Sample essay
Note
Two things I want you to note about the below sample essay:
- Views are not only described but explained. You don’t just hear that Parmenides believes change is impossible but a detailed reason why he comes (or might come) to that conclusion.
- Objections are entertained and responded to with replies. There are at least two sorts of objections here also, with two sorts of corresponding replies: objections and replies about how to interpret Parmenides and Heraclitus, and objections and replies to the views they hold.
Sample essay
Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ differing views on change rely on a problem about the relationship between mind and world, though each views the consequences of that problem in a different light. The problem is that thought and language seem inadequate vehicles for grasping the anomalous structure of change; while Parmenides sees this as a reason to abandon the attempt to capture change in thought, Heraclitus views it as a reason to abandon certain prerogatives of thinking. In the following, I will discuss their views in relation to this problem, while also attempting to tease out differences and similarities between them.
Parmenides’ views on change are shaped by an argument about what is sayable or thinkable. According to this argument, it is impossible to say or to think of something that is, that it is not, or to say or to think of something that is not, that it is. Naturally, of course, speech and thought of this sort, on one interpretation, are perfectly possible. For example, it is entirely possible to say that unicorns exist or that three-sided rectangles exist—but Parmenides doesn’t seem to be saying that such propositions are unutterable. Parmenides’ view instead seems to be that statements of a certain sort are not meaningful, where “meaningful” may be taken simply to stand for “consistent,” in the logical sense. Then a statement is meaningful if it is possible for it to be true, and a statement which asserts something to be both true and false is not meaningful in this way.
Parmenides’ view seems to be that it is impossible to say or to think, meaningfully, of something that it is x and not-x—for example, blue and not blue, or up and down, or any other set of attributes that imply a contradiction. These properties, however, should be understood to attach to subjects in some specific way, so that a flag with blue and white stripes on it is not to be taken as blue and not blue—rather, wherever it is blue, it is blue (and not not-blue), and so forth. I will refer to this provision as the ‘manner’ provision.
Implicit in this idea is that each attribute said of some subject attaches to some subject in some definite way, so that when I say, “The wall is white,” the wall I’m referring to is the thing I’m attributing whiteness to. What Parmenides wants us to notice about this definite relationship is that contradictory attributes cannot meaningfully be said of the same subject. For example, if I say, “The wall is white and non-white,” and I mean this in a way consistent with the ‘manner’ provision, then nothing can be meaningfully meant by “the wall,” since this would be something that (in the same manner) is both white and not white, which is meaningless.
The application of this argument to change turns on the idea that to speak of change requires us to say something that is meaningless, or internally inconsistent. When I say, “The turtle walked down the road,” say from point A to point B, this implies that the turtle, the subject of the proposition, is a thing at point A and a thing at point B (that is to say, a thing not at point A). Then the same subject is being described as being a thing that is at point A and a thing that is not at point A—which is meaningless, since something cannot be at point A and not at point A (in the same manner). All talk of change, for Parmenides, is meaningless in this way.
Heraclitus holds a similar idea about the relationship between mind and world. His various claims about something being both up and down, or having some attribute and its opposite, speak to the idea found in Parmenides: When we attempt to make sense of the changing world around us, our language turns up propositions that are internally inconsistent; that require us to say of something both that it is x and not-x. However, Heraclitus seems to take this as a reason to rethink the way in which we make sense of the world.
A misleading interpretation of Heraclitus would be to say that he accepts the Parmenidean paradigm along with its arguably devastating conclusions. On this interpretation, we should embrace the meaninglessness of talk of change; only we should not embrace abandoning it; instead we should embrace contradiction as one (perhaps a chief) mode of meaningfulness. Consideration of the well-known river metaphor will demonstrate attention to an underlying supposition of Parmenides’ account of change that Heraclitus finds issue with, and will give us reasons for rejecting the misleading interpretation.
According to the river metaphor, at different moments, upon stepping into a river that perhaps seems to be the same one, we are in fact stepping into different rivers. The misleading interpretation would say that the river \(r\) at time \(t_1\) is different from the river \(r\) at time \(t_2\). The reason this interpretation is misleading is because Heraclitus does not say the same river \(r\) is different from itself at different moments; he says they are different rivers. Then at \(t_1\) we step into \(r_1\), and at time \(t_2\) we step into \(r_2\).
To illustrate the important differences between Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ account of change, suppose we are watching the Chicago River as it is dyed green on Saint Patrick’s Day. We say, “The river is blue,” and then at some later point, “The river is green.” Parmenides wants us to notice that we have said of “the river” that it is both blue and not blue (and both green and not green), and that this is meaningless. (I.e., there is no river that can sustain being or having an attribute and not being or not having the same attribute.) Heraclitus, however, wants us to see the two rivers as distinct rivers (which may be literally true, since, as water flows, the material constitution of the river is indeed different; for example, the Chicago River does not actually become green; ‘it’ becomes full of green dye). Then when we say, “The river is blue,” and later, “The river is green,” there is no shared subject between the two claims; one subject is blue and the other is green. The Parmenidean objection of meaninglessness has no application, because there is no claim that some one subject has an attribute and its opposite.
While avoiding the Parmenidean objection of meaninglessness, Heraclitus’ changed-subject view is susceptible to a host of objections countenancing common-sense ideas about thought and language, such as that, when you and I talk about something, even as it changes, we take ourselves to be talking about the same thing, and if we were surprised with the Heraclitean consequence that we were not, a different sort of meaninglessness would seem to settle over all thought and communication at all. The changed-subject view may make all talk of change consistent (and therefore ‘meaningful’ in the sense I laid out for Parmenides), but it might come at the expense of making all talk tautological and empty—so that when I say, “The wall is white,” the wall and the whiteness I mean apply literally and only to the item and awareness that immediately vanish.
This consequence may not be so worrisome in cases where induction is the chief means of learning about the world; for in these cases we can take it, without unusual philosophical consequences, that empirical observation and claims predicated on it have as their subject only immediate items of awareness, and generalizations premised on these observations need not be literally true in order to pass the usual muster. However, it might be strange in the context of non-empirical sciences like arithmetic; if ‘2’ and ‘3’ are never the same things, then whether their sum is ‘5’ would become a contextual matter—a reasonably absurd consequence.
But if, on these lines, we were to distinguish between the nature of talk about changing things from the nature of talk about non-changing things, it would be reasonable to ask in which mode we were to talk about the distinction, first, and then, second, whether this sort of distinction were consistent with Heraclitus’ views, since, among other claims, Heraclitus seems to speak of categories like immortality and mortality—which seem like predicates that should apply fixedly to gods and humans respectively—as subject to different interpretations in different contexts.
The broader picture, however, is that Parmenides and Heraclitus seem committed to some version of the idea that articulating change requires some revamping of thought and language, or of our understanding of these. Indeed, on a certain view, we can take them both as committed to the idea that predicates attach fixedly to their subjects: Curiously, Heraclitus’ theory of meaning has no obvious truck with Parmenides’, at least when regarded from a certain abstract and overly general perspective. In that sense, much as both thinkers seem committed to some version of the opposite view, the seeming contrast of their views, coupled with their ultimate agreement on the nature of thought, may serve as a demonstration that theories of thought or language need not dictate theories of change at all.