the opposite process goes on simultaneously, we appear to remain the same.[1]
74.(a) Sleeping and waking. This, however, is not all. Man is subject to a certain oscillation in his "measures" of fire and water, which gives rise to the alternations of sleeping and waking, life and death. The locus classicus on this is a passage of Sextus Empiricus, which reproduces the account given by Ainesidemos.[2] It is as follows (R.P. 41):
The natural philosopher is of opinion that what surrounds us[3] is rational and endowed with consciousness. According to Herakleitos, when we draw in this divine reason by means of respiration, we become rational. In sleep we forget, but at our waking we become conscious once more. For in sleep, when the openings of the senses close, the mind which is in us is cut off from contact with that which surrounds us, and only our connexion with it by means of respiration, is preserved as a sort of root (from which the rest may spring again); and, when it is thus separated, it loses the power of memory that it had before. When we awake again, however, it looks out through the openings of the senses, as if through windows, and coming together with the surrounding mind, it assumes the power of reason. Just, then, as embers, when they are brought near the fire, change and become red-hot, and go out when they are taken away from it again, so does the portion of the surrounding mind which sojourns in our body become irrational when it is cut off, and so does it become of like nature to the whole when contact is established through the greatest number of openings.
- ↑ We seem to have a reference to this in Epicharmos, fr. 2, Diels (170 b, Kaibel): "Look now at men too. One grows and another passes away, and all are in change always. What changes in its substance (κατὰ φύσιν) and never abides in the same spot, will already be something different from what has passed away. So thou and I were different yesterday, and are now quite other people, and again we shall become others and even the same again, and so on in the same way." This is said by a debtor who does not wish to pay.
- ↑ Sextus quotes "Ainesidemos according to Herakleitos." Natorp holds (Forschungen, p. 78) that Ainesidemos really did combine Herakleiteanism with Skepticism. Diels (Dox. pp. 210, 211), insists that he only gave an account of the theories of Herakleitos. This controversy does not affect the use we make of the passage.
- ↑ Τὸ περιέχον ἡμᾶς, opposed to but parallel with τὸ περιέχον τὸν κόσμον.
