The Philosophy of Change by Dwayne Schulz

8/8/2019 The Philosophy of Change by Dwayne Schulz

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The Philosophy of Change

by Dwayne Schulz

Part 1. Things and Events

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once famously remarked It is not possible

to step twice in to the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.

What he meant was that all things are in constant flux; just as a river consists of a

flow-through of different waters, so everything else in the cosmos is in a state of

perpetual change, of birth, growth, decay and death. This was summed up by a

famous expression panta rhei attributed to Heraclitus meaning everything flows.

But other ancient Greeks like Zeno argued that change was impossible and thought

up some of the most devious logical paradoxes to prove it. In one Zeno asks us to

imagine an arrow in flight. He considers the fact that the period during which the

arrow is in flight consists of an infinite series of instants and argues thus: (1) At any

given instant the arrow occupies a single spaceand no other, and (2) during that

instant the arrow is stationary. How then, Zeno asks, if the arrow is stationary at

every instant during its trajectory can it be said to have moved? Zeno concluded

that motion and change were illusions masking a deeper unchanging reality below.

The paradoxical nature of change which so troubled Zeno can be illustrated with a

few more thought experiments. Consider the fact that every single molecule in the

human body, every atom in every cell, is replaced by different ones every few yearsor so. How can you be the same person if, like Heraclituss river, the stuff of which

you are made is constantly turning over and changing?

Or take Plutarchs mythical Ship of Theseus, the old planks of which are not only

replaced over the years but gradually re-assembled to form the original ship. Which

is the true ship - the old new one or the new old one?


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Part 2. Essence

Parmenides and Zenos notion that change was impossible was taken up byPlato in

his theory of Forms. He argued that the idea of change without a real thing simply

led to confusion. In his book Cratylus, Plato argues in support of Parmenides and

Zeno that below the world of apparent change is a world of timeless unchanging

essences which are templates for ordinary objects on earth, that for each actual

horse there exists somewhere a perfect horse Form of which real horses are but

imperfect imitations.

Plato has Socrates say:

How can that be a real thing which is never in the same state?

knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always

to abide and to exist, and if the transition is always going on there will always

be no knowledge and according to this view there will be no one to know and

nothing to be known.1

Everyday thought and language seem to support Platos notion that somehow an

unchanging essence must underpin or ground apparent change. We tend to speak

about ordinary objects being subjected to accidental variations or changes of form.

Objects have propertiesand events happen tothem. For example, in declarative

sentences like Johnis sick or My car was in a smash or Venus is in orbit, we

tend to think of the predicates being sick, being in a smash and being in orbit as

incidental properties or states that the objects (John, My car and Venus) are

subjected to. This manner of thinking lends itself to a model of change in which the

subject is static and change is inessential, occurring as an externalforce.

This object-property model was formalised by Aristotle who argued that all things

were a combination of matter and form, a theory called hylomorphism. In Aristotles

theory matter was a passive substance or patient which changed when acted upon

1Cratylus Paragraph 440 sections c-d.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratylus_(dialogue)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cratylus_(dialogue)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato


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by an external force or agent which gave it form. Ultimately all effects in Aristotles

schema could be traced back to some original First Cause or God he called the

Prima Mobileor Prime Mover.

The idea of substance or matter deriving its form from some external agent of

change was adopted by medieval theologians like Aquinas who used it in support of

the Church doctrine that the bodys soul derived from God. The substance-form

distinction also informed modern mechanical theories espoused by people like

Descartes and Newton who disagreed with Aristotles physics but retained the idea

that modes [properties] cannot be clearly conceived apart from the really distinct

substances of which they are the modes.2 For Descartes, all the properties of

nature could be reduced to the quantitative (mathematical and measurable)

movements of matter whose fundamental property was extension in space or res

extensa. Scientists like Newton and Boyle agreed with Descartes principle

interpreting it in atomistic terms (contra Descartes who subscribed to something like

an ether theory), arguing that nature was nothing but arrangements of impenetrable

corpuscles within the void of space.

The mechanistic idea left little or no place for real chance or novelty in the world.

Effects were totally determined by their causes and if you only had enough

information and processing power, you could predict with total precision all future

change in what they saw as a clockwork universe. Newtons contemporary the

French mathematician and astronomer Laplace summed up the mechanistic attitude

when he said,

[For] an intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set

nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed,

2Descartes, Principles of Philosophy LXI.


