Socio-economic conditions in Germany and the November Revolution

The emergence of the Weimar Republic is directly related to that extreme situation, which took shape at the end of the First World War and the November 1918 revolution in Germany.

The republic was born in the atmosphere of a hopeless military situation in Germany towards the end of the summer of 1918 and was partly (in the people's minds) a reaction to the government's inability to end the war victoriously. In fact, the Weimar Constitution fixed what had long been on the agenda of imperial Germany, namely, to carry out the transformation of the state into a bourgeois republic.

In a series of revolutionary events in Europe, after October revolution in Russia, the November bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1918 occupies a special place. The German revolution was of a massive, popular character. Almost all social strata of Germany were involved in it. It was powerful explosion popular indignation against the war itself and those reactionary militarist forces that unleashed and continued it until the complete defeat of the German army. The war brought more and more disasters to the German people. It cost Germany 2.5 million killed Germans, hundreds of thousands of missing persons, 4.5 million wounded and disabled people, led to devastation in industry, a reduction in crop areas, a drop in harvests, and famine resulting from the economic blockade. Resentment against the government was widespread. The elite could no longer rule the country in the old way. A chasm has formed between the German people and the completely discredited ruling elite.

In the conditions of a complete military and political defeat approaching in the fall of 1918 in Germany, the tangle of social contradictions inherent in the Kaiser's empire, in which the rapid development of capitalism was combined with the preservation of semi-feudal land tenure in the countryside, the semi-absolutist regime, with the established forms of bourgeois parliamentarism, sharpened to the extreme.

Left-wing radical forces linked the future of Germany with the elimination of the bourgeois order in the course of the victorious socialist revolution in alliance with Soviet Russia. These slogans, however, were not shared not only by the majority of the German people, but also by the majority of the working class in Germany, which was firmly under the influence of the reformist Social Democratic ideology. The Communist Pro-Bolshevik Party of Germany, formed in December 1918 on the basis of the Spartak League, did not rely on any significant social base. It was unable to offer the workers, the middle strata and the peasantry their own broad democratic program for a way out of the most difficult social crisis.

The dominant demands and slogans of the November Revolution: the end of the war, the destruction of the monarchy, the creation of a democratic parliamentary republic, the elimination of the political domination of the militant circles of the big bourgeoisie, the elimination of semi-feudal landlordism, the consolidation of the social rights of the working people, did not go beyond the bourgeois-democratic framework.

The revolution in Germany was not a one-time event. It was preceded by a wave of political strikes and demonstrations in the summer of 1918 demanding peace, democracy and improvement. living conditions German people, the beginning - the uprising of sailors in Kiel on November 4, 1918, during which the first workers 'and soldiers' councils were created. Then the revolution, with varying degrees of intensity, began to spread throughout the country. But already in January 1919, the counter-revolution, relying on the preserved Kaiser state apparatus, the generals, the officers of the old army, on the volunteer detachments created throughout the country, in which representatives of the middle strata and the peasantry, who did not share the radical left-wing demands of the rebels, were widely involved, proceeded to its armed suppression. ... The workers' protest in Berlin was brutally suppressed, the headquarters of the German communists was destroyed, the founders of the German Communist Party Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were brutally murdered.

Local revolutionary uprisings continued until 1921, but they were scattered. Their peculiar culmination was the establishment of proletarian power in Bavaria. In April 1919, the Soviet Republic was proclaimed here, a 15-person Action Committee headed by the Communists was elected, commissions were created to carry out revolutionary transformations in the economy, the nationalization of banks began, the Red Guard and the Red Army were created. The republic fell in early May, not even one month in existence. By this time, the last revolutionary centers were suppressed in Germany.

The main achievements of the revolution were Germany's withdrawal from the war, the collapse of the Kaiser's empire of the Hohenzollerns, and with it the elimination of two dozen more German semi-absolutist monarchies, the establishment of a democratic form of government, a parliamentary Weimar republic, the consolidation of a wide range of political and social rights and freedoms of the German people: universal electoral rights, freedom of speech, assembly, unions, the 8-hour working day, the right to organize trade unions, a collective agreement, the abolition of reactionary laws on enslaving forms of exploitation of peasants, the elimination of large feudal land tenure, etc. Due to a number of objective and subjective factors, the November revolution in Germany did not destroy the Kaiser's bureaucratic state apparatus.

