by anonymous

"The usual, George. Light on the onions. Last one gave me heartburn." Parmenides and Heraclitus met for lunch one day. Parmenides ordered his usual, a "Number 9," from a menu he knew by heart.

The place was new to Heraclitus, but he ordered without the menu: "I’ll have a slice of bread with a slice of tomato, a slice of cheese, a slice of onion, and a slice of bread on top. Mustard, please." The waiter shot a look at Parmenides and rolled his eyes.

Parmenides spoke, "Why must you enumerate each individual component of your sandwich instead of using the menu that everybody else uses? It’s no fun serving you, Heraclitus!"

"Odd, isn’t it. But don’t you see how odd it is when you use the words ‘Number 9’ as if they pick out something that is definite and unchanging, as if anyone hearing these words would understand exactly what they refer to? But this ‘Number 9’ is a fiction. You give many sandwiches the same name although you know that no two ‘Number 9’s’ are identical. Even that slice of tomato there is not really a static thing, but a series of barely detectable changes that are occurring constantly. When George cuts into the tomato, he intervenes in processes of its becoming something else. It is constantly becoming something other than what it is at each instant. All reality is like this, Parmenides. Reality isn’t ‘Being,’ but ‘becoming.’ It is more like events or processes intermingling as they run along—now birth, now growth, then decay, and again variously, all things continuously eroding into atmosphere, decaying into rot. The stable, continuous identity of things is mere fiction, a mere shorthand. This is especially true of tomatoes, Parmenides, you know, the flavor is gone thirty seconds after you slice them open."

"You’re missing the point. To say that something is real just means that it has stability and is unitary, and self-identical. Reality is that which exists, and what exists is ‘Being.’ The idea of ‘a tomato slice’ is a good example of how all things we know we know by seeing how their existence involves a relation to a larger unity. It isn’t a fiction to call this thing by a name that identifies it as a part of a larger unity. Its larger unity is essential to it. The essence of this thing is to have come from a tomato. Try to tell me what that slice of tomato really is without making any reference to tomatoes. You won’t get very far. All things are similarly parts of the over-all unity ‘Being.’ To exist is to be part of ‘Being,’ the question is always, ‘Which part?’ It is therefore impossible to speak of the nonexistent or unreal. Nonexistence is not really conceivable or nameable for this reason."

The reference to naming especially annoyed Heraclitus. "Look Parmenides, neither of us can say that the world of experience truly is as our names would have it: Here a tomato, there is an onion, and a loaf of bread....Ohhh, stuffed grapeleaves, give me those!...As experienced, these things are momentary bundles of impressions from the senses that we organize into convenient packages which we label ‘tomato,’ ‘onion,’ ‘bread.’ If you pay attention to your experience, it describes a fragmentary, ever-changing, perpetually moving re-arrangement of mass; an enduring smudge of sensation that is in unending motion creeping across your awareness. That does appear to be what we call ‘a slice of tomato,’ according to convention and ‘common sense.’ But isn’t the lover of wisdom committed to going beyond ‘common sense’ when the evidence of reason tells us the truth lies there?" Heraclitus gulped down two stuffed grapeleaves.

"There again you are wrong. And you have rice on your face. It is not common sense to think through the relations things really have to the larger wholes into which they fit, from which they derive their meanings. In everyday thought and speech we assume all this. As odd as it sounds to say, to know what a slice of tomato is, is to know that it is a part of tomato-ness. To leave this out of an account of the slice of tomato would be to misunderstand what it is. Without reference to the larger unity, the tomato-part would become impossible to conceptualize properly. Without its larger unity or system in mind, the slice is unnamable, and inconceivable—it is not."

