People are in a process of wanting change, but they don’t know where to change, what to change to. How to do it? They think if they get involved in some kind of activity groups that change will be potent.
Our thought is turn on the switches and make a comfortable change. Actually there is no switch, there is no place to go, there is no help. The thought is in our heads and switch is a methodology not a change.
We want change but we don’t want our positions to get violated. We want change but we want to stay the way WE are. We want everything to change except us. Who is going to change? Change from doing what? Are we going to change willingly? At a dinner party last night a woman said change can come without war. We think of war as being something, either war or no war. But conflict goes on all the time. How intense is the conflict? It depends on the need for change.
The conversation would have to go a little further. You must ask the question, what do you want changed? Is it something immediate to you that you realise you want changed? For example people want enough social security money to be able to survive. They say we need to change it because they need it. Did anyone at the dinner party need anything? I am asking you a question.
What do we need? We are going to look at a Classical period where there was a definite need for change. We don’t know the need of the populous itself, all we know is the need of the idea. There was a certain superstructure that needed.. All we can do is assume change was needed at the bottom end, needs for commerce, needs for paperwork. The Athenians had a big commercial fleet. They were in constant commerce. Athens society was one of the capitals of the Western world. They had commons there, they had commons in Italy.
Look at Sicily, all that area in the lower corner. It is now Calabria, Crete, Neapolis, a Greek word meaning new city. All settled by Athenians. You have a big philosophical school there, the Eleatics. Parmenides is Sicilian. Greek, but lives in the colonies. From the colonies you get these Philosophies because the colonies were distant enough and still close enough to have the freedom of thinking. Also had the need for better methods, guys like Archimedes were working out cranes for holding up cargo on ships. You have mechanics being applied because in those days you applied. It is needs that drive change.
Now we have certain needs. Our need has become the need to survive. As people. It is a new need. Never had consider the whole world, the survival of people.
You can describe motion, but you how do you describe change? You look in the mirror and you say Oh, I have some white hair on my beard, time is moving on. I’m changing. I’m becoming old. We see change as a deterioration. I need a change of pace. I need to change my environment because I need to get away from its deterioration. How do we describe change? We keep using the word.
The word change isn’t adequate to describe what we are saying. We need something else to describe it. And it is not just a word, because we can’t find a word. We can’t find a noun that will do it for us. If we use a verb we still have a problem. We have to find some way to describe change. This is man’s dilemma at the present, it isn’t mine.
Philosophically how do we understand change.. How do we describe change? What is change?
We can describe motion. There are many books that contain formulas concerning motion. Anything mechanical. The motion of the air, the motion of the earth, the motion of speed. We talk about change and think it is motion. Placing, placement, changing of placements, the changing of one place for another place, this is what we think change is.
To understand change you must take it in two points, then and now. And you have to be able to see that change takes place to now. Then you see what change is. It makes itself manifest to us, then you become aware of what it is. We can start there.
The word change is not adequate to describe what we are saying. We need something else to describe it. And it is not just a word because we can’t find a word, a noun, that will do it for us. If we use a verb we still have a problem. We have to find a way to describe change. This is man’s dilemma at the present, it isn’t mine.
What do you think the argument of relativity is about? It is not talking about motion, it is not talking about the speed of light. It talks about the change in relationships to... change, isn’t it?
Some cultures can see change and other cultures can’t. analiksis Change to the Greeks isn’t change. To Plato, when it changed it deteriorated. If you were descending to the idea, it illuminated. If you were in the particular, it deteriorated. Each side had its compensation. You are buried, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It is a natural change. My position is changing. The tree buds, then the buds fruit, then the leaves fall. There is a cycle that takes place. The cycle repeats itself. The issue raised is this, is it static since it happens all the time, or are we to look at it as cyclical change, change moves forward also? Not only is the wheel changing its position in its rotation, it is also changing its position in time and space as it moves forward. In mechanics it works out nicely. You can make an equation out for this.
Heraclitian thinking, when extrapolated, is concerned with the changes of position. If you apply geometry to Heraclitus, you see positional changes taking place. His students claimed that the change is taken place so fast you can’t position it. You are caught in the constant swim of it, you are carried with it. His students went to an extreme concerning change.
When we think of change, we want to approach it from the basics. Because if we approach change as an already put together change, we will have trouble unraveling the bastard. But if we come from certain postions of change that were apparent to the preSocratics, we can see why they raised the argument. Things changing, things in motion.
Change can be so subtle we don’t detect it. Can you understand cyclical change, like the change in seasons, historically? Certain things in history repeat themselves, but the argument of repetition means that it is done the same way. It is not. Even though Spring comes every year, it is not the same Spring. There has been a change in it. If that change didn’t manifest itself through soil disturbances, it has to manifest itself on another level that is so subtle you don’t detect it. For example we are trying to find methods to predict earthquakes, to find methods to detect the changes of the geological shelves and plates. Is this seeing and understanding change? Why is change different than motion? Because motion has direction. That is one of the differences. Motion of the earthquake has direction to analyze it.
