A.N. Whitehead famously claimed that all Western Philosophy was nothing more than footnotes to Plato. But long before Plato or Socrates, there were many Greek thinkers who looked for answers to many of the same questions that Plato had asked. Two of the most famous of these thinkers were Heraclitus and Parmenides. Both of these philosophers were thinkers were pre-Socratic metaphysicians and asked questions related to the nature of reality. Since they were both two of the oldest philosophers in Europe, many of their ideas seem quite strange to modern readers and the fact that their works only exist as fragments (quite often as poetic fragments) and as references in the philosophies of other thinkers, including Plato, makes it very hard to understand fully what they are saying. However, an incredible amount of work has been done on these two philosophers and they are generally seen as presenting two opposing ideas of reality. These two opposing views have helped shape western thought for millennia and understanding their differences and similarities is crucial to understanding how metaphysics itself works.
Both of these early philosophers seemed to have dealt exclusively with questions of metaphysics. Their modes of reasoning and their conclusions were diametrically opposed to each other. While Parmenides believed that the world was perpetually fixed, that is, that change is illusory and that things always remain the same and only appear to change, Heraclitus believed that the universe was in a perpetual state of flux and things only appear to remain unchanging but do, in fact, change constantly.
The reasoning which each thinker gives is also very different. Heraclitus believed that the world was ordered according to a divine ‘logos’ which has been variously interpreted as meaning some kind of logic or a rule of nature according to which everything in the universe ran. He used simple observations to shore up his conclusions such as the fact that day will invariably follow night and that hot objects invariably become cooler. This, according to Heraclitus, proved that all things in the universe not only changed, but changed in a very specific way which cannot be fully understood except as a ‘logos’. He also believed in the existence of an ‘element’, that is, a basic substance or force of nature. According to him, this basic element is fire because it epitomises the changeability inherent in all nature and therefore is the purest form of nature. Fire constantly changes into other simple substances like air and will eventually morph into all kinds of entities including humans, earth and water. While this is not the easiest idea to accept for a contemporary reader, it does have some clear internal cohesion and that, considering that most of Heraclitus’ works are not only fragmentary but also written in somewhat complex poetic forms, it does deserve a slightly more sympathetic reading (Kahn 33-39).
Moreover, the nature of the constant change is also one which has been debated for thousands of years. Plato famously called this a kind of ‘Heraclitian’ flux where everything changes so fast and so constantly that no knowledge of anything is possible. It is generally considered that this is a strawman argument and Plato purposely weakened the Heraclitian position so that Socrates could perform his famous rhetorical work (now known as the ‘Socratic Dialogue’). A more likely answer is that change occurs in more or less even ways and the ‘war within nature’ is driven by what could be an understandable force – the Logos. Heraclitus’ description of the Logos is confusing and contradictory in many ways but all in all it seems as though he believed that knowledge of the logos would constitute knowledge of reality (Kahn 88-97).
In almost complete opposition to this position is Parmenides’ idea that the universe is completely unchanging. In the fragmentary sources which remain, Parmenides seems to have believed that the entire universe is a single unchanging unit and that change of any sort, even movement, is only an illusion. Parmenides’ arguments rely a lot more on logic and language than Heraclitus’ arguments. He begins by asking a very simple but very, very difficult question – difficult both to understand and answer – if something exists, meaning that ‘it is’, how can it also not exist, meaning how can it be that ‘it is not’? This is confusing question because it hits at a very basic, almost silly paradox, but its implications are enormous. An example might help understand it better – in everyday life, people tend to say things like ‘The moon is not in the sky’ or ‘the coffee is not ready yet’, but how can this describe a state of being? According to Parmenides, it does not, rather, it describes nothing at all. Stating that something ‘is not’ does not answer any questions about the nature of reality, it only provokes more questions. It is likely that Parmenides would answer this question by saying that words refer to very specific objects and to say that they do not exist is simply to state something wrong. In the two examples given above, one more point needs to be added – time. If the moon is not in the sky now, it might be up tomorrow, or might have been up yesterday and. likewise, if the coffee is not yet ready, it will be ready soon. But it seems that according to Parmenides, time is itself a wrongly understood concept because time is not a constant flow of moments but a set of specific moments, and within each of them the universe remains completely constant (Prier 92-105).
Both Parmenides and Heraclitus did, however, have one very important point in common – neither of them were content to take nature at face-value. Regardless of what the absolute nature of reality is, both these philosophers made the important leap from trying to explain individual events to trying to explain everything using a particular theory. This idea has been so influential that it set the course for all thought, whether philosophical, scientific or even artistic, in the Western World and has helped shape the world as we know it (Cornford 12-24).
Work Cited
Cornford, Francis Macdonald. Plato and Parmenides. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.
Kahn, Charles H. The art and thought of Heraclitus: A new arrangement and translation of
the fragments with literary and philosophical commentary. New York: Cambridge
Prier, Raymond A. Archaic logic: symbol and structure in Heraclitus, Parmenides and
Empedocles. Vol. 11. Walter de Gruyter, 1976. Web. 9 April 2016.
