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[ 12 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
saying is disputed. Probably he meant that because all material objects are
always changing none of them is the same for more than an instant, hence none lasts
for more than an instant. This is how Plato interpreted him. Cratylus, who became a
follower of Heraclitus, is said by Plato and Aristotle to have carried Heraclitus’s
intriguing idea one step further, maintaining that since everything is constantly
changing, not only does nothing persist but it is not even possible to speak truly. To
dramatize this point, Cratylus pronounced, rather colorfully, that you cannot step
into the “same” river even once.
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Whatever Heraclitus’s actual view,
he was the first thinker whose writings
have survived who was concerned with explaining the conditions that would
have to obtain for persons, or anything else, to persist. The introduction of this
issue was the origin in Western thought of the philosophical problem of the
identity over time of objects that change—that is, of how something that
changes can nevertheless remain the same. Heraclitus’s view was that nothing
that changes can remain the same. Whether or not this view is true, it is not
practical.
Once the issue of explaining persistence through change was introduced, it
immediately struck a cord in Greek intellectual and artistic culture. By the
beginning of the fifth century b.c.e., many Greek thinkers, probably including
Epicharmus, believed that since everything is in constant flux, humans too are in
constant flux. Whether a thing in flux could nevertheless continue to remain the same
is, of course, a separate question.
In Plato’s
Symposium, which is thought to be one of his earlier dialogues,
Diotima explains to Socrates, rather matter-of-factly:
[Overtime,] each living creature is said to be alive and to be the same individual—as
for example someone is said to be the same person from when he is a child until he
comes to be an old man. And yet, if he’s called the same, that’s despite the fact that he’s
never made up from the same things, but is always being renewed, and losing what he
had before, whether it’s hair, or flesh, or bones, or blood, in fact the whole body. And
don’t suppose that this is just true in the case of the body; in the case of the soul, too, its
traits, habits, opinions, desires, pleasures, pains, fears—none of these things is ever the
same in any individual, but some are coming into existence, others passing away.
A few lines later, Diotima remarks that unlike in the case of divine things, everything
mortal is preserved not by “being absolutely the same” but by replacement of
something similar: “what is departing and decaying with age leaves behind in us
something else new, of the same sort that it was.”
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