How Philosophy Became Possible: II. When Change Becomes a Problem

Once the world has become questionable, a difficulty quickly appears.

The world changes.

Things come into being and pass away. Plants grow. Animals move. Rivers flow. Seasons turn. Bodies age. Political orders rise and fall.

Change seems to be among the most obvious features of experience.

But now consider what it means to ask a question about the world.

To ask what something is seems to require that we can identify it as the same thing long enough to say something about it.

If everything is changing, what makes anything the same?

And if nothing remains the same, how can knowledge be possible?

This is where the Greek inquiry into the world begins to encounter a problem that is more fundamental than any particular cosmological theory.

Change itself has become a philosophical problem.

Heraclitus and the instability of things

Heraclitus of Ephesus is famous for the doctrine that everything flows.

The famous phrase “you cannot step into the same river twice” is not actually preserved in that form in Heraclitus's surviving fragments, but it captures something important about the problem his thought presents.

A river is a particularly revealing thing to consider.

It appears to be one thing.

We give it a name.

We identify it as the same river today, tomorrow and next year.

Yet the water is continually moving. What constitutes its identity cannot simply be the persistence of the material currently flowing through it.

The river is what it is partly through a pattern of relation: water flowing in a channel, continuously changing while retaining an organised form.

Change does not necessarily destroy identity.

It may be what constitutes it.

This is one of the profound possibilities opened by Heraclitus.

The world may not consist of stable things that occasionally undergo change. Perhaps what we call things are themselves patterns of organised change.

Heraclitus's fragments are notoriously difficult and aphoristic, but they repeatedly return to opposites, transformation, conflict and the logos. Things that appear opposed may belong to a deeper order.

Day and night.

Life and death.

Waking and sleeping.

Hot and cold.

The world is not orderly because change has been eliminated.

Its order may consist precisely in the relations through which opposites transform one another.

If so, stability is not the opposite of change.

Stability may be a form of change.

But then what is anything?

This possibility generates an immediate difficulty.

If everything is becoming something else, what gives us the right to say that anything is?

The question concerns the possibility of thought itself.

Suppose I say that something changes from A to B.

I seem to be presupposing that A and B are distinguishable.

There must be something that can be said to change.

But if the changing thing is never the same at two moments, what exactly is it?

Change appears to require identity.

Yet identity appears to require some resistance to change.

The problem begins to close upon itself.

And it is here that another Greek thinker, Parmenides of Elea, takes the question in a radically different direction.

Parmenides and the problem of becoming

Parmenides's poem presents a journey toward a truth that is sharply opposed to ordinary assumptions about change.

What is, is.

What is not, is not.

From this deceptively simple distinction comes a devastating problem.

How could something come into being from what is not?

If it comes from what is not, then something has emerged from nothing.

But if it comes from what already is, then it was already there.

Similarly, how could something cease to be?

If it becomes what is not, then we appear to be speaking of something becoming nothing.

Parmenides therefore presses the concept of becoming until ordinary experience begins to look conceptually unstable.

We see things coming into existence and disappearing.

But can we think such becoming without contradiction?

This is a different kind of philosophical move from the Milesian search for an underlying principle.

The question is no longer simply:

What is the world made of?

It becomes:

What must be true for any account of the world to be thinkable at all?

That is a remarkable transformation.

The investigation has turned back upon the conditions of explanation.

The pressure between experience and thought

Parmenides does not simply deny that human beings experience change. His poem distinguishes between the way things appear and the way reality must be understood according to the argument.

Whatever we make of his precise position, the conceptual pressure is extraordinary.

Experience seems to tell us one thing.

Argument seems to tell us another.

The world appears to contain multiplicity, movement, generation and destruction.

But if being cannot become non-being and non-being cannot become being, what room is left for any of these?

The problem is not solved by choosing one side.

If we simply trust experience, we risk failing to account for its conceptual conditions.

If we simply reject experience, we risk making our account incapable of explaining the world we actually encounter.

Greek philosophy has therefore reached a new kind of impasse.

The problem is no longer merely to find the right substance or principle.

The concepts themselves have begun to resist one another.

A new kind of constraint

This is an important development in the ecology of thought.

In the previous essay, we saw that the world could become questionable.

Now the act of questioning encounters constraint.

Some possibilities seem unable to survive scrutiny.

Perhaps change is possible.

Perhaps change is impossible.

Perhaps identity persists through change.

Perhaps identity and change are incompatible.

Each possibility generates consequences.

Each puts pressure on the others.

This is not yet formal logic in the later Aristotelian sense. But something resembling a new intellectual environment is emerging: an explanation must increasingly survive not only comparison with phenomena but also the consequences of the distinctions it employs.

A concept can undermine itself.

A claim can generate a contradiction.

A distinction can reveal that the problem was badly formulated.

This is a new kind of resistance.

The world resists explanation through experience.

Thought begins to resist itself through argument.

And that resistance will become enormously productive.

Two possibilities emerge

Heraclitus and Parmenides are often presented as opposites.

Heraclitus says everything changes.

Parmenides says change is impossible.

The historical reality is more complicated than these slogans suggest, but the contrast is philosophically illuminating.

For Heraclitus, the danger is that we mistake temporary stability for fundamental permanence.

For Parmenides, the danger is that we mistake apparent change for something that can actually be coherently thought.

One begins from the instability of experience.

The other begins from the requirements of intelligibility.

Neither position can simply eliminate the other.

And that is precisely why their confrontation matters.

A conceptual ecology becomes especially productive when two possibilities constrain one another without either immediately disappearing.

The resulting pressure can generate new possibilities that were not available when the alternatives were considered separately.

Later Greek thinkers will spend enormous intellectual energy attempting to respond to this problem.

Can there be change without coming from nothing?

Can there be multiplicity without abandoning unity?

Can something remain what it is while undergoing transformation?

Can permanence and change belong to different aspects of the same reality?

The question has changed again.

The emergence of becoming

There is something particularly significant about the word becoming.

It appears to describe a simple fact: something becomes something else.

But once we ask what becoming consists in, we discover that it sits at the intersection of several concepts.

Identity.

Difference.

Time.

Causation.

Possibility.

Being.

A change is not merely an event.

It is a relation between what something was, what it is, and what it may become.

This makes becoming a particularly fertile philosophical concept.

It connects the present to what is no longer the case and to what is not yet the case.

The Greeks have therefore encountered something that will recur throughout philosophy: a concept that becomes philosophically important not because it provides an immediate answer, but because it exposes relations among problems that had previously appeared separate.

What has changed?

At the beginning of our inquiry, the world became questionable.

Now something more subtle has happened.

The world is not simply being questioned from outside.

The concepts used to question it have themselves become unstable.

To ask what the world is requires us to ask what it means for something to be.

To ask how the world changes requires us to ask what remains identifiable through change.

To ask how something comes into being requires us to ask about being and non-being.

The inquiry has become reflexive.

The question is beginning to include the conditions under which the question itself can make sense.

This is a major step toward philosophy.

But it creates a new problem.

If change and permanence appear to constrain one another, perhaps we need another resource with which to think their relation.

One possibility is already beginning to emerge in Greek thought: number.

Number can remain the same while things change.

It can describe relations without being identical to the things related.

And for the Pythagoreans, number may become something far more ambitious than a tool for counting or measuring.

Perhaps the world is intelligible because its order is, in some sense, numerical.

The next question, then, is not merely what things are or how they change.

It is:

What if the structure of the world can be found in relations that are more stable than the things themselves?

That is where number begins to become a world.