In the teachings of Heraclitus, logos is neither a purely abstract concept nor a concrete image; logos is an image-concept, an image of meaning. In its meaning, logos is close to the concept of universal order. Heraclitus uses this word in the sense of an eternal all-governing principle, an objective principle that determines the unity of all things or the “World Order,” “measure,” proportionality and balance.

According to the spirit of the teachings of Heraclitus, the universal logos is an imperishable, eternal and unchanging order, a measure of changing things; logos is the relationship of the origin, fire, to its various states, therefore logos is the “way up and down,” forming from the one many and from the many the one.

There is a logo driving force changing things, it manifests itself through struggle. That's why he exists polemos(war, struggle) and harmonie(harmony), coordinating and balancing struggling opposites.

Heraclitus calls that one thing that underlies everything and rules everything differently; when he means the measured transformations of natural phenomena into each other, he speaks of fire; Having in mind religious and mythological ideas, he calls the one or universal Zeus, etc.

However, it is incorrect to interpret the logos of Heraclitus solely as an abstract concept or only as a material element. Moreover, there is no reason to consider the logos to be simply a mythological creature. Logos and fire are two sides of the same being, which cannot be reduced to either an ideal or a material principle, but represents a dynamic unity of opposites,

Until now we have been talking about the universal logos, but Heraclitus has fragments that say that a personal logos is also inherent in the human soul:

“You will not find the boundaries of the soul, no matter in which direction you go, so great is its measure (logos)”

Heraclitus establishes a contradictory unity between human logos and universal logos: he distinguishes them, but does not oppose each other. The Logos of the soul may be in agreement with the universal Logos, but this does not happen often. And yet, at their core, they are one, similar and identical; in any case, there are no fundamental differences between the logos of the best people and the logos of the world. Both logos are the rational principle that rules everything.

The subjective logos of the soul and the objective world logos represent a single world in two aspects; in the aspect of the inner world of a person, his subjectivity, and in the aspect of the external structure of things, Self-knowledge takes a person from the sphere of the internal to the external material world. On this path the human soul is enriched and developed -

“The psyche is characterized by a self-increasing logos”

at the same time, having entered into contact with the logos of the external world and

“By drawing this divine logos into ourselves through breathing, we become intelligent.”

Both ways of becoming rational do not exclude, but presuppose each other, for the logos of the soul and the logos of the world, identical in difference, constitute the unity of the internal and external.

In the Heraclitean understanding there is a close connection between subjective logos and objective action; for him, wisdom (the logos of the soul) is the unity of word and deed and represents the ability to speak and act in accordance with the objective logos. Therefore, his subjective logos means both “telling the truth” and acting correctly.

Heraclitus uses the term “logos” in the meaning of “word” or “speech” and in the meaning of the objective content that this “word” or this “speech” carries. And such content of “words” or “speeches” are both individual objects, things or deeds, and that universal that rules everything, that universal law that dominates everything, that measure that determines the proportionality of all transformations in the world, etc. P.

The meaning (subjective logos) of speech is something whole and inseparable. The same can be said about the world as a cosmos, as a harmonious and unified whole. The orderliness of the world, its harmony are determined by the “divine” logos, which dominates everything, “extends its mouth as far as it wishes, dominates everything and prevails over everything.”

That is why the “dark” philosopher, who thinks in terms of meaning, chose the term “logos” to express both the one in the diverse world of things and phenomena, and the one “wise” in the diversity of words and speeches. It is the logos that “rules all through all,” while remaining “detached from all.” He is one in two aspects; in the subjective sphere of words, speech or teaching, he determines the meaning of all our words and speeches through all words; in the objective sphere, he rules all things through all things, the Logos is universal, but it does not coincide with the world of individual things and phenomena. It represents the hidden structure of the objective and subjective world of phenomena. If logos coincided with the world of the individual, it could not “rule everything.” Likewise, the logos could not rule the world if it were not connected with it in any way, “detached from everything.” This explains why the Ephesian equates objective logos with living fire, and endows fire with the sign of rationality. Thus, Heraclitus distinguishes between the general and the individual, the ideal and the material, the subjective and the objective, but does not oppose them to each other,

Subsequent philosophy sought to reconcile the word about being with the “word” of Heraclitus - the concept of unchanging substance with the concept of genesis, process. The “words” of thinkers of this period have varied content and character, but they all converge in one desire - to create logical physics, that is, to explain the world process, starting from the logical definition of existence. Despite all their enormous significance, these attempts obviously could not be crowned with ultimate success: this was the original attempt of Empedocles, who tried to unite the mythological and philosophical worldview, reconciling the abstract logical concept of Parmenides with the physical representation of nature in the form of epic cosmogony; such was the famous teaching of the atomists, who gave the first logical construction of pure materialism; Such was, finally, the philosophy of Anaxogoras 1.

This is how the concept of a universal rational principle is defined for the first time. But the philosopher does not call this principle logos: in his system it plays the role of an exclusively physical principle - the world engine.

IV. "Existence", or "Parmenides" and "Heraclitus".

The Hellenic sages were the first to begin to reason about the nature of things, but not a single one of their teachings remained firm and unshakable, because subsequent teachings always overthrew the previous one.

Where does opposing thought, often even hostile to another teaching, arise between philosophers? Philosophical teachings never arise only as abstract, purely theoretical constructions. Let it be, in the final analysis, but philosophy is always generated by life, or more precisely, by social life. Every philosophical teaching is a reflection of the life that gave birth to this teaching.

Heraclitus and Parmenides belong to the second generation of Greek philosophers. The first philosopher, Thales, figuratively speaking, “opened his mental eyes” 2 and saw nature, physis. In this sense, Parmenides and Heraclitus had before their mental eyes not only physis, but also the views of the first generation of philosophers. As we have seen, in connection with questions about the permanent element of all changes, an internal dialogue first arose between Thales and Anaximander. Parmenides and Heraclitus, on the contrary, entered into a dispute over the basic premises shared by their predecessors. The first generation of natural philosophers believed that change exists. For them it was a prerequisite, an assumption. From there they asked what was the constant element of all changes. A second generation of philosophers questioned this premise by asking the question: Does change exist? Its representatives made the premise accepted by the first generation the subject of critical reflection. Parmenides and Heraclitus offered apparently opposite answers to this question. Heraclitus argued that everything is in a constant state of change or movement. At the same time, Parmenides believed that nothing is in a state of change. Taken literally, both of these answers seem meaningless. However, the literal understanding does not correspond to what these philosophers said 1 .

Parmenides takes an alternative position to Heraclitus. This does not mean that for him the statement: “nothing is in a state of change” is unconditional. Parmenides argues that change is logically impossible. As for Heraclitus, for Parmenides the starting point is the “logical”. His arguments can apparently be reconstructed as follows:

1. What exists exists. What does not exist does not exist.

   What exists is conceivable. What does not exist cannot be thought of.

The idea of ​​change suggests that something begins to exist and that something ceases to exist.

For example, an apple turns from green to red. The green color disappears, becomes “non-existent”. These considerations show that change presupposes a non-existence that cannot be thought. Because of this, we are unable to express a change in thinking. Therefore, change is logically impossible.

Of course, Parmenides knew as well as we do that our senses indicate a wide variety of changes. However, he was faced with a dilemma. Reason says that change is logically impossible. Feelings indicate that change exists. What should you rely on? The Greek Parmenides rightly argues that we must trust reason. Reason is right, but feelings deceive us.