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nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present

before its eyes.3

Newton and Laplace believed in a clockwork universe

The first philosopher of modern times to revive Heraclituss idea ofpanta rheiand to

mount a systematic critique of the mechanists was the early 19th Century German

philosopher Hegel. Hegel too argued that Becoming or change was fundamental.

However, for him change as it manifested itself in nature and history revealed the

story of an inner essence he called the World Spirit or the Absolute gradually

unfolding itself through a process he called the dialectic (i.e. the clash of binary

opposites. in in war, politics and science) culminating in a state of perfect freedom

and unity with God.

In my opinion Hegels Absolute plays the same role as Substance in the philosophyof the mechanists, and his dialectic is just as deterministic, proceeding as it does

along a singular narrow path towards a pre-determined end. Hegels dialectic

constricts the scope of change choking the multiple and diverse alternatives that

history can take. I will return to this idea soon but the same criticism can be applied

to all theories of history and change which tell a story of uni-linear progress. For

3Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities.


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example 19th Century anthropologist Henry Morgan asserted that humankind

progressed through a series of stages from savagery through barbarism to reach

its apogee in civilization. Marx also adopted this view arguing that history

progressed from the primitive tribalism via class society and ultimately to

communism. Modern right-wing commentators like Francis Fukuyamas also adopt

this view when they say that free-market liberalism represents the end of history.

Such views pretend to a philosophy of change but at the end of the day preach

different versions of mechanism in which change proceeds towards some pre-figured

image in an isomorphic movement from same to same, where there really is nothing

new under the sun.

However, the idea that there is more to change than the expression of unchanging

essences, principles or substances, the idea that that the cosmos is animated by a

kind of change which is more unpredictable, diverse and creative has persisted

through the ages. To my mind the first modern thinker who really put this kind of

change at the centre of their philosophy was the French intellectual Henri Bergson.

Part 3. Bergson

At the end of the 19th Century, Bergson argued that the object-property model

misconstrues becoming (or what he called duree,i.e. duration) because it tries to

think the unstable by means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile.

But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no

form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the

continual changeof form: form is only a snapshot viewof a transition.

Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous

images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not

differ from each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and
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waning of a single meanimage, or as the deformation of this image in

different directions. And to this mean we really allude when we speak of the

essence of a thing, or of the thing itself.4

In other words, in speaking about an object and its forms we are abstracting out

idealized entities from a continuous stream of change, trying to cut out and arbitrarily

privilege one stage above the whole process. This procedure is equivalent to saying

to an 80 year old man that he is but a diminished representation of his true self as a

teenager. In reality Bergson would argue, the 18 year old and the 80 year old are

equally necessary and valid parts of a single and indivisible process.

Bergson therefore does more than just assert the internal or necessary nature of

change. What he does is to abolish objects and forms altogether arguing that both

are fictional entities invented by our intellect to fix or screen out the fact of perpetual

flux. Bergson argues that that we have a bad habit of distorting the truth of our own

inner experience of time, of treating it like space, as something that is homogenous,

measurable, and divisible.

In contrast to thinking about time in terms of space, Bergson urges us to think about

how our inner sense of time arises from experiencing the flow of heterogenous

qualities or intensities of feeling in what he calls a confusedor qualitative multiplicity.

Bergson gives the example of watching the graceful movements of a dancer, and

how our aesthetic experience gradually unfolds from one set of qualities to others.

Thus the perception of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of

mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present. A third

element comes in when rhythm and measure [allow] us to foresee to a still

greater extent the movements of the dancer. . Thus the increasing

intensities of aesthetic feeling are here resolved into as many different

4Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution


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feelings, each one of which, already heralded by its predecessor, becomes

perceptible in it and then completely eclipses it.

Series of heterogenous intensities ground our inner sense of time

Bergson is encouraging us to pay attention to how we actually experience change asa continuous stream of different qualitative states merging into each-other, as a flow

of heterogeneous but fused feelings which cannot be analyzed as a series of merely

quantitative or discrete changes. He is highlighting the fact that no situation is ever

truly repeated in consciousness, that every experience is qualitatively unique and

that this perpetual newness or creativity constitutes our sense of the passing of time.

