“In fact, it is the easiest thing in the world to utter a verbal contradiction, though much harder to entertain a mental one. This is indeed an arresting fact of speech—that what logicians claim you cannot say, you can so easily utter.”
From volume X of the file · Book · 21st century
Themes: philosophy · reason & truth
More from Eva Brann
“For it is common experience that, as in matters of passion small differences can be most irritating, so in matters of thought the study of differences based on common intentions is most stimulating.”
“If we are longing for ontological grandeur and uncompromising plumbing of that one and only thought, Being, then Parmenides will seem the primordial deep thinker in his blazing induction into ‘the steadfast heart of persuasive truth’ (Diels, Parmenides, 1, 1. 29). But if we are gripped by the strife-locked unity of the physical cosmos and aroused by Heraclitus’s unflinching heedfulness to that one Speaker, the Logos, then he will appear as the aboriginal penetrating observer in his solitary burrowing into the designs of the Wise Thing.”
“It [the cosmos] is a realm constituted of oppositions, now stably locked together in a wrestler’s hold, now suddenly parted in a catastrophic transformation, as when fighters break apart and gain the distance to strike home. That is its genesis and its rule:
‘War is Father of all things, of all things King.’ (53)
Antagonisms are, once more, ultimate. Heraclitus can both see a world constituted of antitheses and enunciate it as orderly because the Logos not only drives everything apart into confronting terms that face each other in fixed measures, but it also, and even primarily, collects everything into a unity:
‘Out of everything one and out of one everything.’ (10)”