Change

Today in CoPhi our topic is change. What kind of change can we believe in? Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Zeno of Elea all had ideas about that. And so did Goober of Mayberry.

The waters around us have definitely grown, the constitutional crises du jour are flowing faster than we can step into, the times are changing and the battle outside is raging. It was another weekend of street protests, even in Nashville (in front of our Senators’ offices at West End & Murphy). Robert Altman’s Nashville seems more timely than ever, Hal Phillip Walker more electable than ever, as our nation’s newly-staffed National Security Council now excludes the National Security Adviser and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs but somehow has room for the guy who said “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

President #45 is issuing orders with his pen, saying “you’re fired” to our highest law enforcement officer and threatening to sack most of Foggy Bottom, tweeting loosely about WWIII… and #44 has broken his 10-day silence to speak to our core value as an open-door society hospitable to all the yearning huddled masses.

Have the ancients any relevant wisdom for us, on all this? Has the more recent hirsute philosopher anything valuable to bring out, besides Floyd’s razor?

Heraclitus was the Heidegger of his time, presumably indifferent to complaints  like Aristotle’s about his ambiguous syntax and cryptic aphorisms. (Hubert Dreyfus defends Heidegger’s obscurity as instrumental to his project. Does the same defense rescue Heraclitus?) Gottlieb gives us examples, some curious and others fairly clear, including:

• Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep.
• Lifetime is a child at play, moving pieces in a game. Kingship belongs to the child.
• As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them.
• War is father of all and king of all.
• The way up and down are one and the same.
• It is disease that makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.
• Much learning does not teach understanding.
• It is in changing that we find purpose.

And the goodreaders share these, decrypted and streamlined:

• Time is a game played beautifully by children.The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change.
• The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny – it is the light that guides your way.
• The people must fight on behalf of the law as though for the city wall.
• Wisdom is to speak the truth and act in keeping with its nature.
• Allow yourself to think only those thoughts that match your principles and can bear the bright light of day.
• The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.
• The sun is new each day.
• What was scattered gathers. What was gathered blows away.

So, he had his vapid moments but also his Dylanesque depths. The main takeaway, inarguable I’d say, is that change is our constant companion and we must work to make it our ally. The universal flux and turmoil is the stream we’re destined to fish and swim in, we “beasts, drunkards, sleepers, and children” who keep letting slip our proper logos, our ruling principle. 

And what is that principle, exactly? He doesn’t exactly say. He does say we’re an oppositional species. Our opposites attract and clash and sometimes issue in the attuned harmony of high and low notes. 

Also, he was an “intellectual pyromaniac,” fascinated by the transformational symbolic fire of living. “In his philosophy the central fire never dies: the world ‘was ever, is now, and ever shall be, an ever-living Fire.’ But fire is something continually changing…”

“Heraclitus maintained that everything changes; Parmenides retorted that nothing changes.” (BR) Parmenides, pupil of Xenophanes (the guy who said horses and oxen would describe their gods as horses and oxen too) and teacher of Zeno, said everything’s eternal and so the times can’t be a changing after all. But that’s absurd on its face, isn’t it?

His main question was a serious one: how can language and thought hook onto the world? Through “touch,” somehow, presumably meaning that a prerequisite of knowledge is some form of perceptual immediacy. That doesn’t sound absurd to me, but it does seem to block the possibility of inferential knowledge. Again, we’ve got to ditch the armchair and the classroom and go out into the world we seek to know. That wasn’t Parmenides’ method.

The essence of [his] argument is: When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require objects outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing or speak of it at one time as well as at another, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must exist at all times. Consequently there can be no change, since change consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be.

This is the first example in philosophy of an argument from thought and language to the world at large. BR

The first, not the best.

Zeno, like so many philosophers before and since, was trying to subvert our confidence in common sense with his paradoxes. It leads too often to confusion and unacceptable consequences, so a good dialectician (or one who seeks knowledge by Q-&-A) walks us back from paradox to a reconsideration of our first premises. Socrates was a better one than Zeno, says Gottlieb, because the former had constructive intentions while the latter just wanted to defend his mentor Parmenides.

As for the Achilles paradox, I still prefer the Diogenes solution: solvitur ambulando: just walk away. A few quick strides will cover an infinitude of minute distances.

Among the problems we might ponder and possibly solve today: Should philosophers be deliberately enigmatic and impenetrable? Can an obscure epigrammatic statement really be profound? Or should philosophers always strive for prosaic clarity? 

And, oh yeah: What do we think of Goober‘s pre- and post-beard persona, and of his friends’ recoil from philosophy? Couldn’t he have kept the beard and, unlike Heraclitus, just toned down the arrogance and pretense? Can’t we all hope to sustain our good characters and still be ourselves, amidst the change that’s gonna come?
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1.31.17. 5:20/6:50, 46/64/43, 5:10
It’s Norman Mailer’s and Thomas Merton’s birthday. Mailer said re-writing was more fun in his later years. “Since at my age you begin to forget all too much, I would hardly remember what I had written the day before. It read, therefore, as if someone else had done it. The critic in me was delighted. I could now proceed to fix the prose. The sole virtue of losing your short-term memory is that it does free you to be your own editor.”

Merton said we should “consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity.”

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