For the first time in intellectual history, man trusted so completely in the course and results of logical thinking that he could not be shaken even by sensory observations that contradicted these results. From this point of view, Parmenides is the first die-hard rationalist 1. In this sense, it is not so important whether his train of thought was formally correct or not. Thanks to the fact that Parmenides proposed to base reasoning on rational argumentation, he became the first scientist who made a significant contribution to the development of logical thinking.

The teaching of Parmenides ends with the establishment of an insurmountable boundary between reason and feelings. Schematically it can be represented as follows:

mind/feelings = being/non-being = peace/change = one/multiple

In other words, the mind perceives the real as something at rest (and one). The senses give us only the unreal, which is in a state of change (and multiplicity). A similar division, or dualism, is also characteristic of some other Greek philosophers, for example Plato. But in contrast to other dualists, Parmenides seems to ignore feelings and sensory objects to such an extent that he considers everything “below the line” to be devoid of reality. There are no sensory objects. If this interpretation is correct, then we can almost certainly consider Parmenides a representative of monism. According to this teaching, everything that exists is one (single), and not many, and this reality can only be known by reason.

By subsuming Parmenides' worldview under these categories of an idealistic system, where everything is reduced to thought and deduced from it, we discover here a unique case where extreme idealism coincides with extreme materialism. In fact, its substance is lifeless (does not even have movement) and is not endowed with any mental properties (it is identical with thought, but thought is not its property). On the other hand, Parmenides reduces everything to thought, detached from both the individual subject and other aspects of spiritual life (especially from the irrational principle); These features are the most characteristic of idealism. The last word of Parmenides' teaching is the absolute identification of thought and matter. We will enter the strictly monistic system of Parmenides’ thinking only if we understand that for him thought and matter are not two sides or two manifestations of the same thing, not one essence viewed from two different points of view, but they are absolutely identical.

Ancient philosophy (from myth to Logos). Heraclitus and Parmenides

philosophy antique religion ecumenical

The formula - from myth to logos - to a certain extent simplifies the essence of the genesis of philosophy, although the general direction of the development of social consciousness conveys correctly. The fact is that this formula covers only the initial period of the formation of philosophy. It brings us only to the origins of philosophy, to the moment when a new form of worldview was determined, which eliminated the contradictions within myth and between myth and new special knowledge. It is advisable to begin considering the second part of the formula by clarifying the content of the concept of Logos, and then move on to analyzing the very process of the formation of philosophy. Usually Heraclitus and Parmenides are considered as philosophers who defended exactly the opposite theses: “Heraclitus argued that everything changes. Parmenides objected that nothing changes.” Heraclitus is considered a great (although not the first) dialectician in ancient philosophy, and Parmenides was its first metaphysician, the first antagonist of dialectics.

The Greek term "Logos" was first used by Heraclitus as one of the main concepts of his teaching. Subsequently, it becomes very popular throughout ancient philosophy and acquires many meanings and interpretations. Logos does not have an adequate translation into other languages, and is most often translated as “word”, “thought” or “meaning” (concept). In ancient Greek, Logos means both word and thought. We are talking, therefore, not about a word in its sound-speech meaning, but about a word containing a thought, a meaning. That is, we mean a meaningful word that contains meaning, information about an object, phenomenon, and at the same time the subject’s self-report about this meaning (“I know that I know”). In other words, Logos is a word that contains a thought that is inseparable from it, just as, conversely, this thought is inseparable from the word that expresses it. This unity of word and thought, language and thinking was captured by ancient thinkers, but most likely captured intuitively. Therefore, depending on the context used, Logos could receive different meanings. The ambiguity of the use of the word “Logos” is found in Heraclitus.

• 1. Logos is a universal law (“the all-governing Logos”), in accordance with which everything happens: “The Logos exists forever... everything happens according to this Logos.”
• 2. Logos is an expression of constancy, certainty; it establishes the measure within which all changes and transformations take place. Logos is the law that makes the world orderly, harmonious and proportionate. All changes occur within the Logos as measure.
• 3. Logos in Heraclitus also expresses the unity, identity of opposites: good and evil, day and night, cold and warm, etc., forming one whole: “whole and incomplete, converging and diverging, agreement and disagreement, of all - one , from one - everything.”
• 4. Logos in Heraclitus does not relate to the world of individual things and does not apply to words and speeches about the individual. Logos is the designation of the universal. “The Logos is universal,” “therefore it is necessary to follow the universal.”

Heraclitus expresses his idea of ​​the integrity, unity and harmony of the world with the concept of Logos. His concepts of Logos and Cosmos largely coincide. If for the senses the world is the Cosmos arising from fire, then for the mind it is the Logos, because the main thing that is recorded in the world and reflected in the idea of ​​the Cosmos is its organization, the world order, which turns the world of individual things, the diverse world into the One. Thus, if we summarize all of Heraclitus’s statements about Logos, we get the following: Logos is the law that gives the world systematicity, substantiality and development. It is as binding on everyone as the laws of the policy. Logos is the universal, universal mind. Logos contains fundamental ontological content, denoting the essence and meaning of the world order. And it can only be intelligible and is not given to simple sensory perception. Logos is the object of contemplation. The movement from myth to Logos is a movement from the unity of subject and object, from the vague distinction and demarcation of the Self from the non-Self to a more or less clear understanding of the opposition of Self and non-Self, object and image. This is a movement from representation to concept, from worldview, worldview to worldview, to contemplation.

In other words, the movement from syncretic knowledge, in which it is difficult to distinguish correct common-sense knowledge from the fantastic, the existing from the should, the real from the illusory, to the knowledge of truths: Logos also denotes the law of the truth of being.

The concept of “contemplation” in the era of the formation of ancient philosophy is close to our today’s “theoretical consciousness”. Contemplation is not so much passive observation, as it seems to the everyday mind today, but - in ancient Greek - “review”, “contemplation”, “mind-vision”. But the performance ancient thinkers about the speculative or intelligible world, which is not captured by the senses, but is comprehended, visible only with the mind, are not yet completely free from clarity and imagery. So contemplation represents the unity of image and concept, intuition and abstraction, living feeling and logical thinking. In general, contemplation indicated a certain detachment, “disinterest” in true knowledge, which does not set as its goal the extraction of benefit. And this is the fundamental difference between new knowledge and mythological knowledge. Along with the movement from myth to logos comes the evolution of ideas about wisdom, which the Greeks designated by the term sophos - sophia, wisdom. A new layer of people is appearing, whose wisdom lies not in knowledge of traditions, customs, rituals (age-related memory) and not in a special position in the family of, say, priests, prophets, peculiar social mediators - intermediaries between kings and the lower classes, but in the knowledge obtained through contemplation. These people, who know a lot, began to be called physicists, physiologists; they focus on observation and contemplation. And finally, another type of sage appears - philosophers, people who differ from physiologists in that they love wisdom, i.e. comprehend the essence of things through rational-theoretical thinking. The appearance of the word “philosophy” - it is believed that Pythagoras introduced it - is evidence of the emergence of a new worldview. "Philosophy", translated from Greek as the love of wisdom, shows what appeared purely theoretical knowledge, the pursuit of which becomes the main task of the whole life of philosophers. There are a variety of concepts of the transition from myth to logos, from one type of worldview to another, but the following stand out as the main ones.

1. Mythogenic theory. The content of this concept comes down to the statement that ancient philosophy stems from ancient mythology the second generation, being its rationalistic interpretation. That is, the myth is considered as an allegory, behind which there are real events, genuine historical facts, which in the myth took on a distorted character and were misinterpreted. The generalizing function in the myth was supposedly performed by a metaphor, with the help of which a person denoted abstract concepts through concrete signs. But gradually the original meaning began to be forgotten and obscured, and therefore it is necessary to rationalize the myth, to translate the system of metaphorical epithets and allegories into the language of concepts and categories. Thus, it turns out that philosophy is the same mythology, but expressed in a different language. Consequently, there is no “Greek miracle”, a new worldview, a new understanding of the world. Representatives of this theory emphasize the complete continuity of the philosophical worldview in relation to the mythological one and do not see a fundamentally new character or specificity of the philosophical worldview.

