Is Change Impossible?
A departure from the ethical; an exploration of the metaphysical.
Prima facie, it seems absurd to suggest that change is impossible. We perceive change in myriad ways every instant of the day. But, as Plato reveals in Theaetetus and Descartes (two millennia hence) in Meditations on First Philosophy, observe: one’s perception of an appearance is distinct from one’s understanding of reality. Parmenides extremely narrow ontology presents his readers with an appearance-reality distinction. Given the legitimacy of the appearance-reality distinction (consider the experience of dreaming), we must seriously consider if Parmenides’s apparently absurd claim is refuted in reality.
Parmenides’s metaphysical denial of change is pithily posited by the following: “For in no way may this prevail, that things that are not, are.”[1] In this sentence, Parmenides has articulated an axiomatic logical law: the Law of Noncontradiction. Something either is some thing—we shall denote this thing by the letter A—or it is not that thing—denoted by ¬A. Something cannot be, at the same time and in the same respect, A & ¬A. And fair enough; I cannot be, at the same time, alive and not alive. One cannot even consider what such a state would be—it is simultaneously unthinkable and, in Parmenides’s view consequently, impossible.
Next, we must consider if Parmenides is right to apply the iron clad Law of Noncontradiction (LNC) to the quality of change. He goes on, “I will not permit you to say or to think <that it grew> from what is not; for it is not to be said or thought that it is not. What necessity would have stirred it up to grow later rather than earlier, beginning from nothing?”[2] It is here that Parmenides reveals a major flaw in his physics: He argues that something transitioning from one thing to another is impossible because this change comes ex nihilo. Hence his rhetorical question in the preceding quote.
However, this question is not rhetorical; and there’s an answer to it.
Parmenides metaphysics only contains one of Aristotle’s four causes: material. If the material cause, i.e., that which something is made out of and perceived to comprise, were all that there is, it would be unintelligible to describe something changing. Luckily, the PreSocratics are saved by the metaphysicians Aristotle, who describes that things have not one but four material causes. In addition to their material cause, things have an efficient cause: what brings it about; a formal cause: what it is to be that thing (essence); and a final cause: the purpose of that thing.
If one accepts Aristotelian metaphysics, we understand Parmenides’s Constraint (PC), i.e., that nothing comes to be from nothing, does preclude the principle of change. To borrow an example from Professor Christine Thomas of Dartmouth College’s Philosophy Department, Socrates is not existentially modified by his musical ability. Let me explain: When Socrates learns to play music, musical-Socrates does not gain existence from nothingness, nor is unmusical-Socrates annihilated; Socrates remains formally unchanged, i.e., extant, and merely changes in description.
Parmenides is right to assert that nothing comes into existence except from something pre-existing, and he is right that nothing is caused to be F by something that is itself not-F. On these two points, Aristotle and Plato agree. However, where The Philosopher and the chronicler of Socrates disagree with Parmenides is that nothing comes into existence from not having existed and nothing comes to be F from not having been F.
Aristotle (and Plato) argue that generation and alteration are both possible and are able to do so with the philosophical innovation of the efficient cause. An example of my own: I was once not alive; now I am. I came into existence from not having existed not completely ex nihilo but from those things—my efficient causes—that preceded and had the quality of aliveness themselves (my parents).
Though you can’t get something from nothing, something can become something else from another thing that shares the quality of that which the original thing becomes. Though he is refuted, Parmenides appearance-reality distinction is an important philosophical innovation that gave rise to many others and for which he deserves credit. Parmenides was not a sophist—just wrong.
P.S. I have no idea what the citation format is in Curd and MicKirahan, Jr.’s A PreSocratic Reader (Hackett: 1996), from which I sourced my Parmenides quotes.
[1] Lines 1-2; Plato, Sophist 242a; lines 2-6, Sextus Empiricus, Against the Mathematicians 7.114 = 28B7.
[2] Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 145.1-146.25 (lines 1-52); 39.1-9 (lines 50-61) = 28B8; revised Curd.