Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
9. Anaximenes, Pythagoras and Heraclitus: Air, Number, and the Puzzle of Change
Class of 2005-01-20
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7a-wisdom-2005/009-anaximenes-pythagoras-and-heraclitus-air-number-and-the-puzzle/

[0:00] Now, Anaximenes is the third thinker, right? And he's supposed to have said, "Not that water is the beginning of all things, or unlimited, but air is the beginning of all things, right? " And as you can see in this fragment, he's influenced by the importance of air for life, right? Just as our soul being air. Of course, the Greek word for soul, psuche, comes from what? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[0:33] Of course, in English, the word for spirit, ghost, right, goes back the idea of breath, huh? So actually, when we do call God a spirit, or the angel spirit, or even the soul is spirit, we're carrying the word for breath or air over to an immaterial substance. It doesn't mean the same thing, but there's a likeness there, right? And these are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, as Shakespeare says, and are melted into air, into thin air.

[1:00] Okay. So just as our soul, being air, holds us together, so do breath and air surround the whole world, right? Well, if you study the first book about the soul, you'll find out that the soul is not air. But most people imagine the soul to be an air-like substance, right, in the shape of a man. And Dante presents the souls there in purgatory and so on as what having the shape of the man, you know.

[1:27] So you recognize your soul because it has the same shape. Of course, he tries to hug, you know, people you haven't seen all these years, and you can't hug the air, you know. so it's frustrating, you know. Try to hug your wife or your mother or somebody,

[1:42] but that's not what the soul is, huh? Yeah. So he's saying, you don't see it all here in this fragment, but he's saying that air is the beginning of all things, right? Okay. Now, compare Anaximenes with both Thales and Anaximander, right?

[2:03] Could he be influenced, the great Anaximenes, by the thinking of Anaximander, to take air rather than water as the beginning of all things? Yeah, less quality so. Yeah, because both in a quantitative sense and in a qualitative sense, air is more unlimited than water, right? So, with the help of Anaximander, you have two reasons for saying air is a better guess than water, right? That's one of my stock questions on an exam.

[2:43] Why is air a better guess than water, right? Well, here's two reasons from Anaximander, right? Now, obviously, you can't give these two reasons why it's a better guess than the unlimited, because nothing could be more unlimited than the unlimited, right? Okay. But you can give. From this thinking here, that if the beginning of all things must be unlimited in these two senses, then air is certainly closer to what it is than water, right?

[3:12] Okay. But why he would say air rather than unlimited? I suppose he wanted to go back to something that's closer to our senses, if he can, right? And unlimited is just described negatively, right? So

[3:29] maybe he wanted something more sensible than unlimited, right? But yet it seems to incorporate these two things, these two ways of being unlimited. Makes sense. Okay. Now there is a third reason you can give why air is a better guess than water.

[3:53] And this can be seen better if we take a little wider perspective and talk about the poets a bit before the philosophers. Now the poets kind of anticipate the philosophers, but their idea is that Mother Earth is the beginning of all things. Okay.

[4:21] So the poets talk about Mother Earth. Maybe even Shakespeare, huh? In the famous play, The Timon of Athens, right? Timon is digging in the ground, right, for roots, and he addresses the earth, saying, "Common Mother, thou, whose womb immeasurable, an infinite breast, teems and feeds all, right? Okay."Notice he's. Speaking of Mother Earth, as giving rise to everything, right? And he's speaking of as being in a way infinite, huh?

[5:06] How many mothers thou whose womb immeasurable, right? That's infinite, right? An infinite breast teems its birth to and feeds all, right? Okay. So the poet said Mother Earth was the beginning of all things, and that's very important to see

[5:27] in this thinking. That this is kind of the first guess about what the first matter is, and it's interesting to use the word mother, right? Which has a double importance in philosophy of nature. If you look a Latin dictionary, you'll see that the word for matter, materia, comes from the word mater, huh? Okay.

[5:57] And that's one of the reasons why we don't call God our our mother, right? Because that would suggest that God is a cause in the sense of matter, right? Okay.

[6:09] Um. So Mother Earth, the word mother, as they say in the Latin, there gives rise to the word for matter, right? So it's kind of like the first thought, really. The second reason why mother's interesting is that mother is the one who gives birth, right? And the word nature comes from the word birth. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Prenatal, then the root there, nat. Prenatal, postnatal, nativity. Are you a native of Worcester?

