Popper's Heraclitus

Homer's understanding of nature was as if it were painted by artists who were antagonistic toward each other at times, with all different varying ideas about what nature ought to look like. Popper saw this as a fairer and more accurate understanding of history. Or perhaps the gods all represent the great men. Those exalted among us.

It’s a mystical epistemology that Popper finds issue with in Heraclitus. Even though Pythagoras would seem to know things, He was not learned. Maybe it's that we make a confusion and a jump when understanding, understanding. Feynman spoke about the difference between knowing the names of things and understanding something. This is different from the mystical sense of understanding. To understand is to know things through the lens of something mystical. You see how politics ought to be through your pre-ordained divine lens.

Popper believed that Heraclitus was more inclined to historicism because of the time he lived in. This is the same type of thing that Hume understood as a philosophy of ease and appeal. Where acceptance of a changing world and an attempt to understand the unknown does not come easy.

I’m not sure what the resolution in this type of thinking is. You can start to classify the opposition to change as thoughts which appeal to the passions. There’s an antagonism here that I find difficult to understand and resolve. On one hand you have the ideas which assert some mystical lens of interpretation. On the other you have a lens of denunciation for ideas resistant to change.

Popper puts forward that much of Heraclitus’ historicism made its way through history. That Hegel took a lot of favour from it. Both historicism, and its antagonist have stood the test of time. What I’m not quite sure of is how long the adversarial relationship exists. If its more like an evolutionary process, then one stands to wipe the other. But something else can always upset the balance. There are probably ideas outside this system, unknown to us that can wipe both or just one of the systems.

Take the 'mind virus' cliche as actually analogous to the idea of a viral transmission. Transmission is not secured de facto. You can reduce transmission enough so that reproduction is not possible. So how much of the anti-heracletian thinking is a strengthening of immune system of ideas. Where eventually, the ideas can't always reproduce. Seems to be an anti-historicist view of the transmission of ideas.