Thoughts on Heraclitus...

mistyfox812 said:Look, the people in the cave aren't staring at some "material" or "physical" world. They're looking at a fake version of reality. They're stuck watching inherited social fictions that stop them from seeing things for what they actually are. Those shadows on the cave wall? That's not the "physical world." That's just the spectacle—it's TV, gossip, politics, mindless chatter, grabbing coffee... just noise.

Post of the Week👍

mistyfox812 said:Sometimes when I’m just staring up at the clouds, I’ll see a shape and be like, "Whoa, look, a horse." Then, out of nowhere, my brain flips and goes, "Wait, no, that's a motorcycle!" Like, a total transformation.
Living things don't work like that. A horse doesn't just turn into a Harley.
A stallion and a mare have another horse (not a bike).

The actual "stuff" that makes up that horse might change over time, but it's still a horse. It keeps its form (eidos). Even if the "matter" of its offspring is different from the parent's—it's still a horse (and definitely not a motorcycle).

Total transformations happen in dreams, though: one second you've got a horse, the next it's a motorcycle. But in the real world? That just doesn't happen.

When we watch clouds, or during nightmares, or when someone's tripping on something, or even just in some crazy rambling from a lunatic, or when everything feels totally chaotic... we get a tiny glimpse of what total instability looks like: everything turning into everything else. You can't even distinguish between "this" and "that" when nothing stays solid and everything just melts into chaos.

For us to actually talk about anything—and since logos basically means speech/reasoning—there has to be something that allows a thing to actually *be* itself. Like, making sure a horse doesn't suddenly become a motorcycle in the next heartbeat.

We shouldn't think or talk like people who are fast asleep. (73.)

Logos is the opposite of pure chaos.

Other people will never understand what we do while we're awake, any more than they understand what they do while they're dreaming. (1)

It has to be... there’s this "formula" that supposedly makes it all possible. It’s called Logos.

Permanence? It’s nothing more than an illusion...

I don't have the bandwidth to dive deep into this fascinating thread; I just wanted to ask
why, in the following paragraph:

nobody and nothing said:So, Heraclitus would be at fault because Hegel misinterpreted him, which led to Marx misinterpreting Hegel, followed by Lenin misinterpreting Marx, and there you have it. All because of Heraclitus.

...talks about misinterpretation? For instance, Marx didn't criticize Hegel for being wrong, but rather for how he placed the dialectical
journey of the spirit within the sphere of the absolute in an idealistic manner—essentially suggesting
that one simply needs to wait for this spiritual journey
to unfold on its own, thereby undermining the necessity of human agency (praxis)
to bring it to fruition. Consequently, Marx flips Hegel on his head, stripping
his system of revealing the spirit as a divine consciousness from celestial realms and instead
redefines it within secular frameworks, viewing a communist society
as the final stage of this spirit's development—a stage that won't occur through mere
waiting, but exclusively through the uprising of the proletariat. This isn't a matter of a "misinterpretation" of
Hegel, but rather a fundamental disagreement with certain idealistic premises
within the Hegelian philosophical system, which Marx explicitly states in several places.
The same logic applies to the relationship between Heraclitus-Hegel and Marxist-Leninist ideology -> depending on one's own
interests, intuitions, and affinities, certain ideas are accepted while
others are rejected. Therefore, it seems to me that the claim itself is a misinterpretation: the idea that a misinterpretation is what is actually occurring.
Where a genuine case of misinterpretation comes to mind, for example, is in the way
Sartrean thought interprets Heidegger as a humanist, despite the latter's explicit warnings against such a reading.

Setting aside that specific point, regarding this chain of who misinterpreted whom,
why is there an underlying assumption that Heraclitus's thought was originally his own?
Who can truly say what influences he was under before he even
formulated these specific propositions?

Look, I’m totally on board here. It's not even about "misunderstandings"—it's more like these people just decided to get all "creative" with what they inherited. At the end of the day, the point is that you can't really blame the predecessors for whatever wild stuff the successors decide to cook up.