The Dilemma (1)

Now 25 centuries ago, the Greeks, with the birth of philosophy, faced two fundamental questions. These questions revolved around the nature of reality and of the human being. We say these are fundamental questions because, depending on the answer we give to them, it will condition every other form of knowledge and, with it, also our own existence.

At that time, at the farthest western end of the Greek world, an exceptional philosopher appears: Parmenides. He answers the fundamental questions in the following way:

If we want to understand the nature of reality and of the human being, we must understand their BEING. If we want to know why things function as things, why they do what they do, we must understand their BEING. That BEING, which inhabits a transcendent reality, the world of ideas or spirits, is eternal and immutable, it does not change.

For Parmenides, change was merely an illusion of the senses.

At that same moment, at the other end of the Greek world, another equally exceptional philosopher appears. This is Heraclitus. And his answers to the same question diverge completely from Parmenides' approach. Heraclitus claims that:

Everything is becoming, the world is in a process of permanent transformation. BEING is a mere illusion, it is just a fleeting moment of a constant process of becoming. The only thing that remains is change.

Heraclitus linked change, becoming, with notions of fire and the logos, the word.

Just under a century later, in the center of the Greek world, a third great philosopher arises, Socrates, who unlike the previous ones decides to found a philosophy on human life, on living well. To begin such a task he realizes he has two different paths he can take, two paths that are antagonistic: The path of Parmenides and his BEING, or that of Heraclitus and change. And although we know he admired Heraclitus, he claims he does not come to understand his philosophy, and opts for the path of Parmenides. It will be a disciple of his, Plato, and a disciple of this one, Aristotle, who will shape what we know today as the Metaphysical Paradigm which, upon converging later with Christianity, will have a decisive influence on Western culture over the last 25 centuries, and which takes as its basis the ideas of BEING and its immutability, from Parmenides himself.

The basic postulates of this form of thought in which we live are:

• If we want to know what reality is like, what things are like, we must understand their BEING. If we want to know what we are like, we must understand our BEING.
• That BEING, while it is in us, inhabits a transcendent reality, different from the reality shown to us by our senses. It is the world of ideas, of spirits, another world. That BEING is eternal, fixed, and immutable, it does not change.
• To access BEING, to grasp the BEING of something, is to access the truth.
• And the truth is one, unique, and anything that contradicts it, by definition, is false. And as it is only one, each question has one and only one true answer.
• That other world, while we cannot capture it with the senses, we humans can access it through reason. And that is why what defines us as human beings is that we are rational beings.

It does not take much shrewdness to intuit what kind of inter and intrapersonal relationships can be generated from this type of postulates: Impossibility of change, existence of a single truth about each thing (which tends to be one's own), the human being is essentially rational, which implicitly disdains other domains such as emotions and the body, etc.

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But let's not get into the ethical implications of the paradigm now, which I will touch on in future articles, since what now occupies us are its implications on change in our world.

Today, our common sense, our way of looking at and understanding the world is totally impregnated with this form of thought and, of course, conditions our actions and thereby determines the results we see ourselves capable of achieving. We use the notion of BEING to explain what happens. BEING we use