Plato And Heraclitus Cosmology example essay topic

The philosophy of process is a venture in metaphysics, the general theory of reality. Its concern is with what exists in the world and with the terms of reference in which this reality is to be understood and explained. The task of metaphysics is, after all, to provide a cogent and plausible account of the nature of reality. Heraclitus and Parmenides are probably two of the most significant philosophers of ancient Greece until Socrates and Plato; in fact, Heraclitus's philosophy is perhaps even more fundamental in the formation of the European mind than any other thinker in European history, including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Why?

Heraclitus, like Parmenides, postulated a model of nature and the universe, which created the foundation for all other speculation on physics and metaphysics. The ideas that the universe is in constant change and that there is an underlying order or reason to this change-the Logos-form the essential foundation of the European worldview. "The logos guides men and keeps them always on the straight and narrow. A man has reasoning, but there is also divine logos. Human reasoning is born from the divine logos" (DK 23 B 57.1-3) Every time you walk into a science, economics, or political science course, to some extent everything you do in that class originates with Heraclitus's speculations on change and the Logos. I will compare Plato's reaction to Heraclitus's assertion that the world is in flux.

As well, I will contrast Plato and Heraclitus cosmology. Cosmology is the scientific study of the large-scale properties of the Universe as a whole. It endeavours to use the scientific method to understand the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the entire Universe. Like any field of science, cosmology involves the formation of theories or hypotheses, which make specific predictions for phenomena that can be tested with observations.

Depending on the outcome of the observations, the theories will need to be abandoned, revised or extended to accommodate the data. The prevailing theory about the origin and evolution of our Universe is the so-called Big Bang theory. Like so much else in the field, process philosophy began with the ancient Greeks. The Greek theoretician Heraclitus of Ephesus (b. ca. 540 B.C.) known even in antiquity as "the obscure" is universally recognized as the founder of the process approach.

In his book On Nature he depicted the world as a manifold of opposed forces joined in mutual rivalry, interlocked in constant strife and conflict. Fire, the most changeable and ephemeral of these elemental forces, is the basis of all: "This world-order... is... an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures" (Fr. 217, Kirk-Raven-Schofield). The fundamental "stuff" of the world is not a material substance of some sort but a natural process, namely "fire", and all things are products of its workings (pros trop ai) meaning the whole universe was made up of fire and will be born again by fire. He believed fire to be the arche (the fundemantal element that makes our planet). The variation of different states and conditions of fire -- that most process manifesting of the four traditional Greek elements -- engenders all natural change.

For fire is the destroyer and transformer of things and "All things happen by strife and necessity" (Fr. 211, ibid). And this changeability so pervades the world that "one cannot step twice into the same river" (Fr. 215, ibid).

As Heraclitus saw it, reality is at bottom not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes: we must at all costs avoid the fallacy of substantializing nature into substances because it is not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities which they produce that make up this world of ours. Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but an ever-changing flow; the sun is not a thing, but a flaming fire. Everything in nature is a matter of process, of activity, of change. Heraclitus taught that panta rhei ("everything flows") and this principle exerted a profound influence on classical antiquity. There are two types of interpretations of panta rhei, maximalist and minimalist. Maximalist suggest that everything in the world is changing and is always in movement, there is no steadiness.

Minimalist interpretation says that the surface level has flux (movement) whereas at a deeper level, we have steadiness and harmony. Even Plato, who did not much like the principle ("like leaky pots" he added at Cratylus 440 C), came to locate his exception to it, the enduring and changeless "ideas" in a realm wholly removed from the domain of material reality. Plato was the youngest son of Ariston and Perictione who both came from famous wealthy families who had lived in Athens for generations. While Plato was a young man his father died and his mother remarried, her second husband being Pyrilampes.

It was mostly in Pyrilampes' house that Plato was brought up. Aristotle writes that when Plato was a young man he studied under Cratylus who was a student of Heraclitus, famed for his cosmology, which is based on fire being the basic material of the universe. It is almost certain that Plato became friends with Socrates when he was young, for Plato's mother's brother Charm ides was a close friend of Socrates. Plato left Athens after Socrates had been executed and travelled in Egypt, Sicily and Italy. In Egypt he learned of a water clock and later introduced it to Greece. In Italy he learned of the work of Pythagoras and came to appreciate the value of mathematics.