[6:44] I say to the students, "Were you born here?" Right? You see, okay. In Shakespeare, there is moving the word birth there in that text I gave you earlier. Okay. Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse, right? Revolts from one's true nature, right? But nature comes from that. So mother is is significant both for mater matter and for nature, right? And of course, Aristotle talks about nature. We first see nature as being matter, then later on, nature as being form, right?

[7:18] Of course, he goes on to show that nature is more form than matter, but we first see matter as nature, right? Earth is very interesting too, because the English word for cause is what? Ground. Ground and ground and earth are kind of the same thing, right? So cause, ground, nature, matter, right? All of these things are kind of confused in the poets talking about Mother Earth, right?

[7:48] So it's a wonderful place to begin, right? But the first philosopher, Thales, doesn't agree with the poets, right? He takes water, right? And then Anaximenes

[8:08] takes air, right? Okay. Now, reason looks before and after, right? Do you see it before and after as you go from Mother Earth to water to air, right?

[8:23] It's more rare, yeah. More, more, more, fewer and fewer qualities. Yeah, yeah. You can say Mother Earth is more sensible, in one sense of sensible, than water, right? And water is more sensible than what? Air, Air, right? Okay. You know, he took everybody out of this room and all the furniture out of this room, right? And somebody says, "There's nothing in there," even though there's air in there, right?

[8:51] Well, we all spontaneously say, "There's nothing in there," right? You open a box, you know. You know, I was reading Sherlock Holmes the other day. You know, and of course, there's this box, you know, that they've recovered, and they think it's filled with rubies and diamonds and so on. And you open the chest, and it's empty. There's nothing in there. Well, there's something in there, but yeah.

[9:17] But with air, isn't there? You say nothing's in there, right? See. So you're going from the more known to us to the what less known to us. That's one order, right? You're going from what is more sensible to what is less sensible, almost not sensible at all, you know. Okay. Um. But now, in terms of a guess as to what the first matter is, right? You're getting something that is maybe more unlimited, right? They thought the Earth, Mother Earth, floated on the water.

[9:59] Some of them. But there's another thing that this suggests, huh? You're getting something thinner and finer in its parts, right? Okay. And so you know how water sometimes comes through the what basement walls, right? But Mother Earth doesn't come through the basement walls, right? But the water is finer and thinner. Go through there, right? Um, but the air will get through where the water doesn't get through, right?

[10:33] So the air is finer and thinner, right? And I mentioned how Shakespeare will often speak of air, you know, melted into thin air. Um, now does it make sense to say that the you're going from the thick to the thin now? You might say, right? Okay.

[10:55] Now is the first matter which all things are made. Is that going to be the thickest of things or the thinnest of things? Yeah, yeah. My standard example is that of a thick book, right? Thick book is made by putting together what? Thin pages, right? You don't make a thin page, but put together thick books. You make the you make the thick out of the thin, right?

[11:25] Huh? Okay. So if you make even modern science, if you make molecules out of atoms, the atoms are thinner than the molecules, right? Yeah. If you make the atoms out of elementary particles, they're even thinner, right? Mm-hmm. And if the elementary particle had a quark, some little thing, they're going to be even thinner, right? So if I say the atom is the beginning of everything, and you say the elementary particle, you're you're making a better guess, right?

[11:53] So this is the third reason why air is a better guess than water, but also water better guess than what Mother Earth. It's thinner, right? Finer in its parts, right? Okay. You see that? So there are three reasons then why air is a better guess than what water, right? Huh? It's more unlimited in a quantitative sense. More unlimited in a qualitative sense, and it's thinner, right? Now you couldn't so much use those reasons to say it's a better guess than the unlimited, but still more satisfactory to us animals who want to sense things, right?

[12:37] To guess air rather than what the unlimited, right? Okay. So it's kind of like he wants to combine with something somewhat sensible, right? It hasn't completely escaped our senses, like water has not. With the insight of an Anaximander that it's unlimited, right? And air seems to do that, right?

[13:09] So those three thinkers are all in the city of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor, coast of what today would be Turkey, right? It's called Asia Minor there. Now the next thinker, Pythagoras, he's kind of an oddball

[13:27] because he comes into natural philosophy more from mathematics, right? And so you've heard the Pythagorean theorem and other such wonders that are attributed to Pythagoras. And in this statement here, the most famous discovery of Pythagoras, right, that the harmony of the octave, what the Greeks would call the diapason, comes in the ratio of two to one. That objects in the ratio of two to one, right, produce this harmony of the octave.

