On Anaximenes's Theory of Change
How change in degree can beget change in type.
I’ve began the final semester of Students For Liberty’s Prometheus Fellowship. The finale of the program includes a substantial amount of philosophical reading, writing, and conversing. For today’s meeting, the first chapter of W. T. Jones’s The Classical Mind was covered, “Pre-Socratic Philosophy.” The Philosophers covered herein span from Homer and Hesiod to the Milesians and Pythagoreans. I was particularly struck by one Milesian, Anaximenes, and his understanding of how things change.
In short, Jones explains Anaximenes’s theory as qualitative changes arising from quantitative ones. Prima facie, this seems implausible: I can have more or less of some thing via quantitative changes, but certainly I can’t get something that is qualitatively different. Understandable, but untrue; Jones provides the example of the temperature of water — something undeniably measured in degrees (pun intended) — determining its physical state, i.e., solid, liquid, and vapor. Jones also presents the reader with the volume of alcohol bringing someone from sobriety to buzzed to drunk — those acquainted with the phenomenon understand the qualitative, phenomenal difference between these states. I would posit the example of color: one goes from yellow to orange only by degrees of red and yet the two colors are qualitatively different and distinguishable (which is why we have a unique name for each).
Who cares about all this metaphysical mumbo-jumbo?
Aside from an intrinsic desire to understand the truth of things in general, I find Anaximenes’s account of quantitative, nominal change bringing about qualitative, essential change to resolve a problem I encountered attempting to distinguish between love (platonic, amorous, etc.) and friendship. If quantitative change to a high enough degree can change the type of thing something is, then perhaps love really is just friendship on steroids, so to speak.