What is a thing?

Metaphysics & Epistemology
41

Identity comes from your memory. Even if you are changing, or your body goes in orbit around the earth in motion, you have your identity as long as you remember you who are.

If you lost your memory who you are, then yes, you have no identity of yourself.

Even if the river lost all its water, it still remains as the same river as long as it has its space. If the space is filled with rocks making it flat, then it would be no longer a river.

Water cannot be held in the flat field or flow. It will still move searching for the slope. But that would mean the river had been transformed into some other type of existence - a new flat field losing its original identity.

The point is that motions and movements cannot destroy identity.

42

I’ve read Parmenides - way of truth, way of opinon. Being cannot come from non-being, and non-being cannot come from being, therefore no motion, no change…

That is about the nature of thought. “It is the same thing to think as it is to be.” This is not about things (although he said it was to emphasize the distinction he was making).

But I don’t know what “momentary actions” means in the context of Parmenides. “Momentary actions” sounds more like “it rests with change” in which case I would think you would be more interested in my analysis of Heraclitus.

Heraclitus was trying to show you what a river is. He was trying to say what a thing is, how it is. He wasn’t actually doing an experiment on walking and rivers. So whatever you think he was wrong about, isn’t what he was talking about. Because obviously as anyone with legs can step in a river.

Memory presents an issue of continuity across time. Heraclitus is talking about what a thing is in just one instant. In just one instant, like a snapshot photo, you can see a line between a river and a river-bank. That line points to two different identities, one identified as a river, and the other identified as dry-land. Identity need have nothing to do with memory. And need have nothing to do with people (although only people seem to talk about it).

You are losing me again. Why bother to pick out a river? If you want to talk about the space a river occupies, I have to ask, occupied by what? The space a river occupies is space; the river is what occupies it. What is a river? What is a thing? In the case of a river, seems to me that you need liquid flowing to bother identifying that thing as a river. It can be a dried up former river, but that is a new, different thing, not a river, or a river space.

Well Heraclitus point is that motions and movements precisely define identity, or enable it, or always come with it. So we may somehow agree on this last point. But I think the river is forking a bit here.

43

How can a thing exist without a matching thought? Can you separate a thing from its matching thought?

44

You have to distinguish between the clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia and what Deleuze means by schizophrenic thinking which has not been conventionalized and normalized by medical discourse. This latter is the basis of his and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, which is not a ‘failed’ synthesis of oneness. On the contrary, the concepts of a stable thing, I and world are mere surface effects of schizophrenic difference.

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45

It just means all your perceptions are frozen piece of present perceived image plus the images from your immediate past memories.

You don’t have access to changes or motions, because they don’t exist. Changes and motions are your illusion.

46

How does one make this consistent with the fact that the schizophrenic ‘positive’ symptoms (e.g. delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, etc.) can be effectively treated with medication that acts on the dopamine and serotonin systems in most cases while being almost entirely resistant to psychotherapy?

47

Stepping into river shouldn’t be understood you actually go into the river with your feet. It just means you cannot have the same moment of time or life, because everything changes.

So you misunderstood my points failing to read between the lines.
My point was he was wrong in saying that everything changes. Change is your illusion. Nothing changes, because all you have access to is a momentary perception. You think things change due to your latent memory.

You cannot go back even to a milliseconds before present, not because something is changing, but because you have no access to what is not existing. What is existing is the very moment of reality, which is the present.

48

I will quote Chomsky here:

"There do seem to be distinctions among “candidates for thing hood,” but questions soon arise. Presumably at least the word thing should be a compelling candidate for thinghood. But what are the identity conditions for things, and how many are there? Suppose we see some branches strewn on the ground. If they fell from a tree after a storm, they are not a thing.

But if they were carefully placed there by an artist as a work of conceptual art, perhaps given a name, then the construction is a thing (and might win an award).

A little thought will show that many complex factors determine whether some part of the world constitutes a thing, including human intention and design—Aristotelian form—which are not properties that can be detected by study of the mind-independent world. If thing does not qualify for thinghood independently of mind-dependent circumstances, then what does?" - What Kind of Creatures Are We?

The problem arises when trying to find what a thing is in the world. We ascribe the conditions we deem necessary for a thing to be thing.

49

You’re a greater articulate than I. The main point being there isn’t a singular band of intensity which is as you say the surface effects of schizo difference. The undifferentiated egg metaphor in Anti-Oedipus works here.

50

Identity without memory and people? Where does the concept and word “identity” come from? From the sky? From the trees? From rivers? Not sure how you could have said that.

River was in Heralclitus’ famous quote, which he was famous and known for. Don’t tell us you never heard of it, or knew it.

Here I was trying to show you that river could be thought as the world. The world is space, and people and time are like water flowing in the space of the world.

It was an interesting analogy that people live in the world, and die in the world. Once lived and died, they never come back.
Same analogy with time, once time passes, it never comes back.

But in actual river itself, you could step into the water or river as many times as you could. So, the river quote must be taken as an analogy which carries a dualism in the universe. Hope you are with this.

Hope the point on river was clear from above.

51

And when we do so, it rests from change.

Meaning, I don’t think Chomsky refutes or challenges or disagrees with Heraclitus.

52

Correct.

It’s only a difference of emphasis between what we count as a thing in the world vs. what we consider to be a thing.

53

“a momentary perception”
Isn’t that a thing?
Heraclitus is saying that a momentary perception rests from change. Even a snapshot, motionless and dead, cannot exist, unless it rests from change.

No - memory is part of the measuring stick of change - not the fabricator of change. Recollecting, remembering, that seems like a distinct type of changing. So I’m not sure the fact of recollection as our means of tracking what we call “change” means “there is no change” or that “change is an illusion.”

