LS - Heraclitus - Part 1


Lawrie Douglas (Lawrie.Douglas@btinternet.com)
Mon, 23 Mar 1998 04:33:30 +0100


I tried sending this post last week, but I don't think it made it; sorry if
it did, and you've seen it before.

I've been threatening this for a while; here's a little excerpt - more will
follow - from a book I have written (currently doing the rounds of London
agents), this chapter on Heraclitus. Heraclitus is important because he
comes before the foundation of the Church of Reason (which began when
Parmenides divided everything up into the Way of Truth and the Way of
Opinion); in fact, it is against him that Parmenides, Socrates and Plato
were reacting.

Heraclitus's main idea is that no thing is utterly individual, but rather
all things run into one another, and that it is this open communication
which guarantees the reasonableness (or Quality) of existence.
Hope it's not too long-winded.

Richard.

The universal language

The Heraclitean realisation that nothing exists as an utterly independent
owner of itself, but that all things form part of one whole, is a crucial
discovery in the context of understanding reason and furthering philosophy.

To say that no thing owns itself is also to say it cannot own another; if it
acts upon another thing it must do so at a remove. It cannot merely make
something happen by virtue of a private power it owns and controls all by
itself. Rather, it must act in accordance with wider, public, powers; it
must act as part of the system rather than a private entity. This being the
case, the interactions between things should always be intelligible; they
should not happen merely because of the private whim of a certain agent, as
a form of magic, but should rather be reasonable, corresponding to
principles which are repeated throughout the system.

    Here is an illustration of what I mean: there is a glass of wine in
front of me on my desk. I take a sip of it. The liquid seeps down into my
stomach. Now that it is within me, is it a part of me, or is it still
separate from me?

At what point does the wine cease being wine and become sugars and
alcohol and water that I am digesting? Can we single out a particular moment
when this transition occurs? If we can, how does the business of digestion
work? How do we get from one stage to another? If we are saying that, one
second there is me on one side and the wine on another, and then the next
second I have incorporated the wine and there is just me, how do we account
for that leap? There would be no transition as such, no process by which one
turned into the next. It would be a miracle; the wine would simply magic
into another form.

    If we say, however, that there would be a gradual transition from one
stage to another, with the wine steadily being mushed around with everything
else in my stomach, and getting slowly broken down into constituent parts
before being digested and converted into other forms, then we are saying
that there is never any absolute barrier which separates me from everything
I eat and drink, the air that I breathe, the environment the surrounds me,
the world in which I live. That there are
no absolute barriers around me keeping the rest of the world out, means that
by the same token there are no barriers keeping the whole of me in. The
boundaries which define all things, separating one off from another, are
never exact and unbroken, but always fuzzy and full of holes. I am in
constant communication with the rest of existence. I should not think of
myself as being infinitely individual, as though I were entirely
self-sufficient and existing in my own private universe. To an extent I am a
public thing, participating in a public world.

    Heraclitus gets to the essence of reason, which is the understanding
that all things are connected. His map of existence covers everything; that
no one thing is utterly individual means all things ultimately partake of
each other, everything being connected together. There are no holes in his
map, no dark areas in which things happen mysteriously, without any cause.
Things happen neither by blind chance nor by the imposition of an individual
will, but in accordance with the structure of the overall system.

    Heraclitus said that all things happen in accordance with the logos.
There has been much debate as to what exactly he meant by this. The problem
stems from the fact that 'logos' possesses so many meanings. Its most basic
use, being a noun related to the verb legein, 'to speak', is 'a thing said',
a word, statement, or story. As variations of this, it can mean account,
agreement, opinion, thought, argument, reason, cause; relation, ratio,
proportion; the faculty of reason, general principle, definition. Its most
well known usage is in the St John Gospel, where it refers to the Word of
God. In this context, and as the Stoics understood it, it means the divine
spirit of Reason.

    All these meanings centre around language. We tend to think of language
as a human invention, but there is more to it than that. The essence of
language is that it is a structure which transmits information, allowing
communication between individuals. What we habitually think of as language
is but a specific type of a more general structure. Since no thing is
utterly independent and cut off from everything else, all things are
necessarily in constant communication with each other. Nature itself
possesses a language, and this is the medium through which everything
interacts; this is the context in which we should understand the Heraclitean
logos.

