Heraclitus' Guide to Paddling in Shallow Water
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Heraclitus was a Greek philosopher who lived between c. 535 BC and c. 475 BC He is credited with the saying:
You cannot step into the same river twice.
It’s difficult to trace back what Heraclitus said exactly. His writing style is obscure, and to make it even worse, his only book, On Nature, has come down to us in fragments. But we know for sure from his writing style that he loved paradoxes. His most famous sentence about the river and its constant change cannot be a paradox, can it?
Let me think. Can I step into the same river twice? For sure. Why not?
It is true that the river is changing constantly: when I step into the river, thousands of water molecules are passing by my feet, fish are swimming around, a crab is crawling slowly behind a rock. The whole river is like a giant organism that cannot rest. It is new and unpredictable at every unrepeatable moment.
It is an interesting thought, but let’s take it to its extreme, and it becomes even more interesting: Can I step into the same river once?
If I put an underwater camera in the shallow water at the bottom of the river pointed exactly at the pebbles that I want to step onto, the camera will record in slow motion how my bare foot enters the crystal-clear, faintly cold water, how little bubbles are forming and swirling around it, how my foot is paddling through 20 centimetres of water before it touches the dark grey pebbles on the bottom. While it is happening, fish are swimming around, crabs are playing on the rock, water molecules are dancing around and around. The river is different at every moment, that’s why — if I take the simplest interpretation of Heraclitus’ saying seriously — it is not possible to step into the same river even once!
I don’t think that this is what Heraclitus meant to say. Despite all these chains of unstoppable change, we can still call the river a river; it never stops being a river. This is a paradox that — I think — Heraclitus loved so much.
Does Heraclitus’ idea about a stable, higher-level concept over the chaotic, unpredictable, perpetual change still have something to tell us today?
It is easy to be frightened by the cheetah-like speed of technological change. But let’s take a look at the bigger picture.
When I was a kid, my friends and I exchanged messages written on tiny scraps of paper during a boring class. The risk was always there: the message could be noticed and captured by the teacher, who would read it or, worse, make the sender read it in front of the class. Nowadays, we have WhatsApp, but it did not change why kids send these messages. Except for eliminating the risk that the teacher could catch the messages, the improvement of technology did not really change anything. It is more convenient, faster to use, but the concept remained the same.
Or let’s take Netflix. When I was a kid, we had to go to a video store to rent a movie on a VHS cassette. Netflix is more convenient, faster, the selection of films is larger, it is even cheaper, but the concept is basically the same.
Or let’s take Tesla. People hail the electric car revolution. Experts predict that electric vehicles will become dominant in the 2020s. Are electric cars new inventions?
The first electric car was made in the 1830s, almost 200 years ago! Humankind needed 200 years (mainly because of the lack of reliable batteries) to return to this technology.
I feel that what we can learn from Heraclitus is that it is much easier to adapt to a new situation if we notice the concept behind the scary, wild horses of sudden changes and we turn them into something calm and friendly, something that we have already tamed.
See also
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
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#Heraclitus