In his book Creative Evolutionpublished in 1907, Bergson argued that our inner

experience of duration, of qualitative multiplicity, was not just a subjective viewpoint

but an objective fact about the behavior and evolution of life in general. He

postulated a universal tendency amongst living things, contrary to the second law of

thermodynamics, towards the production of novelty and diversity, a tendency he

dubbed the elan vitalor vital force or as he put it a ceaseless upspringing of

something new.

Despite great popularity in his early career, in the inter-war period, Bergsons views

were increasingly marginalised as merely poetic, mystical, feminine and out of

touch with hard science. Bergsons claim about the elan vital was misconstrued as

an argument for some kind of ectoplasm. For these and various other reasons

Bergson faded into relative obscurity.


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sensible quality consists in this repetition of movements, as the persistence of

life consists in a series of palpitations.5

Atomic phenomena seem to be the result ever more subtle and elusive processes

But Bergson saw the elan vitalas manifesting itself mainly in living organisms. He

called living organisms zones of indetermination, more than simple robots which

reacted automatically to chemical and physical forces. So, somewhat ironically

Bergson was accepting the picture that had been passed down from Aristotle and

Descartes of matter as a passive and brute substance requiring an external agent to

animate and organise it. Had Bergson studied the revolution in quantum physics

unfolding in his own time he may have been tempted to abandon that picture, and to

generalise the elan vitalto the matter in general and the cosmos as a whole.

Part 4. Whitehead

One philosopher who did believe that matter and nature were processes rather than

substances was Alfred North Whitehead, a younger contemporary and fellow travelerof Bergsons. Whitehead was famous as a mathematician and logician before he

turned to metaphysical philosophy in the 1920s. In his view an ordinary thing of the

world like an atom, a person, a chair or a planet is not a static and homogenous

object but a relatively stable balance of forces, a coalition of divergent tendencies or

processes in temporary equilibrium, what he called an event.

5Bergson, op cit.


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AN Whitehead

Whitehead gave the example of Cleopatra's Needle on the Victoria Embankment in

London as an example of an apparently static object that is actually a series of

events cascading through time and history. One writer summaries Whiteheads

lesson about Cleopatras Needle thus:

Its granite was sculpted by human hands, sometime around 1450 BCE. It was

moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12 BCE, and again from Alexandria to

London in 1877-1878 CE. And some day, no doubt, it will be destroyed, or

otherwise cease to exist. But for Whitehead, there is much more to it than

that. Cleopatra's Needle isn't just a solid, impassive object upon which certain

grand historical events being sculpted, being movedhave occasionally

supervened. Rather, it is eventful at every moment. From second to second,

even as it stands seemingly motionless, Cleopatra's Needle is activelyhappening. It never remains the same. "A physicist who looks on the part of

the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost

some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it

gets dirtier and is occasionally washed" (ibid., 167). At every instant, the mere

standing-in-place of Cleopatras Needle is an event: a renewal, a novelty, a

fresh creation.6

6Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead Deleuze and Aesthetics.
http://images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.illc.uva.nl/~seop/archives/sum1999/entries/whitehead/whitehead.jpeg&imgrefurl=http://www.illc.uva.nl/~seop/archives/sum1999/entries/whitehead/&usg=__LfqlwaE9w1UDpFIIJ-Io8SVMbVA=&h=522&w=390&sz=81&hl=en&start=1&itbs=1&tbnid=eP9mTEP4yGWULM:&tbnh=131&tbnw=98&prev=/images?q=AN+Whitehead&hl=en&gbv=2&tbs=isch:1


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insoluble problem of the Virtual which exceeds its limited manifestations like a river

that is forever bursting its banks. In some sense the Virtual contains all the multiple,

divergent and opposing directions selected by the Actual. It is therefore like a

dynamo that not only works to produce the seemingly regular, repetititious, and

cyclical changes underpinning identity but also the irregular and aberrant changes

which lead to branching and genuine differences.

