Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
11. Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus: Air, Form, and the Problem of Change
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/3-natural-hearing/011-anaximenes-pythagoras-and-heraclitus-air-form-and-the-problem/

[0:00] Right. There was an article about. they were talking about the reasons why the universe seems to be ordered to man in some way. They quoted some modern scientist saying, "There's no evidence at all for intelligence in the universe." He said he couldn't see any evidence at all. It was. Scientists, I'm studying all these things. Yeah.

[0:33] I think part of the problem with science is that it's so complicated, really, compared to to this knowledge based on common experience, right? That you can't see the fundamental things, the simplest things, in a way, huh? You just the thing is so many factors, you know, that that have to be factored in, right?

[1:00] I was talking to Warren Murray on the phone the other night there, but he was saying that the scientists are beginning to doubt, really, that there's any life anywhere else in the universe. You know, for a while it was kind of a common saying. You know, there are planets, you know, all kinds of planets. There must be life, you know, and you know, does that be something?

[1:17] Apparently, the the things that had to, you know, come together in order for there to be life on this unit, on this planet, are astronomical in the odds, right? So I mean, I mean, and he was quoting to me some guys, you know, who used to, you know, always talk about, you know, we're going to find life sometime, and you know, now they doubt themselves that they're going to find life, you know, that just just the odds are in kind against it.

[1:41] Apparently, that's kind of interesting. Also, Mother Earth is coming back to the universe again because it's the only place where life is found. Really, in the life in any higher sense. Um...

[2:00] it's kind of interesting, though, when when the soul separates from the body, right? Your soul is going to be in this immaterial world that you know very little about, really, huh? And we don't really know what the angels are. We know them kind of negatively, too, you know, some things about them, you know. But it's like you know, we did all this time up to now in this material world, and then we're going to be living in a time entirely in the immaterial world, and then you know, eventually we get back our bodies again, right?

[2:28] But we're going to be, you know, be absorbed in God, right? And the body will be in a very subordinate position, I think, and so it's kind of interesting to see that we'll, you know, have been in the material world for a while exclusively, so to speak, right? You know, it's funny

[3:01] this couple last night there. You know, the influence that the Rosary had upon them, you know, and you know how they they first thought that the Catholics were some kind of idolaters, but their worship of Mary, you know, and so then they get to know this better, you know, and they realize that the Rosary, you know, like the Pope says, is kind of a compendium of the Gospel, right?

[3:20] You know, and it's kind of a contemplative prayer and. And kind of interesting, comment sometimes. I used to work in the package store there with Charlie Swisher, and kind of a nice, humble guy, you know, kind of a kind of laboring man in a way. But the one guy who come into the church, I guess, is one of these other denominations. But they have some kind of communion service, but doesn't mean anything really.

[3:50] And he happened to come back, in the, it was actually, whatever it was, you know. And guy had to play of the hosts, and he's throwing the Easter baskets, you know, the minister, you know, you know, to tell me to do this, you know. They don't have any, you know, they have to consecrate anything, really, you know. Well, that's all it is, you know. I think I'll go someplace where the bread is something, you know.

[4:08] This guy just did that, you know, kind of simple thing, you know, but that was the turning point for him, right? Just seeing the guy, you know, kind of throwing stuff in the waste basket, you know. Well, what the hell, we, you know, having the ceremony for, you know, if that's all it is, right? Yeah, but it's funny how something like that, though, just you know, just you know, be the catalyst, you know, for them to to come.

[4:37] Charlie used to deliver milk, right? You know, and I guess, he, but he had the habit of smoking, right? So he's up at the the uh, the Seventh day Adventist College up there, and he wanted to get some cigarettes. So he didn't know any better, so he went into their kind of their campus store, what it was, you know, and and had some cigarettes. And the woman says, "Oh, we're all good here."

[5:01] They're really kind of annoying him, you know. For Charlie, you know, we're all good, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we had nothing at the back. Who was? Who was? He was actually a lawyer, but he was—he was—he was. He involved in faithfulness, you know. His, you know, that he'd be his wife, you know. So we used to argue with him about the faith and so on. So Charlie, Charlie, so he always said to me, you know, he says to me, yeah, why do you believe what they tell me to believe in the church?

[5:49] I said, I do too. So then, all we're—you know—blood brothers, you know. Though he didn't have any education, you know. But I mean, but I mean, coming down to it, I mean, you know, he—he—he had faith, right? Hades was influenced by life. So he says, just as our soul, being air, holds us together, when the soul leaves the body, the body disintegrates. So do breath and air surround the whole world?

[6:24] Now that's interesting. In Homer, you have the soul represented as a air-like substance, and even Dante represents the soul that way. In the Divine Comedy, he encounters the souls of people who have died before, and he of course-recognizes them because they're an air-like substance in the shape of that person when they're on Earth. Of course, he tries to hug them. It's frustrating because they're trying to hug the air.

[6:56] Of course, that's not what the soul is. But in the battle scenes there in Homer, in one battle scene, the people are always dying in these battle scenes in the Iliad, and their souls are flitting down to Hades in the underworld. Once one guy is injured, and his soul starts to leave his body, and a strong wind comes up and forces the soul back in the body, and he survives.

