Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos

Ferdinand Lassalle was born to a German-Jewish bourgeois family, studied philosophy and philology from 1843 to 1846 and decided from an early age to become a philosopher and social reformer.

[1] Heavily influenced by the German idealism of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lassalle wrote Die Philosophie Herakleitos des Dunklen von Ephesos from 1844 to 1858.

[3] Outside the Hegelian school, the Schopenhauerian philosopher Philipp Mainländer praised the work for its "brilliant astuteness" and maintained that Lassalle had found "the essence [of the philosophy of Heraclitus] behind a million cloaks".

[3] In a subsequent letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx dismissed Lassalle's book as a lesser repetition of points from Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy.

[1] He characterised Lassalle as self-important, "like a young man with his first smart suit", and wrote about the positive response Herakleitos received from academic circles: "It seems a fact that the elderly professors were astonished to experience this posthumous flowering of a past age.