Ultimately what people like Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze are arguing for is the

idea that creative change is a fundamental and ubiquitous tendency in nature that

nothing is ever truly repeated, and is as Locke once said of time a perpetual

perishing as well as a new creation, that every morning and every breath is unique,

unprecedented and new. On this view, an effect is only partlydetermined by its

antecedent causes. There is always an aspect of the unfolding present which

cannot be traced back to the past, an aspect which is unprecedented and truly

different from any thing that came before. In Whiteheads words, Creativityis the

universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact.9

Part 6. Instants and Duration

I think we are now in a position to resolve some of the paradoxes mentioned at the

beginning of this talk. Bergsons advice about the follies of trying to think the mobile

in terms of the immobile is the key. Bergsons diagnosis of Zenos arrow is that we

simply cannot divide an event or a process into a series of instantaneous points of

zero duration, that the concept of a moving arrow being at an instant is a fiction to

begin with. Instants are frozenabstractions, attempts to capture the moving by

means of the immobile. Once we realise that time cannot be decomposed into a

series of instants, that all parts of a duration are themselves durations, that in any

given period during the arrows flight it is never stationary, the paradox disappears.

9 Whitehead, AN. Process & Reality, 1929, Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2


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As for human identity, the Ship of Theseus, and the loop of string paradoxes, I think

Bergson would say something similar that there is no one true form that can be

isolated as the essence of a sequence of different forms in a process of continual

change. No inner soul which survives changes in bodily and mental composition, no

Real Ship of Theseus that persists through the ship-building process, and no self-

same Loop that survives the flow of different string parts10. To assert the existence of

an essence is merely to abstract out an idealised form from a process of continual

transformation the only reality is the whole and indivisible process of change itself.

Part 7. Vibrant Matter & Creative Change

Another important aspect of a substance or essence based ontology which can be

criticised is that it tends to rank phenomena hierarchically. If we assert the existence

of an inner essence or substance we privilege one form above others, that is we set

up a hierarchy in which one form is the true and the others merely derivative

imitations or primitive precursers.

For example in the now outdated medieval notion of a Great Chain of Being,revived by 19th Century naturalists, nature and evolution are portrayed as moving

from more primitive forms towards more complex and sophisticated ones reaching its

apogee with the human civilization and consciousness. All organisms are ranked on

a scale with simple organisms like bacteria at the bottom, more complex beings like

mammals in the middle and humans at the top.

Evolutionary biology however teaches us that there is no march of progress in

nature, that each organism is more or less successful in its own terms and ecological

niche. Also recent biology points to the importance of phenomena such as

horizontal gene transfer between species by viruses and a process called endo-

symbiosis.11 These discoveries are breaking down the idea of completely separate

10So either we have A=B or A=C but not both, the notion of A persisting through a change in string parts is true

only ideally, as a useful fiction, a manner of speaking, or a facon de parler.

11 Frank Ryans recent book Virolutiontells how the presence of foreign DNA in the genomes of every

creature testifies to the importance of symbiotic relationships especially those involving viruses and


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species or a tree of life in which genes are exclusively passed down the generations

through distinct lineages. A new image of the evolutionary process is emerging as

an impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness12 where species lines regularly merge

and hybridize. Biological science is now telling us that life cannot be organised into

sharply differentiated species let alone a hierarchy because every organism is

deeply enmeshed in inter-species genetic flows. Life is a messy network rather than

a neat hierarchy. The idea that humans are at the pinnacle of evolution is now

defunct, we are just one creature amongst many and may like 99% of every species

that has existed one day disappear into the evolutionary night.13

These findings show that the forms of nature are rheamorphs which have a

tendency to flow and blend into eachother via what Deleuze and his sometime

collaborator Felix Guattari referred to as rhizomorphicor transversalflows which link

them up into dynamic and heterogenous multiplicities, networks, ecologies or

assemblages.

The structure of life: Darwins tree or a dense thicket of inter-relatedness; a rhizomorph?

bacteria. See also biologist Lynn Margulises work on symbiosis in the evolution mitochondria and

eukaryotic cells.

12Lawton, Graham, Why Darwin Was Wrong About The Tree of Life, New Scientist, 21 January

2009.