[7:25] So when people imagine the soul, which of course you can't imagine the soul, they tend to imagine it like a human person, but much finer material, this air. And actually, the the Greek word for soul, which is psuche, where you get the word psychology, which meant originally the study of the soul, but psuche is taken from the Greek word for breath, or for air. And even Scripture speaks that way: that God breathed into the clay this living soul.

[8:06] And in fact, the word spirit in Latin comes from the word for air or for breath. And we actually carry over the word air or breath. Which names a material substance that is difficult to sense; can't see it, although you can maybe feel it in some way, whether it's in a bag or when it's blowing on you, and so on. We carry the word "breath" or "spirit" over to these immaterial substances that are in no way sensible, so that even God is said to be a spirit, or the angels are said to be a spirit.

[8:51] And there's a reason why we carry that word over in particular, because it seems to be what, like an invisible substance, almost an unsensible substance, although a material substance. And so we borrow that word to name these substances that are entirely immaterial. And Shakespeare says in *The Tempest* when they have this vision that Prospero conjures up, and then he he forgets or remembers something he'd forgotten, and the image, oh, the whole scene comes down, and he says, "And these are actors, as I foretold you.

[9:29] were all spirits, and melted into air, into thin air." So, Anaximenes is influenced by air, whether that is or is not the soul. It's certainly tied up with life, and you can't live too long without breathing, as you know. It's even more immediate in that sense than the water that Thales talked about.

[10:02] Now, just as we ask why did Anaximander say the unlimited instead of water, now the question is why did Anaximenes say air instead of water, and you could also say why air instead of the unlimited. But could Anaximenes have been influenced by the thinking of Anaximander? To guess that the first matter is air rather than water.

[10:35] Well, if you recall, with the word unlimited, we mentioned how that could mean in quantity or in what quality. And there is a reason why you could say that the first matter is not limited in quantity and not limited in quality. We saw how our friend Thales was looking for a kind of qualityless matter. It was not limited. A matter was not limited to any definite quality, but could take on all qualities.

[11:30] And water seemed like a good guess in that respect. But you also might think of the beginning of all things as unlimited in some kind of quantitative way, because things keep on coming to be. It seems every spring without end. So if things come to be without end, then the origin of must be endless or unlimited. And so he, as you saw last time, Anaximander, guessed that the beginning of things is the unlimited.

[12:04] But in a sense, carried Thales' thought further by trying to go to something even more without quality than water, because water, at least in the natural environment out here, there are water seems to be wet and cool. So it has some qualities. You know, a drop of water seems to have a shape, in fact, too, kind of a globular shape. So he went all the way and removed all qualities.

[12:35] Now maybe that's a little bit too abstract or too remote from the senses, the unlimited. Maybe Anaximenes wanted something a little more concrete, a little more sensible, than a little more affirmative than just this negative, unlimited. But he could be influenced by this great thinking of Anaximander to guess air rather than water, because which is more unlimited in a quantitative sense, water or air? Does it seem to be more of water or air?

[13:16] Yeah. Air seems to be everywhere, and water not everywhere. The lakes and so on not everywhere, and the air seems to go up and up and up, as he says, on all sides of us. So, looking for something unlimited. In a quantitative sense, air would be a better guess than water. So that's one reason why we could say that air is a better guess than water. It's more unlimited in a quantitative sense.

[13:45] Now, how about in a qualitative sense? Well, which is more invisible, water or air? Oh, yeah. Yeah, air is more transparent than water. And as air is definitely wet or dry? Like water is definitely wet, or definitely cool, huh? cool? Well, if you're down in the desert, there you wouldn't be saying that. So, see, but water, even in the desert, we think of water as being something kind of cool, just about anywhere.

[14:19] So there might be two reasons why he would say air instead of water, and two of those reasons would be influenced by what Anaximander. But yet, it's a little more maybe satisfactory to have something more concrete like air. You can call air concrete, than to have what the unlimited and just have this negative notion. Yeah. So you see that those two reasons.

[14:51] Now, a third reason we could give why air seems to be a better guess is putting that aside now and just comparing the guess of the poets with Mother Earth as the beginning of all things. And incidentally, notice when when the poet speaks of Mother Earth, they think of Mother Earth as kind of infinite, don't they? I was giving the reference there in Shakespeare's play, there, *Timon of Athens*, where Timon is digging in the ground there. For roots and so on, and he says, "Common Mother, thou, whose womb immeasurable and infinite breast teems and feeds all."

[15:39] So even there, the Mother Earth is spoken as being infinite, but air seems to be much more infinite than than Mother Earth does. Okay. If you look at Mother Earth, water, and air, do you notice a certain order here in these three reasonable guesses?

[16:14] There's a couple things to note about the order there: Mother Earth to water to air. So Mother Earth would be more immediate. Yeah, more sensible. Yeah. More material. Yeah, yeah. Water is less sensible, and air is the least sensible, isn't it? And it's interesting that if you took everything out, let's say of this room in here, all the furniture, and somebody looked in, they said, "There's nothing in that room," even though it's filled with air.

