Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth by Stanley L. Jaki

Author:Stanley L. Jaki
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-12-07T08:56:00+00:00

But at a time when being in the thrall of what is novel is taken for the only sign of sanity, one can expect hardly an echo to the claim that it is not possible to sing the praises of change without paying homage, however unobtrusive, to permanence. Unobtrusive as that permanence may appear, it should seem obvious to any mind moderately keen on logic. Heraclitus failed to note that his claim, all is change, predicated the permanence of change. It did not dawn on Parmenides that he effected a change in claiming that nothing ever changes. Yet, contrary to the view perpetuated in histories of philosophy, those two sages did not contradict one another. They merely opposed one logically faulty formula to another no less defective.

The contradiction between the two was only apparent, and therefore the task of reconciling it could not be avoided. Democritus seems to have been exercised by this task. If atoms were the ultimate and permanent reality, change would then have consisted in their rearrangements and regrouping. This posed purely technical problems, which Democritus did not resolve to any satisfaction. It was sheer fantasy to say that atoms had hooks whereby to attach themselves to one another. He complicated such problems by postulating the existence of atoms of all conceivable sizes, including atoms infinitely large. There was further the problem of the undoubtedly obvious sense of personal permanence or identity. It is well to recall that Socrates' friends argued against personal permanence (immortality) with a reference to the atomists. If the Socratic reaction was an effort to save the sense of purpose, it was in terms of saving the sense of permanence in a welter of change.

Plato and Aristotle, who carried on Socrates' program, both held that the vindication of permanence in the teeth of change was a principal task for philosophy. Plato's eternally permanent ideas could not, however, be convincingly related to the level of ever-changing physical reality. In taking his starting point from the sensible world subject to change all the time, Aristotle knew that he also had to postulate something unchanging. This he did by proposing the idea of various substantial forms, akin in a sense to Plato's eternal ideas. But unlike such ideas, these substantial forms were postulated to come forth from something that was a substance, that is, something that "stands under" (sub-stat) the layer of existence that could be observed. On that level, by definition unobservable, lay also the prime matter, an entity totally void of any form, being sheer potency.

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