the other side of Plato in the history of western thinking.
Here’s how it happened. Both Heraclitus and Parmenides, when referring to nature, said the word “physis” (“nature”). Parmenides had in mind a thing while Heraclitus had had in mind a process. These two forms of the concept of nature may also be understood in their Latin equivalents: natura naturata(nature natured) and natura naturans (nature naturing). See how one is a noun and the other is a gerund? If nature is a thing that has already come into being, then we just need to report the facts about it. However, if it is constantly becoming, then stating a fact about it would merely be referring to it in some particular point in time. If I drove from Atlanta, GA to Grand Rapids, MI, I could summarize this in factual form by saying “I’m driving to Grand Rapids.” But as a process, I realize there are many little detours that occur between the two cities, like stopping to see a friend in Cincinnati. When stopped there, am I really driving to Grand Rapids? Well yes, but not necessarily at that moment. With Heraclitus and Parmenides, both men understood that reality was both a thing and a process, and saw no point in deciding which was the most correct. Once again, this is like saying that they agreed that both a and not-a were correct. I’m both driving to Grand Rapids and stopping to see a friend in Cincinnati. But for some unfortunate reason, we are somehow handicapped from thinking this way. Trying to hold two contradictory statements in our mind is akin to practicing cognitive gymnastics, so we eventually resort to thinking “it’s either a or not-a.”
With Heraclitus and Parmenides, there is no possibility of losing the universe to facts about the universe (this was referred to as abstractification in the Introduction). This could only occur were one inclined to decide whether nature was either a thing or a process. My smart phone is beside my laptop on the desk. It performs certain smart phone actions. I have confidence that, insofar as it remains a smartphone, it will be capable of performing these tasks. It’s a smart-phone-thing. If I received a phone call but couldn’t slide the unlock-bar, I would still believe that it is a smart phone, only that I am incompetent as its user. To call it a thing and a process would be to allow it to transform moment to moment. In any given day, it can be a smart phone, a dumb phone, a paper-weight, desk-clutter, and so on. Despite its regular and functional transformations, we still call it a smart-phone. This is not how the Greeks understood stuff like smart phones, quarries, or garden tools. Seidel explains, “Being reveals itself to the Greeks as physis, but both as the emerging dominance which abides and as the appearing appearance. In Heidegger’s view there is no opposition between appearance and being for the Greeks” (p. 35, emphasis added). A smart-phone is both its smart-phone-ness and its capacity to be a variety of other things—flashlight, alarm clock, vanity mirror, weapon. But we struggle to think this way. We prefer to say “it’s a smart phone, you idiot.” This way of thinking is a consequence of the efforts of Plato.
When Plato hears the dissimilarity between the physis spoken by Heraclitus and that of Parmenides, he thinks: well who is correct? We have been condemned to ask superlative questions like this ever since. “So who do you love more?” “Yeah, but which city has the best pizza?” “So how small of a penis is too small?” Today we are suckers for the really real. “As Heidegger has said, metaphysics says that it is interested in being, but it is rather things that it takes, or rather mis-takes, for being. This has been the tragedy of [Western] thought” (p. 40).
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Today we ask our search-engine or smart-phone:
“How do I know if I’m in love or not?”
“How can I get her to like me?”
“How much money will I make with a psychology degree?”
For each of these, there is an assumption that a complicated process can be best understood as a matter of fact. Love™. Romance™. Success™1. These are things of which few people would denounce the importance. Yet we are gullible enough to believe that these are things that people can somehow acquire—as if they may simply be added to their shopping cart. Here they have been trademarked in their superlative forms. My partner and I have the least romantic™ history imaginable. Friends have even shared, candidly, that they were impressed that we actually admit our internet match-maker story publicly (rather than making something up that has more spontaneity and whimsy). The assumption is that the fictional story would tell others more about ourselves than our actual romance! The first time this happened (and it has happened more than once), I couldn’t believe it! To me, it couldn’t have been any other way. It certainly won’t become a Nicholas Sparks novel anytime soon, which is fortunate, because then there’d be a bunch of hapless love-seekers trying to orchestrate their own serendipitous internet-dating match.
The problem is not that we are capable of referring to love as a fact, or even that we sometimes do. The problem emerges when we are no longer satisfied with our unique and personal version of love. I have actually had friends walk out on their partners because their love didn’t have a close enough approximation to its mid-twentieth-century billboard representation—you know, 2.5 children and picket fence. It was impossible to this friend that a loving and meaningful relationship could have come without these things. The “love thing” replaced their unique—and unique it was—loving relationship.
I am advancing the claim that it is impossible to capture who you are by a list of facts. It is, however, possible to summarize who you are by a list of facts. The danger here is to let the summary of who you are replace the continuously changing person that you are becoming moment by moment (who can, gasp!, change her/his mind!). Keep in mind that facts are abstractions about you. As I explained earlier, abstractions are not wrong, they just fail to provide an adequate account of the process for which they stand. They are without context and without meaning. It would be more accurate to say that as a person, you are both a list of facts (helpful for describing who you are in a pinch) and a process of becoming. Fortunately, there is an easy way to remember this, and it begins with a return to the pre-Socratics.
For the pre-Socratic philosophers (Heraclitus and Parmenides, remember?), nature was not alone. Indeed, at the time it would have been impossible to think of a concept that exists by itself, but we do this all the time today. When we ponder a word—e.g. “physis”—we immediately think of its definition, like whether it is a process or a thing. By doing so, we forget the process by which the concept itself has arisen; for example, the context of people in conversation in a particular time and place, like Heraclitus and Parmenides on the bank of a river. The process of communication, the exchange of knowledge, the sharing of ideas, the act of understanding—these are all part of the meaning of a word. A concept’s meaning is a product of its conceptual history and the context out of which it arises (as is the case with all things). The Greeks had a word for this, and it is a word that is still paid lip-service in the academy: lógos (as in Bio-logy, psycho-logy, eco-logy, and so on).
We can understand that, for the Greeks, “physis and lógos were intimately united” (Seidel, p. 44). Lógos had originally meant “collection, the happening of uncovering, of revelation, of truth.” I hope this sounds familiar from your experiences in the college classroom, but most likely it will not. Instead, academic disciplines proceed with the positivist assumption that there is but a single pile of knowledge that represents all that can be known about such-and-such a discipline. There is no creation or revelation of truth. Instead, as Seidel has observed, lógos has eventually come to mean a “statement in the sense of correctness or rightness, the exact opposite of the place of truth” (p. 44). That is to say, a statement is either right or wrong; it can never be both right and wrong.
Parmenides and Heraclitus both say physis. The former has in mind a thing; the latter, a process. Their apparent disagreement only occurs when lógos is forgotten. Indeed, the observations of each man come together in service to lógos. However, by separating lógos from physis, the underlying theme of collective truth is lost, and these men are suddenly found to be at odds with one another,