[16:48] And do you want to join the lecture? Yeah. Okay. Don't chop these cats on Halloween time, you know. Okay. Now, my camera is distracting me. Sorry.

[17:15] Yeah, yeah. If you took all the furniture out of the room in there, and there's nobody in that room and no furniture, and someone looked in there, they said, "There's nothing in there." So even there's nothing in there. There's air in there, but no. Normally, we'd say there's nothing in there. That kind of shows that air is less known, and and less sensible, therefore less known, than water and a fortiori than Mother Earth.

[17:41] So you're going from the more known, the more sensible, to the less sensible. Now, that's not a reason to say one of these is a better guess, but kind of explains why Mother Earth should come as a guess before water and air. But in terms of what is the first matter, notice something else about this. You're going from the thick to the what? Oh, more rarefying. Yeah, to the thin.

[18:15] So when one of the characters is fed up with life, in Shakespeare, you know, "Straight, flat, the thick rotundity of the earth," but to think of the earth as being thick. But then again, those words I was quoting. These are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and they melted into air, into thin air. So you're going from the thick to the thin.

[18:41] That's why you can say that, you know, people sometimes get water in their basement, but Mother Earth doesn't usually come through the walls. And air seems to come through the the roof, even in the house, but hopefully not water, is it? Now, does it make sense? Is the first matter out of which all things are made? Is that the thickest of things, or is that the thinnest of things?

[19:11] What do you mean, the first matter? The first matter, the matter before all other matters, the matter of which all things are made, ultimately. Could be thin because you can take all those thin layers and make a thick layer. Yeah, yeah. Matter is that out of which you make something. And don't you make the thick out of the thin? So I used to take an example with one of my fat books on my shelf, and I say the thick here is put together from these thin pages.

[19:56] But if you put thick things together, you wouldn't get a thin thing, would you? So it's the the thick is made out of the what? Thin. So the thing that has the thinnest and the finest pieces would be the best guess, wouldn't it, as the first matter? What did you? What? What did you? Yeah. Sit my down and say. Yeah. The thick you have more to take from.

[20:21] That's true, but is that like matter? Is that like taking apart from a whole? You have a thick book. You can rip pages out for a long time. But that I'm taking parts out of a whole. And is matter like the whole or like the parts?

[20:44] I don't really follow that one. Sorry. Well, when we define matter as a cause, eventually it'll be defined as that from which something comes to be and is in it. Okay. So which is made out of which? Which comes from which? Huh? And is in the thing that it that comes to be from it. Well, the whole comes to be from the parts. They're inside it. Huh?

[21:15] Well, the whole is more like the the form, the the wholeness of the object. So, you know, a few said the molecule is a modern example. It's beginning of all things. And I said the atom is beginning of all things. And you said the elementary particle is the beginning of all things. Whose guess would be the best? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Because elementary particles would make up the atom, and the atoms make up the molecule.

[21:49] Yeah. What's the first matter of a paragraph? Well, you say the sentence, and I say it's words, and you say it's letters. Which is better? Are the letters made out of words? Yeah. You can get letters from a word, but not that the letters are made out of. That's what you mean by matter, the out of which something is made. Okay. So the smallest thing would in those three would be the best guess, huh?

[22:19] Hmm. So the poets guessed Mother Earth, and the Thales water, and now Anaximenes' air. So it's a better guess, even though air is less known to us, because it seems to be thinner and finer. Now, if there's something smaller and finer and thinner than elementary particles, like some people talk about quarks, but there's some question about quarks. But there would be even a better guess if there's something actually smaller.

[22:54] Do you see that? Yeah. The Greek word, incidentally, for element and the Greek word for letters of the alphabet is the same. Stoicheia. In Latin, you'd find the same word use for the letters. But the letters of the alphabet are like the elements in nature. So you first make things out of the what letters, maybe the words, then out of the words you make sentences, and out of the sentences you make paragraphs, and out of paragraphs chapters, and so on.

[23:26] See, but the first out of which everything is made in this case would be the. The letters. When you study Greek for the first time, the first thing make you do is learn the alphabet.

[23:42] They tell you about this cynical professor in English at the University of Minnesota. Friend of mine went there, and the freshman English kind of a general English course for freshmen at University of Minnesota. First day of class, he said, "Everybody, take out a piece of paper, okay?" And he says, "Write the alphabet." Some people can't write the alphabet.

[24:05] As I say, it's a cynic. I mean, you realize how bad the educated we are. He said, "We wanted to show you how dumb you are. Really, you don't even know the alphabet."

[24:24] So, as I always say to my students, this is one of my favorite questions in the exam. Why is the guess of Anaximenes that air is the beginning of all things a better guess than that of Thales that water is the beginning of all things? And there'd be two reasons here, right? Suggested by the thinking of Anaximander, it's more unlimited in both a quantitative and qualitative sense.