Heraclitus’ point is universal, logical conclusion about things, not just a description of what is happening (clearly, because he describes the impossibility of stepping into a river).

But really, whether the contents of your consciousness are an illusion or they are direct perceptions of the real world, to distinguish this from that, to identify any one unit (like “a momentary perception”), is to conjure up a thing, which, according to Heraclitus, is to refer to that which rests from change.

If change is an illusion, than illusion is an illusion too. You have made the phenomena of change distinct from the phenomena of illusion. In learning about change, and then learning about illusion, you become the change, the arbiter what has moved from seeming change to actual illusion.

What things exist to allow one to distinguish realities like “a momentary perception”,or “a snapshot” from “the illusion of change”? Anything? If so, Heraclitus says what exists rests from change.

Admittedly Heraclitus does assume that change is already happening. If you don’t agree with that, then his notion of thinghood will remain unsatisfying, or, I will be unable to change your mind.

ADDED: Oddly, I don’t think we see the world too differently on this point - we are getting at a similar…thing. I would say that change is what makes things elusive. Because of this, people say “change is an illusion”. But I think this misstates a more clear notion of the difference between thinghood versus the existence of individual things.

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Perception is never a thing. A thing is a word. Unless a thing has the matching object in reality, it is an empty word.

I proved there is no change. If change is illusion, then saying that momentary perception rests from change collapses.

55

It means the same thing. Your understanding of reality is limited by your perception. You cannot go beyond that. If you do, then you would be in the world of Thing-in-itself.

It is the result of our rational analysis on the perception and the world itself.

Again, all we have is our reasoning and rational analysis on our own perception and the world, without which we wouldn’t be able to make any judgement or reflection on change, rest or existence.

Rest from change could mean our thoughts. We can pick out an image from the millions of images we perceived on the world, and freeze it in our mind to contemplate over what it was. H. may have expressed it as “rest”.

56

There is what I take to be a fundamental question that unless I missed it has not been addressed, that is, the relation between logos and what we say and think.

Fragment 50:

It is wise to hearken, not to me, but to my Word, and to confess that all things are one.

Some translations have the word (or logos) rather than my word.

Fragment 92:

So we must follow the common, yet though my Word is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

What is the connection between hearkening to him and hearkening to his (or the) logos?

What does it mean that his word is common? That wisdom is the common?

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This was the dawn of philosophy. The first moments of distinguishing “truth” about the world, from “truth versus lies” which both hover among opinions. Truth about the world, words that could be proven in experiment, was magic until the Greeks. I think Heraclitus’ references to the Logos are him saying, don’t take my word for it, because these things are spoken to me by the fabric of nature.

So when he also says “we must follow the common”, he is saying trust the science, don’t trust your untested and often superstitious and erroneous opinions. Follow only what none can deny.

So to put these together:

  1. All is one. And that one is things changing things that are changing. An exchange. One fire. Fire for all things. One.

  2. This is wisdom. This is truth. This is eternal word. There is a Logos with the One which is Burning things.

  3. It is there for all to see for themselves. Common.

So he has contradicted himself (but where the way up and the way down are the same, I don’t think that bothers him at all).

He is comfortable with the tension and paradox that is human minds seeking to understand the world.

He says all is One;

And that this One is many things changing constantly;

And he has thereby depicted a natural world where nothing can be said of things that doesn’t disappear and become unsaid (“in the same river we both step and do not step”), that as soon as you identify “up” you find it is “down”, so words are falsified by the things they name changing to other things for other names;

And yet, this is wisdom, and is itself, as revealed through Heraclitus’ words, a Logos eternal and unchanging in nature. (We don’t read Heraclitus to understand and believe the authority of Heraclitus. We read Heraclitus to look at things like he looks at things, and thereby discern the Logos for ourselves, a Logos which seems unspeakable, about things that are in constant flux.)

“The way of writing is both crooked and straight.”

Maybe. He didn’t write enough about the Logos.

I do think Heraclitus was a bit of a one-trick pony, but that trick happens to be maybe one of 15 or 20 philosophic ideas that seem like eternal wisdom to me.

It rests from change. Describes each encounter, and each instance of an “each”, a thing.

58

I think I’m saying that Heraclitus is saying: the thing is, its motionless apprehension contained in a word that is spoken via motion and change.

A “barley-drink”. That’s a word. The matching object in reality that gives rise to this word (and not the word “ice cream sandwich”) is the stirring motion of barley, wine, cheese and oil. But forget all of those images, because the point is, if you pick out one thing, to name it or drink it, that one thing “stands still as one thing only while stirring in existence”.

It’s a simple point, that I don’t think can be deconstructed without contructing still things that stand still only while stirring.

A thing is a word. If so, than words like “thing” stand still only while stirring and bouncing off the other words in the sentence.

59

What does it mean to rest from change? I may have mentioned that the common translation is either rests in change or rests by change. Rests from change might be taken to mean free from change, that is, statis, what does not change.

Reading the fragments raises several questions.

By listening to the Logos do we discern the logic or intelligibility of nature or the world? Are the paradoxes intelligible? Or is nature irresolvably paradoxical? Or is the problem the limits of our understanding?

What does the common mean? Heraclitus’ sayings, after all, are not what is commonly said.

Fragment 89:

The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.

A multiplicity of views is common. Is he claiming that he is awake and others are asleep? Is subjectivity a failure to recognize the common? Is the common what is objective?

60

River is banks and water shaping each other. Neither alone is river. Together they rest in change.

And you can’t step into the same river twice because each stepping changes both you and the river.

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