[14:05] Now the time when I did this years ago in California, there we do with music strings, and you had these raised strings above the board, and you could tighten them or loosen them, right? And you tighten or loosen one, so when you pluck it, it sounds just like the other one. Then you take a wooden block, right, and move it down underneath one of the strings halfway, and you pluck the half string and the whole string, and you get the harmony of the octave.

[14:31] Now we call it the octave because we have eight notes in our thing. The Greeks called it diapason, means dia through pason all. You've gone through all. It's like you start over again, right? Okay, you go from do to do, right? Now the other harmonies have simple numbers behind them too, but this is the most famous one, huh? So they say the Pythagoreans got carried away, right?

[14:56] Maybe behind every. Thing there is what simple numbers, simple ratios like that, huh? And so, in the opinions about the soul, say in the first book about the soul, Aristotle mentions the opinion that the soul is a self-moving number. That's undoubtedly what Pythagorean, right? And when they get into ethics, right? They try to find a number for the virtues, huh? And they try to see some kind of likeness, huh, between this number and that virtue, right?

[15:26] And so, with justice, for example, the virtue of justice, would that be an odd number or an even number? Even. Yeah. See, justice is a question of, you know, are we even now? You know, you know. Equals. Like we say we're accepting something financially. are we even now, you know. So, okay. This expression, I get your number. That's probably Pythagorean in origin, right? Okay. All right. Now, in coming into

[15:56] natural philosophy from mathematics, in mathematics you don't really have matter, but you have this thing called form, right? Okay. And so, if you are accustomed to mathematics, you are accustomed to looking for some other kind of cause that these other guys are looking for. You are inclined to look for the kind of cause called what? Form. Yeah. And so, the ratio of two to one would be an example of that, right?

[16:25] So, we talk about the second kind of cause, form. We call it form, but it's not only shape that's meant by that, right? But ratio, order, and so on, right? Okay. So, you know what a Manhattan is?

[16:51] Some kind of drink. I don't know what's in it. Vermouth whiskey. Well, it's made out of you know the original formula is made of rye whiskey, right? And sweet vermouth, right? Okay. But you got to combine them in a certain what? Ratio. Yeah. And the classical one is two to one, right? Two parts rye whiskey to one part sweet vermouth, huh? Okay. Now, what's a Stinger? A little bit, right?

[17:16] Yeah. Now, the matter of a Stinger is different from a Manhattan. You use brandy, huh? And white creme de menthe. But you combine them also in the ratio of what? Two to one. Two parts brandy to one of white creme de menthe. Now, if you made it the reverse, or if you made even half and half, it'd be too sweet and kind of cloying, right? Mm-hmm. So it's got to be put in the proper what ratio, right?

[17:45] Okay. And you know, there is a little big difference in natural thing between carbon dioxide, which is I guess in our sodas or something. And carbon monoxide, right? Yeah, somewhat. Yes. That ratio one, that ratio one to one will kill you, right? By the ratio of what, two to one will kill you, right? Okay, so you got to watch out for that ratio. So now, Pythagoras is touching upon a second kind of what?

[18:13] Cause. Cause form, right? Okay. And I was explaining there during the break there. I think I done so with some of the people before. Um, the second kind of cause is not as well known in a way as the first, right? And I take the simple example always to illustrate this.

[18:38] Let me just give it again here. Cause synthetic He says, "What is worth saying can be said twice." He says, "Okay." So you take the word cat.

[18:54] It's funny I was giving a lecture there at the the conference there, and I was using this example using the word cat, right? And then the Dominican I was there, he gave me a talk too, and using the word cat in this thing too. It's kind of funny, you know. It's like I allude to the fact that I had used the example of this He was using it to illustrate something else.

[19:17] But if you look at the word cat, what is the most obvious dependence that the word cat has? Yeah, depends upon C A and T. And if someone says it doesn't depend upon C A and T, well, we'll take away C, we'll take away A, we'll take away T, right? Obviously, it does depend upon. C, A, and T, okay? So that's the most known, you might say, the most undeniable dependence that the word cat has is upon what it's made out of, which is like its matter, right?

[19:54] Okay. Now does it depend upon anything besides letters? See, and it might seem at first that that's all depends upon because if you take away C A T, you got nothing left, right? Nothing else involved in it besides the letters, right? But then if you look around a little bit and you see maybe somewhere else the word act, right? You say, "Hey, I found something that has exactly the same letters as the word cat, but it isn't the word cat, okay?