[24:51] And then a different reason here that arises when you compare these three, that it's the thinnest of things, and the thick is composed or put together from the thin, and not vice versa. Pie dough is a real thin dough, and then they'd make layers and layers of it to make these pastries and so on. So you make the thick out of the thin. So the thinnest of all things, whatever that is, would seem to be the best guess as to what is the first matter.

[25:22] Okay, so much for the the Milesians, the three citizens. Of Miletus, the three philosophers of Miletus. Now, Pythagoras started on the coast of Asia Minor, on the island of Samos, but then he migrated to southern Italy, and there are Greek cities, you know, in southern Italy and in Sicily. In fact, the Greek temples there are in better shape than the ones that are left in Greece. They say, and that's why we have all these Greek names: Greco for one of the grapes, Aglianico, which is a

[26:07] change of Hellenico. So you have all these Greek grapes, the land of wine, the Greeks called it. So, Empedocles we'll meet later on. He'll be in Sicily, but Pythagoras went to southern Italy. And when Plato got disgusted with Athens after they put Socrates to death, he left Athens for a while and he traveled and studied with various people. He went to Italy and studied with the Pythagoreans over there.

[26:39] Now, Pythagoras, as you know, is primarily a what mathematician, and everybody has heard of the famous Pythagorean what theorem. So Pythagoras is coming in to the study of natural things from mathematics. Now, in mathematics, there's no matter,

[27:08] and so he's accustomed to mathematics, and therefore not to looking for the cause called matter, but what is a kind of cause you look for in geometry? We could call this kind of cause form, meaning by form not just the shape of things, but the order of them or the ratio in which they are. I'll give you a simple example of that.

[27:46] When straight lines intersect, these opposite angles will be equal. Now, if you say why are they equal? Well, the basic reason why they are equal is that the lines are straight rather than bent or curved. It's the form of the lines. Now, it's not too hard to see if you know earlier in geometry what you mean by right angle—that when a straight line meets a straight line and makes equal angles we call these right angles, huh?

[28:26] And we, you know, show in earlier theorems how to construct the right angle and so on. Now it's not too hard to see that if a straight line meets a straight line, it's going to either make two right angles or angles what equal to two right angles. So these two angles are going to equal what these two right angles, and it's actually divide these up if you want to do it that way.

[28:58] Of these two right angles, equal to this and these two right, and this angle equal to these two, these. So they're both equal to those three, so they're equal to each other, right? So because these are straight lines intersecting, because this is a straight line, in other words, meaning a straight line, necessarily x plus b here will have to be equal to what Two right angles, huh?

[29:29] And because this is a straight line meaning a straight line, necessarily x plus a will have to equal what Right. Two right angles, and the rest is just the axioms, huh? Quantities equal to the same are what equal. to each other. Yeah. So x plus b must equal x plus a equal subtracted equals results equal. But all follows from the fact that the lines are straight. If one of them had been bent or curved, then they would not have been what equal.

[30:11] Okay. So the kind of cause that you have in mathematics is a different kind of cause than Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes have been talking about And we'll see later on that this kind of cause is called form But form, not just in the sense of shape, but

[30:34] order, ratio, as opposed to the matter itself. So, in Pythagoras, custom has a great influence upon the way we think and how we think, and so on. So, Pythagoras coming into the study of natural things is looking for the kind of cause that he's accustomed to look for, and so he's really quite different from the first three men.

[31:02] Now, the most famous discovery of Pythagoras in the sensible world is the one right here. He discovered that the harmonious sounds, like for example, if you in our scale where we call it the octave because there's eight notes, you go do re mi fa sol la ti do, and you sound the do above and the do below, they'll sound well together in the ear. But they are produced by objects in the ratio of two to one.

[31:42] Now, there's different ways you could do this. You could do it with drums. Let's say they thought you might do it with drums. You do with glasses, I suppose, with different thing. When I was at St. Mary's, we would use these musical strings, and they would they're raised above a wooden board, and you've got a little device that you can tighten or loosen the string, and you pluck this string, and then you pluck this one, and you tighten or loosen this one until you pluck this one, you pluck that one, they sounded exactly the same.

[32:19] Then you take a little wooden wedge and you go down exactly halfway, and you force up the string, and then you pluck the whole string and the what half string? The harmony of the octave. Oh. So it's produced by objects in the ratio of two to one. Now, the other harmonious sounds also has simple numerical ratios, but this is enough to get the basic idea. It's the most famous one.

[32:48] Now, the Pythagoreans got carried away when they saw this, and they thought that under everything in the sensible world there'd be simple numerical ratios, simple numerical things. Now, if you looked at these things of unity, finis, and simplicity, you can see that they are very much in the tradition of what Pythagoras, as Heisenberg says Bertrand Russell, who's into that sort of stuff, you know, mathematical science and so on, he says Pythagoras, perhaps the most influential man I know, but certainly in terms of the mathematical science of nature, he is.

