David Egan Philosophy

Autumn is a season of changes. The days get shorter quickly as the northern hemisphere tilts away from the sun. The leaves change colour and fall from the trees. At least where I live, the summer sun disappears behind a near-perpetual grey of cloud and rain.

From Sam Cooke to David Bowie to Big Thief, popular music has a lot to say about change. Philosophers, judging from the historical record, don’t like it.

I want my newsletters to be informative, so let me teach you a new word. Misoneism is “a hatred, fear, or intolerance of innovation and change,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. (If that isn’t a new word for you, take a bow, clever clogs.)

The history of philosophy is replete with misoneists. Setting the pace, as with so much else, is Plato. His Theory of Forms imagines a domain of being superior to our changeable world. While justice fails and beauty fades, Justice itself and Beauty itself are eternal and unchanging. As he puts it, they “remain the same and never in any way tolerate any change whatever.” It’s not just that this world of perfect forms happens not to change. Its unchangingness is part of its perfection.

Plato was hardly alone in his resistance to change. Partly inspired by Plato, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers saw God’s unchangingness as integral to His perfection. The Stoics counselled that peace and happiness was a simple matter of not allowing changing worldly circumstances to shake your composure.

One source of inspiration for Plato was Parmenides of Elea, who flourished in the early fifth century BCE. Parmenides argued that, contrary to appearances, change is impossible. All we have of his thought are fragments of a metaphysical poem so piecing together precisely why he thought so is tricky. The idea, it seems, is that everything is ultimately one, and since change would require one thing to be changed by another (the leaves by cooler air and shorter days, my mind by a compelling argument) this ultimate oneness can’t undergo change.

This Parmenidean reasoning is probably best known through a series of paradoxes devised by his student Zeno. To get from one place to another, says Zeno, you first have to get halfway. And to reach that halfway point, you must first get halfway to the halfway point, i.e. one quarter of the way to your destination. And to reach that one-quarter point, you first have to travel half of that distance, and so on. Because any distance, no matter how small, can be divided in half, you can never get anywhere without first crossing an infinite number of halfway points. This infinite travel is impossible for finite beings like ourselves and so, paradoxically, it seems we can never even get started. Change is but an illusion.

Many centuries later, Karl Marx would write, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” That, you can imagine Zeno replying, is the one thing philosophy can’t do.

But Marx sat on the far side from Zeno of an important historic divide. If you want someone to praise or blame for the shift, consider Isaac Newton. Along with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Newton invented the calculus, a mathematical tool for analyzing change—and, depending on who you ask, giving a definitive answer to Zeno’s paradoxes. Newton also formulated three laws of motion, the first of which contradicts the ancient assumption that all bodies tend toward rest. And Newton’s law of universal gravitation explains the movements of the heavens according to the same principles by which things fall out here on Earth, undermining the idea of a perfect heavenly realm that isn’t subject to the changes we suffer down here below.

We live in a post-Newtonian world where the only constant is change, as the cliché (or the misquotation of Heraclitus) has it. It can be hard to get into a Parmenidean mindset. Why might changelessness seem attractive?

Consider the Buddhist teaching about change. Buddhists acknowledge impermanence as the first of three characteristics of reality, but that hardly makes them fans of change. The second characteristic of reality, suffering, follows directly from the first: we suffer because we get attached to phenomena that will change and pass away. The Buddha counsels us to relinquish attachment to worldly things precisely because they’re impermanent. Attachment to what changes inevitably leads to suffering.

Life, in short, can be a bit disappointing. We’re adrift upon a sea of heartbreak and anything we might grip on to for safety will only keep us afloat for so long. Small wonder so many philosophers have sought something beyond the reach of change that they can fasten on to.

When Buddhist philosophy reached Japan, the teaching about impermanence took a new form in the aesthetics of mono no aware. This phrase, roughly translated as “the pathos of things,” gives expression to the wistful sadness at the passing away of all things. That things are impermanent is a source of grief. To Japanese aesthetes, it’s also a source of great beauty. Think falling cherry blossoms and you get the idea.

Or think falling autumn leaves. Autumn, as a season of changes, is a fine time to reflect on impermanence, its sadness, and its beauty. 

1. On average, scientists who win a Nobel Prize or Macarthur Fellowship tend to be a little less productive than before they won the big prize. (source)
2. Margaret Abbott was the first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal, for golf in 1900. She happened to be in Paris at the time and saw there was a golf tournament going on. She and her mother signed up, not knowing it was the Olympics. She won and received a porcelain bowl as prize—women weren’t given gold medals at the time. Abbott died in 1955, never having realized she was an Olympic champion. (source)
3. Due to a subtle gradation in the Earth’s electric field, the tops of flowers have a negative electric charge. The friction of flying through the air gives bees a positive electric charge. That means that pollen will leap from stamen to bee in a version of botano-entomological static cling. (source)
4. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, after whom the temperature scale is named, became orphaned as a teenager because both of his parents died of mushroom poisoning. (source)
5. The first recorded use of the word “cowboy” was by Jonathan Swift. (source)
6. The idea that exercise is good for you first gained scientific plausibility in a study of post-war London transport workers. The study found that bus conductors, who had to run up and down the steps of a double-decker bus to take tickets, had a 30% lower incidence of disease than sedentary bus drivers. (source)
7. Counterfeiting is by far the most lucrative illicit industry in the world, bringing in about $1.1 trillion dollars per year, nearly twice the amount that second-place drug trafficking ($650 billion) brings in. (source)
8. Deer produce two gallons of drool each day. (source)
9. As much as three quarters of human-caused deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution. (source)
10. Since 1950, average global life expectancy has been rising by 18 weeks per year. (source)
11. In 1950, Africa accounted for 8% of the world’s population. In 2050, it’s projected to account for 25% of the world’s population. (source)
12. Estimates for the population of what is now the Greater Vancouver area in 1750 (so before Europeans arrived and before a smallpox epidemic that preceded them) range as high as 100,000 people. (source)