A variant of the mythogenic concept is the symbolic theory of interpretation of myth, which interprets myth as a unity of sensory image and meaning, fixed by ritual and tradition. From this point of view, philosophy frees myth from symbolic convention, revealing real content behind the latter. Thus, the symbol became an adequate reflection of reality: let's say, the gods become only symbols of natural elements.

• 2. Epistemogenic theory. Outwardly, at first glance, it is the exact opposite of mythological. The content of this concept comes down to the following. Philosophy has nothing to do with mythology, since it has a different source. The philosophical and worldview view of the world was formed on the basis of scientific and theoretical knowledge that developed outside of mythology, and was a consequence of the generalization of real experience.
• 3. Epistemogenic-mythogenic theory. It attempts to reconcile the first two theories, which radically diverge from each other. Representatives of this theory believe that the mythogenic and epistemogenic concepts can be logically consistent, since within the myth there are elements common sense, everyday experience, just as outside mythology there were elements of scientific specialized knowledge: mathematical, medical and other, borrowed from the East. The spread of this knowledge to the entire worldview led to the emergence of a new philosophical worldview.
• 4. Socioanthropomorphic, or historical-psychological theory. Its representative is J.-P. Vernan. The transformations in the way of thinking carried out by the early Greek philosophers consisted in the fact that the last emergence of the cosmos and all the processes occurring in it began to be interpreted in the image of observed everyday facts. While the mythical consciousness interprets them in the context of the “primordial actions of the gods”: that is, Vernant makes an installation on a rational explanation of everything that happens on the basis of a rational explanation of the immediate surrounding life and transferring, projecting it onto existence as a whole.

The sociomorphic theory of the origin of philosophy is based on drawing parallels between social life and nature. F.H. Cassidy, the author of the “Afterword” in Vernant’s book, criticizes the latter for excessive sociologization and even politicization of cultural phenomena.

None of the concepts we have considered can be recognized as the only correct one and fully explaining the process of the formation of philosophy. For the first of them, the entire history of the formation of philosophy is nothing more than the unfolding of the initial principle, which is Myth. For the second concept, this is a process of growth of scientific knowledge outside of myth and independently of it, with the gradual transfer of specific private scientific knowledge to the entire picture of the universe. If in the first case the philosopher turned into an interpreter and interpreter of myths, then in the second he is a physiologist, physicist, simply a scientific sage-theorist. The second point of view is most widespread in educational literature, in which philosophy is presented as a single undivided ancient science - natural philosophy.

Undoubtedly ancient philosophers were knowledgeable in the field of special scientific knowledge. Moreover, not only in ancient times, but even in modern times, a philosopher could turn out to be an outstanding mathematician, physicist, biologist, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, which could serve as a basis for enrolling them in one or another “scientific department”, although at the same time they remain primarily philosophers. Ultimately, the point is not where to enroll and what to call this or that thinker. It is quite possible that for some, Pythagoras is a mathematician, and Democritus is a physicist. However, Pythagoras and Democritus are philosophers, since they pose the problem of number and the atom philosophically. The question is different: is there a specific area, a subject of special philosophical study, and is it different? philosophical study from special scientific knowledge by its method of studying it. In other words, is there, along with special private scientific knowledge, also philosophical knowledge. Whether or not the thinker himself, the sage, is isolated from other types of knowledge is a rhetorical question. Consequently, the wise men of the 6th-5th centuries. BC. can, without a doubt, be considered philosophers. We can call them philosophers, first of all, not because they abandoned mythological images or sociomorphic and anthropomorphic ideas. The point is different, the point is in the nature of thinking and in the subject of their contemplation. The nature of the thinking of philosophers - wise men, and not just sages - can be defined as contemplation, meaning that we are talking about theoretical, speculative knowledge: thinking (Greek noesis - literally “recognize”, “sniff out”) of philosophers was a kind of reflection on knowledge.

The subject of their contemplation was the universal beginning - arche, that is, that from which everything came, the beginning of everything, eternal and unchanging. This is the first problem, the problem of all problems. Arche - key concept emerging ancient philosophy. The method, the method of philosophical contemplation, in contrast to empirical scientific knowledge, was based on the dialectical-hypothetical principle. If mythology was based on tradition, authority, ritual, and private scientific knowledge was based on sensory-observable reliability, then philosophy was based on dialectics as rational, standardized thinking that occurs according to certain rules. Only such thinking allows us to “see” the essence of nature hidden by appearance - physis. Aristotle gave a whole system of definitions of nature, indicating its six most important meanings.

Nature or nature (physis) is called 1) the emergence of that which grows; 2) the fundamental principle of the growing, from which it grows; 3) where the first movement inherent in each of natural things comes from; 4) nature is also called that from which, as the first, any thing consists or arises; 5) the essence of natural things is also called nature or nature; 6) every essence in general is called nature.

Thus, we can draw the following general conclusion: philosophy, in contrast to private scientific specialized knowledge and everyday consciousness, directly related to everyday experience, turns to universal, “ideal” questions, the knowledge of which becomes general worldview principles. The emerging new form of social consciousness synthesized and united a wide variety of knowledge, taking on the main function of ideological consciousness - orientation-regulatory - through the creation of a holistic picture of the world in its relation to man.

One of the first philosophers to point out the difference between sensory and rational knowledge was Heraclitus(c. 540-480 BC). But Heraclitus is most notable for the fact that he expressed a number of ideas that anticipated Hegel's dialectic. The statements of Heraclitus are widely known about that everything flows and everything changes. He emphasized the relative stability of things and argued that things themselves contain opposites, that everything in this world happens through struggle. Struggle is the cause of all emergence and destruction, disappearance. But he views this struggle as harmony, and wisdom will consist in knowing everything as one. However, the opinion, i.e. knowledge based on sensory experience does not lead to knowledge of everything as one. Many “do not understand how the hostile is in harmony with itself,” “that war is generally accepted, that enmity is the usual order of things, and that everything arises through enmity.” This “enmity” and “harmony” is nothing more than the unity and struggle of opposites. Thus, Heraclitus views being as becoming, as a process of development, as a process of destruction and emergence at the same time. Being and non-being are one, one, because opposites exist in the same thing, being passes into non-being, and non-being into being. For being understood as a process, the primary essence, the primary element can only be that which itself can be visible, perceived in this world as a process. It is clear that water or air are not very suitable for this role. And for Heraclitus, such an essential essence, the first cause, is fire. And the cosmos itself, according to Heraclitus, has always been, is and will be an eternally living fire, gradually flaring up and gradually dying out.

However, Heraclitus is still very mythological and, in fact, broadcasts, and does not reason and prove. Actually, the teaching of Parmenides could be called philosophy (and the first philosopher), for Parmenides strives for reasoning and proof of his philosophical positions.

Parmenides(born c. 540 BC) lived and taught in the city of Elea and was one of the leading philosophers of the Eleatic school. Like his predecessors, he raises the question of a single being and the multitude of existing things, but surpasses them all in that he already raises the question of the relationship between being and thinking, and, moreover, the only reliable source of knowledge of truth for him is clearly reason. Parmenides makes a sharp distinction and contrast between rational knowledge and sensory knowledge. But reason, according to Parmenides, is not immune from errors and risks, by following the wrong path, not achieving the truth. One of the first mistakes, as Parmenides believes, is the assumption, following Heraclitus, of the presence of opposites in things themselves and thereby the assumption of the existence of non-existence. Parmenides clearly states that nothingness does not exist. One can only think about existing things, i.e. being, but one cannot think or speak about non-existence (non-existence). Only that which is conceivable and expressible in words is recognized as existing. Thinking (mind) begins to act as a criterion of existence and, moreover, is identical with it.