[33:29] And if you look at the famous, you know, School of Athens, you've seen that painting by Raphael. In the center there, you have kind of a arch and so on, and in the very center, Plato and Aristotle, who is the chief philosopher, as he said. And they're walking and talking, and Aristotle is carrying, and you can see if you look closely, he's carrying the Nicomachean Ethics, but Plato is carrying the Timaeus, and the Timaeus is a mathematical view of the what natural world, and it's put in the mouth of Timaeus, who may be a fictional character, but he's represented as a Pythagorean.

[34:13] Socrates is present, but he listens, and Pythagoras—not Pythagoras, but Timaeus—gives this long discourse on the what universe, huh? And he's giving a mathematical theory of the four elements that Empedocles later on will talk about, but it's all in terms of geometrical figures, there's no matter there. Now Heisenberg now says, as a young man there, he was reading the Timaeus, and it was inspiring him to look for mathematical symmetry in atomic physics.

[34:54] And Schrödinger, who was responsible for a lot of things, but the Schrödinger equation, obviously, in modern physics, well, Schrödinger was the Austrian physicist there who perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics, which goes back to Louis de Broglie. But when Schrödinger perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics and published it, the same year Heisenberg published his quantum mechanics. And the physical world, the physicists, as I say, were amazed to see two different mathematical formalisms that both worked.

[35:38] Hasn't heard a thing. And then subsequently, Schrödinger did a study comparing his with Heisenberg and showing there's certain equivalence between the two. But it's more convenient sometimes to use one or sometimes use the other, right? Okay. I mention all this because here's a man that's obviously deep into the mathematics of the atom, because he perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics, which is used in talking about the atom, and then showed the mathematical equivalence of that in Heisenberg's quantum mechanics.

[36:18] But he says that the modern atom consists of no stuff at all. There's no matter there. That's kind of an amazing thing. And but here's a man who could speak with authority of these things. There's no matter there. It's kind of funny that when the when the communists were still in power in Moscow and the party line was being, you know, religiously defended, they got upset because modern science seemed to be to have no matter.

[36:55] Oh. Of course, communist philosophy is called dialectical materialism. Materialism. That's the beginning of all things. And so they're you know starting to raise some questions, even though they'd often use science as kind of a backup for them, you know, or misuse science as a backup for them. But it's kind of kind of funny to see that, huh? But there's no matter there. And in in that same place where Schrödinger says that, he he says he compares it to what Plato did in the Timaeus, where it's all geometrical things, but there's no matter there.

[37:32] So. But notice now we're being introduced to a second kind of cause, what you could call form, as distinct from matter. And later on we'll see, Heraclitus starting to introduce a third kind of cause, which could be called the mover or the maker. And then later on we'll see Empedocles, he has a position on the matter of which things are made, and he starts to use the formal cause, and he has the what?

[38:07] Mover. And then eventually, Socrates and Plato introduced a fourth kind of cause. Okay. And later on we'll see Aristotle bring it all together. But this is the second kind of cause now. Form is distinguished from matter.

[38:29] Now the Pythagoreans, they say, got kind of carried away a little bit, and even in ethics, say they would look for numbers to explain the virtues, and they try to see a certain likeness. Just give a simple example of that. Would justice be an even number or an odd number? Do you think? An even. Yeah, It's just—a question of getting even with somebody, right? And we said, daily life.

[39:01] Are we even now when we made a little financial deal? Are we? Even now, you know, settling with you, and you use the word equality there and so on. And when Aristotle is giving the opinions of his predecessors about what the soul is in the first book about the soul, he had this one strange opinion that the soul is a self-moving number. I'm sure that has a Pythagorean origin, and this expression that we have—I got your number.

[39:37] If there was a number that was your number, then you'd be a lot more understandable than you are. So I always had a certain, you know, attraction to the number five. So since likeness is a cause of of love, maybe that's my number. So see if we can find out what your number is, and then we'll we'll be able to explain everything about you. You'll make quite understandable.

[40:08] But Plato, as I said, was very much influenced by the Pythagoreans, and he wrote that great work, the Timaeus. And I assume that the reason why Plato put that in there was that people were getting interested in the mathematical science of nature very much at that time of the Renaissance. and therefore Plato stood out as very important. It's a kind of model. as you can see in Galileo.

[40:32] In fact, Galileo presents his ideas in the form of a dialogue. It takes that aspect of Plato too, but, but, okay. Now we come to Heraclitus, and you'll notice we have more fragments from some of these later thinkers, at least from Heraclitus and from Anaxagoras and Empedocles. you have more fragments. Heraclitus takes we're back down the coast of Asia Minor, and Heraclitus, up the coast, I think it is a little bit.

[41:06] He's from the city of Ephesus. Now we know about Ephesus because of Saint Paul's what, His, epistle to the Ephesians, and we also, I guess Saint John is supposed to have gone there with with the Blessed Mother, huh? And I see an internal word there. Well, Angelicus things sometimes they have a little thing about the the holy sites there in in Ephesus, huh? So it's a famous thing.