Development and adoption of the Constitution

The content of the Constitution was determined not only by clashes of interests and agreements of various socio-political forces in the National Assembly, but also by those cardinal social and political changes that took place in Germany at a turning point in its history - from November 1918 to June 1919. The first important a step towards a political compromise was taken on December 15, 1918, when Hugo Preuss, a professor of public law at the Berlin School of Commerce, known in imperial Germany as a "leftist statesman" and a prominent figure in the National Liberal Party, was appointed to the post of State Secretary of the Ministry internal affairs together with a proposal to draft a new constitution. The draft constitution was drawn up in record time - namely, within a few days. This project was made on the basis of a project developed by him earlier on his own initiative and after revision, in which M. Weber participated as a representative of the government, was sent to the SNU under the title "Draft of the future constitution (general part)". The preliminary draft constitution consisted of a small (compared to the constitutions of other countries) number of articles, namely 68. It contained only three sections: "Empire and Free German States", "Reichstag", "Imperial President and Imperial Government". So what was the Preliminary Draft Constitution? It constructed a model of a parliamentary republic with two interacting and restraining centers of state power: the Reichstag and the president. Fundamental rights and freedoms were not spelled out in detail in the draft and were represented only by articles on freedom of conscience, on the equality of all Germans before the law and on the protection of national minorities. The compiler sought to avoid a lengthy debate on this issue in the National Assembly, which could obscure the project itself, as was the case in Frankfurt am Main in 1848.

One way or another, the project was submitted for consideration. So, in January 1919, the draft constitution was submitted to the SNU. (Note that SNU is an abbreviation that stands for the Council of People's Commissioners. SNU took over the powers of a temporary "political cabinet" and was headed by the Social Democrats F. Ebert and G. Haase.). Members of the SNU (in particular Ebert) demanded a greater identification of the democratic character in the constitution, primarily by including a wide range of rights and freedoms. The result of the subsequent six-month work on the draft constitution (including debates in the National Assembly) was a new version of it, composed of two parts: "The structure and tasks of the empire" and "Basic rights and obligations of the Germans."

It must be said that the version of the next draft constitution differed from the constitutions of other countries, in which the list of the rights and freedoms of citizens was in the first place. The departure from the traditional structure of European constitutions, in which the list of rights and freedoms was in the first place, was not accidental. G. Preuss and his colleagues on the Constitutional Committee believed that "first there must be a state that could protect fundamental rights." This slogan largely reflected the largest part of the requirements that the SNU put before the drafters of the constitution. So, the state comes first, and only then the rights of the citizen.

And so, in July 1919, the Constitution was adopted by the National Assembly. The Weimar Constitution was strikingly different from the Constitution of 1871. Fundamentally new legal concepts, in comparison with the Constitution of 1871, were reflected in its preamble. This is the principle of "national unity" and "popular sovereignty", as well as the principles of "freedom" and "social justice". The proclamation of "popular sovereignty" destroyed the dynastic tradition of state power, since the Reichstag elected on the basis of universal suffrage and the president became its bearers.



November revolution of 1918, (German Novemberrevolution) - revolution in November 1918 in German Empire, which became one of the reasons for the defeat of Germany in the First World War. The revolution led to the establishment in Germany of a parliamentary republic known as Weimar republic.

The German revolution was of a massive, popular character. Almost all social strata of Germany were involved in it.

It was a powerful outburst of popular indignation against the war itself and those reactionary militarist forces that unleashed and continued it until the complete defeat of the German army.

In the conditions of the impending complete military and political defeat in Germany in the fall of 1918, the tangle of social contradictions sharpened to the extreme,

Other distinctive feature The November Revolution was connected with the fact that it took place under the direct influence of the October Revolution in Russia and, moreover, with the direct ideological and organizational support of the leadership of the Russian Bolshevik Party of its radical left wing.

Left-wing radical forces linked the future of Germany with the elimination of the bourgeois order in the course of the victorious socialist revolution in alliance with Soviet Russia.

