in the inner self. 

The two biggest powers in the world are capitalism and religion. Heraclitus claimed that you shouldn’t follow any of those ideas, but only through critical and deep thinking it is possible to reach the logos. Religion and the capitalist system are both big obstacles on the path to the logos. But let’s stay hopeful and maybe someday we will find the logos in ourselves. Heraclitus lived a very long time ago, but we can still learn a lot from him, about how we have to share thoughts of the logos with everybody, and not just make ideas a sellable product or a proclaimed truth. I think his ideas were far ahead from his time, secretly he was just a punk anarchist from the ancient greek.