Having pointed out the discrepancy between the sensory and the rational, Parmenides clearly gives preference to the evidence of reason. Reason reaches truth in spite of feelings, contradicting them. Sensory perceptions of beings are unstable and vague, fluid and changeable, and differ from conceivable beings, opposing them. From this we can conclude that if the physical world perceived by the senses is contradictory, then it cannot be true. Only supersensible, intelligible, consistent existence can be true.

The intelligible being of Parmenides, which alone can be true, turns out to be homogeneous, always equal to itself, motionless and perfect, in contrast to being as a process, as constant formation, emergence and destruction in Heraclitus.

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

DOI: 10.17212/2075-0862-2018-4.1-212-229 DK 1 (091); 115

TIME AND ETERNITY IN THE ONTOLOGICAL MODELS OF PARMENIDES AND HERACLITES

Denisova Tatyana Yurievna,

candidate of philosophical sciences,

Dean of the Faculty of Social Technologies of Surgutsky state university, Russia, 628412, Tyumen region, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug - Yugra, Surgut, Lenin Ave., 1 [email protected]

annotation

The article provides a systematic analysis of the positions of two outstanding and traditionally opposed representatives of Greek natural philosophy, Parmenides of Elea and Heraclitus of Ephesus, regarding the problem of time as a world-forming principle. The study includes substantiation of three theses. The first thesis is that attempts to consider time from the perspective of its ontological essence, and not just empirical manifestations and instrumental use, were made already in early Greek philosophy. The second thesis is that the tradition of contrasting the ideas of Parmenides and Heraclitus about the principles of the world order distorts the real state of affairs. The article shows that the static nature of being in Parmenides does not exclude the movement and formation of things, and the metaphysical dynamics of Heraclitus does not reduce the existence of things to an endless becoming that never reaches being. The third thesis is that the ideas of both time and eternity are somehow present in both concepts. Time is considered as a condition and basis for the existence of individual things, manifested in their variability and movement. Outside of time, that is, in eternity, there is the Whole, which includes all existing and possible individual things. The teachings of Parmenides and Heraclitus thus represent two parts of a single ontological model, in which time and eternity serve the task of changing and preserving the Cosmos.

Key words: time, eternity, movement, being, existence, essence, boundary.

Bibliographic description for citation:

Denisova T.Yu. Time and eternity in the ontological models of Parmenides and Heraclitus // Ideas and ideals. - 2018. - No. 4, vol. 1. - P. 212-229. - yok 10.17212/2075-08622018-4.1-212-229.

Time is like ontological problem

It is impossible to find a problem that has occupied minds for thousands of years more than the problem of the essence of time. IN modern philosophy time undoubtedly has the status of a central concept of ontology, and, as is often stated, it received this status for the first time in the twentieth century, in the philosophy of E. Husserl and M. Heidegger. Heidegger himself believed that before his “Being and Time” everything philosophical theories are only comments on the ordinary understanding of time. The ordinary understanding, in his opinion, comes down to counting time and presenting it as a simple sequence of “now” moments. Philosophy, agreeing with this, later only made a clarification that time is “a homogeneous irreversible sequence of one thing after another” [Ibid.].

However, this categorical statement by Heidegger is questionable, since the topic of time was already raised by the Pre-Socratics in the context of the search for arche, i.e., the ontological foundations of the world, as well as in the comparison of time with the metaphysical concept of eternity, which represents a non-empirically verifiable (countable) sum of all finite “times” , but their indestructible completeness and integrity, which knows no boundaries. Greek natural philosophy asked questions about what gives stability and unity to the world, trying to find either a single material fundamental principle (water, fire, air, atoms), or a single governing first principle (Logos, being), and the theme of time was considered in connection with the problem of movement (changes) of being, as well as the problem of the essential boundaries of this moving/stationary being.

The ideas of time among the Pre-Socratics are most deeply represented in the ontological models of the founder Eleatic school Parmenides and his contemporary Heraclitus from Ephesus. As a rule, these two thinkers are contrasted with each other due to the supposedly opposite attitude towards being as unshakable, static (Parmenides) or as moving, fluid (Heraclitus). The philosophy of Heraclitus is called the philosophy of the absolute process, the teaching of Parmenides and the Eleatics in general is called the philosophy of absolute substance. However, such an unequivocal opposition is hardly justified.

In our study we will try to substantiate both of these assumptions. Firstly, the ontological status of the problem of time was already obvious to the Greek natural philosophers, and in ontological

in the divisions of the world of Parmenides and Heraclitus, time, even not directly named, explicitly plays vital role. Secondly, the seemingly axiomatic opposition of their positions is removed if the focus of the study is precisely the problem of time.

Eleatics on time and eternity

The ideas of the Eleatics about the unchangeable, immovable, indestructible and never born, unconditionally existing absolute being, which has nothing outside itself - not even non-existence, were expressed in theological form by Xenophanes, then ontologically comprehended by Parmenides and wittily supported by the aporia of Zeno of Elea about the impossibility of movement. Only absolute eternal existence exists; things that arise and are destroyed, move and change, have an illusory, false existence and are inaccessible to true knowledge. The Eleatics were the first to point out the difference between true and unchanging existence as such and the phenomenal existence of the empirical world of things, between the speculative world of principles and the visible world of their manifestations, building on this their concept of the world order, according to which absolute substance, unlike individual entities, is outside space , since it has nothing outside itself (itself representing a complete space and being simultaneously at every point), and also outside of time, since it resides entirely in one eternally present moment.

In Parmenides's On Nature, the goddess of truth Dike instructs the young man how to understand true existence: Only one path remains,

“There is”, saying; on it - it will take on so many different things, that it must be unborn and unperishable as well, whole, only-begotten, trembling-free and perfect. And it did not “was”, and will not “be”, since now everything “Is” at once, one continuous thing. You won't find him a birthday.

In true being, all empirical boundaries are abolished, since the boundary represents, as it were, a gap in being, that is, non-existence, which, as Parmenides believes, does not and cannot exist. Time for true existence is also not divided by boundaries into parts “before”, “now”, then,” which means that there is no time for it: How can something that is “be later”, How could “be in the past” ?

“It was” means it is not; not to eat if “there is no time” [Ibid., p. 296].

Parmenides contrasts the unity of true being with a multitude of sensory phenomena, things that, precisely due to variability and lack of final certainty, do not possess truth. Existing things, by virtue of their temporality, the ability to arise and be destroyed, to be separated from other beings by spatial boundaries, contain non-existence. But it is not the presence of boundaries that distinguishes things from true being: being-sphere also has boundaries-limits (external boundaries), and the presence of boundaries is a universal condition for the existence of any “what”. The difference between being and individual things is the immutability of the first and the variability of the second. The elusive essence of things, their impermanent “what-ness”, the transformation of boundaries allows us to talk about their untrue existence, confusion with non-existence, which is impossible: “Being exists, but nothing is” [Ibid., p. 296]. The image of an indivisible and unchanging whole, in which “everything is filled with being,” is difficult to correlate with the visible world, where one thing is separated from another, where things arise, change and disappear, and Parmenides understands this, calling for trust in the mental, and not the sensory, image of the world:

“See, however, with your mind: what is absent is truly present,

For it is impossible to cut off from the existing the existing in the bow” [Ibid., p. 297].