[20:26] " Now you see it has a second dependence, right? What does it depend upon? Order. Yeah, It's not quite as obvious that it depends upon the order as it depends upon the letters, right? But the order now is the second kind of what? Cause. Now once you see that the same very same letters get into different orders, do the letters explain how they get into that order?

[20:55] No, it's not because they are those letters that they take on that order. Otherwise, you know, when I look back, oh, it's become the other. This would have come back and this be going over here, right? Yeah, they don't do that, right? Well, that starts to make me think now the third kind of cause, which would be the mover or the maker, right? In this case, the writer, right?

[21:16] Okay. And now the ability of the writer to form letters and to arrange them, right? Does that fully explain this? Well, I was mentioning in the break that my daughter went to Thomas Aquinas in College, and they're always talking about TAC and I run into those guys. So I could put them in a quite different order: this order, this order. I could do this order, right? I'm really my ability extends to all kinds of orders, right?

[21:49] But why did I put them in this order rather than that order, that order? Well, I wanted to talk about my favorite animal rather than about this college, right? Okay. Or about human acts or something, right? In ethics, I've never been doing that. So my ability to order the letters doesn't explain why, among all the orders I could put them in, I did this one, right? It's for the sake of talking about that animal or my pet or something or former pet, is it?

[22:21] Okay. The same with this chair, right? The most obvious dependence this chair has is upon the wood that's in it, right? Because if you took all the wood out of it and maybe the screws, nothing left, right? But then when you see that this is also made out of the same maybe wood, right? Then you're forced to the second cause, right? And then how does it get into the shape because it's wood?

[22:46] Well, then this would start, you know, turning the chair. No. Well, then you're introduced to the maker, right? But it says it built and shaped the wood explain why he put this shape among? See, and he could have given the chair instead of this

[23:04] that shape. He could have given this shape, right? You know. See, and he could have given the roof of the chapel to this this shape. Could have given the roof of the chapel that shape, right, of the house, right? And you say, well, he could do that. You talk to the carpenter. You say you are crazy, but I can do it. I am able to do it, right?

[23:26] So his ability to shape wood doesn't explain why he gave it this shape or that shape, right? And we're forced back to to the final cause, the end, right?

[23:36] So these guys start out looking for what matter first, and then they see the need a little bit for form, and then eventually, in fact, they see the need for the mover, and then you get Socrates and Plato. You start to see the end, right? So it's beautiful the human mind develops here.

[23:59] Now, Pythagoras, incidentally, he was starting the island of Samos, I think it was, off the coast of Asia Minor there. But then he migrated to what southern Italy? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So in southern Italy, the mainland there, he was there was a center of Pythagorean studies and so on. And Plato, when he got fed up with Athens after the death of Socrates, he traveled over there and got a lot of his mathematical training, right, that comes out in his Timaeus and so on.

[24:34] So Heraclitus is back on the coast of Asia Minor, but a little bit north of Miletus, the city of what? Ephesus, right? But some time before St. Paul, right? More than 500, 600 years, right? Five hundred years at least. We have a few more fragments here from Heraclitus, huh? Heraclitus, I sometimes call the central thinker in human thought, and it's by analogy to the center of a circle, right?

[25:08] You say, well, you can take off from the center of a circle and go in all kinds of directions, right? And so, Plato and Aristotle take off and go in one direction, right? And Hegel in modern times, and Marx, and so on, they go off in another direction a little bit, and the physicists go off another direction, and so on, and the evolutionists go off another direction, right?

[25:32] But he's the center, right? He's the central thinker in human thought. You don't see many reasons for that you start to study this man. Plato was taught by a student of Heraclitus, Cratylus, right? Cratylus. Cratylus, yeah. He was um genius.

[25:59] C r a t y l u s, and an image of that's we spell. And there is a dialogue of Plato called the Cratylus, where Cratylus and his more famous teacher Socrates, right, have a conversation, right? And although Socrates seems to be put above Cratylus,

[26:20] Aristotle in the Metaphysics he says, even in old age, Plato was still quoting Cratylus and still following some of the thought of Cratylus, huh? But Cratylus, of course, is just a student of Heraclitus, right? He's a calm dimwit, but Heraclitus, he's a wit. Okay.

