Introduction to special issue: ‘the ordinariness of translinguistics’

Abstract

What did the legendary Heraclitus actually mean when he claimed, ‘We step and we do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not’? Heraclitus was, of course, known as ‘The Riddler’, filling and filthening his words with multiple tiers of meaning and complexities that were to be solved like riddles or puzzles. According to Barnes (1982), Heraclitus was a ‘material monist’, who believed that everything was in flux, in the sense that ‘everything was always flowing in some respects’ (p. 69; emphasis in original). Simply, all is in flux, and nothing stays the same. A rendition of Heraclitus via Cleanthes is known as one of the most reliable sources passed down from Heraclitus: ‘On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow’ (Graham, 2015). If Cleanthes’s quotation is to be recognised as authoritative, the main philosophical conclusion seems to us that ‘the river stays the same’while ‘the water does not’. To us, the correlation between ‘same rivers’ and ‘other waters’makes good sense: we can say an object – ‘a river’ –may ‘change’, but it may also remain what it is by only changing what it comprises – ‘other waters’. Put differently, ‘other waters’ might be ‘the same’ in a certain way, because if they were entirely different, there would be no ‘river’ at all (Graham, 2015). We, as human beings, of course, may rationally distinguish between the features that remain the same and those that change. These two features, nonetheless, should be destined together, because we argue in this special issue that ‘the same thing changes.’ As Graham (2015) reads Heraclitus through Cleanthes,