The Communist Pro-Bolshevik Party of Germany, which was formed in December 1918 on the basis of the Spartak Union, did not rely on any significant social base. It was unable to offer the workers, the middle strata and the peasantry their own broad democratic program for a way out of the most difficult social crisis.

The dominant demands and slogans of the November Revolution: the end of the war, the destruction of the monarchy, the creation of a democratic parliamentary republic, the elimination of the political domination of the militaristic forces of the Junkers and the militant circles of the big bourgeoisie, the elimination of the semi-feudal Junker-landlord land tenure, the consolidation of the social rights of the working people - did not go beyond the bourgeois-democratic ...

The revolution in Germany was not a one-off event. It was preceded by a wave of political strikes and demonstrations in the summer of 1918 demanding peace, democracy and the improvement of the living conditions of the German people, the beginning - the uprising of sailors in Kiel on November 4, 1918, during which the first workers 'and soldiers' councils were created. Then the revolution, with varying degrees of intensity, began to spread throughout the country. But already in January 1919, the counter-revolution, relying on the preserved Kaiser state apparatus, the generals, the officers of the old army, on the volunteer detachments created throughout the country, in which representatives of the middle strata and the peasantry, who did not share the radical left demands of the rebels, were widely involved, switched to its armed suppression.

Local revolutionary actions continued until 1921, but they were scattered. Their peculiar culmination was the establishment of proletarian power in Bavaria. In April 1919, the Soviet Republic was proclaimed here, an Action Committee of 15 people headed by the Communists was elected, commissions were created to carry out revolutionary transformations in the economy, the nationalization of banks began, the Red Guard and the Red Army were created. The republic fell in early May, not even one month. By this time, the last revolutionary centers were suppressed in Germany.

The main achievements of the revolution were Germany's withdrawal from the war, the collapse of the Kaiser's empire of the Hohenzollerns, and with it the elimination of two dozen more German semi-absolutist monarchies, the establishment of a democratic form of government, a parliamentary Weimar Republic, the consolidation of a wide range of political and social rights and freedoms of the German people: universal suffrage, freedom of speech, assembly, unions, the 8-hour working day, the right to organize trade unions, collective agreement, the abolition of reactionary laws on enslaving forms of exploitation of peasants (laws on servants), the elimination of large feudal land tenure, etc.

Weimar Constitution(German Weimarer Verfassung; official name The Constitution of the German Empire (Verfassung des Deutschen Reichs) or the Weimar Imperial Constitution (German Weimarer Reichsverfassung), abbr. WRV) - the first democratic constitution in force in Germany. It was adopted on 11 August 1919 in Weimar. The Weimar Constitution established a republic in Germany, operating on the principles of parliamentary democracy and federalism. Many provisions of the Weimar Constitution were borrowed from the Paulskirche Constitution of 1848, and then in 1949 were adopted by the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. At the place of adoption of the constitution, the German Empire in its democratic period from 1919 to 1933 received the name of the Weimar Republic.

The first draft of the constitution was largely prepared by the Secretary of State of the Reich Department of the Interior, Hugo Preiss, who later took over the post of Reich Minister of the Interior after the Council of People's Plenipotentiaries refused to nominate Max Weber.

Everything political structures of the Kaiser period, provided for by the Bismarck constitution, such as the Federal Council of the German Empire, were liquidated or lost their significance, therefore, between the monarchist and republican parties a serious struggle unfolded. On July 31, 1919, the National Assembly adopted the constitution in its final form (262 in favor, 75 against, 84 deputies were absent). On August 11, 1919, Reich President Friedrich Ebert put his signature on the constitution in Schwarzburg. The Constitution came into force from the moment of its publication. August 11 became the national holiday of the Weimar Republic, recalling "the birthday of democracy in Germany."

The Weimar Constitution formally remained in effect even after Adolf Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. In fact, however, it was mostly inactive. First, after the fire of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, a decree of the Reich President "On the Protection of the People and the State" was issued, which canceled the mandates of 81 deputies of the Reichstag from the Communist Party of Germany and thereby created the necessary 2/3 majority for the adoption of amendments to the constitution, which allowed the adoption of the Law "On overcoming the plight of the people and the Reich. " This law, passed on March 23, 1933, was initially limited to four years, but was subsequently extended several times. Only with the transfer of power to the Control Council on June 5, 1945, the Weimar Constitution completely lost its effect.