Heraclitus responded, "For me, words that name things seem always too big and static, while for you they seem always too small and narrow! Somehow, it seems, reality is either more or less than words easily grasp! But what of what our minds grasp? I use a shorthand of words to name the processes I experience at the moment—gooey, wet seeds, cold, orangey-red flesh, fresh and acrid smell of the tomato vine—this present experience is called ‘slice of tomato.’ But how far can you take the idea that its essence depends on what is not present? Isn’t ‘tomato-ness’ also a shorthand, and a fiction of a plump, round, collection of gooey slices? If you are right, the slice belongs to the tomato. But the tomato belongs to the vine. And the vine belongs to the patch of soil whose nutrients it contains. The patch of soil belongs to the farm, which belongs to the farming region north of the city, which belongs to the nation’s landmass, which belongs to the entire Western Hemisphere. Do you really mean to say that calling this present experience ‘a slice of tomato’ is meaningless unless we include in it all of these integrated aspects of its identity? But it is only in imagination that this speculation takes place, conceiving the slice against a variety of ever-broadening backgrounds, as if it were the scenery at a dramatic performance. The mind is incapable of knowing all this about the humble ‘slice’ it actually encounters. What do I see before me and smell and taste? Just this moment-of-flux, mingling with my own, not the Western Hemisphere."

Parmenides smiled to himself and to George as he was finally handed his sandwich. George shook his head as Parmenides spoke. "I am not saying that you have the Western Hemisphere on your plate, Heraclitus. Although I’ve no doubt you could eat it. Look—we both use a kind of shorthand in speech about things and in our ‘common sense’ thinking. You say the real is ‘many’ and ‘various.’ But you regard it as a constant movement or flux. Is it many and various things, or is there just the smudge of flux? Even you regard it as incorrect to say things exist separately except in each infinitesimal moment. This is a hard way to think about things, even for you, Heraclitus! More importantly, it seems inadequate to the experience that many types of objects occur in our experience that have a consistency and predictability to them. I know that no two ‘Number 9’ sandwiches are identical. But I also know what to expect when I order one at George’s from one day to the next." He bit his sandwich with relish. "Mmm mmmph, mmm mmumm mmuphh, Mmmuummuummph mmph,...."

"Pig. Don’t talk with your mouth full. I’d rather wait!"

"Gulp. Mmmph-ummmm sorry. But here’s the point, to make sense of this thing I call ‘a slice of tomato’ before me, I must have some sense of what type of things tomatoes are. This doesn’t imply the identity of the Western Hemisphere with my sandwich, but it does imply that in order for an object to be called ‘real’ it must take up a place in the vast system of relationships we call ‘Being.’ In our common experience, things are indeed separable from one another. In conceptualizing their reality, however, in order to fully know and grasp what each is requires that we conceive of it differently. When we define anything, Heraclitus, we are doing this on a simple level—calling the individual thing by a general name that we give to its essence or definition. We define things by identifying them as members of general classes. The difference between us seems to lie in how we understand this activity of naming and defining. I say it is more than a vast, artificial mental filing system."

"I say that we name things in order to create a fiction of stasis, to create an illusion of calling a halt to the flux so that life is easier to navigate. Definitions are labels that allow us to organize experience. They are words we use to identify collections of observations we regard as similar. That’s all we can say."

"Yeah, see, I think things really have something like systematic relations. Things have roles and functions and purposes that come from the larger system of ‘Being.’ Insofar as we know anything, we grasp part of this structure mentally. It’s like this ‘Number 9’ is composed of its parts, but as a real object, as a part of what I call ‘Being,’ it is integrally related with all the rest of what exists, ‘the All,’ which, as such, is ‘What Is,’...Hey, are you listening to me?"

"Yes, and yours is wishful thinking! The universe would perhaps seem more comfortable were it to conform to our expectations, but there is no evidence that it does. Were we to find reality’s ‘joints’ or ‘pins’ so as to ‘pin it down,’ we might go far in making it correspond to our wishes. If we care only about manipulating things, then you can say whatever you like about how things 'are.' But, to the extent you do, you create fiction in order to manipulate fact. If, on the other hand, you care about the truth, then there are things you cannot say because they are not warranted by the evidences of logic and experience. I say there is no 'It' that 'Is' called 'Being,' but, rather, a various and continuing flux of 'becoming.' Even if our lives were unlivable in the face of the truth, you cannot eat the same sandwich twice,..."

"Yuk!,"

"....or stand in the same river, or be, really, from one instant to the next, the same person. ‘Same’ means, really, just that two things are separate from and not-identical to one another. It thus requires that we compare the two separate things in relation to the ‘pure equality’ that they are not, and find, unsurprisingly, that they come up short!..."

"Hmmmph, now you sound like Socrates...."

"Who?"