[41:34] But of course Heraclitus is there many hundreds of years before, you know, almost five hundred years maybe before Saint Paul would come there, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And didn't the Ephesians give Saint Paul kind of a rough time there? Some of them. Yeah, they had the Artemis. All the makers of the idols are getting mad because he's going to ruin their economy. Yeah.

[42:04] Not being something about that in the Epistle to Corinthians, he's referring to the the struggles they had in in Ephesus, but in the political fragments of Heraclitus, there's a kind of interesting one where he's he's kind of down on the the Ephesians. They cast out some man because he was too smart, and we don't anybody you know superior to us. But Heraclitus said, "Well, they ought to cast themselves out and turn the city over to beardless lads."

[42:36] It was a beautiful proportion, isn't it? And so they cast out Hermodorus because he's better than them. Well, then they ought to cast themselves out because they're better than the boys. I mean, the boys are the herd of the beasts. Because you know,

[42:52] it shows the irrationality of the Ephesians there casting out a man because they they dislike his superiority. It's like with the ostracism there in Athens there, where some guy was known that there was Aristides the Just, and somebody was casting a vote to him to out of the city, and he was there, and he I didn't know who he was, and he said, "Why are you voting to have him cast out?

[43:15] I'm just tired of hearing him called the Just." He senses superiority, you know, let's get them out, huh? Now Heraclitus. Is perhaps the the central thinker in human thought. That's what I call him. And the more you study Heraclitus, the more you realize how he is a central thinker. And again, I call him the central thinker by analogy to the center of a circle. As you know, you can in a circle there you have many radii, and they all go off in different directions, and their endpoints are quite different, but they all meet there at the what center.

[44:02] So I mean, Hegel goes all the way back to Heraclitus, and Plato was a student of a student of Heraclitus. Plato was a student of Cratylus, and Cratylus was a student of Heraclitus. And Aristotle in the Metaphysics he says how even in old age Plato was still holding on to certain things he had learned from the Cratylians like Cratylus. And there's in fact a dialogue of Plato called the Cratylus, where he has Cratylus and Socrates talk.

[44:49] Undoubtedly, he puts Socrates above Cratylus, but there's a commemoration there of Cratylus in that dialogue. So he was influential, influenced Plato, and through Plato, of course, he influenced Aristotle. We'll see that when we go back again, Aristotle. So Heraclitus is a very very central thinker. I know it's the statement of Heraclitus: "Nature loves to hide." I like to quote that to my colleagues, and I say. Why does nature love to hide?

[45:29] Because it's a wonderful way he says it, and people tend to agree with him when they see it. But what's the first reason for saying that nature loves to hide?

[45:41] Nature is within. Yes. Yeah. And what's within is hidden, now. Okay. Um. Now, the thing that Heraclitus, first of all, very much known for, is his insistence upon change in the world around us, and that things in the world around us are always changing.

[46:15] Now, he's emphasizing, in this respect, what, in a way, is the beginning of our thinking, because the natural road that we all follow is the road from the senses into reason. Now, as Shakespeare says in

[46:39] *Troilus and Cressida*, things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs. Is that true? And so, if you get off the airplane or the, you don't see me, and I'm picking you up. We wave to get attention. And when they want to keep the, when the police or the fire or the, you know, ambulance, they have a light that's changing all the time, blink, blink, blink, maybe a siren's going.

[47:16] Because things that are changing are going to catch the attention of people. That's the idea. These crazy performers on the stage, all they do is jump around. You know, to

[47:28] hold your attention. And even professors, I walked around a little bit, get a little bit the attention of the people. Why, vice versa, if you don't want to be seen, if you're hiding in the tree like that, in the bushes or something, don't move, because you might give away yourself. So, in emphasizing change in the world around us, he's focusing our mind on what really comes first in our knowledge.

[48:00] And if you don't understand change, I sometimes say to students, you don't understand anything. I give them a very simple way of saying this. They say, if you don't understand change, you don't understand changing things. That seems to make sense, right? If you don't understand changing things. You don't understand unchanging things, because as the word unchanging suggests, we know unchanging things by the negation of change. And if you don't know or understand changing things or unchang or unchanging things, you don't understand anything.

[48:43] So from first to last, if you don't understand change, you don't understand anything. So you're very fortunate to be in this course. I tell them.

[48:56] Before this course, you understood nothing. Now Heraclitus emphasized not only the reality of change, but the fact that these things are always changing, and that nothing quite remains the same. And so he took the image of the river, which is flowing. And this is the famous fragment: "It is not possible to step twice into the same river." But we also have a statement attributed to Heraclitus that all things flow; nothing remains.

[49:34] He takes that image of the river because the waters are always different. And so, if I step into the Mississippi River today, and then tomorrow I step into it, are we stepping into the same river? Well, if the river is water, it's not the same water. I can't really step twice into the same river. And we often borrow that image when we're talking about. See if the situation is changing as we talk about it.

[50:02] We see the situation is fluid. People will say you've heard that expression. It's changing even as you talk about it. Well, this Cratylus here is supposed to have taken this um one step further and say, "It's not possible to step once into the same."Same river, because as my foot breaks the surface of the water and starts to go down, the water at the surface there is different before my foot hits the what bottom of it, so you can't really step once into the same river.

