Socrates: Welcome, traveler.
Traveler: It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Socrates. I’ve been a fan of yours from a distance, but what I’ve heard about you makes me feel connected. I like the way you discuss topics.
Socrates: I simply talk and humbly ask.
Traveler: Nevertheless, you seem to get to the heart of topics.
Socrates: Maybe it’s the years of practice that guide me so. I’ve found that many people have views that they can’t defend when I question them. But I suppose that I, too, could just as easily be said to hold views that are indefensible under scrutiny.
Traveler: I wish you could come to Ephesus. We haven’t had a good philosopher there since Heraclitus went the way of all waters.
Socrates: Ah! Heraclitus. Waters? Oh! “You can’t put your foot in the same river twice.” But the way of all waters? What is the way of all waters?
Traveler: Cycling. One thing then another and back to the one thing before becoming another, maybe taking a different shape while being the same in some way.
Socrates: It does seem to occur. Water the liquid becomes water the solid and back to the liquid. Liquid to solid, but in between? I think the “in between” is worth discussing. Do things just become their opposite? Do ideas just become their antitheses? Isn’t there usually an “in between.” Would it be more appropriate to say that all change occurs through an “in between state”?
Traveler: So, between solid ice and liquid water there is an “in between.” Is it an ether that we cannot see, but know it must be there because all changes occur in some “in between.” The water changes by disappearing only to return in its previous forms. Isn’t that the way of the world? Cycling through an “in between”?
Socrates: It seems so, but it’s not always evident. Does a tree recycle in a new tree?
Traveler: Good question. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s a different tree, isn’t it? The first tree makes a seed from which the second tree sprouts. What cycles except the process of trees growing, making seeds, dying, and being replaced by a new tree?
Socrates: Interesting thought and a great way to respond to my question not with an answer but with another question. I’m beginning to like you, Traveler. You have the stuff it takes to become a philosopher—or a politician.
Traveler: But you set the stage for my questioning. You made me think of a question I hadn’t thought of before. And now I’m wondering if water is the same water as it turns from flow to rest and back to flow, from stable ice to unstable liquid. Does water plant a seed I do not see? Is it the ether-water that changes?
Socrates: A difficult question to answer, for sure. But it’s like so many other questions we have. Maybe questioning is really all we have. We get answers that make us think of new questions. In that sense, all questioning is cyclic, at least in the process. And for awhile we see some apparently solid answers. Really solid, so solid, in fact, that they control how we see everything else. Political answers are like that. Psychological answers, too. I suppose how we see the physical world is also solid for awhile, then liquid, and then solid again. The times between are transitions, and they can’t be seen by those who undergo the mental transitioning, especially when it is a slow transition.
Traveler: You mean like what constitutes a man or a woman? Or what constitutes morality?
Socrates: I mean almost every solid answer that a culture holds dear and solid and that is subjected to questioning as one generation asks, “Why is this so?” Today, for example, I hold that things move because they contain movement that is realized in the moving. Who knows how I will explain moving tomorrow?
Traveler: But aren’t these transitions in understanding or in belief merely extraneous to how the world actually works? Does it matter how we picture that which we believe to be solid today if it is going to undergo a change? Isn’t the process of changing perspectives more important fundamentally than the actual changes, especially in or knowledge that things become their opposites and then change back to what they were? Ice to liquid to ice, for example.
Socrates: Good questions? And they engender in me new questions. Are there solids that never transition into liquids via the unknown substance we’ve been calling “ether”? Is there anything we can grasp hold of in one generation that the succeeding generation can also hold? Is nothing because of and through cycling permanent?
Traveler: You mean not substance but the process? Is there permanent ice? Or permanent liquid? Or even permanent “ether”?
Socrates: We know the processes continue like the tree to seed to new tree. And I can assume that aging is also a continued process. My dad had bad knees. Ended up he couldn’t walk to pick his own grapes but had to rely on his children and grandchildren. Now I have bad knees. Maybe I was just lucky to have chosen the profession of philosopher. I can just sit and talk until I can talk no longer. I might be going into a transition of body as well as a transition of mind. And the transition is subtle. It is occurring while I do not notice it. And then suddenly I’m an old guy with bad knees and the youthful spring is gone from my step, replaced by a shuffle.
