Heraclitus B65 · B65

The world-fire has two conditions and Heraclitus names both at once. <em>Chrēsmosynē</em> is need, the state of lack; <em>koros</em> is satiety, the state of fullness. As the fire consumes it is filled; as it is spent it wants — the same fire in its opposite phases, exactly the rhythm of B30's kindling 'in measures' and going out 'in measures.' Fullness and hunger are not two fires but one fire's breathing in and out.

Here the unity of opposites is welded onto the cosmology. The pair reappears as a divine oscillation in B67, where god is 'satiety and hunger' among the other opposites, and the cosmic exchange of fire for all things (B90) is just this alternation writ large. <em>Koros</em> also carries an old moral shadow — surfeit as the overreaching that breeds insolence — so the fire's fullness quietly rhymes with the human excess Heraclitus elsewhere calls worth quenching more than a wildfire (B43). Want and glut are the world's own pulse.

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