By (Written Nov. 2020)
To give you the short answer, contrary to Parmenides, change is real, and contrary to Heraclitus, change is not all there is. But let’s take a look why they were wrong…
As you may know, Parmenides denied that there was any change in the world. His argument is fairly simple. Change is something coming into existence, but nothing can come from non-existence. Ergo, change is not real. In other words, the banana changing from green to yellow is an illusion, as that yellow came from non-being, and nothing can do such a thing. Zeno’s paradoxes are similar insofar as they deny change to a certain extent. His dichotomy paradox asserts something along these lines: a person running from A to B will never reach B. Why? Because to reach B, he would have to reach the midpoint between the two, and to do that; he would have to reach the midpoint between A and the original midpoint. This goes on into infinity. Ergo, the runner can never even leave point A.
Ok, come on, this stuff cannot actually be correct? Right? That’s our gut reaction, but what if the two are right and all change is an illusion? Well, some absurd consequences would follow. Our natural senses would be completely unreliable, the world would be one thing, and we wouldn’t be able to differentiate anything in it, scientific investigation would be impossible because it’s premised on change, and knowledge would be impossible because coming to a conclusion requires changing lines of reasoning. But wait, that last absurdity…. It’s the way out of this mess.
Here’s a useful philosophical tool for you all to remember, it’s called reductio, or immanent critique. The two differ in some respects, with the latter being a more Hegelian concept used, especially by Frankfurt School Theorists, and the former being a logical move in 1st and 2nd order logic. The basic gist in both of them is essentially this: accept that the argument is true and derive a contradiction. Or if you like metaphors, take the argument, try it on like a pair of shoes and walk a few miles in it to see how it holds up. I prefer the shoe metaphor because it illustrates the idea of really feeling out or living out the position you are engaging with – none of this surface-level straw man nonsense that is so commonplace today.
So, what happens when we use this strategy on the arguments of Parmenides and Zeno? Well, suppose we are trying to convince someone of the legitimacy of their claims. In order to do this, we would have to initiate change in our mind – going from premise one to two to three, our mental states have to change. Furthermore, we have to convince the other person’s mind, that is, change their mind. And when we first learned of Parmenides’ and Zeno’s positions, it’s possible our minds were changed from not accepting their positions to accepting their positions. In fact, they themselves had to change their minds to accept their belief. Granted, that is, that they didn’t believe in the non-existence of change since they could first think, which probably the case. What does this mean? It means that if we are to argue for the idea that change is an illusion, we have to assume that change is real to make our case. In other words, the position is self-contradictory.
In regards to Heraclitus the same type of reductio can be given. He affirms that change is all there is, and that everything is in flux. If this is the case then when he is giving the argument for his postion he will not be able to draw a conclusion. Why? Because he isn’t the same person as the one who was arguing in the first place. After all, all is in flux, so there is no stable identity of anything. This also includes the laws of logic and language. By denying that there is any stability in those Heraclitus can’t do any type of reasoning and is barred from drawing conclusions. Even more absurd is that there can’t be any argument for his position, since an argument requires a stable line of reasoning to come to its conclusion. But any stability is denied!
How can we get out of this mess? Aristotle gave us the answer over 2000 years ago when he came up with the distinction between act and potency. These Pre-Socratics overlook the act/potency distinction. In the case of Parmenides, being can be said in many ways, and one of those ways is being-in-potency. Change does not come from non-being, but from the real potentials in a thing. For example, the water bottle in front of me has the potential to be a melted lump of plastic. If I were to heat it up I would be actualizing that potential In other words, rather than bringing about being (of the lump) from non-being, I would be bringing out one of its potential ways of being.
In the case of Heraclitus we can look to the nature of change to see where he went wrong. Change is always directed toward a range of specific outcomes. For example, the water bottle has a limited range of what it can be changed into. In other words, it has a limited range of potentials. It cannot be changed into a bouquet of flowers, or a rock. And as science has told us (if you take the project of science to be the fact that science catalogues observed regularities about nature and its laws), change occurs in constant and repeatable patterns. E.g, the carbon, water, and rock cycles generate specific and predictable changes. Finally, the very fact that I can sit and type this, and reason my way through philosophical positions gives credence to the fact that I have a stable identity in the world. This points to some sort of stability as a real feature of the world, and the existence of real potentials which limit the change of a thing.
As pointed out by a contemporary Thomist, this look at the Pre-Socratics gives us the following argument.
P1. Change and permanence cannot coherently be denied (I would add to that that they exist as real features of our world, and I think that the reductio demonstrates that sufficiently.)
P2. They can be real features of our world only if we affirm an act/potency distinction.
C. The division between act and potency is a real feature of our world
What does all this mean? After all, Aristotle pointed it out thousands of years ago, so why is it relevant to us today? Not only does science rely on the falsity of the Heraclitian and Eleatic conclusions, but as Aristotle and Aquinas very much knew, affirming a distinction between act and potency as a real feature of the world is the first step to demonstrating the existence of God, in the classical theistic sense.
Works Cited
Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics, ch. 1
The Reluctant Philosopher 