 For Anderson’s Heraclitus, “seeing things as they are” is seeing them as complex, active and changing; a perspective opposed to the optimistic, rationalist illusion of the simple, fixed and static. It is to see things as moving, historical, in process, and yet as in balance. Heraclitean “strife” is harmony: the things of everyday experience are positive and concrete because they are contingent and historical. Anderson described this “fundamental strain” in all fields of inquiry as that “between objectivism and subjectivism”, between “critical thinking” recognising complexity and tension everywhere, and “rationalist illusion” seeking the fixed and simple (JAA, Lectures on Criticism 1955, number 11.). Rationalism here shared with more primitive mythological thinking the quest for stability, security and moral uplift. Both have looked for solutions at a higher level than the problems being addressed.