[26:44] Nature loves to hide, right? I love that one. Now, I think I mentioned some of you one time here that I was in the bookstore there, Borders and stuff like that, and looking at the books in the scientific section, and there was a book entitled "Nature Loves to Hide," and the guy was not giving any credit to to Heraclitus, at least I could see at the beginning, but but that was the name of the book, right?

[27:06] So it's become a very famous statement. Now, why does nature love to hide? Why does he say that? Because within. Yeah, yeah. See, the original meaning of nature, of course, is birth, right? And birth, the baby comes from what? Within. Within, yeah. As I say, my daughter just gave birth recently, and I guess they're kind of expecting a boy because he has so many girls, And he just had one boy, but the rest are girls, and so they thought more about the boy's names, right?

[27:41] And so, and little old lady Sophia comes out there, you know, every day they were a little bit, because you have to sign, you know, the name down before you leave, so and so, but that's hidden, right? The baby inside, especially you know, in the old days we didn't have those, you know, instruments to try to see the baby's like in there, and then,

[28:07] then the word nature was carried over to the source of the baby within the mother, right? But that's hidden too, huh? And then it became generalized for any cause of motion and rest within a thing, right? Yeah. And then eventually nature comes to mean what a thing is, but always this is something what within, huh? So that's why nature loves to hide, right? It's the outside of things that are known, right?

[28:37] Not hidden from us, huh? Now there may be other reasons too. Nature loves to hide, to help with the fact that nature means first what matter, and then what's in matter, and matter is reason to hide things. It's not that actual, but but the first reason why nature loves to hide is because it's something within, huh?

[29:01] And Shakespeare often points that out, huh? Like like Iago, the villain there in Othello, right, huh? Okay. He speaks of his internal nature, willing, right? And because he wears it on his sleeve, later on, you'll know, what he is. But at first, it's hidden, right?

[29:23] Okay, nature loves to hide. Now, nature, as they say, is defined by motion, right? The beginning and cause of motion and rest. The Heraclitus is, as you can see, the next group of fragments here.

[29:41] He especially is famous for emphasizing the change in the world around us, right? And he uses the image there of the river, right? That reality is like a river, which is always but flowing and never stays. What? The same, yeah. Okay.

[30:03] So it is not possible, he says, to step twice into the same river. Now, why does he say that? Yeah, because not really the same water, right? River is water, and it's not the same water, right? So, if I cross the Mississippi or the Hudson, same river, many times? No, no. Now, Cratylus, huh, is supposed to have said you can't step once into the same river, right?

[30:34] Because as your foot what breaks the water and then goes down, right? The water is flowing on, right? So it's not the same water there at the surface when you first broke in, and when your foot reaches the the ground beneath, right? Okay.

[30:51] Notice how we sometimes use that same image. You know, we'll say the situation is fluid. You hear that expression sometimes? Meaning it's not staying the same; it's always. I describe it right. Okay.

[31:09] Now, in the next group of fragments here, DK forty-nine down to about DK eighty-four. Hey. Um. The next thing that Heraclitus is famous for doing out is that in these always changing things, right, or in change itself, he points out what seems to be a contradiction in these things, right?

[31:40] And some thinkers, like Parmenides, say, reacting to this, right, to what Heraclitus says and what the Eleatics said, maybe others too besides who don't know about, is going to reject change, right, as an impossibility because it involves a contradiction. Now, did Heraclitus really think that change involves something being and not being at the same time? In some way. Or is he just trying to give that appearance, right?

[32:14] Okay, we'll leave it up in the air a little bit, right? See, because you have words where he seems to admit that something can both be and not be. And Parmenides, he's not in this particular collection because Parmenides is outside of natural philosophy because he says there is no change, and nature is the beginning and cause of motion or change and rest. So there is no change, is no nature, right?

[32:39] So you know. But he's reacting to things like Heraclitus is pointing out here: this appearance of what contradiction in change, and those like Plato and Aristotle. Take off from Heraclitus saying, "Well, there's an appearance of contradiction here, but that can't really be in there, right? And therefore, we don't yet understand this, right? That's the way they start to develop it, right? They untie that appearance of contradiction, right?

[33:14] But then thinkers like Heraclitus, I mean Hegel, say in modern times, and Karl Marx, following Hegel, right, they say there really is a contradiction in things, right? And dialectics in the Hegelian sense and in the Marxist sense seems to be saying there really is a contradiction there. So as Comrade Lenin said, right, dialectics is the study of the contradictions and the essence of things, right? Okay, they're taking off in a different direction, right?

