Ancient Philosophy
Heraclitus begins with a total mobilism of things, which is the structuring principle of the cosmos. The fragments display also an order in the unity of opposites. In different claims about opposites that coincide. The relativistic account, that the same things seen from different persons can have different effects, and the same thing can be described by one and the same person from different perespectives. The third idea is that opposites are mutually implied in their meaning. Having one usually implies the other. You can only experience healthy by contrasting it with a state of sickness. Opposites are also connected, not just that you define one thing in opposition to each other like health and sickness, but that they can only exist if they are in opposition. Descartes gives an example of this: ’I think of a valley and immediately I think also of a mountain’. Heraclitus’ example is that day and night coincide. You can’t have day unless you have night. It becomes ever more existentially stringent. In the first instances it is only about perspective, and as we continue the analysis it becomes existential.
Heraclitus also reacts against Hesiod. Hesiod’s main other work was called ’works and days’, which is about the agricultural life in rural Greece, northwest of Attica. He complains a lot about how lazy his brother is. Heraclitus says that Hesiod doesn’t even know the difference between day and night, because he doesn’t see that they coincide as opposites.
The last point of Heraclitus’ is not just that they depend for their existence on one another, but that they are in fact identical. The most famous example of this reading is about the path up and down. These are one and the same. The path you go up, in its inclination to the top, is also a decline to the bottom. The opposite ways of describing the thing, are actually explaining the identity of the thing itself. Without the fundamental inclination there would be no path up or down.
The circle: if you have a circle it makes no difference where you start or end, because every single point are all the beginning and the end on the path around it.
This all seems like sophistry. Playing on these kind of oppositions and paradoxes are common for Sophists, but for Heraclitus this is really describing the world as it is. Opposites are consitutive of the order of the world.
Without opposite forces, there would be no reality, no universe. Those opposite forces are actually trying to neutralise one another. They want to destroy each other.
In Freud, we exist becaues the death drive and the lust drive makes us exist so long as one doesn’t get the upper hand and destroys us. It’s a similar idea. Don’t see how this is a good example lol.
The entire universe is a constellation of tensions between things that are each other’s enemies. This in its flux is paradoxically a kind of harmony, but which clearly allows for things to come and to be destroyed.
To be rendered divisible, to reveal oneself, not in terms of producing, to be seen as a hero on the battlefield is not about producing in Homer. Only in later authors, much later authors, will say that to reveal is to produce. Generally look at the homeric meaning of words and you’ll be closer to earlier philosophers.
For Heraclitus, the corporeal principle is fire. All things are one according to the logos. And he identifies the logos with fire. Fire in itself is actually the paradigm of the coincidence of opposites in nature. Even Homer and Hesiod would stress this fact. Fire is life-giving, and at the same time destructive. It is a force that only lives by destroying things. In order to have the warmth of fire it has to destroy something. Fire is actually the tension between opposites which technically is in all things.
For the ancient Greeks the world was never created. It may have a cyclical movement of growth and destruction, but as such, nature never perishes. This whole thermo-state of the whole world is ever-changing, but never destroyed.
The ever-existence of fire is the principle that keeps the world going. Life too is fire. Life supposes warmth, and any instance of warmth is an instance of fire. The temperature of my blood is the presence of a kind of fire in there. Fire can burn without flames or smoke.
Ancient philosophers who quote Parmenides and Heraclitus were incredibly aware of nothingness and being. Parmenides totally denies nothingness. Had Heraclitus said something of nothingness that would have probably been written down. He seemingly did not think of this possibility. Neither does Parmenides. They both think nothingness is entirely impossible. It is the absence of things. They conceive of the world as a collection of things, not even necessarily of matter. They just have bodies, corporeal world. The destruction of one corporeal thing is not nothingness but only into a different state of corporeality. Only Plato introduces nothingness.
Privation: you could have something but you have it at a lower degree. It could be there but it is not.
Negation: total absence of a thing.
Absolute negation: unthinkable. We can only think of this as privation, never a pure non-existence, with the Greeks.
Logos is here already being developed into a new meaning, of the principle of everything. It is taken the meaning of a archè, as a first principle. The logic, or the rational account, is the archè of the world in Heraclitus.
Parmenides
Elea was founded around 535 bce by settlers from Phocaea. And we know that the city was actually rather recently founded when Parmenides was born there. He cannot be younger then third generation settlers of Elea. Many sources indicate Parmenides was born in 530. It is a bit questionable whether Parmenides ever knew the texts of Heraclitus, however, he did come from the same city as him. So he could’ve known about the evolutions of philosophy in Asia Minor at some point, which would make understandable some things we encounter in him.
