Waking is death, sleep is sleep
Read the full text in our reader
θάνατός ἐστιν ὁκόσα ἐγερθέντες ὁρέομεν, ὁκόσα δὲ εὕδοντες ὕπνος
Death is all that we see once awake; but all that we see asleep is sleep.
Preserved by Clement of Alexandria (Stromata). An enigma on the grades of death: what we see awake is death; what we see asleep is sleep.
The fragment sorts the states of consciousness by their nearness to death, and puts waking life on the wrong side of the line. What we take in with open eyes — the whole perceived world of things coming to be and passing — Heraclitus calls <em>thanatos</em>, death. Sleep, by contrast, is only sleep: a lesser withdrawal, not the real thing. The everyday hierarchy is inverted. We think waking is life and sleep a little death; he says waking sight is the death, and sleep merely its milder cousin.
The key word is <em>horeōmen</em>, 'we see' — the fragment is about perception, the soul turned outward through the eyes toward the moist, changing world where things die into one another. That outward-facing life is already a kind of dying, which is why B26 has a man 'kindle a light for himself in the night' and touch the dead while he sleeps. Behind it stands the old Greek pairing Hesiod drew, Hypnos and Thanatos, Sleep and Death, twin sons of Night — here not twins but degrees of one descent.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Heraclitus B21 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Heraclitus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Heraclitus B21 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/heraclitus/B21/