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Parmenides' world-view, which I wrote about yesterday, is kind of tough to get your head around; but it is almost common-sensical in comparison to Heraclitus' tenet that the only constant in the world is change.

The certain truth there is no man who knows, nor ever shall be, about the gods and all the things whereof I speak. Yea, even if a man should chance to say something utterly right, still he himself knows it not -- there is nowhere anything but guessing.

What I take from reading about Heraclitus is, the universe is a constantly seething cauldron of chaotic changes. We humans perceive objects as having characteristics which remain the same over long periods of time; and we perceive events as being related to each other by the mechanism of causation. But all this is illusory.

I haven't been able to get into this cosmology as deeply as I have that of Parmenides; however it seems somehow intriguing. I wonder whether there could be any objects in Heraclitus' universe, or whether what we call "things" are only ephemeral by-products of the ongoing fever of random events. If there are not things, what is changing? (This is similar to Russell's quibble with Plato's theory of forms, which I find unconvincing.) Most of all, how and why do we hallucinate this continuity of objects around us? "We" must, in fact, be part of this hallucinated continuity; we are imagining ourselves.

Anyway, like I say I haven't been able to really adopt this world-view thoroughly enough to come up with answers to any of this. But the questions I find pretty thought-provoking, and I particularly like the notion that human beings are reflexive hallucinations.

Here's what my brother says about Heraclitus and Parmenides:

Hey Jer,

Did I ever tell you I took philosophy class my first year in college, which was billed as "History of Western Philosophy, I -- Pre-socratics through early moderns." It was taught by this comically stereotypical guy, the sort central casting would send down if you called in looking for an eccentric intellectual. He was alright. The thing is, he was a specialist in the pre-socratics, so we didn't actually talk about anything else (actually that's not quite true, we read one Platonic dialogue and Descartes' "Meditations on first philosophy," which I have always thought to be some of the most uninteresting crap I have ever had the misfortune to waste my time on). I took an odd pleasure in Parmenides and Heraclitus (more than Xeno or Anaximander or Anaximenes). Parmenides always seemed maddeningly counter-intuitive. In essence he seems to be saying that there is only one thing and it is round. That's a pretty tough idea to swallow. On the other hand Heraclitus appealed to me then for very different reasons than he does now. At the time he seemed the first of a series of nihilistic anarchist theorists that, sophomoric and jaded poseur that I was, I liked telling people I liked (the Italian Futurists fall into this camp, as does de Sade, or at least my image of de Sade.) Now, however, I am really taken with the idea that most of what we describe as fixed entities are not. That is, everything is constantly moving, changing. Objects, particularly stable objects, are the conceptual result of our minds' attempts to make the world we perceive comprehensible. I was thinking about this this summer in NY. The city is in a constant state of decay, and only through the herculean effort of literally millions of people is total collapse averted. The city is in large part a collectively constructed thing. This is not to say that it doesn't exist, but that to think of it as a fixed object -- New York, as a totality, as opposed to the myriad processes human and otherwise through which that thing we conceptualize as New York is constantly being created -- is a simplification of something very complex and non-unified. This has some specific resonance for my work, because I am interested in the idea that music, which is so often described as though it has a concrete existence is, in fact, emergent. (is this a word you have run into, meaning "constantly coming into being"?) Perhaps this is not altogether coherent, but I hope my point is clear. The thing is, so much intellectual energy is spent making it seem like all is unified, fixed, comprehensible, fixed, that it is hard for many scholars to get the idea that Heraclitus and my own Heraclitan thinking (and lots of my contemporaries'--it's not like I'm the first person to talk about emergent stuff) is not nihilistic.

well, hope all is well with you. All my love to Ellen.

Gabriel