The latest possible date is 515 in Plato, but Plato lies a lot.
Every following philosopher has the weight of Parmenides on their shoulders. He imposes obvious weight upon the coming generations.
He is rather lucky in terms of being preserved by Simplicius. Simplicius was commentating on Arisotle 1200 years later. It was already rare in his time.
Parmenides says that either it is or it is not. Parmenides does not understand the terms of being vs non-being. The english word being means not just this thing in front of me, but being as an abstract concept. Parmenides is speaking of that which is. A particular corporeal thing. Otherwise you have a distinction between being and non-being in an abstract sense, but he doesn’t consider abstract senses. People like Hegel, who weren’t bothered by this historical detail, it is the first instance of an internal logic of being vs. Non-being. However, he is not actually discovering any abstract notions at all.
The text has two parts. What is and what is not. The singular being and appearances.
Parmenides explains his cosmology as the existence of the spheres of the universe and of what they consist. After he has first emphatically denied the truth of this account. You only have to believe the account of what is, which is the ’it’. Why would a philosopher first deny the truth value of what appears and then describe what appears? Simplicius however stops quoting in the appearances part. Even he thought the second part was more disinteresting. It probably says something about the following content. His thought loses a bit of strength once he speaks of a normal cosmology.
The prologue itself is interesting from pov of what philosophy was in those days. For Parmenides it is a mythical revelation. It is something like a philosopher gaining his own authority by attributing the words to the revelation of a goddess. Philosophy and religion have not seperated ways, and they don’t in pagan antiquity. For every philosopher there is a divine inspiration or revelation in place. What they talk about is always also divine reality, there is no secular philosophy.
In the fragments quoted by Proclus, 1000 years later, ’it is all one to me, where I begin, for I shall come back there in time’, he refers to the circular image of truth. If we compare this with Heraclitus, it is totally different because there flux is everchanging, whilst in Parmenides it generally makes no difference where you begin or end because it’s all the same.
Either the thing at hand is or it is not, and it not being is impossible. If something is not, you have stated the final word about it. Anything you would say after this statement would imply its being in some way or other.
You have to avoid the path of non-being. You cannot go there, because it ends in a deadlock.
There is only one path which you can actually take, ie that it is.
There is however also a third path which is also wrong; this path includes that it is, and it is not, can be said together. There is some type of non-being amongst the things that are. But this is absurd for her. Take an embryo, it is a human-being, but it is not that yet. Parmenides says that only stupid people and fools think this. Normal people go around thinking there is some mixture. The water is cold and warm at the same time, depending on the context, anything Heraclitus is saying about opposites is a stupid way of normal people. This is a way of looking at the world which the goddess also tells Parmenides to give up.
Parmenides comes and says we cannot believe what we see. We should not believe the world of our senses. The only thing you can believe for truth is the fact that ’it is’. If you were to bring it is not into the world of it is, it would bring nothing into it.
He is talking about corporeal things in the world, and trying to argue what the archè, the principle, that makes them into what they are. He says that the principle that something is, is the very fact that it is. A material ’it is’. All things has this being in them.
Logos is now changeless truth. Eternal characteristics of the very feature that ’it is’. We need to analyse what makes things be. The archè is logos.
We have a logic, a clear cut and forcing logic. It is or it is not and any mixture is excluded. To understand this we have a number of signs about how to conceive of this.
If it is, we cannot say there is change, coming to be, or becoming. No perishing. Decay or coming to be is displayed at a level of becoming which is in the senses. In truth nothing changes. On the level of ’it is’ at any stage of it is, it is still identical. Even in nature as a whole, you have ever-ongoing decay, but nature as a whole doesn’t change. He is trying to explain the world’s order by the material principle which makes things be.
And that which is is one, as it is always identical. I may as well say it once.
And as such there can be no kinematics, no movement.
In the greek notion, perfection is actually about occupying the whole range of territory that is mine to take. Nothing is perfect if there is always more to get. The perfection is bound to be limited.
And as such it also has to be spherical, because this shape has no imperfections. By its very nature, this ’it is’ is going to be spherical because that’s what corresponds to all previous criteria. Parmenides’ it is is of immaterial shape kind of.
In Heidegger when he talks about Sein, and Sein-zum-tode, it is because we need recipient boundaries in our lives which we can vill. A vase can be filled because it has boundaries that contain it. Without these boundaries, this specific bunch of water in the vase could not exist. Our death is actually functioning as a kind of outer boundary of our lives which gives it content to be lived. Heidegger through Nietzsche was very inspired by the pre-socratics. The form, the external form, of the recipient is constitutive for its contents. And form is the word Plato will later use to describe his ideas. It is about perfection contained by specific boundaries.