[33:45] See how central thinker he is. We step and do not step into the same rivers, right? He seems to be saying it is and is not, right? We are and we are not, right? Okay. So is this the same guy teaching us last week? Have I remained the same or have I changed since last week? Well, yeah, old grandfather, I guess. Yeah, if I I've changed somewhat since last week, right?

[34:18] Huh? Lost some hair, and who knows what else. So changes staying the same or becoming other. Becoming other. Yeah, so it's not the same guy teaching us last week, is it? I've become other since last week, right? And you guys too. Are you the same? No, if all things are flowing, you guys have changed too, right? No, I'm here this week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're not the same guys as you know.

[34:45] And he said, "Okay, that seems to be correct. Just a minute now, though. This is the same guy teaching us, right? This is the same students, right? So we are, we are not, right? "So he seems to be admitting, right, that we are and we are not. But is that so? Did you really think that? There is some, there is something to it, but how far, how far he would go, I don't know.

[35:10] Yeah. But you can see from what he's saying that there is something to that. Yeah. The sun is new every day. The sun is changing, everything else is changing, right? Yeah.

[35:25] Now, in the next fragment, huh? You can see in a fragmentary form the induction. You know what Heraclitus is making, right? And it's an induction that you find repeated by Socrates or Plato in the dialogue called the Phaedo, and that Aristotle in the first book of Natural Hearing will make again. And the change, or the induction, is that change is between contraries, right? Change is from one contrary to another, right?

[36:08] And we even say in change that one contrary becomes the other. Cold things become warm, right? And the warm becomes cold, right? The wet dries out, and the dry becomes wet, right? What dries out? Something wet, isn't it? And what do you moisten? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, what what do you soften? It's hard. What do you harden? Yeah. Yeah. Who becomes healthy? Who becomes sick? Yeah. So inductively, right, an argument from many particulars to the general, it seems a change between contraries, right?

[36:58] Now maybe you might start sometimes not from hot or cold, but from lukewarm, but that seems to be a mixture of hot and cold, right? So everything seems to go back to what the contraries, right? Now Socrates, as I say, develops this idea there in the first argument for the immortality of the soul. He wants to reason from change being between contraries.

[37:22] And in the next fragment, the kind of puzzling application of this: the same in us as the living and the dead, Well, they're contraries, right? Well, they're contraries, right? They wake and they sleep, the young and the old, huh? For the former having changed are the latter, and again these having changed are the former. Now notice, in speech we say that the living become dead, right? Or the hard becomes soft, right?

[37:53] Or the cold become hot, huh? Now what does the word "become" mean? Comes to be, right? Now, if the cold comes to be hot, then the cold would be hot, right? That's what we seem to be saying, right? Saying. Now, if you don't mean that, the cold comes to be hot, right? Why do you say it?

[38:21] And if the cold doesn't become hot, then the cold will always be cold. Won't be any change anymore? Right. Okay. Now, a very strong example of this that one contrary is the other, right? Because it comes to be there is day and night, right? And so he makes fun of the poet, right? I guess Hesiod has a work called Days and Nights, doesn't he? Right. And I don't know.

[38:51] I suppose he tells you, you know, get up and do your work in the day, and get it done during the day, and then go to bed and get your rest at night time, right? So Hesiod, like most men, would talk about day and night as being not the same thing, right? Yeah. And of course, the poets are the great teachers of men. So Hesiod is the teacher of most men.

[39:07] They believe he knew very many things, but he didn't even know day and night, for they are one, right? He spoke as if they are two different things, right? Well, if day becomes night, night becomes day, then they are the same, right? Then day is night, right? It comes to be it. Okay. Now, did Heraclitus really think that day and night are the same thing? Did he really think the living and the dead are the same?

[39:31] Those who are awake and those who are asleep. Well, sometimes another group of fragments, the ones that deal with method and desire to know and so on, we have that fragment that I quoted before, where Heraclitus says, "We should not act and speak like those asleep. " You know, for the sleep, for the waking, there is one world that's common, but when men fall asleep, it goes into a world of its own, right?

[39:56] Hmm. Obviously, he does see a difference between being sleeping and being awake, right? But he speaks or says in words that the sleeping and the awake are the same, right? Because one becomes the other, right? The living and the dead are the same, right? The dead are the same, right? So if you just take his words, he seems to be admitting that something both is and is not, right?