[50:48] Now this had a great influence upon Plato, but in a kind of negative way, you might say, because if he, if this is true, and he kind of accepted it from his teachers, if the world around us is always changing, how can you really have any knowledge of it? How can you really understand it? As the word understand suggests, something has to stand still in order to be understood.

[51:20] So how can you understand the changing? You can't, it seems, and especially if you've answered to the central question that the way we know must be the way things are, otherwise you don't have truth. So how can I understand what doesn't stand still?

[51:45] And the Heracliteans sometimes say would go so far as to say you can't say anything about the world because before you finish your sentence it will have changed. And there's some truth about that. Usually, I'll say, you know, where is Berkeley? Well, he's in front of that chair. Well, no, before I can finish my sentence, he's no longer there. So some of them said all you can do is what point?

[52:13] chair But you can't say You can't say anything about it. Now we'll be looking later on at a quote from the great Max Born on page two.

[52:30] But that's not the point I'm interested in right now. You know Max Born is? He's one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, and he's especially known for his work with waves. Of course, he got the Nobel Prize, and he's the man who finally explained what the wave means in wave mechanics. Okay, but he stands at the very center of modern physics because he he worked with Einstein in Berlin, and they were so close that you can you can buy now the Einstein-Born correspondence because they had these letters back and forth about the developments in quantum theory that Einstein wasn't too happy about, and Born was going along with the Copenhagen interpretation.

[53:17] So he's very central there. At the same time, he's associated with Niels Bohr and Heisenberg in the development of quantum theory and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory. In fact, it was Born who put Heisenberg on to the matrix mathematics, as you know Heisenberg was starting to get something of it. But then Born said that reminds me of this kind of mathematics they've been developing over here in Gottingen and so on.

[53:42] So he's a man who got the Nobel Prize, a very great physicist himself, but he's associated with all the other great men. But notice this particular book. Notice the title there: "The Restless Universe." And in that book, he says that it's strange we have a name for what doesn't exist, namely rest.

[54:07] It's very, very like Heraclitus. Strange we have a name for what doesn't exist, rest. There is no such thing. But you know, for the physicists, now even all these molecules is always constant what motion on and down these things, these vibrations of some sort. So we can see how central to even the thinking of the modern physicists, in this case, at the very center of modern physics, Max Born, is the thought of Heraclitus that all things are what changing.

[54:38] He's saying the same thing: the restless universe. That's Heraclitus' universe. Is it? Now, the second thing, apart from emphasizing now the reality of change and the fact that things are never the same when they change, the second thing that Heraclitus is very famous for and is very important is he loved to point out what seems to be contradictions in change—that something both is and what is not.

[55:22] And this next group of fragments, which we'll look at individually, but. Him as a group, DK49A there, DK6, DK126, DK88, DK57, and DK84A. All of them in some way touch upon this apparent, at least, contradiction in change.

[55:50] Notice what he says here in 49A. We step and do not step into the same rivers. I've crossed the Mississippi River many times. I grew up near the Mississippi River. I could get down there on my bike, play in the cliffs around the Mississippi River. And when my son was at West Point, we crossed the Hudson many times.

[56:21] So we step into the same river many times. But since the waters are always flowing, in a way we don't step into the same rivers. So we both step and do not step into the same rivers.

[56:37] You see the river still back there in St Paul where I left it back there in St. Paul where I left it? Yeah, I think so. Well, it is and isn't.

[56:47] You might say that. We are and we are not. You and I have changed since last class. Not the same as you were. You lost this, some hair, and so on. Okay, you've changed in some ways, huh? Okay, so you're not the same person, are you? Well, but yes, you are the same person, right? So we are and we are what? Not, huh? Okay.

[57:19] Now, the Heraclitus really thinks that that there's a contradiction there, but he—that's another question. We'll come back to that. But he speaks as if there's a contradiction there, right? We are and we are not. He's admitting that something both is and is not. The sun is new every day. The sun itself has changed every day. So change remains the same? No, it's becoming other. So it's new sun every day, not the same sun.

[57:47] What do you mean? Same son. Okay. You know, sometimes he'll marry. Not the person I married, or something, right? But you know, sometimes you know, you know, people who really had quite a change in their life. He's not the same person. I hear people say that. Well, he is and he is not then the same person. You might say he is still Joe, I guess, but not really the same person.

[58:18] Huh? Right. Um. Now, in DK 126 and DK 88, these are the most important fragments, because in these fragments he starts to point out, on the one hand, that change is between contraries, and we see in DK 126 there, he's making or starting an induction. An induction is an argument from many particulars to the general. So, what is it that becomes warm or hot? It's something that's cold or cool, isn't it?

[59:03] What is it that cools off? Something that's warm or hot. What is it that dries out? Something that's wet. What is it that's moistened? Yeah, see, you don't moisten the ocean. You can't moisten the water here. Moisten something that is dry. What is it that's hardened? Something that is soft. What is it that's softened? Something that is hard, right? What becomes sick? Something is healthy. What becomes healthy?