Articles 136, 137, 138, 139 and 141 of the Weimar Constitution in 1949 were incorporated into the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany. Other norms of the Weimar Constitution, which did not contradict the Basic Law, functioned as customary law of the Federal Republic of Germany until the 60s.

In keeping with the traditions of German constitutional law, the Weimar Constitution consisted of three parts... First of all, it delimited in external relations the powers of the empire and its constituent lands (the former allied states of the imperial empire). Further, the constitution established the bodies of the imperial state power and their powers in relation to each other. The third part of the constitutional norms regulated the relationship between the state and citizens. Unlike the Imperial Bismarck Constitution of 1871, the Weimar Constitution established in the second part an extensive list of basic constitutional rights and freedoms.

When studying the history of creation Weimar Constitution of 1919 it is necessary to find out the correlation of socio-political forces in Germany, which has developed as a result of the revolutionary events of 1918-1919. Special attention on the alignment of forces in the Constituent Assembly, on the nature of the political and legal guidelines of those parties, party factions that were directly involved in the development of the Constitution.

Constitution of 1919 became one of the most democratic legal documents of its time. Its main content was reflected in those compromise provisions that called for the establishment of "people's sovereignty", "civil peace", "cooperation of all classes", for "freedom" and "justice." The democratic nature of the Constitution, which marked the end of the era of traditional autocracy for the country, was determined not only by the political compromise of various socio-political forces in the Constituent Assembly, but also by those cardinal changes that took place in Germany at a turning point, revolutionary democratic stage in its history, from November 1918 to July 1919

It is necessary to understand the nature of these changes, their purpose and significance. When considering the main features of the Weimar Constitution, it is advisable to pay special attention to its new principles and political attitudes compared with the Constitution of 1871: "popular sovereignty", "social justice", democratic republicanism and federalism.

Investigating the peculiarities of the form of the state in the Weimar Republic, it is necessary to identify (based on the analysis of the relevant articles of the Constitution) the difference between its federal structure and the federal structure according to the Constitution of 1871, clearly define the form of government, as well as the nature of the political regime, methods of exercising state power.

2. State system according to the Weimar Constitution of 1919. Parliamentary-republican form of government and federal-administrative form state structure... Democratic rights and freedoms under the 1919 Constitution.

When analyzing the system of supreme authorities, it is required to consider the democratic procedure for their formation, the scope of powers of the Reichstag as a body of popular representation, the Reichsrat as a body of representation of the states and the president, who was formally assigned the role of “non-party arbiter”.

Investigating the specific features of the German federal administrative structure, it is necessary to show how the Weimar Republic, through the introduction of new principles for the creation of the upper house of parliament, as well as the complex principle of the distribution of legislative rights between the empire and the lands (Articles 6-12), based on the main postulate: “imperial law has priority over the law of the lands ”(Article 13), overcame the traditional political hegemonism of Prussia.

In addition, it is necessary to substantiate the statement that the order of division of spheres public relations on regulated exclusively empire legislation, predominantly the laws of the empire, the laws of the empire "of necessity" and the laws of individual lands, was introduced with the aim of strengthening the central federal authority as necessary condition overcoming the acute economic, political and social crisis in post-war Germany.

It should also be emphasized that in accordance with the guidelines for strengthening the general imperial power, the content of other provisions of the 1919 Constitution was determined to a large extent. The empire owned, for example, the most important powers in financial sphere: to determine the size and procedure for the receipt of revenues in the imperial treasury, to intervene in the local taxation of individual lands (Article 11), etc. The Constitution referred to the powers of the lands mainly on local administrative issues, the implementation of general imperial laws.

