Big Questions

 

I was quoted by a doctoral student saying that “things change.” What I have said on multiple occasions is that technologies change … technologies change what people do … what people can do … what people will want to do.” It is Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, who argued that things change. What he actually said, according to other early Greeks familiar with Heraclitus’ lost book, was panta rhei – variously translated as everything flows or everything is in flux. Thinking of the essence of everything flowing like a river, Plato writes in the Cratylus that one cannot step into the same river twice since the water is continuously changing, and Plutarch takes it further noting that one cannot step into the same river once as the concept of sameness is then lost both for the river and for the individual. People are continuously changing and evolving along with everything else, according to Heraclitus’s philosophy.

While there are problems and inconsistencies in Heraclitus’ philosophy as it has come down to us over the ages (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/), and Heraclitus clearly influenced subsequent thinkers, what is notable is the early form of humanism found in Heraclitus as expressed in the notion that a guardian spirit is inherent in human nature. While there is much to unpack in that notion, the ordinary interpretation in modern English would seem to lead one to deny that notion.

Nonetheless, thinking about this reminds me of a note in one of Bouwsma’s (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oets_Kolk_Bouwsma) unpublished notebooks – namely that one’s life must show what one thinks of oneself. One cannot judge one’s own life, a rare mistake that Nietzsche attributes to Socrates, as others will judge one based on what one is doing and has done and those things accumulate over time. Each choice or decision that one takes makes one more like one kind of person and less like another kind of person. The unanswerable question that one should be asking is what kind of person one is becoming.

Perhaps that is the unique trait of being human – the ability to ask unanswerable questions. Unfortunately, some people claim to have those answers about themselves.