"What is the world?" she asked.”I replied,"Heraclitus said,"We can't step into the same river twice.”Confucius stood on the riverbank and sighed,""The world flows day and night like this river.”They all thought of the world as a river that would flow forever. However, this metaphor could only explain that the world was ever-changing. It did not answer the question of what the world was. It was difficult to explain what the world was.
Everything in the world was endless and unpredictable. Was there something that remained unchanged behind this ever-changing world? There were all kinds of things in the world, all in different forms. Was there a unified thing behind all these phenomena? Asking what the world was, in fact, was to find the unchanging in this change, the unity in this variety. The philosophers called this unchanging and unified thing " entity "," noumenon "," root "," essence ", and so on.
If everything was changing, then what was changing? It seemed that there should always be a bearer. Having a bearer was like a play without actors. It was unbelievable.
For example, I went from a baby to a child, a teenager, a youth, a middle-aged man, and finally an old man. If you ask who is changing, I can tell you that I am changing. No matter what age I become, I will still be myself. I will always remain as an independent life form with continuity. By the same logic, no matter how the world changed, there should be an unchanging core that made it still a world.
In the early days, philosophers often looked for the " noumenon " of the world from one or several common physical forms. The physical forms that were regarded as " noumenon " were water, fire, air, earth, and so on. They believed that all things in the world were either individually or mixed together. Later, the ancient Greek philosophers Leucippus and Deimos proposed a far-reaching view: The unity of all things did not lie in their form, but in their structure. They were all composed of the same inseparable fundamental particles of matter, which were called atoms. Physics had supported this view for a long time, but the development of modern physics had raised a series of questions about the existence and role of elementary particles.
Other philosophers believed that since all material things were changeable, the "noumenon" that maintained the continuity and unity of the world could not be a material thing, but something spiritual. They called this thing " idea "," absolute spirit ", etc. However, the most accurate name for it was " God ". It was as if they had already understood the world. No matter how the plot changed, it was all directed by God according to an unchanging script. This view was supported by religion.
For a long time, philosophy was entangled in the debate between these two views. However, in reality, the two views had different starting points. No one could convince the other, and there would never be a result from the debate. It is worth noting that their inconclusive debate has caused other philosophers to think and doubt the problem they are arguing about.
3. Could he ask the question," What is the world?"
What did it mean to ask what something was? In most cases, this was a classification. For example, if you ask what a table is, the answer is that it is a kind of furniture. If you ask what the earth is, the answer is that it is a planet. Here," furniture " was a higher class than " table," and " planet " was a higher class than " Earth." However, the word 'world' included everything, and there was nothing outside the word 'world'. In that case, if we asked what the world was, what higher category could we put the word' world 'into? This was one of the reasons why he shouldn't ask questions like " what is the world?"
Was there something that was changing? Did movement mean that something was moving? Not necessarily. For example, in energy conversion, we can only obtain heat energy, kinetic energy, potential energy, and other specific forms of energy. There is no abstract energy that does not belong to any form that changes there. "It's thunder." Was there really a "sky" that was thundering? No, what actually existed was the phenomenon of thunder itself. Thus, we should understand the world according to its appearance. We should not look for the "noumenon" behind the change of all things. This kind of search is not only futile, but also unnecessary. This was another reason to object to the question of " what is the world?"
In today's era, this opposition to the question of noumenon had developed into a powerful trend. A large number of philosophers, mainly active in English-speaking countries, even declared that the question of noumenon was just a false question caused by the logical fault of language, which could be eliminated by treating the language error. For example, language has a structure of a subject and a verb. This structure makes people mistakenly believe that there must be a subject if there is a verb, and that the subject must be an existing entity. However, this was not the case. This was how the idea of finding an unchanging bearer for change came about.
However, no matter how the logical problems of language were eliminated, the inquiry into the secret "noumenon" of the world still seemed to be an "incurable disease" of the human spirit. However, those modern philosophers (such as Heidegger) who suffered from this "disease" no longer gave an arbitrary answer to the question of what the world was. They tended to believe that understanding the "noumenon" could not be done by logical thinking, but by spiritual experience, and it was difficult to express it in words. If he was reluctant, perhaps he could use the language of the poem to hint at it. In fact, the "noumenon" in their minds was very close to the "Tao" that the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu had said, and it was also very close to the "Logos" implied by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus in obscure language. An unspeakable thing could not be the object of study. Therefore, in the eyes of these philosophers, philosophy was not a field of knowledge, but an inner spiritual life that only belonged to each individual.”
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