     In that no thing is an absolutely particular unit, no event can have an
absolutely particular cause. No individual thing causes something to happen,
all by itself. To say that it could would be to say that it created what it
gave rise to, all by itself, a creation ex nihilo; it would make it a kind
of god. An illustration: let's say I felt a sharp pain on my arm, looked
down and saw a wasp crawling along it. Ordinarily we would say that the wasp
had caused me to feel pain. But strictly speaking, we couldn't say this, and
I do not mean here merely that if I hadn't seen it sting me, I couldn't be
sure it was responsible. Let us say that I knew the wasp had stung me;
still, I am saying, it couldn't have caused my experience of pain.

     When we think about causation, what we are looking for is a culprit,
one particular agent to which we can fix total responsibility. What we are
demanding is for this agent to own both the origins and the effects of its
actions. In other words, we want to deal with just one single thing,
something which we can say, purely through its own powers, created the new
state which we have observed.

     The moment we interrogate this prospective cause, however, we find it
fracturing, our factor of causation multiplying to infinity. Could we really
say that a wasp, entirely by and of itself, had caused me to feel pain?
Could we isolate one individual wasp from its species, as we must if we are
to hold it as the single culprit responsible for my being stung? Surely that
individual wasp did not invent its act of stinging; yes, it carried out that
action itself, but that action was one for which it was biologically
designed. To an extent, it was predisposed towards it, its action
programmed into it. To an extent, then, it was not this particular wasp and
this alone that was responsible for stinging me. To an extent, it could only
sting anyone by virtue of its existence as a wasp, qua wasp; as an
individual, particular thing, the most it could do is enact the wasp's
ability to sting things by acting aggressively. We cannot pin the cause of
my pain down solely to this one insect; to an extent, we must drag the
entire species of wasp into the dock. Yet, we cannot rest here, either.
Could
we isolate this one species from the rest of existence? It is not as if a
species were a single individual, capable of inventing anything. There was
no primeval Wasp which designed itself from scratch. Wasps evolved from
other forms, these from yet others. If wasps have stings that is because
such things serve a purpose, one which gives them a natural advantage and
enables them to play their role in the whole ecosystem. If we are to be
exhaustive about this, we must say that, ultimately, it was
nature that caused me to be stung.

     One can proceed in the opposite direction and reach exactly the same
sort of conclusion. Never mind trying to establish why the wasp stings me,
once it has done so, what causes me to feel pain? The venom, we might
ordinarily reply. Yet what is it about the venom that generates such a
reaction? Its chemical make up. And what lies behind this? Its molecular
structure, and then its atomic structure, and then its subatomic structure.
And what of these? Did wasp venom design all these so that, when arranged in
a certain formula, they would create a caustic substance? Did atoms and
subatomic particles invent themselves? Or, rather, did these things not
simply evolve into the forms that they have now? In which case, again, we
must condemn the universe at large for making my arm hurt after being stung.

This might not seem all that important. Never mind if we can't say why
things happen, we can at least say how and when . . . Can't we? Even if we
cannot hold any particular agent responsible, in the sense of being guilty,
we can at least trace the physical chain of causation behind every event.
Even if we don't blame the wasp, we can at least say it set off the chain of
events which led to my feeling pain . . . Surely we can? Well, not exactly.
Roughly, yes, but not exactly. We could never see exactly how one thing led
to another, for the reason that we could never exactly
distinguish between one thing and another. When does the wasp sting me? Is
it when the tip of its sting first enters my skin? But the tip of its sting
and the surface of my skin are not exactly defined things; ultimately each
is made up of subatomic particles, moving too fast and too mysteriously to
be measured. Each is already open, in communication with other forces and
particles which surround it. Since the boundaries of each are uncertain, we
could never say when exactly one came into
contact with another. And this is not because we don't possess the equipment
to measure it; there is no exact answer. The universe itself doesn't know.

     There can never be an exact moment in which something happens. We could
never say when the wasp stings me. After it has started, we can say it is in
the process of stinging me; but we can never find one moment in which it
starts. The transition from one event to another is truly uncertain. This is
flux; radically unknowable. The only way we could know exactly when an event
occurred would be if we froze the universe and kept it perfectly rigid,
isolating utterly all its various parts. But if we did this, then nothing
would ever happen anyway. There would be no time,
no change, no events. Everything would simply stay perfectly still for
eternity. If we have change, we have uncertainty; there is no way around
this. It is the uncertainty which allows for change, which provides the
slack in the system, the lubrication between the joints - that is, the more
definite individual things and moments.

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