In another, clearer statement it sounds like this:

“However, contemplate with your mind what is absent

as always present,

For the absent does not cut off the existing from adjoining the existing,

Not when it is completely dispersed throughout space,

Not when it unites” [Ibid., p. 288].

A being may be absent at a certain moment in time - still unborn or already dead - but it has the potential property of being, therefore, regardless of presence or absence, it now always belongs to being. The existence of a being is temporary, but its ability to exist is timeless. This is important to understand when comparing Parmenides and Heraclitus: Heraclitus, speaking about variability in time, also means the world of things, and not the principles, the beginnings of being.

Parmenides' ideas about the impossibility of movement and the illusory nature of the world of things moving in time were developed in Zeno's aporia. It is assumed that about forty of them were created, but only a few have come down to us, thanks to Aristotle’s retelling.

The most famous of them are “Dichotomy”, “Achilles and the Tortoise” and “Arrow”. In paradox problems, Zeno not only revisits the theme of communication

time and movement, but tries for the first time to theoretically consider the nature of the space-time continuum, namely to show whether time and space are a collection of further indivisible elements (moments of time, parts of space or intervals of movement), or whether they represent infinitely divisible quantities. The general meaning of Zeno's aporia is to explain the impossibility of movement due to the infinite divisibility of the spatial continuum.

Let us briefly recall their contents. The main idea of ​​the “Dichotomy” is that since a moving body, before traveling a certain distance, must travel half of it, and before that - half of the half, etc., then, strictly speaking, movement under such conditions cannot even begin . In the Achilles aporia, the fleet-footed Achilles, in order to catch up with the tortoise, must first overcome the distance that the tortoise has already covered. And since the turtle continues to move, he must occupy the infinite number of “places” that the turtle had hitherto occupied. The essence of the difficulties in these aporias lies in the fact that if the spatial continuum is an infinite number of elements (points), then movement in it is impossible, since it is impossible to occupy an infinite number of consecutive positions in a limited period of time.

In the Arrow aporia, time is the subject of consideration. A flying arrow fired from a bow at a target is actually at rest, since the process of its flight is the sum of states at rest - at each indivisible moment of time, the arrow is at rest at an indivisible point in space. Zeno reasons approximately like this: at each moment of time (the point “now”) the arrow occupies some place equal to its length (otherwise it would be “nowhere”, but this is impossible). But if one occupied a space equal to its size, then it would be impossible to move, since motion presupposes that a moving body occupies a space larger than itself. This means that motion is the sum of states of rest, and this is impossible, since the endless addition of “nothing” will ultimately give the same nothingness. Consequently, movement does not exist, and the world of temporary things, where everything is multiple, fluid and transitory, does not have true existence. And where there is no movement and change, the concept of time is devoid of any meaning.

The ideas of Heraclitus of Ephesus, who believed movement to be a world-forming principle, appear at first glance to be the complete opposite of the ontological model of the Eleatics.

Time and motion in the teachings of Heraclitus

The interpretation of the surviving fragments of Heraclitus’s main work “On Nature” is a very complex and at the same time unusually fascinating task. And it’s not just a matter of fragmentary

The wealth of surviving texts, many of which exist only in the form of comments by later thinkers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages: the philosopher, who was called the Dark One during his lifetime, expressed his thoughts in sayings that were reminiscent of the Pythian oracles in their polysemy and had a specific grammatical structure. As M. Heidegger warned, “the two and a half millennia that separate us from Heraclitus are a dangerous matter. We have to be extremely self-critical in order to see anything here.” But he also declared, however, that “there is nothing to be said against speculative interpretation,” and therefore called for taking risks by turning to the texts of Heraclitus in order to get something meaningful in the end. Therefore, in analyzing the views of Heraclitus, we intend to move away from the tradition of direct opposition of his concept to the philosophical position of Parmenides.

Although time is mentioned only once among the more than 100 surviving sayings of Heraclitus, it is the ontological core of his picture of the world. Thematically, we can highlight the following basic provisions of the Heraclitean doctrine of nature related to the problem of time: 1) time as a condition for the existence of the world as a Whole; 2) time and eternity; 3) time and movement (formation, genesis); 4) time and the possibility of things achieving existence.

It should immediately be noted that the most important and fruitful idea for the further development of natural philosophy is Heraclitus’s idea that time has no basis, it itself is the basis of everything, the cause and condition. Heraclitus was the first to see in time not the form of existence of things and the world as a whole, but an active substance.

This belief is heard in the only fragment of Heraclitus, where time is named explicitly, directly: “Aiœv nrnç son nrnÇœv, nsoosûœv nrnSoç ^ ßaoi^nin” (literal translation: “Aeon (age) is a child playing pesseia, the child belongs to royal power" ). In Russian-language studies, authors rely, as a rule, on one of two translations of this saying: “A century is a child playing, throwing dice, a child on the throne” or “Ayon (Time) is a child playing checkers: the kingdom of a child.” Two discrepancies are noteworthy: what plays (interpretation of the concept aiœv) and what the aiœv-child plays. In the first case, the word “aiœv” is translated as “eternity” (aiœv - “age, eternity”; aiœvoç - “eternal”), in the second - as “time”. According to the etymology of the concept “aiœv” (which we will not give here), it is close in meaning to the Russian word “youth”; aiœvoç, accordingly, is not only “eternally existing”, but also eternally new, renewing, starting over. In Homer, the concept “aiœv” has nothing to do with either time or eternity, meaning vital force. The Iliad (Iliad, 16:453) says,

that the dying hero Sarpedon is simultaneously abandoned by both fihL (soul) and ashg (life force):

Ashar vl^g t6v ue Mlp ^HP te ka! aíyuv... .

In the phrase of Heraclitus we are talking about both time and eternity: eternity, itself remaining unchanged, plays with things that exist in time, pouring them over, sorting them out, changing places.

But what does she play with? In various fragments, the authors call Pesseia either a game of dice (Lucian, Philo of Alexandria), or a game of checkers (Gregory of Nazianzus): “Time (Chronos) rolls everything like checkers in a Pesseia." The third version of the game is proposed by Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch, who compare time with children playing with sand on the seashore. This image is subsequently encountered very often by various researchers (for example, by S.N. Trubetskoy).

Is there a difference? Yes, I have. Checkers, whatever it means, and dice can be won and lost, both games involve rules, a goal, a beginning and an end to the game. Sprinkling sand, collecting and scattering, and even sculpting various figures from it is a process that knows no end, has no other goal than endless continuation. And although Heraclitus is talking about a game with a specific name, the metaphor of pouring sand is consistent with the general meaning of his teaching about the endless change and movement of the ever-living cosmos. A child playing and endlessly pouring sand, creating and destroying figures, does not have the necessary completion for his actions: sand is inexhaustible for play, the number of shapes of figures that can be molded from it is infinite, it is impossible to ultimately create an indestructible or perfect figure, and the child does not have goals to achieve excellence. Just as the meaning of playing with sand is in the game itself, so the meaning of changes over time is in the changes themselves.

Proclus's comments indicate that Heraclitus means by the play of the Aeon the play of the Demiurge during the creation of the cosmos. Philo of Alexandria also holds the same opinion [Ibid]. That is, the Aeon is what creates the world, it is the metaphysical beginning of the world, and the creative beginning, and not just some static and eternal principle that lies at the foundation of the world. Consequently, already in this metaphorical characteristic of time (eternity?) its deep ontological connection with movement is obvious.

However, are we still talking about time or eternity? Let's try to understand this fundamental issue.