Traveler: And your mind?
Socrates: I need to think a moment. Have I undergone any transitions in thinking?…I believe I have when I look back. Have I gone full cycle in thought? Have I gone from one ostensibly solid perspective to another through subtle transitions? Was I unaware of my transitions but only aware of all those temporary, but seemingly solid, derived thoughts that I thought were permanent?
Traveler: I think we are always in some kind of Heraclitean river, standing only briefly on the bank in our minds while actually always moving in the ever-changing stream. Remember, I’m from Ephesus, so to me even the bank itself is always different because we erode it as we flow through the channels of our lives. Do we frequently step onto opposite banks as we move, first believing one side to offer stability and then the other? If we are always in the flow, always part of some unknown transitioning, then aren’t all our transitions only temporarily interrupted by a seeming stillness?
Socrates: Anyone who has observed a stream knows that at some point in its flow, some of its waters seem to flow upstream or even remain still along its banks. I would ask whether this seeming stillness is just a figment of imagination. Is the water that seems to stop flowing actually flowing underneath and the stillness is just stillness by comparison with the main flow? That which is on the surface is easy to see. That which lies below remains hidden, but it is the constant.
Traveler: Indeed. The quiet water is probably not as still as we think, but since it is all water both on the surface and underneath, and since it is transparent, the flow that might occur is invisible to us unless we launch some little float like a stick or some marker like the dye we use for our clothes. We need the movement with respect to the bank to know the movement exists. We can observe the water’s motion not by the transparent water, but by some visible substance in the flow or apparent still water. Even slow and imperceptible movement that is invisible to the casual eye becomes visible with close observation.
Socrates: Observation. Now there’s a clever thought, Traveler. But how do we observe that which occurs very slowly in the mind if we can’t even observe the gradual aging of our knees?
Traveler: For most transitions, we can’t, I think. We need some noticeable change, maybe an abrupt and distinct alteration, some radically new way of seeing, some marker that stands out like the stick in the water. Take philosophy, for example. For a long while a culture might accept a particular way of seeing Nature and life, but some thinker comes along and sets in motion a self-perpetuating thought that seeps into the common mind, or rather that makes diverse minds think in common.
Socrates: I know what you mean. Abrupt changes can make the transition visible. Greece as a democracy differs from Greece the land of tribal chieftains. Greece under the dictators differs from Greece the democracy.
Traveler: So true. Even when we know we are changing, we cannot fathom all the changes and all the end products, all the eventual solids that are just seeming solids hiding some underlying flow. I wonder whether or not people will see the world differently hundreds to thousands of years from now. How will they define human? How will they define Nature? Surely, they will think in some ways the same way we think and in others different.
Socrates: So, Traveler, are there any solid solids? Any end states that aren’t themselves mere transitions?
Traveler: What of the gods? Aren’t they the solids we look for? Don’t they continue, always in the background, always the Constant?
Socrates: So you mean that there is some underlying stable state? Something that is unchanging?
Traveler: But it can’t rest in humans or their culture, because we see these always change if not to something different then back to something that was.
Socrates: So, each of us is in constant transition even when we don’t recognize the transition?
Traveler: Certainly every culture is in transition, even those that lie in the control of dictators. The change is inevitable because every dictator is mortal. The changing is Heraclitean, it’s ineluctable, though I realize empires can last centuries. Look at the Babylonians, for example, or the Egyptians. I’m sure there will be more such empires in the coming centuries. But all empires transition as they incorporate more peoples from other lands, peoples with different perspectives, habits, cultures. And even languages change as one population adopts the accents, the root words, and the idioms of another.
Socrates: And what transitions do you recognize in yourself, Traveler, as I recognize the transition of good knees to bad knees in myself—but only in retrospect.
Traveler: I guess that’s the key. Retrospect. We see ourselves not as we are but as we were, not as we are becoming but as we either plan to be or happen to develop. We are always in a state of in between, always in the ether, or rather always a kind of ether.
Socrates: I would not be Socrates if I did not end this with a question. Do you, Traveler, see the ether of transition in which you now exist in spite of the “solids” that you hold to be your permanent state? Remember that you will probably not know your knees are going bad until they have become bad.