When identifying characteristic features Weimar Constitution, its fundamental differences from the Constitution of the German Empire of 1871, it is necessary to pay attention to a wide range of democratic rights and freedoms of German citizens, especially to social rights, to a fundamentally new interpretation of property rights (Article 153), to norms labor law(Art. 157, 159, 165, etc.), social security(Art. 161, etc.), the right of workers to participate in determining the economic policy of the state (Art. 165). Thus, the Weimar Constitution of 1919 opened a new page in the field of the rights and freedoms of citizens by giving social rights (the second generation of rights and freedoms) a constitutional status, which was directly related to the peculiarities of the November Revolution of 1918, which, in turn, experienced the strongest influence of the October Revolution of 1917. in Russia, its socialist slogans and demands. Of the Constitution " new wave”Adopted in a number of countries after the Second World War, adopted and developed this social aspect of the rights and freedoms of citizens of the Weimar Constitution of 1919.

The student should also characterize those historical circumstances, due to which the democratic rights and freedoms of the Weimar Constitution of 1919. were not implemented (lack of the necessary economic base, the proper level of social consciousness, political stability, the preservation of the pre-revolutionary bureaucratic apparatus in post-war Germany, etc.).

Heraclitus belonged to the royal city of Ephesus, but he gave up the throne, built a hut in the mountains and devoted his life to philosophy. Heraclitus is called crying philosopher because, according to the legend, he could not look at the bustle of people without tears. He is also called the Dark One, because his aphorisms were not always understood by his contemporaries. Works about nature are attributed to him, but only insignificant fragments have survived to us.

Philosophical ideas of Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus, a younger contemporary of the Ionian philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes, a man of a noble family, an aristocratic way of thinking and a sad temperament, inclined to melancholy, built a system based not on experience, but on speculation, taking fire as the source of material and spiritual life, which , in his opinion, it is necessary to consider and the beginning of all things. Heraclitus expounded his teaching in the book "On Nature"; ancient writers say that his presentation was very dark.

According to Heraclitus, fire is a natural force that creates everything with its warmth; it penetrates all parts of the universe, we accept, in each part its special property. These modifications of fire produce objects, and further modifications of fire destroy the objects produced by it, and thus the universe is in an eternal cycle of changes: everything in it arises and changes; there is nothing lasting, unchanging. Everything that seems to a person constant, immovable, seems so only by deceiving the senses; everywhere in the universe, every minute everything takes on different qualities: everything in it is either compounded or decomposed. The law by which the changes take place is the law of gravity. But the eternal process of changing matter is ruled by a special universal law - unchanging fate, which Heraclitus calls Logos or Heimarmene. This is eternal wisdom that brings order into the eternal current of changes, into the process of the eternal struggle between emergence and destruction.

Heraclitus is the first ancient Greek philosopher known to us, who believed that the main task of a philosopher is not to contemplate the inert, motionless forms of the surrounding life, but to penetrate the essence of a living world process through deep inner intuition. He believed that this eternal incessant movement is primary in the universe, and all material objects participating in it are only his secondary instruments. The doctrine of Heraclitus stands at the origins of the ideological trend, which gave, among other things, the modern Western "philosophy of life."

The human soul, according to Heraclitus, consists of warm dry steam; she is the purest manifestation of divine fire; it feeds on the heat received from the fire that surrounds the universe; she perceives this warmth with her breath and sense organs. That soul is endowed with wisdom and other good qualities, which consists of very dry steam. If the steam that makes up the soul becomes moist, then the soul loses its good qualities and her mind weakens. When a person dies, then the divine part of him is separated from the body. Pure souls in the afterlife become beings higher than humans ("demons"). Heraclitus, it seems, thought about the fate of the souls of bad people in the same way as the popular belief about the afterlife of the god Hades. Some scholars believe that Heraclitus was familiar with the Persian teachings of Zoroaster. They see his influence in the fact that Heraclitus considers all the dead to be unclean, gives an extremely high meaning to fire and considers the process of life to be a universal struggle.

Sensual knowledge cannot, according to the teachings of Heraclitus, lead us to the truth; it is found only by the one who tries to delve into the divine law of the mind that rules the universe; whoever obeys this law receives peace of mind, the highest blessing of life. Just as the law rules in the universe and must rule over the soul of man, so he must rule over the life of the state. Therefore, Heraclitus hated tyranny, hated democracy as well, as the dominion of an unreasonable crowd, which obeys not reason, but sensual impressions and therefore deserves contempt.

