Change, Identity, and the Fundamental Transformation of America

[Geee]

American Thinker:

While on his campaign trail for the presidency, Barack Obama talked to no end about the "change" that would visit upon America, a change so profound, so sweeping, that it would "fundamentally transform" America. To understand the implications of this, we would do ourselves a good turn to subject the concept of "change" to philosophical interrogation.

"Change" is a concept with a storied history in the annals of Western philosophy. In fact, it is no exaggeration to account for Western philosophy itself as an enduring conflict over the nature of change and its place in the world. From its inception in ancient Greece 2600 years ago to the present day, philosophers have realized that inquiries regarding change are inseparable from those concerning permanence, identity, knowledge, belief, particulars, universals, and, in short, a plethora of other philosophical concepts.

The pre-Socratic philosophers set the stage for the issues that would arrest the attention of their successors for the next two-and-a-half millennia. Parmenides thought that change must be an illusion, for change is identity-extinguishing: if change were real, than neither the objects that constitute our world nor our knowledge of them would be possible. Heraclitus, on the other hand, thought that it was permanence that was illusory: it was he who famously said that "you can't step in the same river twice." Another partisan of "the flux," Cratylus, grabbed hold of the logic of this reasoning and ran with it further: if change is the only constant, so to speak, then you can't step in the same river even once, for nothing remains itself from one unit of time to the next. Thus, nothing can be known.