Traveler: It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Socrates. I’ve been a fan of yours from a distance, but what I’ve heard about you makes me feel connected. I like the way you discuss topics.
Socrates: I simply talk and humbly ask.
Traveler: Nevertheless, you seem to get to the heart of topics.
Socrates: Maybe it’s the years of practice that guide me so. I’ve found that many people have views that they can’t defend when I question them. But I suppose that I, too, could just as easily be said to hold views that are indefensible under scrutiny.
Traveler: I wish you could come to Ephesus. We haven’t had a good philosopher there since Heraclitus went the way of all waters.
Socrates: Ah! Heraclitus. Waters? Oh! “You can’t put your foot in the same river twice.” But the way of all waters? What is the way of all waters?
Traveler: Cycling. One thing then another and back to the one thing before becoming another, maybe taking a different shape while being the same in some way.
Socrates: It does seem to occur. Water the liquid becomes water the solid and back to the liquid. Liquid to solid, but in between? I think the “in between” is worth discussing. Do things just become their opposite? Do ideas just become their antitheses? Isn’t there usually an “in between.” Would it be more appropriate to say that all change occurs through an “in between state”?
Traveler: So, between solid ice and liquid water there is an “in between.” Is it an ether that we cannot see, but know it must be there because all changes occur in some “in between.” The water changes by disappearing only to return in its previous forms. Isn’t that the way of the world? Cycling through an “in between”?
Socrates: It seems so, but it’s not always evident. Does a tree recycle in a new tree?
Traveler: Good question. I hadn’t thought of that. It’s a different tree, isn’t it? The first tree makes a seed from which the second tree sprouts. What cycles except the process of trees growing, making seeds, dying, and being replaced by a new tree?
Socrates: Interesting thought and a great way to respond to my question not with an answer but with another question. I’m beginning to like you, Traveler. You have the stuff it takes to become a philosopher—or a politician.
Traveler: But you set the stage for my questioning. You made me think of a question I hadn’t thought of before. And now I’m wondering if water is the same water as it turns from flow to rest and back to flow, from stable ice to unstable liquid. Does water plant a seed I do not see? Is it the ether-water that changes?
Socrates: A difficult question to answer, for sure. But it’s like so many other questions we have. Maybe questioning is really all we have. We get answers that make us think of new questions. In that sense, all questioning is cyclic, at least in the process. And for awhile we see some apparently solid answers. Really solid, so solid, in fact, that they control how we see everything else. Political answers are like that. Psychological answers, too. I suppose how we see the physical world is also solid for awhile, then liquid, and then solid again. The times between are transitions, and they can’t be seen by those who undergo the mental transitioning, especially when it is a slow transition.
Traveler: You mean like what constitutes a man or a woman? Or what constitutes morality?
Socrates: I mean almost every solid answer that a culture holds dear and solid and that is subjected to questioning as one generation asks, “Why is this so?” Today, for example, I hold that things move because they contain movement that is realized in the moving. Who knows how I will explain moving tomorrow?
Traveler: But aren’t these transitions in understanding or in belief merely extraneous to how the world actually works? Does it matter how we picture that which we believe to be solid today if it is going to undergo a change? Isn’t the process of changing perspectives more important fundamentally than the actual changes, especially in or knowledge that things become their opposites and then change back to what they were? Ice to liquid to ice, for example.
Socrates: Good questions? And they engender in me new questions. Are there solids that never transition into liquids via the unknown substance we’ve been calling “ether”? Is there anything we can grasp hold of in one generation that the succeeding generation can also hold? Is nothing because of and through cycling permanent?
Traveler: You mean not substance but the process? Is there permanent ice? Or permanent liquid? Or even permanent “ether”?
Socrates: We know the processes continue like the tree to seed to new tree. And I can assume that aging is also a continued process. My dad had bad knees. Ended up he couldn’t walk to pick his own grapes but had to rely on his children and grandchildren. Now I have bad knees. Maybe I was just lucky to have chosen the profession of philosopher. I can just sit and talk until I can talk no longer. I might be going into a transition of body as well as a transition of mind. And the transition is subtle. It is occurring while I do not notice it. And then suddenly I’m an old guy with bad knees and the youthful spring is gone from my step, replaced by a shuffle.
