Three central claims from Heraclitus:
- Total mobilism of things, everything is in constant flux.
- Unity of opposites: the fragments display an order therein. (a) relativistic account, (b) difference in perspective (c) opposites are mutually implied in their meaning (no satiation without hunger) (d) opposites can only exist together (day and night are mutually dependent) (e) opposites are identical (The path up and down is one and the same.)
to (e) some will remark that this is kinda sophistry and it’s shit. but for Heraclitus this describes the world as it is. Opposites are constitutive of the world.
To be rendered divisible, is to reveal oneself not in terms of producing.
All things are one ← therefore
Fire is life-giving. It is warmth-giving and at the same time destructing. It can only live by destroying things.
Fire is the tensions between opposites in the world order.
Cyclic movement of growth and destruction
Even climate change is an indication that nature adapts itself to new situations.
Fire can burn without smoke and without a flame, so you can explain warmth with fire.
There is no nothingness until Plato.
Privation vs. negation
Privation is ‘you could have something, but you have it in lower degree.’ A blind person does not have the force of sight.
Negation is you are out of range. A stone does not have eyes.
Parmenides
He cannot be younger than 3rd generation settler. The age of Parmenides would locate his birth around 515 BCE. Some sources would put him at 530 BCE.
Very early in the existence of Elea. It is questioned whether Parmenides knew the texts of Heraclitus.
If he knew of the evolution of philosophy in Asia Minor, he’d be aware of Heraclitus.
Dates from Plato (but he is shit at chronology) c. 515 - after 450 BCE, he was one of the first philosophers.
Parmenides imposes his weight on the next generations of philosophers until Plato and Aristotle (inclusive).
He actually got preserved in ~155 verses, which is rather lucky. A large part of the verses were preserved by Simplicius in 5th-6th century CE. He said “I only have one copy, so I’ll copy it.”
Parmenides says “either it is or it is not.” Being or non-being in our terms, but that’s too abstract for Parmenides. Parmenides talks about Seiendes, “that which is” rather than the abstract being.
People like Hegel do not care about the hermeneutics so they just make up their own philosophy on this basis.
On Nature has two parts. The second part is cosmology, which he lays out after he has emphatically denied the truth of this account in the first part.
At any rate, once this second part on the appearances starts, Simplicius stops quoting Parmenides. Even for the latter, the second part was less important. This says something about the contents, once Parmenides starts talking about cosmology his thought loses a bit of strength, the lucidity of the vision which was expressed in the first part, it is and it must be.
The path of day and the path of night. the path of that which is and that which appears.
The path of non-being ends in deadlock. You immediately clash with the fact that you cannot say anything about it, the nihil negativum.
The only path you can take is the path of what is.
A third path exists, which is also wrong, and that is the path of the ‘doubleheaded,’ contradiction. I.e. to claim that there is some kind of non-being among the things that are.
For instance, a world where a human being is and is not yet, like an embryo. Or a chicken and an egg - the latter is the former, but also is not. ← Stupid people, the goddess says, fools, ordinary people don’t understand this message.
First time in history don’t believe what you see, don’t trust your senses
“It is” is never detached from individual things.
He is trying to explain the order of things through a central principle which is shared by all things.