Heraclitean definition of being comes from the recognition of Ysvsalq - genesis, formation - as the main principle of the existence of being.

For Heraclitus, existence is an ever-flowing process, eternal formation and change. If things seem unchanging and motionless to a person, this is just a deception of the senses, an illusion. In many philosophical and artistic interpretations, time, with reference to Heraclitus, is represented as a continuously moving stream carrying things (immobile in their essence, apparently). Let us recall, for example, the well-known: “The river of times in its rush / Carries away all the affairs of people / and drowns peoples, kingdoms and kings into the abyss of oblivion” (G.R. Derzhavin).

However, for Heraclitus it is not time that flows, but into things and processes that exist in time. His “P^ta reT” refers to things - their nature is fluid. They move, that is, they go through the path of formation and change, earth and sky, air and water, things and bodies, the material world and consciousness, never stopping or reaching the limit of the path, renewing and transforming.

For Heraclitus, time does not appear as something external in relation to things, as a certain principle that controls from the outside, and, as it seems to us, this idea was precisely understood and perfectly expressed by Kh.L. Borges in his essay “A New Refutation of Time”: “We are made of the stuff of time. Time is a river that carries me away, but this river is myself; the tiger that devours me, but this tiger is myself; the fire that burns me to ashes, but this fire is me again.”

It is this clarification that helps to understand whether Heraclitus is talking about time or eternity. The image of flowing water (stream, river) excludes any division, distinction, denies intervals and their boundaries, as well as the external limits of things. This is the nature of eternity, and not time, that is, it turns out that the metaphysical dynamics of being are carried out in eternity. However, eternity is motionless and unchanging, and, therefore, the fluidity of the material world is still connected with time, which is always measured, establishing the sequence and duration of the processes occurring with things.

Heraclitus does not speak about the fluid “substance” of time, but about fluid things that exist in time, having life spans correlated with time. In order to say “You cannot step into the same river twice,” you need to mean something specific that is capable of changing with time (along with time) and in time, that is, something that enters a changing stream already changed. Time is the force that imperiously involves everything that exists in the process of change, being an ontological condition for the existence of things, which is possible only in movement. The world will perish if it stops, it will turn into a dead sediment like a chatterbox kykeon, which must definitely be shaken and mixed: “And kykeon also decomposes if you don’t shake it.”

Having identified the movement of time with the change of things, Heraclitus, as S.N. correctly noted. Trubetskoy, “reified, materialized the process of eternal change, turning action into an active substance.” Time is not what “happens” to things, but what makes things themselves happen. Time for Heraclitus is thus real, and real not just as a repository, a container of events and processes, but as something independent and autonomous. And this will become especially clear if we return once again to the analysis of the Heraclitean expression “P^ta reT”, since both parts - both “l^to” and “reT” - can be interpreted in a way different from the established version.

In the famous seminar on Heraclitus, O. Fink and M. Heidegger devote a lot of time to discussing what Heraclitus understood by “togaho”. Despite the fact that traditionally “ta togaha” is translated as “the universe” (“The universe is ruled by lightning”) or as “everything” (“everything flows” [Ibid., p. 154]), O. Fink justifiably argues that it is more accurate understand this in the plural - all things, all beings that are collected into something whole, but at the same time are still separated from each other. By a thing, O. Fink proposes to understand “something isolated and having certain outlines,” but at the same time also possessing “features of the universal, at least in the method of origin.” Consequently, he concludes, by “that yaotta” we mean “the total multiplicity of finitely limited things” [Ibid., p. 15]. “Yaotta” is used in the same meaning in the 50th fragment (“togata ta ovta”, which is usually translated as “all things”). Fink argues that this does not mean a listing of all beings, but an indication of their separation, isolation, distinction [Ibid., p. 46]. P(^ta does not have totality, but it is not a simple collection of things - it is a whole, collected together, divided and connected by boundaries between individual entities.

At the same time, Fink draws attention to the fact that in the 64th fragment “everything” is not a static, but a moving diversity of existence [Ibid., p. 19], since lightning implies movement. Heidegger also agrees that Heraclitus’s “tagota” is not “a certain present whole, but a being in motion” [Ibid., p. 20].

In this regard, Heidegger gives his interpretation of the concept<с^еа!.д»: это не просто последовательное развитие, становление, которое действительно не имеет ни внутренних границ, ни внешних пределов и не позволяет вещи хоть когда-нибудь стать собой, обретя сущность; это есть вступление в бытие или в присутствие - т. е. это одномоментный акт. И образ молнии подкрепляет такое понимание: «В миг яркой вспышки молнии сущее вступает в определенность» [Там же, с. 25].

To be always means to be something specific, within the given boundaries of qualities, terms, place. You can no longer be, but at the same time remain something

then uncertain. Everything that exists, insofar as it exists, has certainty, but this certainty, according to Heraclitus, is not static, not given forever, since a thing appears within its boundaries, at the moment of lightning. Boundaries are not constant, not final, but at any moment in time, every being that exists in time has them. Fink also believes that the function of the ruling lightning is to give beings not only outlines, but also an impetus that encourages them to move and exist. And since it encourages movement not of individual things, but of the entire totality of existence, hence the expression “návxa 5ia návx&v” - “everything through everything,” affirming a universal connection, a common basis, mutual permeation with each other [Ibid., p. 29, 30].

Summarizing Fink's statements, we can say that, firstly, “ta návxa” is not an indivisible “everything”, but a collection of “everything”, individual beings; not the universe, but “the totality of the intraworldly,” therefore, it is not the world as a whole that flows (changes), but the individual things included in it flow.

And secondly, the lightning that governs the world (a metaphor for the moment in time when a being receives certainty by entering presence, into being) is also not the universe, but it is what forms the universe, it is a condition for the formation of the world. Moreover, it connects two world-forming functions - movement, without which the world could not exist, and freezing, stopping, thanks to which existing things receive certainty. Things, becoming from one to another, have conditional stops to recognize them in a certain quality, but at the same time changes occur endlessly and unstoppably. Heraclitus associates time with eternity, but not in the way that is easiest for ordinary consciousness to assume: times do not add up to eternity, do not constitute it, just as points do not form a straight line, but exist in eternity, are included in it, move in it, connecting with each other friend.

It seems to us that the above interpretation of the famous expression of Heraclitus really corresponds to the philosopher’s thought, and not just to the letter. We consider it necessary to also rethink the second part of the famous expression. Did Heraclitus really mean the continuous flow of beings, depriving them of the certainty and authenticity of being?

We find the following fact interesting in this context. Plato in the dialogue “Cratylus” mentions: “Heraclitus says somewhere that everything moves and nothing remains in place (návxa X®psí Kai oúSév ^évsi), and likening everything that exists to the flow of a river, he says that you cannot enter the same place twice. and the same river." In our opinion, this is very important - not návxa psí, but návxa X^psí. The verb psí is from reyu (“to flow”), x®psí is from %yureyu (“to leave, giving way to another”). Although Plato mentions the metaphor of a river, a flowing stream, the difference between the two verbs seems significant to us. The course of the

implies continuity, the absence of any division, division, but in “concession” there is order, consistency, the presence of “one” and “another”, which are different and exist separately. Flow is associated with eternity and the absolute, yielding is associated with time and things.

By the way, modern philosopher A.V. Akhutin also draws attention to the fact that the “flow of everything” in Heraclitus most of all resembles not a continuous stream, but the joining of one with another, a rhythmic surf, the unity of more and more new waters. The verb “reT” (“flows”) appears later, in Aristotle. In his treatise “On Heaven” we find, in particular: “P^ta uggreaVar 9ao1 ka! reto" - "Everything becomes and flows."

