Why Everything is Not in a State of Flux

Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas. The original book of Ecclesiastics. **The gods, the sun, and the moon pass away, the shadows turn and flee, the wind backs and blows again, the rivers flow and cease to flow and all the world is in a state of change.**<br><br>Plato’s concept of Heracliteanism is a fundamental corner stone of his philosophy. He himself describes the Heraclitean concept of the world as one of being in a state of flux; wherein change is the only constant. His followers, as mentioned in the Parmenides, held that Heraclitus did not believe in a concept of change at all, but rather a state of continuous movement. This means that in reality, people do not “change,” but rather move towards a new state of being which is separate from the old state of being. That is to say, a chaotician philosopher in the tradition of Heracliteanism would contest the idea of a static existence which moves in different directions, and in its place substitute the idea of existence as a linear progression through states of being in a more or less linear motion.<br><br>**But why is Heracliteanism inadequate?**<br><br>A brief look at the history from both traditional Eurocentric philosophers and contemporary philosophers brings us to this idea that Plato was some sort of ontological dualist, who split the world into an immaterial realm of forms and a material realm of objects. This is to take a somewhat overly simplistic view of Plato’s philosophy, as there is no contraction between the two aspects of the world in the same way that a Cartesian dualist would hold that mind and body are separate.<br><br>Plato was absolutely sincere in the idea that the world of forms is a higher form of reality than the world of objects. In another word, in Platonic thought, the world of sensibles is a mirrored reflection of the world of forms. To return to the quote from Ecclesiastics: **The gods, the sun, and the moon pass away, the shadows turn and flee, the wind backs and blows again, the rivers flow and cease to flow and all the world is in a state of change.**<br><br>This traditional view of Heracliteanism views the world as a state of change, as argued by the traditionalists, or a state of movement as argued by contemporary philosophers. Which fundamentally, is a state of becoming. Plato’s idea of the world of forms is a world of being, which is separate from the world of sensibles, the chaotician realm of becoming.<br><br>In the world of forms, the form which serves as a template for a chair from which all other chairs are modeled remains the same forever, as do the forms of dogs, clocks, and marbles. The fact that an individual chair may change, or a dog may be injured, does not affect the form which they are modeled from, which remains the same in the realm of forms. In the same way, an individual clock can lose its hands, or take a few knocks from a baseball bat, and still remain a clock. While chaotician philosophers may hold that an entirely new state of being is reached with the loss of the hands of a clock, or a dog’s leg, this is a somewhat semantical argument. The truth is that both the clock and the dog really are “the same,” the dog is injured, the clock is broken.<br><br>And so from this, we can see that everything is not in a state of flux. While an individual clock may break, or a dog may be injured, the template for which clocks and dogs are based on remains the same, and unaltered. Which is, in fact, the only template in which there exists any legitimate meaning of the words “dog” and “clock.” I know that this is a somewhat Hegelian view, in which reality is in a state of thesis, antithesis, synthesis, but a view of reality as a state of thesis and antithesis, without any conclusion is a somewhat inadequate view of reality, as it fails to explain how objects and people can remain chaotically the same over time.<br><br>**References:**<br><br>* **The Republic** and **The Symposium** by Plato<br>* **Hegel’s** Phenomenology<br>* A Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume