The Pre-Socratic Consensus

1000 words, 5 minute read

From the Alpha (Parmenides ) to the Omega (Whitehead) and beyond (Quantum Mechanics), Western philosophy has struggled with one persistent challenge: How to account for the twin phenomena of stability and flux! The problem is summarized in popular memes as well as in academic tomes:

Ø  “The only constant is change.”

Ø  “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

Ø  Wave-particle duality.

Alfred North Whitehead, author of the last great work of systematic philosophy, Process and Reality (c. 1930), summed up the dilemma with a single verse from a popular Anglican hymn:

Ø  “Abide in me, fast falls the eventide.”

2400 hundred years earlier, in the oldest substantially extant work of Western philosophy, On Nature, Parmenides, the father of Western philosophy, struggled with the same paradox. His solution: Realm of Truth (Aletheia), meet the Realm of Appearance (Doxa)!

Re the former, he writes:

Ø  “…What-is is ungenerated and imperishable…whole, single-limbed, steadfast, and complete; nor was it once, nor will it be, since it is - now, all together, one, continuous… It is not lacking (anything) but if it were, it would lack everything… It must either be completely or not at all.”  (Fragment 8)

But,

Ø  “…Nevertheless you shall learn…how the things that (only) seem must have genuine existence, permeating all things completely… (Fragment 1) To come to be and to perish, to be and not be, and to shift place and to exchange bright colors.”  (Fragment 8)

Commentators are right to note the apparently irreconcilable contrast between events in the Realm of Aletheia (stability) and those in the realm of Doxa (flux). But they fail to note that Parmenides sees these, not as separate classes of events (one real, one imagined) but as two aspects, two poles of every event (“permeating all things completely”).

In the language of Heidegger, Dasein (that it is) is ‘permeated’ by Wassein (what it is). Qualia alone do not constitute an event but there are no events without qualia. Commentators wrongly assume that Parmenides is lionizing one realm (Aletheia) at the expense of the other (Doxa). Rather, he anticipates a version of complementarity.

As human beings, we love a good rivalry: Red Sox-Yankees, Ali-Frazier, Lions-Christians, and now, Parmenides-Heraclitus. As tradition has identified Parmenides as the ‘scion of stability’, so it has labeled Heraclitus the ‘father of flux’. The stage is set for a Melee in the Mediterranean…but unfortunately for the event promoters and the ticket scalpers, Heraclitus must account for the same paradoxical phenomena as Parmenides; so it is no surprise that he arrives at a strikingly similar resolution:

Ø  “It scatters and brings together again (or, rather, it brings together and lets go, neither again nor later but simultaneously); it forms and dissolves, it approaches and departs.”  (Fragment 91)

Ø  “Whole and not whole, drawn together and drawn asunder, harmonious and discordant: the one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one.”   (Fragment 10)

Ø  “While changing, it rests.”  (Fragment 84a)

Ø  “On those who enter the same rivers ever different waters flow.” (Fragment 12)

There is a real difference between Parmenides and Heraclitus, but the difference is one of emphasis. Parmenides begins his account of ‘what is’ from the perspective of stability and then introduces flux: what is ‘whole, steadfast, and complete’ is also ‘to perish, to move and to change appearance’. 

Heraclitus begins with change and deduces permanence: ‘When I enter the same river, I am and I am not the same person; the river is the same but the water flowing though it is ever new.’

When the first Transcontinental Railroad line was built in the US (1869), it was intended to bring the West Coast east, or the East Coast west, depending on your point of view. Appropriately, construction began simultaneously from the two end points; miraculously, the two vectors met in the middle. The Golden Spike fused East and West forever via one track running in both directions.

As Heraclitus himself wrote, “The road up and the road down are the same road.”  (Fragment 60)

Parmenides began with stability and incorporated flux while Heraclitus (“everything flows”) began with flux and incorporated stability. They met in the middle. Their Golden Spike? Empedocles! A generation younger than our two headliners, he likely had access to the complete (not fragmented) works of both and he was able to point out clearly what Plato and his successors (i.e. us) managed to miss, i.e. the natural compatibility of their ideas:

“They (things) come to be and have no constant life but in so far as they never cease from interchanging, they are forever unchanged…running through each other they become different at different times and (so) are perpetually alike.” (Fragment 25)

Nothing further is required. ‘Interchanging and running through each other, they become different at different times (Doxa) and (so) are perpetually alike (Aletheia)’. Same river, different water! QED

But Empedocles elaborates:

“There is no growth…(nor) destructive death…but only mixture and interchange.” (Fragment 21)

“We come together into one cosmos…from which all things that were, and are, and will be in the future have sprung…” (Fragment 25)

There were many other philosophers of note during Greece’s Golden Century (5^th century BCE), Anaxagoras and Democritus to name just two, and they did not all agree about everything… not by a long shot. But they all confronted the paradox of permanence and change and, generally speaking, their thoughts converged on what I call the Pre-Socratic Consensus.