Therefore, “Everything Flows” can and should be understood not as a process of incomplete and meaningless spontaneous flow, in which things and states are indistinguishable, but as their ordered alternation in time. In the endless movement of “everything” as one, each individual included in this “everything” has a place and time.

What is the source of the dynamics of everything that determines the order of change, what is the time to “advance” and “give way”?

Here we should turn to another famous saying of Heraclitus: “P6A, etsod lavtyv tseu lat^r vota, lavtyv 5e RaaLeid” - “War is the father of all, the king of all.” The absolute beginning includes in Heraclitus not only the idea of ​​unity and harmony, but also the idea of ​​discord, struggle and discrimination (as in Empedocles). The Absolute is immanently characterized by struggle (war), and hidden harmony is also immanently inherent in it, otherwise the organization of the cosmos and the general world order would be inexplicable: “By virtue of the eternal law, everything that exists has its opposite by necessity, in a fatal way. Otherwise, the isolation, the individual existence of individual things would not be complete and would violate the unity and harmony of the whole,” writes S.N. Trubetskoy.

That is, without the struggle of opposites, not a single individual could be holistic, that is, be itself, and therefore, be at all. In addition, without the struggle of opposites, any individual would be locked into one thing, would be completely isolated, thereby being excluded from the whole. And this means that the whole would be deprived of its integrity, order and harmony and could not exist. The struggle of opposites, accompanied by movement, emergence and destruction, changes and mutual transformations, thereby ensures both the relative integrity and completeness of the individual, and its participation in the whole. The principle of the world order in Heraclitus, according to which the absolute agrees with itself, diverging from itself, differing in itself, ensures the mutual consistency and harmony of the world. Struggle and movement are the cosmogonic beginning of the world.

But it is important that this struggle and movement, i.e. the dynamics of cosmogenesis, must be balanced by another principle - a static one, preserving the results of movement, giving being as a whole form and certainty, and thereby solidity.

As S.N. accurately notes. Trubetskoy, “...what seems to be a motionless, abiding body or being is only a visible point of intersection of opposing aspirations.” A point is the moment when an entity freezes in being itself; it has no extension (and, understood as a moment in time, has no duration), but is the boundary of a certain state. On the one hand, at different moments in time a thing is never equal to itself, it does not even have relative constancy, its continuous state does not consist of “now” points, but at the same time the point of transition from one state to another is necessary for understanding and describing the essence and way of its existence.

Understanding Heraclitus’ “Everything flows” as a principle of the world order, reduced only to infinite variability, would ultimately lead to an ontological and epistemological dead end.

Firstly, if everything is only genesis and “everything is and is not” at the same time, therefore, a being with certainty does not exist. Moreover, the fluid existence of things cannot be called being in the strict sense - it is just as much being as it is non-being. Such a model of the world excludes even relative stability, and the question remains unresolved of how, in the cycle of matter, if not individual, then at least generic forms of things are preserved unchanged, and it is impossible to ignore mention of forms when speaking about formation, since forms are, if not the goal and the result of formation, then at least its intermediate stages.

Secondly, if there is nothing that is in the same state, then there is nothing to be affirmed, and nothing can be known. According to Aristotle, one of the followers of Heraclitus, Cratylus, who came to extreme skepticism and continued Heraclitus’ thought with the phrase “You cannot enter the same river not only twice, but even once,” no longer spoke, but only moved his finger, showing perpetual motion.

The contrast between the ideas of Heraclitus and Parmenides regarding the world order as a whole (one denies the existence of being, the other - non-existence), regarding the principle of its existence (dynamics or statics, the presence of movement or absence) is didactically and logically convenient, but in reality this is a very superficial idea of ​​their ontological concepts, simplification and distortion of their models of the world.

What is common in the concepts of time between Parmenides and Heraclitus

Among those who categorically denied this opposition between Heraclitus and Parmenides as apologists for variability and stability, respectively (included in textbooks as an axiom), there were such influential thinkers as M. Heidegger, J. Beaufret, S.N. Trubetskoy, A.V. Lebedev and others. Thus, M. Heidegger in his “Introduction to Metaphysics” states: “Heraclitus, to whom, sharply contrasting him with Parmenides, is credited with the doctrine of becoming, affirms truly the same thing as him.” J. Beaufret speaks about the same thing: “... both of them, despite the difference in their sayings, at the origins of Western thinking listened to the same logos, listened to it with the same ears.”

What is their commonality, what did they hear with “the same ears”?

A.V. Lebedev points out at least two of their common features: 1) in both, being corresponds to the one, and becoming to the many; 2) the one is understood as an intelligible truth, the many - as an illusion of sensory perception.

Let us try to show further that the static nature of being in Parmenides does not exclude the movement of things, the formation of “many”, and the metaphysical dynamics of Heraclitus does not reduce the existence of things to an endless formation that never reaches being.

For all its fluidity, the world appears complete and complete in Heraclitus: opposites (i.e., opposite characteristics of a thing, opposing forces and aspirations) diverge and converge, things arise and disappear within the general world process. The world, endlessly changing, invariably returns to itself, governed by a single law - the Logos. “The sun is new every day,” says Heraclitus, noting in another fragment that “it does not exceed the established boundaries,” and its movement is eternal: “The sun, having reached the western sea and plunging into it, goes out, and then, having passed under Earth and reaching the east, it flares up again, and this happens endlessly.” By the limits that the Sun never crosses, we mean, without a doubt, not the qualities of the Sun, but the moments in time when it “turns to decline or to gain.” Time is what gives the Cosmos a general, unchanging order.

Things exist and change in time, but time itself is unchanged: “One day is equal to every one.” The constancy of measures is thus more important than the variability of the world of things. As J. Beaufret wrote, “there is nothing more alien to the spirit of Heraclitus than this imaginary doctrine of universal mobility, which the inert tradition attributes to him,” and therefore

Mu, he believes, needs to rethink the famous Heraclitean thesis “navxa psî” - “everything flows.”

The struggle and division of individual forces and entities becomes a condition for the consent and unity of the whole, and constancy only marks the boundaries of variability. “It turns out to be constancy only to the extent that it is both constancy and variability within a unity thoroughly permeated with difference,” notes J. Beaufré. Heraclitus’s idea of ​​agreement, harmony of opposites of their “sameness”: “As above, so below”, “The road there and back is the same” does not consist in their reconciliation, mutual cancellation or balance, but, according to A.V. . Akhutin, in “the nesting of one world in another.”

And this applies to the same extent to the problem of time. Times not only follow each other, alternating, differing, but are also co-present in a single being. This thought is presented in fragment 88 DK: “The living and the dead, the waking and the sleeping, the young and the old are one and the same in us, for these [opposites], having changed, are these, and those, having changed, are these.”

A.V. Akhutin emphasizes that we are talking here not only about different states of something, but about different times (being perfect, happening, coming true; living now - living before, already awakened - still sleeping, etc.). At the same time, A.V. Akhutin makes an extremely important remark about the co-presence of times at the point ax^, i.e. the point of maturity, the moment of the fullness of being, the flourishing of the past (which at the same time died and continues to participate in life). Since being is becoming, in it all times are united into one: “Unlike gonic stories (theo- or cosmo-), where origin passes, goes into the past, ending with the present, in Heraclitus, being is always a present” [ Ibid., p. 544] (our italics - T.D.). This coincidence of times and conditions, by the way, sounds in Pindar’s famous call “révoi" oioç éaai ^a0œv" - “Become who you are by learning.”

