Part one of the series can be found here.
Part two of the series can be found here.
It is impossible that what is, can also be what is not. (Restatement of the Law of Noncontradiction.)
Do you believe that all of reality came from one source? If you do, you are in agreement with one of the oldest cosmological and metaphysical theories of all intellectual history. You also might find yourself in agreement with the pre-Socratic monists who believed that Being is unified into one essential metaphysical scheme. If you disagree with the monists, however, you too might find yourself at home with the pre-Socratic pluralists whose understanding of reality also enjoys an ancient provenance. At this point, we will not answer this important conversation but I do hope to point out some things that we can learn from it. First, the question itself, whether reality ultimately came from one source, is one in nature, or is simply a collection of random diverse things, is still alive and with us today. We see this in debates about the fine-tuning of the universe (mostly from physicists), and various intelligent design theorists (generally from biology), who point to a theistic God as the source of reality, and those who would fall into a similar category as the pluralists who point out the diversity, randomness, and chaotic aspects of the natural world. The great question of the one and the many just will not go away. The other thing we can learn about this conversation is how it centers on what the ancient philosophers called Being (the nature of all reality). As we will see in future posts an important reformulation of the question of the one and the many has come to be known as Being (the one) and Becoming (the many). We can use the terms interchangeably. Everything we discussed in parts one and two about the problem of the one and the many can be applied to the concepts Being and Becoming. This brings us to the important discussion between Heraclitus and Parmenides.
We will begin with Parmenides. Parmenides (ca. 475) was a philosopher who lived in Italy, founded the Eleatic school of philosophy, and taught that it is rationally necessary that reality be one and immutable. Parmenides went as far as to deny motion and change, teaching that such things are an illusion. Being (the principle which unites all reality) must be one. If Being is one, it can not change, and it can not be many. Being can not include nonbeing or becoming as that would be a defect in Being. For Parmenides, change involves imperfection, temporality, and mutability. Change in particular things must be counted among the many (the diversity of all things around us). If change is imperfect, according to Parmenides, it can not be one. If all reality is essentially one, change must be illusory. Parmenides is famous for such pronouncements as “It is necessary to say and think what is. For Being is, and Not-Being is not” and “whatever is, is.” Essentially, Parmenides utterly denied the reality of the sensible world along with all plurality and motion. As radical as Parmenides sounds, there might be an element of truth in his position. He was, after all, making a statement about reality and the essential nature of things. Most philosophers think things have an essential nature that makes them the kind of things they are. A cat has an essential nature that makes it different from a cephalopod. If the essential nature of a cat changes, it is no longer a cat but something else. This is known logically to us by way of the logical laws of identity and the law of noncontradiction (here we notice the metaphysical implications of the laws of logic). Something can not be what it is and something else in the same way and the same relationship. Essence, essential being, is what it is. This has to be for things to make conceptual sense to us.
On the other hand, it would seem foolish to deny that things change. After all, cars, airplanes, and great Blue Whales (among other things) are all capable of traversing large amounts of land, airspace, and water. We understand that movement, motion, growth, and change are part of everyday experience and it does not seem reasonable to deny this aspect of reality. This brings us to Heraclitus (ca 500 B. C.) who taught that all things are in a state of flux governed by a divine, cosmic Law. Several of Heraclitus’s statements have been preserved. He is known for saying things like, “the sun is new every day,” “we are and we are not,” and in reply to Parmenides, “whatever is, is changing.” He is probably most famous for the phrase, “you can not step twice into the same river.” The idea is that once you put your foot into a river, different water will be flowing by the time you put your other foot into it. For Heraclitus, all reality is constantly changing, dynamic, and in flux. It is important to realize that, Heraclitus too, is making a statement about reality. As we move and do things throughout our day, we are changing. As all things exist in time, everything we experience is in a different segment or time frame. In some sense, things are constantly changing.
The tension remains, however, that if everything is in a state of becoming as Heraclitus taught, what is it that perdures when things change? Things do not change into nothingness because nothing (or non-being) is not a thing. Nothing in the physical cosmos can violate the law of conservation. On the other hand, if things have an essential nature and are not completely changing, then rational communication, law and justice, and science are possible. These are important metaphysical concerns that are sometimes overlooked by scientists and others working in the social and behavioral sciences.
This is the difficulty—the tension between Being and Becoming—that was given to Plato to address in his day and has become a central part of the Western intellectual tradition and how we understand that nature of the world around us. The tension is still with us today and the conversation is still alive. In our next post, we will see how Plato attempted to answer the question of Being and Becoming and then we will look at how Aristotle answered the problem.
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