He bravely rebelled against Greek worship and rejected the gods of popular religion. Scientist Zeller says about him: “Heraclitus was the first philosopher who decisively expressed the idea that nature is imbued with the original principle of life, that everything material is in a continuous process of change, that everything individual arises and perishes; to this process of eternal change of objects, he opposed the invariable identity of the law of changes, the dominion of rational force over the course of the life of nature. " The idea of ​​Heraclitus about the domination of an unchanging, intelligent law-Logos over the process of change was apparently not accepted by those of his followers, at whom Plato laughs for not recognizing anything constant, they spoke only of the continuous variability of everything according to the inner law of the universe ...

HERCLITUS of Ephesus(lat. Heraclitus, Greek. Heraclitos) (about 550 BC, Ephesus, Asia Minor - about 480 BC), ancient greek philosopher, one of the largest representatives of the Ionian school of philosophy. He considered fire to be the origin of existence. Creator of the concept of continuous change, the doctrine of "logos", which was interpreted as "god", "fate", "necessity", "eternity". Heraclitus was credited with the famous saying "you cannot enter the same river twice". Along with and Heraclitus determined the foundations of ancient and all European philosophy. Revealing the all-round mystery of the familiar world of myth, custom, traditional wisdom, Heraclitus discovers being itself as a riddle.

A native of Ephesus, the son of Bloson, Heraclitus belonged to an ancient aristocratic family, dating back to the founder of Ephesus, Androcles. Due to the origin, Heraclitus possessed a number of "royal" privileges and hereditary priestly dignity at the temple of Artemis of Ephesus. However, in his years of life, the power in Ephesus no longer belonged to the aristocrats. The philosopher did not participate in the public life of the city, he renounced his titles, spoke sharply negatively about the urban order and contemptuously treated the "crowd". According to him, "the Ephesians deserve to be hanged by all without exception" for the fact that they expelled his friend Hermodorus, "saying:" Let no one be the best among us. " He considered the laws of the city so hopelessly bad that he refused his fellow citizens a request for new ones, noting that it was better to play with children than to participate in public affairs.

Heraclitus did not leave Ephesus and refused the invitations of the Athenians and the Persian king Darius. According to some testimonies, Heraclitus was a student of Xenophanes and Hippasus the Pythagorean, according to others, he was not anyone's student, but he "learned everything from himself." Numerous anecdotes about the death of Heraclitus are based on some of his sayings, misinterpreted and transmitted by hearsay.

The main work of Heraclitus - the book "On Nature" was preserved in fragments, but it is extensively cited in the works of later ancient philosophers (, and others). This book consists of three parts: about nature, about the state and about God, and is distinguished by the originality of content, imagery and aphoristic language. At the same time, the book is difficult to understand, for which, already in ancient times, Heraclitus received the nickname Skutinos (Dark).

The main idea of ​​Heraclitus is that there is nothing permanent in nature. Everything in nature is like the movement of a river, which cannot be entered twice. One constantly passes into another, changing its state. Fire is the symbolic expression of universal change for Heraclitus. Fire is continuous self-destruction; it lives by its own death. Heraclitus introduced a new philosophical concept - logos (word), meaning by this the principle of the rational unity of the world, which orders the world by mixing opposite principles. Opposites are in eternal struggle, giving rise to new phenomena (“discord is the father of everything.”) Human reason and logos have a common nature, but logos exists in eternity and governs the cosmos, of which man is a particle.

Tradition has preserved the image of Heraclitus the sage, a highly intelligent loner who despised people (and those who were famous as sages) for not understanding what they themselves say and do. Having interpreted the teachings of Heraclitus in the spirit of the common world grief about the transience of life and everything in the world, popular philosophy saw in him the prototype of the "weeping sage", just as in Democritus it found the type of the "laughing sage". The wisdom of Heraclitus, detached from the knowledgeable ignorance of people and living in the neighborhood with the simple wisdom of being, is captured by a characteristic scene: some wanderers who wished to look at the famous sage stop at the threshold of a wretched dwelling, embarrassed by the sight of an ordinary-looking person warming himself by the hearth. "Come in, they hear, and the gods also dwell here" (Aristotle, "On the Parts of Animals").