This was an event of great importance since from the ideas Plato gained from the disciples of Pythagoras, he formed his idea. ".. that the reality which scientific thought is seeking must be expressible in mathematical terms, mathematics being the most precise and definite kind of thinking of which we are capable. The significance of this idea for the development of science from the first beginnings to the present day has been immense". This would have not been possible if Plato was never turned on to this train of thought from his predecessor, the teachings of Heraclitus. In his theory of Forms, Plato rejected the changeable, deceptive world that we are aware of through our senses proposing instead his world of ideas, which were constant and true. Even though he rejected Heraclitus and his world of flux there wouldn't have been anything to reject. Heraclitus held that our senses accurately portray physical reality, which exists in a constant state of flux.

Although nature might appear to the mind to be static, actually it is changing. As Heraclitus noted, a river appears to be static, but the water which wets your foot one minute is not the same water which wets it a minute later. By emphasizing change, Heraclitus developed a philosophy of becoming and so departed from most other influential Greek philosophers who held to a philosophy of being: "To be or not to be?" that was their question. Heraclitus had a very strong influence on Plato.

According to both Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus held extreme views that led to logical incoherence. For he held that everything is constantly changing and opposite things are identical, so that everything is and is not at the same time. In other words, Universal Flux and the Identity of Opposites entail a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Plato indicates the source of the flux doctrine: "Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things go and nothing stays, and comparing existence to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river" (Cratylus 402 a = DK 22 A 6). Plato interpreted Heraclitus to have believed that the material world undergoes constant change. He also thought Heraclitus was approximately correct in so describing the material world.

Plato believed that such a world would be unknowable, and was thus driven to the conclusion that the material world was, in some sense, unreal, and that the real, knowable, world was immaterial. He concluded that there must be another world where there is no flux beyond a world of sense experience. Heraclitus stresses the importance of (what he calls) "the logos". This term can have a variety of meanings: word, statement, reason, law, ratio, proportion, among others. (Barnes translates it as account.) It is related to the verb "to say" - a logos is something that is said. This is the view that everything is constantly altering; no object retains all of its component parts, or all of its qualities or characteristics, from one moment to the next.

Plato attributes the Doctrine of Flux to Heraclitus. And it is because he thought Heraclitus was a Fluxist that he thought Heraclitus denied that there were any persisting objects. But even if Heraclitus was a Fluxist (which is far from clear) it does not follow that he had to deny that there are persisting objects. If an object is more like a process than like a static thing, then one and the same object can endure even though it is undergoing constant change. This problem of change was addressed by a number of later Greek philosophers, most notable of whom were Plato (428-348 BC) and his pupil, Aristotle (384-322 BC).

Plato reconciled the positions of Heraclitus and Parmenides by positing two worlds: the supra sensual world of form understood by our intellect and the ephemeral world detected by our senses. The real world of forms was perfect, eternal and immutable and contained the essence of being; the world perceived through the senses was imperfect and only represented the changeless world of forms in vague fashion, thus giving the illusion of variation and change. For example, our eyes reveal horses as existing in different sizes, shapes and colours and changeable to a limited extent during their lifetime. But these varied appearances are but imperfect representations of the pure form of horse which alone is real.

The intellect (mind) can recognize these different objects revealed by our senses as horses only because it can grasp the form of a horse through a process of abstraction. Plato adopted the dualism of body and soul (matter and mind, or sense and intellect) to explain nature. Only the intellect is capable of true knowledge because it participates in the ideal world of forms. The senses suggest change and variation only because they perceive shadows of this real world. Plato thus sided with Parmenides in viewing nature as static, fixed and eternal.

Throughout this paper we have seen how much of Platos' cosmology relied on Heraclitus's perception of movement in the world. Although Plato did not, undeniably, agree with what Heraclitus expressed in his book On Nature, he was able to benefit from his knowledge Because of what is included throughout Cratylus' teachings and the assumption that Plato knew Socrates, I can presume that Plato was influenced to come up with his own conclusions of metaphysics once he was exposed to Heraclitus' thoughts.

Bibliography

Allen, R.E., Ed. Studies in Plato's Metaphysics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 1965.
Baird, E.F., Kaufmann, W. Ancient Philosophy; fourth edition. 2003 Corn ford, F.
M. Plato's Cosmology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1937.
Dover, Kenneth. Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle. Oxford: Blackwell, 1974.
G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, M. Schofield., 'The Pre socratic Philosophers', A Critical History with a selection of texts, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press [1995] Kahn, Charles.
The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge, 1979).
Mueller, Gustave E. Plato. New York: Philosophical Library, 1965.
Robinson, C.E. Hellas: A Short History of Ancient Greece. Boston: Beacon Press, 1948.