Flaws In Heraclitus’ Notion Of Absolute Change Or Impermanence

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Reply to tim wood :up:

Reply to tim wood Heraclitus himself, in fact, produced a manuscript of his own that was entitled, “On Nature”, which he submitted to the historically famous “Artemisium”, &, therefore, he wasn’t merely remembered as having voiced opinion “x, y, & z”, so, try to bear in mind that all of his extant quotations come from people who had access to & directly cited his personal manuscripts; which is why we only have fragments of his work, since no respectable author ever quotes an entire body of work of another author, but only parts, bits or fragments of it.

Therefore, to be clear, the quote in my O.P. is literally in Heraclitus’ own words, it’s a direct quotation from him; so I’m not merely discussing hearsay about his philosophy, that’s a direct albeit short passage from his personal work.

Ok, now that that’s cleared up, even though all of that was & is pretty irrelevant to the matter at hand, let’s get to the point. In my view, Heraclitus meaning in that short passage is quite obvious; & my interpretation of his meaning, here, isn’t far off, if at all, from the general understanding of what his philosophy is intended to mean, imply or suggest, which is that of ceaseless change/ impermanence.

Are you denying that, in the aforementioned quote in my O.P., Heraclitus is maintaining that a person or self, a “man” (in his words), cannot exist for more than a moment or instant?

Reply to aRealidealist The ‘memory’ is the ‘illusion’ of ‘permanence’. We need something to ground ourselves in or we’d just be floating entities without any orientation whatsoever.

The key point is ‘orientation’. A point of reference is required regardless of how ‘permanent’ we consider it to be - hence the reason people believe x, y or z, because it forms their axis mundi/their weltanschauung (aka. ‘worldview’).

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Reply to aRealidealist The veracity of your claim of fault inhering within that line of phrase is contingent upon the way in which one derives any sense of the meaningful, therefrom, and what forms of parameter constrain one's chosen interpretation of its object. Which is to say, without cause for equivocation, that its meaning as intended, is likely to have endured a depth of change itself, and consequently deviates in the case of its present expression, from that of which it was conceived, firstly. Given time, in its fullest passage, such as has occurred with respect to the given manner of phrase, loss of clarity becomes doubtless, as what is held in question as the object of one's inquiry assumes a newfound significance for the general thought of each passing era, which, having grown in breadth as a whole, finds ever lesser precision in its usage; or at least, a conditioned variance between those sentiments that it seems to convey is found, when one considers it in a context that differs to any great degree from that in which it came proceed, before all else, at the time of its outset.

There is reason for one to suspect that the subject to which his past statement pertains, is the universality of the application of change to all affairs of life in its broadest sense. Any individual having sway, and been considered in the instance of which he had spoken, in particular, serves only as a means to illustrate, and grant further reflection upon some principle of an exceptionally diverse, and expansive foundedness. Seeing as a clear and established difficulty lies in the act of rendering such maxims intelligible, without sacrificing due substance through the inadvertent, within the course of their respective exposition, it is necessary at times to dispense with conceptions that lie wholly entrenched in the abstract, and without any firm grounding within the world of the intuitive, such as he had sought to achieve. One may thus provide a certain extraneous structure, applicable to any domain of thought, within the confines of which the preceding force of expression collapses unto itself beneath the heft of our instruments of analysis, as devoted thereto, whilst ensuring that such scrutiny never alters, nor detracts from, the truth of its principle.

Reply to aRealidealist Yes, and then again, no.

The issue of identity and permanence vs. transience which Heraclitus raised remains, and will remain. For practical purposes, I am confident of my identity and think the world is stable and remains the same from minute to minute. If I step away from practicality, however, I can see that the world isn't entirely stable (it really is changing all the time, from the sub-atomic scale to the macro scale of the universe, though usually in an orderly and more or less predictable way). Whether my identity is stable or not is a more complicated matter than I want to get into right now.

Pick a river, any river. Yesterday you swam in the river. Today the water you splashed around in someplace else. The water you swim in today is not the same water you swam in yesterday -- quite literally. The water is moving past you even as you dive in. The shores of the river remain; the name of the river remains; the water which composes the river (without which it would be a dry gulch) moves, mixes, becomes more or less turgid and turbid from time to time, increases and decreases in volume, is more or less pure--depending on how much crap we dump into it.

