Heraclitus B9 · B9

Donkeys, Heraclitus says, would take a pile of sweepings over gold. Aristotle cites the line for the relativity of pleasure, and that is its surface: what counts as good depends on the nature doing the choosing. To the ass, chaff is wealth and gold is nothing to eat; the valuation is not wrong, only relative to a donkey's world.

It belongs to a set — pigs preferring mud to clean water (B13), the sea that is life to fish and death to men (B61) — in which Heraclitus keeps decentering the human estimate of worth. The sting is that gold is precisely the thing he uses elsewhere to figure real value: all things are an exchange for fire as goods are for gold (B90). So the donkey's error is not that it values, but that it values by its belly, seeing only <em>surma</em>, refuse, where another eye sees the standard of all exchange. The fragment quietly asks the reader which animal he is — and most men, Heraclitus thinks, are reaching for the chaff.

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