Page 8 - GALIET THE RIVERING WATERS: Heraclitus IV

Heraclitus of Ephesus, companion of solitude and enemy of multitudes, known as the obscure for his dark, aphoristic style and negativity towards Eleatic thought,2 supports the doctrine of flux or change, the awareness that everything flows given that all things are in perpetual motion. Plato, in Cratylus, writes: “Heraclitus postulates that all things flow, παντα ρει, and that nothing rests, and, in likening things to the flowing of a river, he says that no one can step into the same river twice.”3 This phrase of Plato earns Heraclitus the name of philosopher of change, of flux, of becoming.4 It is not certain whether, as Aristotle posits in his Metaphysics,5 it was Cratylus who gave this idea to Plato. Nevertheless, if it wasn’t Heraclitus,’ at least his followers believed that all things flowed.
2 For the Eleatics, whose main exponent is Parmenides (and Zeno, too), the ultimate reality of all things is fixed, permanent, and the unity beneath all things can be named ‘God’ or ‘Divine Law’ (F4 and F32) in contrast to Heraclitus who predicates that all things are under constant flux. 33 Thus, the argument is ‘everything is permanent’ (Parmenides) versus ‘everything changes’ (Heraclitus). Moreover, the Pluralists try to find a compromise between these two extremes: all pluralists admit plurality and motion (thus disagreeing with Parmenides), but they all accept that there is no generation or destruction. Empedocles and Anaxagoras admit the existence of many qualities or differentiation (Empedocles, a limited number of them, four; Anaxagoras, an unlimited number of them). Whereas Empedocles and Anaxagoras understand change in a qualitative sense (that is, the change of qualities), Democritus apprehends it in a quantitative sense (change is the motion of atoms in the void, or empty space, colliding, attaching to others and forming compounds that have secondary qualitiesthatcanbereducedtoprimaryones. Waterfield,Robin.TheFirstPhilosophers.ThePre-Socraticsandthe Sophists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
3 Plato. Cratylus 402a8-10. Plato. Complete Works. Cratylus. Ed. John M. Cooper. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing, 1997.
4 To Ionian philosophers, change and becoming was inapprehensible to reason, this is why it was necessary to postulate the existence of a first principle, whether it be water (Thales), apeiron (Anaximander), or air (Anaximenes). Arche as beginning, as principle of reality, had key features: it was thought of as a material substance and permanent entity underlying all changes and explaining both change, opposites and multiplicity. SeeMiletianphilosophers. Waterfield,Robin.TheFirstPhilosophers.ThePre-SocraticsandtheSophists.Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2009.
5 Aristotle. Metaphysics A, 6, 987 to 32. Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Metaphysics. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.
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