Discussing the essence of “current being” in Heraclitus, A.V. Akhutin brilliantly expresses it with the thesis “Existence is the unity of a current event.” If there is something, he writes, then it carries within itself the beginning of its existence, proves its autarky by being, thereby representing a complete whole, a thing-cosmos that begins with itself (exudes itself) and comes to completion, outlined by its limits, but not frozen within oneself: The Sun is new every day, but at the same time it does not cease to be the Sun.

We see an echo of Heraclitean dialectics, the idea of ​​difference as the basis of unity in his opponent Parmenides: “Cognize (^suoos - “bring to the white light”, bring to clarity, reveal the hidden) the absent as

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constantly present,” says the thinker, meaning by “absent” that which is not obvious, hidden or potentially present in existence. Nothing is always, and nothing is not (that is, is not absent, does not belong to non-existence) definitively. The “present” never disappears completely, but in its existence one can distinguish periods of hidden and obvious presence, alternation of potential and actual modes of being.

As a result of the analysis of the concepts of Parmenides and Heraclitus, their main provisions can be summarized as follows.

Time has no basis, it was not created by anyone and cannot be destroyed. Time itself is the condition and basis for the existence of things, it is inscribed in the ontological structures of the Cosmos and ensures its order. It is the ontological creative principle of the world, manifested in the variability and fluidity of things. Time is directly related to movement and change, and therefore only changeable individual things are subject to the flow of time. The whole remains outside of time, that is, in eternity. The constancy of being in the variability of the world is structured as a confrontation between emergence and death, or the co-presence (in the mind) of the present and the absent. To understand (think) a being in its being means to grasp it at the point of its highest realization, when growth gives way to descent, like the peace of a thrown stone at the top point of its movement or the fulfillment, the flowering of a person’s life at the moment of his highest achievement. The moment of the present at a point does not simply connect the past and the future, as their border, but contains them within itself, is the focus of time in general.

Both thinkers dialectically evaluate the relationship between the variability of things in time and the immutability and eternity of being as two equal world-forming principles, without absolutizing either one or the other.

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3. Akhutin A.V. Ancient principles of philosophy. - St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2007. - 783 p.

4. Borges HL. Collected works. In 4 volumes. T. 2. Works 1942-1969. -Ed. 2nd, erased - St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2011. - 847 p.

5. Beaufret J Dialogue with Heidegger. Greek philosophy / trans. from fr. and entry Art. V.Yu. Bystrova. - St. Petersburg: Vladimir Dal, 2007. - 254 p.

Literature

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The article was received by the editor on May 21, 2018. The article was reviewed on July 2, 2018.

SCIENTIFIC HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ^JOURNAL............................................ ........................................................ ...................................................

DOI: 10.17212/2075-0862-2018-4.1-212-229

TIME AND ETERNITY IN THE ONTOLOGICAL MODELS OF PARMENIDES AND HERACLITUS

Denisova Tatyana,

Cand. of Sc. (Philosophy), Associate Professor Department of Philosophy, Dean of the Faculty of Social Technologies Surgut State University,

1, Lenina Ave., Surgut, Khanty-Mansy Autonomous Okrug - Yugra, Tyumen region, 628412, Russian Federation [email protected]

The article gives a systematic analysis of the positions of two outstanding and traditionally opposed to each other representatives of the Greek natural philosophy Parmenides and Heraclitus regarding the problem of time as a world-forming principle.

The article is focused on the ground of the following ideas. First, attempts to consider the ontological essence of time (not only its empirical manifestations and instrumental uses) were already made in early Greek philosophy. Secondly, the tradition of contrasting the views of Parmenides and Heraclitus concerning the main principles of the world order is hardly justified. The article shows that the Parmenides" idea of ​​the static nature of being doesn"t exclude the movement and the formation of things, and the metaphysical dynamics of being according to Heraclitus does not reduce the existence of things to an infinite becoming without the opportunity to get true being.

Thirdly, images of time and eternity, one way or another, are presented in both conceptions. Time is considered as a condition and basis for the existence of individual things, manifested in their conversion and movement. Out of time, that is, in eternity, there is the Whole that includes all the existing and possible individual things. Thus the conceptions of Parmenides and Heraclitus represent two parts of a single ontological model of the order of the Cosmos.

Keywords: time, eternity, movement, being, existent thing, substance, border. Bibliographic description for citation:

Denisova T. Time and eternity in the ontological models of Parmenides and Heraclitus. Ideas i ideally - Ideas and Ideals, 2018, no. 4, vol. 1, pp. 212-229. doi: 10.17212/2075-08622018-4.1-212-229.

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"Concept Parmenides, with all its obvious paradox, with all the obvious discrepancy with experience, it seems in comparison with the concept Heraclitus simpler, less unexpected.

Movement and change in general contradict the concept of being, therefore Parmenides ascribes immutability and homogeneity to being - absolute self-identity in time and space. Being is one and motionless. As for visible motion, ancient Greek thought, introducing the concept of substance, had already abandoned the naive belief in the truth of empirical data.

Hegel gives a story about Diogenes of Sinop, who, in response to the denial of the movement, began to walk. But this story ends with an unexpected twist: when Diogenes’ student agreed with such an argument, Diogenes began to beat him: one cannot be satisfied with sensory certainty in logical analysis (See: V.I. Lenin. Complete works, vol. 28, p. 230).

In Eleatic philosophy, Greek thought encountered the aporia of movement, variability, and diversity. But at the same time she encountered other aporia - the aporia of identity. Aporia Zeno- aporia of non-identity. Zeno brought them to a negative conclusion: there is no movement. The aporia of identity is what was hidden in the positive statements of the Eleatics. The main of these positive statements: being is identity, homogeneity, immutability - has quite serious real roots. Reason comprehends in nature that which corresponds to its logical function, identification, inclusion of individual impressions and private ideas into unified sets of identified elements. Substance is that which is common to identified elements.

If Heraclitus moved from specific substances to the very process of transformation of one substance into another and made the change itself a substance, then Parmenides did something opposite. He considers immutability, identity, homogeneity itself as substance. In fact, if there is only immutability, identity, homogeneity, then the subject of these predicates disappears, there is nothing to which identity and identity can be attributed. immutability. If all instants are filled with the same content, if they are identical in this sense, then time is compressed into one unextended instant. If space does not have heterogeneous content, it contracts into an unextended point. This is how the subject of immutability, the subject of identity, disappears.

The concept of Parmenides is a mirror (i.e. with inversion) reflection of the concept of Heraclitus. The latter faced a similar danger - the annihilation of the subject of the movement, the suicide of the movement itself. If everything changes, then we come to change without that which changes, without that unchangeable thing that is the subject of change. If everything is preserved, then we come to a similar suicide, devastation, annihilation: the changing and without this non-existent subject of immutability disappears.

Thus, the Heraclito-Eleatic conflict is a conflict between two components of being - an unchanging substrate and changing predicates, a conflict that is cross-cutting for science and philosophy. This is exactly what conflict is about. Identity is the negation of differences, differences are the negation of identity.

If we consider the philosophical schools of the past from their questioning, “programming” side, then both the school of Heraclitus (if such a thing existed) and the school of Parmenides expressed not only conflict, but also the inseparability of the components of being. In philosophy Heraclitus there is a question addressed to the future about the invariant substrate of change, in the philosophy of Parmenides - the question about non-identity. About non-identity, which the philosophy of Parmenides denies, the question here does not come from the philosopher, it is rather a cry for help from being, which philosophical schools are tearing apart, isolating its non-isolable poles.”

Kuznetsov B.G., Mind and Being. Sketches about classical rationalism and non-classical science, M., “Science”, 1972, p. 28-29.