Beautiful waste, orderly randomness

Abstract

The image of Heraclitus as the weeping philosopher has been celebrated in the history of the doxography. Plato, himself an heir to the teachings of the universal flux, was reticent to knowledge of the things of the sensible world, formulating his theory of Forms. But the vision of the continuous flux of the sensible is not of pessimism in Heraclitus. With a set of two pairs of opposites, waste / beautiful and random / order, he gives us his definition of the sensible world: “beautiful waste” and “orderly randomness.” As waste and randomness they will be presented to men with their own ideas; it will be necessary to liken the look to the one of a god to see the beauty and order. For whoever that has reached the position before the world that the sage has, which Heraclitus calls for, the flux is shown as the beauty of the cosmos.