PARMENIDES AND HERACLITUS

A new generation of philosophers during these years agreed on a certain diagnostic for Europe’s
problems, one connected to the “crisis” brought about by science. Many thinkers would side with
Husserl’s phenomenology as a proposed solution. Not Heidegger. He distinguished himself from his
teacher by offering a different interpretation of Einstein’s and Bergson’s contributions. In the winter
semester 1942–1943 in Freiburg, Heidegger gave a couple of lectures on Parmenides of Elea and
Heraclitus in which he referred explicitly to Bergson and implicitly to Einstein. The comparison was
not entirely original, though it would prove increasingly fruitful. The philosopher of science Karl
Popper, among others, compared Einstein to Parmenides. Heraclitus, in contrast, was seen as
defending the view that reality was always ever changing. Russell, Reichenbach, and others
compared Bergson to Heraclitus.29

How did Einstein’s views compare to those of Parmenides? In the surviving lines of the ancient poem
On Nature, Parmenides described the universe, in a section titled “The Way to Truth,” as basically
static and unchanging. Einstein and the mathematician Hermann Minkowski were often seen as
offering a similar description and conceiving the universe as a block. “If all motional phenomena are
looked at from this point of view,” explained a writer on relativity, “they become timeless
phenomena in four-dimensional space. The whole history of a physical system is laid out as a
changeless whole.”30