Heraclitus and becoming

Heraclitus lived in Ephesus approximately in the years 550 – 480 BC. He observed that everything flows: rivers flow, time flows, all existing things change and age; he explained, as an example, that it is not possible to bathe twice in the same river, since the second time the water, due to the current that makes it flow, is no longer the one in which you have bathed before. It would be easy to object that a river is always the same, always keeping the same geographical name, regardless of the flow of its waters; or we could tell him that his observation is too obvious, but, if we try to generalize his philosophy, that is, to rethink about all the things we have thought of so far, reconsidering them under the light of this continuous flow and change, we will realize that he actually has a lot to teach us. It is a philosophy that can cause us a sense of insecurity, uncertainty, things that do not last, disorder; but it is also a very interesting philosophy, because, at the same time, it expresses an invitation to dynamism, movement, life, in opposition to a stagnant existence; moreover, it has certainly a value for its effort to say something that reflects, as faithfully as possible, the facts of the world as they actually are in reality.
A radical consequence of Heraclitus’ way of thinking would be having to eliminate all names from the language and replace them with verbs: in fact, a chair is not continuously a chair, but it goes, even if very slowly, towards being a non-chair, that is worm-eaten wood, consumed, then dust and then who knows what else; for this reason we should not say “it is a chair”, but “it is becoming, it is transforming itself the way a chair gets transformed”; however, besides the fact that converting our entire language to follow this criterion would be impossible in practice, we must also bear in mind that, in our human experience, there is the perception of a certain permanence of the identity of objects along time; only a very fine analysis makes us notice that in reality every object changes without stopping. We can better understand this situation by thinking about what happens to the hands of a clock, or to the stars, the moon or the sun: at an immediate glance they look stable, steady, but to a just a little more accurate observation it is easy to prove that they are moving. The fact that the hands of a watch are in constant motion does not prevent us from having time to say what time it is; but what happens jokingly, if we try to say what time it is now, also indicating the seconds, can help us to understand the situation we are in: any of us may have tried sometimes to joke by saying or hearing that “it is ten, twelve minutes and fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen … seconds”. That is, if we want to say what time it is and specify the seconds, we don’t have enough time to do it because, the very moment we say it, the flowing of time belies too soon what we have just said, so that we feel forced to update it immediately, without being ever possible coming to a definitive conclusion as to what time it is, with the accuracy of seconds. This situation actually applies to all our statements; in most cases we can speak because we limit ourselves to an approximate meaning of what we are saying, the same way we can say what time it is if we limit ourselves to hour and minutes, ignoring the analytical precision of seconds. Since our most immediate human experience is made up of unitive associations, rather than disintegrating analyses, our language, which in first place serves us to live humanly, rather than to analyze nature scientifically, reflects our daily life needs; that’s why it peacefully contains many names, rather than just verbs indicating movement, because this is how our most immediate human experience of reality is made. But we have to be careful not to forget this approximation contained in our language when we want to express a more in-depth idea of what the world is: we must not forget that we make use of words, expressions, ideas, that were born to express reality in an approximate, not scientifically precise, way.