[40:19] And that's what led Parmenides to make explicit, "Hey, that's impossible, right? " He says, "Only a two-headed mortal could think that. You have to have one head to think that it is so, one to think it isn't so, right? But one the same head couldn't think both at the same time, right? "

[40:40] And because two-headed mortal would be a monster, right? Something unnatural, right? Of course, Heraclitus says we should follow nature, right? But if you just take Heraclitus' words, day and night are the same.

[41:00] Then he seems, in words, to be making a contradiction, right? Okay. So now you have the famous dichotomy, right? The most famous dichotomy in human thought. Are you going to follow Heraclitus, who says everything's changing, but change involves a contradiction? Therefore, it's possible for something to both be and not be, right? Or are you going to follow Parmenides and say something can't both be and not be, right?

[41:31] Therefore, change is a what illusion, right? Okay. Now, if you had to choose between these two, right, which would be more reasonable? Right, right now it would be Parmenides, but we don't know enough to make the judgment. Now, usually, when I ask this in class, some people will say, "Well,

[41:58] our knowledge starts with our senses, right? " And as Shakespeare says in *Troilus and Cressida*, "Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs," right? So, if you're following your senses and what catches your senses, it's motion, it's change, right? So, starting from your senses, you might say change is real, right? Yeah. And therefore, it's possible to both be and not be, right? Okay.

[42:26] But Parmenides says, "Well, you can't really think that so, right? That it is and is not, right? Therefore, this talk about change must be a what illusion, right? Okay. Now,

[42:41] maybe there's a way to avoid these two alternatives right way to avoid these two alternatives, right? But if you had to choose between these two, which would be more reasonable? Yeah, so that change exists and that. Parmenides seems more logical if you're just doing analytically right Well, you see, Parmenides seems more logical. Yeah, you're following reason there. Yeah, see, you're following the senses. You kind of, kind of, oh, okay.

[43:09] Follow Heraclitus there, right? And Hegel and Marx, right? Following the words, not necessarily the thought, but the words there of Heraclitus. The official name of the Marxist philosophy is dialectical materialism, but the dialectical part comes from Hegel, right? And

[43:32] what they mean by dialectical is that there's real contradictions in things, and the struggle of the opposites gives rise to development, right? So sometimes I use Heraclitus against Heraclitus on this matter, and I say, "Well, Heraclitus says in other fragments that we have to follow what is common, right? Okay. So if you and I disagree, right, it doesn't get us anywhere for me to say, you know, I'm right and therefore you're wrong, and you return the compliment, okay?

[44:09] If you and I disagree, we have to get back to something we can both agree about, right? And then try to decide between us, right? Like two scientists, you know, if you've got one hypothesis, and another hypothesis, we might both, you know, make a prediction on the basis of our hypothesis, right? And find an experiment we could both observe that would contradict maybe one of our predictions and not the other one, right?

[44:31] Okay. Now I say, what does Heraclitus and Parmenides have in common? At first sight, they have nothing in common, right? Because the one guy says everything's changing, and the other guy says there's no change at all. That's all illusion. And yet one guy seems, at least in words, to be saying something can both be and be and not be. We are and we are not, as he said, right?

[44:51] And the other guy says, no, that's impossible, you know, okay. But the one guy affirms, the other guy denies. And vice versa, right? But if you think about it more deeply, right? You say, hey, they do have something in common. They think you have to choose between change and the impossibility of contradiction. And if you choose change, you have to reject the impossibility of contradiction. And if you choose the impossibility of contradiction, you have to

[45:26] reject change, right? That's what they agree about, right? You gotta, is it? Now, why do you have to choose between them? Because apparently they contradict each other.

[45:40] That's Parmenides' principle, right? So, in choosing between them, if Heraclitus is really doing that, right? He's doing so on the basis of Parmenides' principle, right? So the ball game's over. Parmenides is the one. Okay. But at the same time, you know, it's absurd to deny that change exists, as Plato and Aristotle recognize, right? And this is kind of a great discovery, now, right? Once you recognize that Parmenides is correct in saying that this is fundamental, you know, and yet you realize it's absurd to deny that change exists, huh?

[46:20] Then there must be a way of understanding change that does not involve a real contradiction, right? And therefore, that apparent contradiction underneath it is hidden—the way nature really is, right? And that's what Plato and Aristotle set out to do, right? To untie the apparent contradiction, right? Okay. And that's been followed all the way up to the Summa Theologiae, right? That idea of presenting what seems to be a contradiction, right, and then untying it, right?