Traveler: And your mind?
Socrates: I need to think a moment. Have I undergone any transitions in thinking?…I believe I have when I look back. Have I gone full cycle in thought? Have I gone from one ostensibly solid perspective to another through subtle transitions? Was I unaware of my transitions but only aware of all those temporary, but seemingly solid, derived thoughts that I thought were permanent?
Traveler: I think we are always in some kind of Heraclitean river, standing only briefly on the bank in our minds while actually always moving in the ever-changing stream. Remember, I’m from Ephesus, so to me even the bank itself is always different because we erode it as we flow through the channels of our lives. Do we frequently step onto opposite banks as we move, first believing one side to offer stability and then the other? If we are always in the flow, always part of some unknown transitioning, then aren’t all our transitions only temporarily interrupted by a seeming stillness?
Socrates: Anyone who has observed a stream knows that at some point in its flow, some of its waters seem to flow upstream or even remain still along its banks. I would ask whether this seeming stillness is just a figment of imagination. Is the water that seems to stop flowing actually flowing underneath and the stillness is just stillness by comparison with the main flow? That which is on the surface is easy to see. That which lies below remains hidden, but it is the constant.
Traveler: Indeed. The quiet water is probably not as still as we think, but since it is all water both on the surface and underneath, and since it is transparent, the flow that might occur is invisible to us unless we launch some little float like a stick or some marker like the dye we use for our clothes. We need the movement with respect to the bank to know the movement exists. We can observe the water’s motion not by the transparent water, but by some visible substance in the flow or apparent still water. Even slow and imperceptible movement that is invisible to the casual eye becomes visible with close observation.
Socrates: Observation. Now there’s a clever thought, Traveler. But how do we observe that which occurs very slowly in the mind if we can’t even observe the gradual aging of our knees?
Traveler: For most transitions, we can’t, I think. We need some noticeable change, maybe an abrupt and distinct alteration, some radically new way of seeing, some marker that stands out like the stick in the water. Take philosophy, for example. For a long while a culture might accept a particular way of seeing Nature and life, but some thinker comes along and sets in motion a self-perpetuating thought that seeps into the common mind, or rather that makes diverse minds think in common.
Socrates: I know what you mean. Abrupt changes can make the transition visible. Greece as a democracy differs from Greece the land of tribal chieftains. Greece under the dictators differs from Greece the democracy.
Traveler: So true. Even when we know we are changing, we cannot fathom all the changes and all the end products, all the eventual solids that are just seeming solids hiding some underlying flow. I wonder whether or not people will see the world differently hundreds to thousands of years from now. How will they define human? How will they define Nature? Surely, they will think in some ways the same way we think and in others different.
Socrates: So, Traveler, are there any solid solids? Any end states that aren’t themselves mere transitions?
Traveler: What of the gods? Aren’t they the solids we look for? Don’t they continue, always in the background, always the Constant?
Socrates: So you mean that there is some underlying stable state? Something that is unchanging?
Traveler: But it can’t rest in humans or their culture, because we see these always change if not to something different then back to something that was.
Socrates: So, each of us is in constant transition even when we don’t recognize the transition?
Traveler: Certainly every culture is in transition, even those that lie in the control of dictators. The change is inevitable because every dictator is mortal. The changing is Heraclitean, it’s ineluctable, though I realize empires can last centuries. Look at the Babylonians, for example, or the Egyptians. I’m sure there will be more such empires in the coming centuries. But all empires transition as they incorporate more peoples from other lands, peoples with different perspectives, habits, cultures. And even languages change as one population adopts the accents, the root words, and the idioms of another.
Socrates: And what transitions do you recognize in yourself, Traveler, as I recognize the transition of good knees to bad knees in myself—but only in retrospect.
Traveler: I guess that’s the key. Retrospect. We see ourselves not as we are but as we were, not as we are becoming but as we either plan to be or happen to develop. We are always in a state of in between, always in the ether, or rather always a kind of ether.
Socrates: I would not be Socrates if I did not end this with a question. Do you, Traveler, see the ether of transition in which you now exist in spite of the “solids” that you hold to be your permanent state? Remember that you will probably not know your knees are going bad until they have become bad.
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