Heraclitus and Parmenides: Impact on Philosophy
Heraclitus: Being-Thought and the Ever-Changing Reality
Any rational certainty that provided no new information to knowledge, he finds, is a logical impossibility, since there is only Being-Thought, as described by Heraclitus. A character dark, enigmatic, misanthropic, and socially problematic, Heraclitus represents a departure from previous thought. He can be considered a mathematician or a physicist. According to him, the task of the wise is to reveal the secrets of reality and find its truth. He asks for a first principle, the generation and corruption of things, and asserts that reality, the source of information used, has two manifestations:
- The senses know the changes of things, of running waters that flow like a river.
- Reason, despite the changes, recognizes something that lasts.
The arche is understood in terms of opposition and the struggle of opposites, of affirmation and negation in constant flux. He is represented by two images:
- For the physical world, the image of fire as functional imaging. Fire is not a constant process; it has cycles of growth and decline.
- For the human social world, the image of war, something both destructive and constructive.
The eternal and universal struggle of opposites is the true arche of reality. What remains in the changes is not a material element, but the ability that reality has to change. The universe is governed dialectically by one reason or logos, which maintains the balance of the universe as cosmos, as the law that leads to the universal order of all conflicting dualism that exists.
Consequences of Parmenides’ Thought
- Parmenides, with his thought, arrives at an Eleatic aporia, named for the school to which he belongs, as it poses a perfect science but one that for all practical purposes is useless.
- No one after him will dare to appeal to a single element from which to explain change and plurality, resulting in pluralist thinking that finds it impossible to explain how “the multiple” emerges.
- Natural philosophers begin to be discredited.
The Humanist Shift in 5th Century BCE Philosophy
Historical and Political Context
The 5th century BCE is known as the century of Pericles. During this time, political reforms that had begun years before in the colonies crystallized into a political transformation that gave way to democracy and, with it, the abolition of the privileges of the old aristocrats and oligarchs. This democratic change saw its splendor but also its decadence. Athens faced both internal and external enemies.
External Enemies
Sparta soon became suspicious, and Spartan aristocrats feared losing their privileges. They would soon feel disappointment at the fact that Pericles was concentrating more and more power thanks to the contributions of the Delian League, formed to stop the Persians. Much of the collected goods were devoted to the reconstruction of Athens and the Acropolis. The tension broke definitively with the Peloponnesian civil war, ending with the defeat of Athens. During that time, Athens also suffered the ravages of plague and continuous coup attempts by the old aristocrats.
Internal Enemies
The internal enemies of democracy were the aristocrats. Although they initially admitted democratic reforms as a way of rewarding the people’s work in the Medic Wars, they soon began to criticize the new political system and on several occasions tried to regain power. Immediately after the war, they established the Government of the Thirty Tyrants, which was so bloodthirsty that Thrasybulus was able to restore democracy a year later.