[46:51] And Aristotle will talk about this way of discovering things, right, by untying contradictions, in the beginning of the third book of Wisdom. We'll see that they read later on. In in the next one, what does Heraclitus mean in in this one saying, "Changing it rests"? Okay. Now, two things, there huh. One is I've heard people say, right? I find travel very restful. Oh yeah.

[47:22] Okay. And I said, now how can that be? Because travel is obviously motion and the opposite of rest, right? So they're saying I'm finding motion very restful. Okay. There's a apparent contradiction there, right? Okay. Now, vice versa, you got you know some ceremony like a long event in church or something like that, right? And you tell a little boy, a little girl, you've got to sit still, right?

[47:46] And sitting still for all that time makes them very restless, right? So being still makes them restless, right? Seems a contradiction, right? Of course, here you can see that when my body is in motion, right? Person says I find travel restful, right? They go for a walk, right? That when their body is in motion, then their emotions calm down, right? Okay. And with the little boy, it's the reverse, right?

[48:18] When his body is made to be at rest, right? Then his emotions get all agitated, right? Huh? See, so it's not the same thing that's at rest and at motion, right? Okay. Now, maybe Heraclitus is stating it that way because he wants to what stimulate your what thinking, right? Okay. But if you just take the words on the surface, right? In words, he seems to be making a contradiction.

[48:47] Day and night are the same, and so on, right? Um. And people say he's talking about justing like to express things in a kind of what paradoxical way, right? Huh? Okay. Um. I seen this sticker on somebody's car in the church parking lot there in mass in the morning. You know, the best things in life aren't things. Have you seen that one? Oh. Yeah. Well, just take the words now.

[49:14] The best things in life are not things. Contradicts itself. Yeah, it's kind of an appearance there, right? Huh? But I think the meaning of it is, you know, that what people something like that. Yeah, sometimes we say people are not things, right? But in some sense, the word things they are things, right? Okay. Now I've talked about that that using equivocal words, right? Where where something is said of two things, and one of them keeps the common word as its own, right?

[49:45] And the other, because it adds something noteworthy, gets a new name, right? That's that's true about the word thing, right? Thing is said of things and persons, right? And persons gets a new name because they add. Something right? They're very, you know. See, so in one sense of things, a person is a thing; they're not nothing, right? But in another sense, they're divided against things, right? Yeah. So, the best things in life.

[50:12] Yeah. So, in the first part of the sentence, things is what in the common sense, right? And when you say are not things, yes, right. So it kind of makes you stop and think. What is? What are they saying here, right? What's the meaning of that, right? You have to stop and, in this case, distinguish the two meanings of things and so on, right? You see. But on the surface, there's an appearance of contradiction.

[50:36] Maybe to make you stop and think, right? See, okay. Why do we say day becomes night? Becomes means comes to be. Does day really come to be night? Well, then day is night, right? Well, I don't mean that. Well, then why do you say that? You see, you know. And if day doesn't become night, then day remains day forever, right? And we'll never have any night. Or if it's nighttime, night does not become day, so it's always going to be night.

[51:05] You see. And the ignorant can't become knowing. You're always ignorant, right? Okay. You see that? Yeah. Yeah. Now we got to stop pretty soon, here, huh? We stopped at four thirty. We stop, yeah. But now, as you look at the next three fragments here, DK fifty-four, fifty-one, eight, which I'll leave you to think about, and we'll talk about them next time. You can see maybe Heraclitus doesn't mean that these things really are contradictory, right?

[51:43] But he wants to bring out the appearance of contradiction. Okay. To make you stop and what think, right? Huh? Just like Thomas, you know, when he gives the first part of each summa, you know, you get you know three or four arguments against what he's going to say, right? And then one on the other side, right? So there's a little contradiction there, right? And that's to make you stop and what think, right?

[52:10] And then the body of the article, you call it, but sometimes in the earlier works, you know they'll call the body of the article the solutio, right? Which means in Latin the untying, right? The untying of that apparent contradiction. Then the question is disputata. You know, you might have you know many more than that on each side. Yeah, you might have made ten, fifteen on one side, and you know five or ten on the other side, right?

[52:33] And so your mind really gets kind of tied up, temporarily, right? And then you have to untie this, right? Huh? Okay. So we'll continue with the central thinkers of human thought, huh?