13See the works of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould


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The hierarchic model of nature not only motivated a great deal of 19th and 20th

century biology but anthropology, criminology, eugenics and politics as well. It led to

the ranking of people according to their distance from an arbitrarily elevated

archetype (the white, middle-class European). Those down the scale were treated

as if they were mere castoffs, inferior imitations, deformations or primitive precursors

of the real thing. As one anthropologist puts it,

A ladder to success arose from the primitive to that of the civilized, from the

tribal village of Africa to London and the splendour of the Strand. The cultures

of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which individual societies

represented evolutionary moments captured and mired in time, each one a

stage in the imagined ascent to civilization. 14

The above ideas ultimately led to the Holocaust. The genetic and historical truth of

course is that transversal flows between different human races and cultures bind us

into a single albeit internally differentiated continuum.

The genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. From Ireland to

Japan, from the Amazon to Siberia there are no sharp genetic differences

among populations. There are only geographic gradients. The most remote

society on earth contains within its people fully 85 percent of our total genetic

diversity.15Science in general is now disproving the hierarchic model which posits dead and

unorganised matter at the bottom, complex and dynamic life in the middle and

human consciousness at the top. Take chaos theory, it demonstrates that even the

simplest of non-linear physical processes can generate startling levels of

unpredictable and complex behaviour. Mandelbrots fractals for example suggest

bedazzling levels complexity to the material world and show us that repetition or

iteration of very simple algorithms generate spirals of self-similarity, of branching and

diversification at every turn rather than homogenous regularity or sameness. I spoke

14Wade Davis, The Wayfinders.

15Ibid


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about how advances in quantum physics destroyed mechanistic substance based

accounts of change showing that even at the smallest scale matter exhibits qualities

like unpredictability and deep connectedness. Some modern cosmologists like Lee

Smolin see cosmic structure as fundamentally life-like, as an open process of

creative evolution and ongoing development rather than the result of a strictly

repetitious application and unfolding of eternal law.16 The discovery of dark flow in

the cosmic microwave background also suggests massive entities beyond the

horizon of the visible universe and the possibility that the cosmos is a vastly bigger,

more complex and open process than current theories allow.

The mechanistic ideas of unilinear progress, hierarchy and deterministic change

therefore seem redundant in the light of todays biology and physics which are

revealing more and more that the domain of matter is not dumb, inert, unchanging

and lifeless but intelligent, eventful, creative and vibrant, a rejuvenation in modern

form perhaps of the ancient Greek idea of hylozoism- that a degree of sentience and

vital life permeates the whole cosmos down to the lowliest stone. 17

I think the philosophic lesson of this vibrant materialism18 is that we are not

separate from nature but just one amongst many of its teeming and interdependentcollectives. A metaphysics which understands creative change as a fundamental

force of nature and the cosmos does justice to the fact that agency is not a uniquely

human trait but one common to all life forms and matter in general facilitating a more

respectful approach to the cosmic, terrestrial, ecological and biotic assemblages

from which we emerged and in which we are embedded.

16Smolin, L. The Life of the Cosmos, 1997 argues that physical law and constants evolve. and

massive entities beyond the horizon of the visible universe and an open cosmic meta-structure

bending into other scales and dimensions.

17Merchant, C.The Death of Nature, 1980: 278)

18Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. 2009.


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Some quotes on change and vibrant matter

Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its

adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Whitehead, Part 5, 337, Process & Reality

This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always

was and will be: an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going

out.

Heraclitus

I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived

in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance

in general. I even hold, with the majority of the ancients, that the whole of nature is

full of force, of life and of souls.

Leibniz to the Electress Sophe

I believe that as long as the world has lasted and will last, it has always had and will

have forms of matter that are more or less subtle in an infinity of degrees, and that

what is subtle in our view is always crude in comparison to an infinity of other forms

that are more subtle. Also, I do not believe that there is a primary element, as

Descartes imagined.

Leibniz to Andre Morell


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We are aware that everything finite, instead of being inflexible, is rather changeable

and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by the dialectic of the finite, by which

the finite, as implicitly other than it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or

natural being, and turn suddenly into its opposite.

Hegel

Everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance

but as Subject as well.

Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with

something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What happens `really' in an atomic event?' Observation ... selects of all possible

events the one that has actually happened ... Therefore, the transition from `possible'to `actual' takes place during the act of observation'.

Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 1958, p.54

This existence of ours is as transient as Autumn clouds. To watch the birth and

death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is a flash of

lightning in the sky. Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

The Buddha
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm#m017http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm#m017

The Philosophy of Change by Dwayne Schulz

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