Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)
Georg Hegel · en
_c._ He further made this fire to be a real process; because its
reality is for itself the whole process, the moments have become
concretely determined. Fire, as the metamorphosis of bodily things, is
the transformation and exhalation of the determinate; for this process
Heraclitus used a particular word—evaporation (_ἀναθυμίασις_)—but it
is rather transition. Aristotle (De anim. I. 2) says of Heraclitus in
this regard, that, according to his view, “the soul is the principle
because it is evaporation, the origination of everything; it is what
is most incorporeal and always in a state of flux.” This is quite
applicable to the primary principle of Heraclitus.
Furthermore he determined the real process in its abstract moments
by separating two sides in it—“the way upwards (_ὁδὸς ἄνω_) and the
way downwards (_ὁδὸς κάτω_)”—the one being division, in that it is
the existence of opposites, and the other the unification of these
existent opposites. Corresponding to these, he had, according to
Diogenes (IX. 8), the further determinations “of enmity and strife
(_πόλεμος_, _ἔρις_), and friendship and harmony (_ὁμολογία_, _εἰρήνη_);
of these two, enmity and strife is that which is the principle of
the origination of differences; but what leads to combustion is
harmony and peace.” In enmity amongst men, the one sets himself up
independently of the other, or is for himself and realizes himself; but
unity and peace is sinking out of independence into indivisibility or
non-reality. Everything is thre-fold and thereby real unity; nature is
the never-resting, and the all is the transition out of the one into
the other, from division into unity, and from unity into division.