Innovation and tradition a Heraclitean and Parmenidean dilemma

One of the main problems in ancient Grece was a metaphysical problem between two philosophers: Heraclitus and Parmenides. That issue lasted around 300 years without any solution until Plato and Aristotle helped humanity solved it. 

Heraclitus proposes that the origin of everything is fire because it can transform whatever get in touch with it. So if the fire is the principle that makes things be, then everything is transformed by it. Everything changes. He focused on the flux of things, rather than its stability. The flux of things is independent of their stability, just like the river. Life and death are a continuum, it revolves around the unity of things despite their change. There is cyclical destruction to balance nature. 

Parmenides was against Heraclitus’s philosophy stating that there is no change in things, that the being is always and will always be one. It doesn’t change. There is no change when things are, no matter what happens they are still the same. 

This dilemma can be interpreted nowadays as the technology and tradition problem. Where technology is constantly changing and moving forward but with each invention and new discovery tradition seems to be shattered by it, for example: in medicine, technology has it’s great improvements when it comes to health, but when it comes to deciding simple facts such as life-and-death we still have questions we need to answer and tradition still stands in time.

Tradition is something we can rely on, it was has been working for the past years and we hope it still goes this way. It is a way that crystallizes the past so it can help us move forward with the certainty of the great men and women who have done it alright.