Greeks III: The Logos of Heraclitus
On the cosmos, and order over disorder
This cosmos, the same for all,
no god nor man did create,
but it ever was and is and will be:
ever-living fire, kindling in measures
and being quenched in measures.
~ Heraclitus
The cosmos, as Carl Sagan put it, is all that is or ever was or ever will be.
He was surely inspired by Heraclitus. Two and a half millennia earlier he defined the concept in very similar terms: “this cosmos,” he wrote, “ever was and is and will be”. It is the first definition of the term we have, at least in the sense of meaning all creation, past and future.
It was not, however, the origin of the word. The Ancient Greek κόσμος, or kosmos, meant order, as in the opposite of χάος, or chaos. And chaos, the poet Hesiod wrote centuries earlier, was the original state of the universe. From it the world was created, and it stood thereafter in opposition: something, rather than nothing; order, rather than disorder.
That sense of order is still a guiding principle of cosmology. We trust that the cosmos is ordered, that the laws we derive here on Earth apply equally in the Andromeda Galaxy and amid the heat of the Big Bang. That they will still apply ten billion years hence, just as they applied on the day the Earth was born. Cosmos, for us, is still a belief in order over disorder.
More fundamentally, we trust that there are laws to derive. The enterprise of cosmology, and most of modern science, rests on the idea that nature can be understood and that there is some kind of logical principle behind it. Heraclitus was not only the first to define the cosmos, but he was also the first to really elucidate this concept of a governing principle, which he called logos.
Of course, he also wrote down what he thought this principle was. To Heraclitus the cosmos was something constantly in flux, in which things were constantly transforming to become their opposites. Hot things inevitably became cold, wet would become dry, and life would become death.
Such constant flux might lead to chaos, and thus to the end of the cosmos. Yet Heraclitus believed nature was governed as an eternal fire, constantly kindled and quenched to keep everything in balance. Though the surface of the cosmos might appear as raging flames, underneath all was kept in perfect order.