Heraclitus expressed himself so succinctly and ambiguously. His sayings are often similar to folklore riddles or the oracle, who, according to Heraclitus, "... neither speaks, nor does he conceal, but gives signs." Some believe that by writing his composition ("The Muses" or "On Nature") it is deliberately dark and having deposited it in the temple of Artemis of Ephesus, Heraclitus allegedly wanted to save him from the ignorant crowd. Others see here precisely the clearly expressed darkness and mystery of the very thing that is to be told. Aristotle explains the darkness of Heraclitus's utterances by their syntactic ambiguity, as a result of which the statement can be read in different ways. The sayings of Heraclitus in fact reveal a well-thought-out structure, a special poetics. They are saturated with alliterations, play on words, internally connected by chiasmata, inversions, non-union syntax or parataxis characteristic of the structure of internal speech, speech addressed not so much to others as to itself, listening to itself, ready for rethinking, for returning to the element of thinking silence. When the tragedian Euripides asked Socrates about the composition of Heraclitus, he replied: "What I understood perfectly, what I did not understand, I think, too, but by the way, we need a downright Delian diver."

The question to which Heraclitus answers, how is everything one, or what is the (one) being of (multiple) beings? The most famous answer to this question is the thesis "everything flows, nothing rests." In the existence of many, a single being flows (flows, occurs). To be means to constantly become, to flow from form to form, to be renewed, just as the same river carries new and new waters. Another metaphor of being as constantly happening is combustion, fire in Heraclitus. The structure of a self-sufficient world ("cosmos") is "an eternal fire, regularly igniting, regularly extinguishing." A single being seems to flare up with a multitude of beings, but it also extinguishes in it, just as existent, flaring up by being, extinguishes in its unity. Another metaphor for the same is play: each time a new game of the same game. Becoming and constancy, the plurality of existing and the unity of being are combined when the stream is thought to flow into itself, the ignition and extinction, the beginning and the end coincide. The single being of a multitude, conceived as a stream flowing into itself, or burning, extinguishing to the extent of its flare-up, is more accurately (and more mysterious) conveyed by the understanding of the whole as an internal interconnection of the opposite: the existence (flow) of night and day is mutual overlapping and internal co-presence, life lives by confrontation death, but death also "lives" by this; immortality of immortals and mortality of mortals are mutual; the opposing forces by this very confrontation are firmly linked into a single harmony of existence, which is similar to the "harmony of bow and lyre". The world as the confrontation of the opposite Heraclitus conveys the image of the world-battle, the world-battle ("polemos"). "You need to know that the battle is universal, and litigation is true, and everything becomes litigation and mutual obligation." "War is the father of all, the king of all: she declares some as gods, others as people, some as slaves, others as free."

The image of a universal battle, which embraces everything that exists as a whole and in which every being is captured in what it actually is, turns out to be also a way of understanding everything and everyone. Such is the general mind, in contrast to private misunderstandings, the one and only wisdom, corresponding to the makeup of the being itself, to how the multitude of the existing is compounded into the unity of being. This warehouse, "syllable" is similar to how a single word of a poem is composed of a multitude of words, the cosmos of speech, which carries in itself "the image of the world in the word manifested" (). Hence the theme of "logos", which, judging by some fragments, has a special meaning for Heraclitus. The composition ("logos") of Heraclitus opened with the words: "With regard to this logos of existence, people are always incomprehensible ...". Aristotle uses this example to explain the "darkness" of Heraclitus: if "always" refers to "existence", it seems to be about the "logos" of existence itself; But it is precisely this ambiguity that is important for Heraclitus. Greek word"logos" means "word", "speech", "composition", "report", but also accountable itself, "state of affairs", "balance of forces". "Logos" -the word about the whole is intended to convey how everything is put into the integrity of the "logos" -being. "Not to me, but to the" logos "listening, it is wise to agree: everything is one". "Logos" is a form, something general, which allows you to convey the warehouse of things in the appropriate way of speech. Hence the "darkness" of the sayings of Heraclitus: being, which occurs in the confrontation of things, is grasped by thought, living in the contradiction of speeches.