Herakleitos and Gene Gendlin
I’m just back from a Greek and Latin summer school at the University of Wales, and ought to be doing something else (sleeping, perhaps), but shall not resist writing a few thoughts here about Herakleitos, by way of homecoming.
“Everything flows; nothing remains. Everything moves; nothing is still. Everything passes away; nothing lasts.” - These are three versions of Herakleitos, Fragment 20. In a moment, I shall try to improve on them.
Fragment 23 says, “Change alone is unchanging”.
OK. So there are two obvious ways in which Herakleitos feeds into Gene Gendlin:
1 The thought that a sentence should be written so as to be clear to the person who gets it, but opaque to the one who doesn’t.
2 The thought that a “model” can start from process.
Taking them in turn:
1 The thought that a sentence should be written so as to be clear to the person who gets it, but opaque to the one who doesn’t.
This idea is dear to Gene Gendlin. Still, it may be worth noting that it hasn’t served Herakleitos very well (nor Wittgenstein). The effect of such a strategy seems to be that everybody projects their own prejudices onto what you say.
Jonathan Barnes remarks that “Heraclitus attracts exegetes as an empty jampot attracts wasps; and each new wasp discerns traces of his own favourite flavour”.
I am more drawn myself by a dictum which we might naturally associate with G E Moore: “Easy reading makes hard writing”. In other words, instead of sheltering our thoughts under a cover of darkness, can we shelter them by bringing clarity and light: by foreseeing ways in which readers may go astray, and heading them off?
This, after all, is what Plato, Descartes, Hume and Frege have tried to do; though Plato eludes us in other ways, and Hume is always dangerous in his ironies.
2 The thought that a “model” can start from process.
Remember that in Greek verbs, aspect is equal in importance with time. If I want to say to an Ancient Greek child, “Stop, look and listen, before you cross the road”, I must decide: do I mean now, once; or do I mean always, habitually?
If I mean always, I shall use a continuous tense, as it were, “Be stopping!”: make a habit of stopping. I shall say, “Mene!” If I mean just this once, I shall use an aorist, “Stop once!” The word will be “Menson!”.
Both imperatives will come through into English as “Stop!”, though the aorist will look to the unwary as if I were saying, “Hey you, stopped!”, that is, it looks like a past tense.
Thus we have:-
panta = all things (neuter plural)
rhei = IS streaming (neuter plurals take singular verbs in Ancient Greek).
“rheo” means “1 to flow, run, stream or gush; 2 to rain [of weapons or words]; 3 to fall or drop off, to wear out; 4 to liquefy; 5 to be in perpetual flux or change; 6 to be inclined or given to a thing; 7 to leak; 8 to have a flux; 9 to let flow or pour”
oudev = nothing
ou = no or not; -ev is the ordinary number, eis, mia, hen, that is, one, in its neuter form (the -d- intrudes for reasons of euphony).
menei = is staying (the “men-” is present as “-main”, in the English word, “remain”)
Thus: “All things are streaming; nothing is staying.”
Jonathan Barnes comments: “There is no reason to deny Heraclitus the novelty of generalizing the natural view of a changing world to the more pugnacious thesis that everything changes”.
Then there is the “notorious ‘river fragment’”, which comes in three forms:
1 “On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.”
This shows that a river is process; or that not all nouns refer to “medium-sized specimens of dry goods”.
2 “We both step and do not step into the same rivers; we both are and are not.”
Barnes renders the central teaching of Herakleitos (”both step and do not step”) as, “Every pair of contraries is somewhere co-instantiated; and every object co-instantiates at least one pair of contraries”.
Perhaps Herakleitos simply fell into a logical trap, treating a statement without its temporal qualifier as equivalent to the same statement with its temporal qualifier. Such mistakes were rife in early thought, and are still seductive.
And I’m reminded of Gene Gendlin’s (delightful but problematic): “Like anything I say, it’s both true and not true. It’s true as far as it goes; and then it’s not true”.
3 “It is not possible to step into the same river twice.”
This is simpler. If the river is the water, then in stepping into new water, one steps into a new river. But is the river the water? Of course not.
“Socrates, where shall we bury you?” - “You can do what you like with me - if you can catch me.”
Here we see very nicely that just as the river is not the water, the person is not the physical matter: in either case the noun refers to a more or less stable process, which organizes some physical matter.
“A process”: is “process” a specimen of dry goods? Of course it isn’t. For a nice account of what it is, try Peter Strawson, “Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar”.
Now what about this: “Change alone is unchanging”? Well formally, of course, if this assertion IS true, then it’s NOT true.
Incoherences of this kind tend to bedevil process philosophy. And do, as my friend David suggests, throw us back upon ourselves. But we can’t solve any of the problems in our reasoning by saying, “Well, this is more-than-logical”.
The fallback from the logical to the psychological (from explicit to implicit) is elegantly discussed in Frege, “Foundations of Arithmetic”. Frege clearly understands the functions of the implicit very well, but sharply (and entertainingly) resists the tendency to muddy the powers and functions of logic.
This is one thing which Parmenides shows us. In Parmenides, we have the first surviving attempt to set down a conclusive argument. His conclusion is frankly bizarre. If you reject it, you need to show where the reasoning fails, and in what way.
David also writes that “Gene…talks of moving from set values or what he calls “value conclusions” to “a process of valuing”. This thought is familiar from Carl Rogers.
And here is that same type of incoherence: for in fact, one of the set values shared by Gene and Carl is that they value “the process of valuing”, and disdain “set values”.
To value “the process of valuing” clearly IS “a set value”. So does Gene also disdain THIS set value? I think not.
I must run. Forgive the scribble, hasty as ever. Oh yes, and by the way, I truly know very little philosophy, and even less Greek!
Kalimera, Rob