Pick some thing: Any thing. It is changing as you look at, even if you can not see the change. Take the window through which you are looking. Glass is an extremely slow-moving liquid. Five hundred years from now, the window will be thicker at the bottom than it is at the top. But it will be "the same window". Chances are that the view you see through your window will also change -- is changing so rapidly you can see it. A bird lands on a branch: a change. A car goes by: a change. The neighbor's dog barks: a change.

You have an identity. Whoever you are, masquerading as aRealidealist, you probably think you remain the same from day to day. Obviously you are, and are not. You have some new skin today that you didn't have yesterday. You have new memories in your brain you didn't have yesterday. You are older today than you were yesterday--a day closer to the grave. But still, your name didn't change; your address probably didn't change; your social security number didn't change; your shoe size didn't change (since yesterday, anyway, unless you feet swelled up and you can't fit into your shoes). We are all a bit impermanent beings living (temporarily) in a changing universe.

That things remain the same is a construct we use for convenience--until some change happens that reveals to us that, lo and behold, nothing is the same.

I've studied Heraclitus for years, and it took me a while to understand how he related his Unity of Opposites to how things change. It's important to remember what he said about "kindling in measures, and going out in measures". I see similarities in Heraclitus and Peirce regarding what is to be revealed in negation and difference. Recognizing something by what it is "not". ... "Measures" ... How we observe change only in "relation".

This video on Heraclitus (audio only) is the best I've heard. Peter Adamson (I'm a big fan) of King's College London has some very insightful things to say, along with the others.

https://youtu.be/W80ToU1tvpI

If I say there is no truth, you'd ask "is that true?" . But selfreference isn't allowed or it leads to Russell's paradox and the liars paradox, I retort. Am I still taking a position at that point?

Quoting aRealidealist

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” — Heraclitus’ primary claim, as it’s generally expressed in the manner above, of absolute change or impermanence (of either things, or the self) is inherently flawed.

His assertion as such can be rebutted in multiple ways; for now, though, I’ll respectfully choose to only express one way that specifically pertains to the self: (1) by exposing the contradiction of being able to demonstrate or know for a fact that no “man” ever steps in the same river twice (emphasis on the word ‘twice’).

1.) If one claims to know or have demonstrated that, “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” then, in some respect, one has already presupposed the permanence of their self, since one cannot know or demonstrate that a given “man” didn’t continue to be the same person after they stepped in a given river once, without their own self having had endured this very transition of that given “man“ not remaining the same person after they stepped in a given river.

Firstly, there definitely is a requirement that something stay constant to serve as a record-keeper to monitor change and thus allow us to recognize it. Memory seems to be a critical faculty here. Events get recorded in memory and when memory is accessed in the present change is perceived as the past and present are different. However, considering the relationship between a memory and personhood I think it's the same as a book in a library. The record (memory) doesn't change but the reader (person) can. Effectively this implies that no person can step into the same river twice but the present person shares the memory of the past person and thus change becomes noticeable. Is it at all surprising that libraries, through books, record the changes the world has undergone and that the readers themselves have been replaced with each generation?

The question is, is memory really constant? What would define change in memory? There is memory like a library that doesn't change and then the contents of the library which are individual memories. The library (memory as a vessel) doesn't seem to change but the books (individual memories) do. So it seems, in a sense, memory as a receptacle of our memories stays constant. However, this is simply an illusion brought about different rates of change. Memory, even as a receptacle for our changing memories, isn't constant and changeless. It just changes at a slower rate than the contents of our memory. A good piece of evidence is that memory malfunctions occur at advanced ages and there's Alzheimers disease.

So, it's not that there's some kind of permanence that Heraclitus overlooked when he said what he said of people being unable to step into the same river twice. A fast change can be recorded by a slower change. The person certainly changes but such changes are slower than the relevant changes in the river and so gives rise to the illusion that something had to be constant.

We seem to know for sure that we really exist and feel things, but what does "real" mean? Time moves such that the minute you point out the now, it's no longer real. Everything seems to be groundless and spiraling.

"Is it true that it's spiraling?"

At the end (the very end), I think relativism "happens". Happens is the best word I can use. A Muslim scholar once called upon people to burn and stone people who deny ultimate truth, because he thought they couldn't deny they were being burned and stoned. In those situations I think one has an even less concept of "truth".

Everything is flux, as Heraclitus rightly noted, including rivers and men. Despite that, we continue to refer to the Amazon River as 'the Amazon River' over time. We continue to refer to any river as a 'river' and to any man as a 'man'. What remains relatively stable and permanent through these continuous changes are the terms of our language. This is perhaps assisted by our perceptions of things being at the level of medium-sized white goods, and our tendency not to notice minor structural changes.