Ancient Philosophy

Problems of Dialectics

By placing the problem of being at the center of their inquiry, ancient philosophers could not avoid the question of whether being itself is subject to change or whether it remains unchanging and constant. While the representatives of the Milesian school did not prioritize this issue, focusing instead on the consideration of being as substance or first principle, the second generation of philosophers, primarily Heraclitus and Parmenides, placed this problem at the forefront of their thoughts, albeit from opposing positions.

Heraclitus, as previously mentioned, chose fire as the first principle, and this was not arbitrary; fire is the most dynamic of the elements. The cosmos, like fire, pulses and transforms. Everything emerges from opposites, for "the same thing is living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old, as the first vanishes into the second, and the second into the first." According to Heraclitus, conflict and strife are the sources of change and birth. The Logos, which governs the world, embodies the essence of fate, uniting opposing desires. Thus, Heraclitus is, in fact, the founder of objective dialectics, the dialectics of the world, which would later be further developed by Hegel and Marx more than two millennia later.

In contrast, Parmenides, who introduces the concept of being into philosophy, holds a different view. He argues that being is one and indivisible, eternal. Non-being does not exist in the universe; being cannot come into existence or cease to exist. In contrast to popular belief, which posits both emergence and destruction in the world, Diogenes Laertius notes that "he divided philosophy into two parts: the philosophy of truth and the philosophy of opinion," asserting that reason is the criterion of truth, while in the senses, "there is no accuracy."

Another significant aspect of Parmenides' doctrine on being is his identification of being with thought. "What is thought and that about which thought exists is one and the same. For without being, in which it is expressed, you cannot find thought," he states in his poem "On Nature." Thus, Parmenides asserts that the unity of being, as the singular essence, cannot be represented outside of thought. In the sensory and material realm, being is always fragmented; to be unified, unchanging, and eternal, it must merge with thought and serve as its expression.

Zeno of Elea, a student and adopted son of Parmenides, presents paradoxes to demonstrate the impossibility of motion, such as "Achilles and the Tortoise," "Dichotomy," and "The Arrow in Flight." In the paradox "Achilles," it is asserted that swift Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, for while he runs the distance separating him from it, the tortoise will crawl forward, and so on to infinity. In the "Dichotomy" paradox, it is argued that motion cannot even commence, as before traversing an entire path, one must first cover half of it, and before covering half, one must cover a quarter, and so forth. The paradox "The Arrow in Flight" also addresses the impossibility of motion, for at each moment, the arrow occupies an equal position, suggesting that motion is merely a sum of states of rest. These paradoxes, seemingly naïve and even absurd at first glance, actually highlight the difficulties in conceptualizing motion in thought. Since motion is inconceivable, it does not exist in truth but only in thought.