Plato and Aristotle on Change
- Posted by Andrew Bailey on Monday, August 06, 2007 at 11:11 AM
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I shall here explicate how Aristotle and Plato respectively account for the possibility of change or becoming. I shall first articulate the problem they inherited from Parmenides, give Plato’s apparent solution, and then Aristotle’s.
Parmenides argued that becoming was impossible: what comes to be comes to be either from what is or what is not. Not the latter, since nothing comes from nothing. Not the former, since what is cannot come to be (it already is).
From this, it follows that change doesn’t happen. Causation, then, doesn’t happen either, since causation involves change.
Note that the task Parmenides hands down to his successors is not merely to give a story according to which change is possible. Rather, it is to give us a story that gives us understanding of what change is and its inner workings.
I shall now explicate one solution the character of Socrates gives to the problem of change in Phaedo. There are interesting literary questions about whether Socrates in this dialogue speaks for Plato. But I here set them aside and simply speak of Socrates’ views as if they were Plato’s.
Socrates believes that if we can give an account of causation, we can give an account of change. And in giving an account of the former, he’s moving toward an account of the latter (among other things).
The account goes like this. Take the example of the event Socrates’ being seated (this is the case the character of Socrates employs in Phaedo). This is clearly an event that became (it wasn’t always the case that Socrates is seated). But why did it come to be? Plato is unsatisfied with answers to this question which merely give the temporally antecedent causes of Socrates’ being seated (he entered a room, took out a chair, bent his knees, and sat down). Nor is Plato satisfied with answers that merely describe the event in question in further detail. Describing the relations Socrates’ various sinews and bones stand in, the angle of the bend in his body, and the curvature of his spine will never reveal why Socrates is sitting.
What’s needed is something entirely different. Enter the theory of forms. Forms are immutable, eternal, perfect objects of knowledge in virtue of which ordinary things are the way they are (have the features they do). Plato explains Socrates’ being seated as Socrates participating in (being an instance of, resembling) the form being seated. Thus becoming is possible. Or so Plato seems to think.
The mature Plato of the later dialoges (I have Timaeus in mind) has a more refined account of change. But since this account has so many affinities to that offered by Aristotle (Timaeus likely inspired his form/matter distinction), I shall simply present Aristotle's favored account.
Aristotle, like Plato, will employ the notion of form in his account of change. But Aristotle’s account will further employ matter. Distinguish between the ways things are, and the things that are those ways. The former, says Aristotle, are forms. The latter he calls matter.
To elaborate. Things are certain ways; they have natures. These natures are forms, or internal principles of motion and rest. The nature of a thing is most apparent when that thing is fully actualized. When the nature is less apparent, the thing is said to be merely potential. When things don’t perfectly exhibit their nature, they are said to exist less than they might. So things which are merely potential are, considered as such, non-being. When fully actualized, something is said to exist more--to be more like what it is.
Change just is the motion of a thing from potency to act: the actualization of a thing’s nature or form (`the actualization of potential being as such’).
So much for the account (in broad strokes). I shall now show how Aristotle uses it to resolve Parmenides’ problem of change. Parmenides says that what becomes comes to be from being or non-being. Aristotle agrees. Unlike Parmenides, he has the resources to explain how becoming might occur.
Take the example of a man learning how to play a musical instrument. Construed one way, this is becoming coming from non-being. For before becoming musical, the man was non-musical. Becoming from non-being. Construed another way, this is becoming from being, for the man nonetheless had the potential to be a musical man. Becoming from being.