[59:38] Something is sick. So inductively, you could see that change is between what? Contraries, huh? And Heraclitus is pointing that out, huh? This is the induction here. Now, if you go to the pupil of the pupil of Heraclitus, the Plato or maybe Socrates, whoever, yeah, in the Phaedo, right? If you look at the first argument for the immortality of the soul, Socrates is going to use the general statement that change is between contraries, but he begins first with an induction to show that change is between contraries.

[1:00:18] When we go back to Aristotle, as we will eventually here after we get through the fragments here, I will see Aristotle bringing that out, huh? Yeah. And you will find this in not only the Greeks, but you'll find it in the Chinese, and you'll find it even in the modern scientists. The change is by contraries. Okay. So it's Heraclitus who begins his thinking. He's concentrated our mind on the reality of change in the world around us, and now he's starting to bring out that change is by contraries.

[1:00:52] Change is between contraries, huh? Yeah. But it's interesting that all of us, to some extent, touch upon those things, and we not only speak of change as being between contraries, but we in fact say that one becomes the other, don't we? We say the hard becomes soft. We say the hot becomes cold. We say the healthy becomes sick, the young become old. We say that one opposite becomes the other, don't we?

[1:01:24] Now maybe we don't mean that, but we say that, and becomes means comes to be. Now, if one opposite comes to be the other, then one opposite is the other, and there again you have contradiction, don't you?

[1:01:44] The same in us is the living and the dead, the awake and the sleep, the young and the old, for the former having changed are the latter, and again these having changed are the former.

[1:02:01] Now, does he really think that one opposite is the other, or is he merely saying, "Hey, we all say that one opposite becomes the other, but it becomes means comes to be. So he's saying one has come to be the other.

[1:02:18] On the other hand, if you say no, the sick can never be healthy, then you're going to be always sick if you're sick. Or if you're healthy, you'll always be healthy because the healthy can never be sick. If they can never be sick, they can never become. You can't come to be something you can't be.

[1:02:42] Notice the example here: Hesiod is the teacher of most men, the great poet. They believe he knew very many things who didn't even know day and night, for they are one. Maybe Hesiod said in days and nights that you know you get up in the day and do your work, and then you go to bed at night and get your sleep, as if day and night were two different things, right?

[1:03:03] But day becomes night, right? Night becomes day. Therefore, day and night are really the same thing. But notice if day and night were the same thing, you'd have something impossible. It'd both be light and not be light, huh? Because it's day, it'd be light, and because it's night, it would not be light, and it'd both be dark. And not be dark. Be dark as is night, but not dark as it's day.

[1:03:35] Changing at rest. That sounds like a contradiction, right? And sometimes I take the example of people who say, "Well, I find travel restful." And do people say that? Yeah, yeah, sure. You know, they go for a walk, or they go for a drive, or they they travel in some way. But travel is is not is a form of motion. So how can travel be restful? There's an apparent contradiction in that thing, really.

[1:04:05] So, how can motion be full of rest? And vice versa, if you've got a little a little child, a little boy in church or some place where he's got to sit still for a long time. He becomes very restless. So sitting still makes him what? Restless.

[1:04:24] Obviously, contradiction, right? Okay. You see that? So he's very famous for emphasizing this. Now, how do people take off from that? It's a center, right? Well, in modern times,

[1:04:51] the followers of Descartes, there like Hegel, and Marx following Hegel. For Hegel, there is a contradiction in change, and Marx takes it over, and Lenin takes it over from Marx. So when Lenin's defining dialectics in the Marxist sense, he says dialectic is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things. I've got a quote later on. So there are some who take the words of Heraclitus and say, "Yeah, that's the way it is.

[1:05:36] Change does involve a contradiction, and therefore they're saying that the same thing both is and what is not." huh? Hegel used to, you know, use Heraclitus use him to refute all the rest. see?

[1:05:56] Now there's another thinker by the name of what Parmenides, huh? Who reacts another way to this? He says that's impossible for day to be night, huh? That's impossible for the sleeping to be awake, and so on. It's impossible for the heart to be soft, and so on.

[1:06:20] Therefore, if that's what change involves, there can't be real things such as change. Change is a what illusion, right? Okay. Now Parmenides is the first man to bring out and make explicit what we call the axiom of contradiction, right? The axioms of being and non-being. That something cannot both what be and not be him. Okay.

[1:06:52] It is impossible to both be and not be. Okay. Aristotle, in the fourth book of wisdom. Will take up this again and and make it more explicit. It's impossible to both be and not be at the same time, he'll say in the same way, and so on, right? okay. and then, like that,

[1:07:29] something must either be or not be. inside of him. okay. So these are the axioms of being and non-being. Something can't both be and not be at the same time in the same way. We might add it. Something must either be or what? Not be him. Another alternative.

[1:08:00] Now Parmenides is the man who has to emphasize this, but then because of that, he said that change, which Heraclitus had emphasized as being the most real thing in a way. Change is a what illusion? Great, great question. Change is an illusion. Yeah.