Kacheyev D.A.
FROM THALES TO
HERACLITUS
(Kostanai, Republic of Kazakhstan)
Thales of Miletus thought that water
was the primordial stuff of the universe. This assertion, not so trivial as it
may seem, is in any case less important than the question to be solved.
Thinking on analogy with human technique, Thales had apparently asked himself
«What is it all made of?»
The question assumes that the universe gets developed, like pottery, from a
common material. Thales wanted to know what that material was. He didn’t ask - or at least we don’t know
that he asked - why
things change or how there comes to be such variety in the worlds. He was
looking for origins, and he took those origins to lie in one universal
self-identical stuff [1,38
p.].
Thus was born the concept of substance,
the oldest and until recently the most respectable in philosophy. In all that
time a great deal has been written about it, but not much has really been said
about it. This is because you find when you come to the heart of the subject, that
hardly anything can be said. What you say about any entity
amounts, in the
end, to listing its qualities, its quantities, and the relations in which it
stands.
But
all these are different from substance itself. You are therefore in a position
of trying to describe substance in terms which are not substantial.
This indescribable entity called
«substance» can be conceived
as cosmic stuff or as elementary particles, but in either case it is inwardly
changeless. It can take on qualities and relations as a body takes on clothes,
without for one moment ceasing to be itself.
Within fairly narrow limits this scheme
is workable. But the impenetrability of substance plays hob with every theory,
based upon it. The prime lesson of sense experience is that things change.
Consequently a separation begins - at first a rent and
then a gulf between the changeless substance and the changing world.
Anaximander detected in the universe a
reconciliation of change and order. Events, he said, suffer punishment and make
reparation to one another for the «injustices» they commit in the flow of time. Each process tends, as if it
were, to excess and thus evokes a contrary process for its own modification.
This description of change as the
interplay of opposites is not limited to ethics, but applies to the universe
generally.
We can think of the interplay as
establishing a pattern and of the pattern as surviving upon the very back of
change. Consequently we can say that it is the diversity of things which gives
them a form. In this view the permanent is the form and consequence of change
in which it rests and prospects.
The dialectical theory, thus born,
reached its first manhood in Heraclitus of Ephesus. He performed, indeed, the
most difficult of philosophical feats: a persuasive revelation of the universe
as it is [2,141 p.].
If movement is an essential condition
of things, the opposition between any one entity and its environment is a
dynamic affair. Things modify one another, there is a certain «strife» among them. From these interactions
nothing withdraws unaltered, but everything is different from what it was and
is different because of its interactions. This is what makes the movement move
and the process proceed. Heraclitus rebukes Homer for wishing that strife might
vanish from the universe: if strife were to vanish, the universe would vanish
with it.
This doctrine of the strife of opposites has remained a basic
part of dialectical theory.
Literature
1.
Spirkin A. Fundamentals
of Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, - 1990. - 424 p.
2.
Ìóðàòîâà Ç.Ã., Ìóðçà À.Á.,
Ïåðöåâ Å.Ì. Welcome to the world of Philosophy. – Ì.: Àêàäåìè÷åñêèé ïðîåêò, 2005. – 352
ñ.