It is difficult to analyze change. It is difficult to detect it along with all the small little subtleties that make change. Heraclitus’ students magnified it. Heraclitus got suck with ta pandari, flux, because flux got distracted from his argument. All things are in flux. Heraclitus is known for that although a lot of other philosophers of the time that said the same thing. That is not the strength of his argument, the strength is the argument of change. When we think of flux we think not only of change but of motion. All things are moving. We get a different view all the time. We really don’t distinguish, as people, between change and motion.
Motion to us is more important than change because we are from the mechanical period. My car doesn’t run, I call Earl to help me get it started. These are arguments of motion. I get the car into motion. I turn the lights on. I’m putting forces in nature, particles, in motion. There is activity in the electrons lighting up the light bulb. The change is what? Light from dark, the black and white side of change, the change of opposites. Darkness/lightness. On one side we get observable changes, connected next to motion. They are close to each other. They directly benefit.
But subtle changes, the changes that take place in ecology? We don’t have an understanding of them. This type of change was looked down upon for two and a half millennium. For the Platonists it was essential to maintain the status quo. They did not want change and the Platonic Academy lasted into the 1400s when it moved to Florence under the protection of the Medici family. They were a fly-by-night outfit.
The Church rejected change. When you go to the Greek church, you hear Platonic thinking. Pando di da mos Pando cra ta mos
The argument of change is vigorous, viral, not afraid. It took a society that wasn’t afraid to postulate whatever came to their heads. They said something, no matter what. It became a fad to name things. Aristotle was naming them by the minute. In Greek when they get somebody who names things they call him (ono ma ti’ zi). He is naming things.
We’ve been together and all of a sudden you tell me those people down there, the SOBs, that bastard over there he was messing around the other day and i saw him. Common gossip. The Greek, instead of insulting you as a wag or a gossip, he says onomatizi. You put yourself in the position where you can name things. You are giving this guy a name SOB, that guy a name adulterer. You are naming people.
This is the way it works. I call him an onomatologist, I set him up, he is pretty good, he names everything. I give him credibility and he accepts it. It is not a difficult job now to dismantle him. You follow that? Then comes, I want to introduce you to my friend, a very brilliant man. He takes the acknowledgement, and for the rest of the evening babbles incoherencies. It is for you, now, to condemn him. It is for you now to bring out of him, in comparison to... from the state of very brilliant. Herodotus said, to praise a man is the beginning of his destruction. The minute he was praised, he was on his way down. So the Greek said, if I really want to mess somebody up, all I have to do is tell you of his virtues. You know Howard, he is one of the greatest men, his virtue is this, things you could never hope to have, he has. Right?
Take this and apply it to the general circulation of philosophy at that time, the Classical period. You can see it working. When you are reading the Socratic arguments, Socrates is forever telling people how wonderfully sharp they are. Oh, you are absolutely... He got it going.
The post Socratics were interested in a way of living. Philosophy became the way you lived, the end-in-view. How could this be achieved? How does the end-in-view involve itself to change? How does change involve itself with the end-in-view toward motion? The Platonic arguments give you a direction that you should follow in order to bring about this change, bring about an illumination. You can see the positive and negative in Plato’s thinking. One side is changeless, the other side changes. So one side of Plato’s argument has change to it. It has distortion. On the other side it has no change, no experience, and no distortion. That is why we say that Platonic love is richer than the particular physical love, because it remains the love of an Idea, and isn’t defiled, isn’t destroyed, isn’t contaminated. The idea can be pure. The Greek was looking for something that could be distilled. Once it was distilled, what change could take place?
A distilled idea made predictability possible. People at the dinner party were asking, do things have change? We are not even aware of change. And still we want to use the word to make something happen, to make a set of events take place.
The only way to demonstrate change is to demonstrate the philosophical change that has taken place in two and a half thousand years. I don’t know of any other way. Unless we show pictures of us when we were young and pictures of us now. We are all aware of physical change as a slow process of ageing. A process of ageing like the fruit tree bears, up to a certain time then can’t bear the fruit any more. We are aware of that. There is another kind of change. There is a metaphysical change that takes place. A historical change.
I have great difficulty extrapolating history from metaphysics. Can’t do it. If I’m demonstrating history, history to me reaches its superstructure. I’m not interested in the little effects of history. History is full of little effects that make up all the big events. They are all part of history. The part of history that becomes most understandable is the part where the ideas are, the superstructure. Because for whatever reasons, the fact that they have reached it means they exist. The reasons for something are infinite. The go to inventive beginnings. You could trace the first world war all they way back down. You want to return to that period. You say we are going to start the study in this period. And you name that period in order to begin with it, the medieval period, the period of enlightenment. You collect all things that were similar in that time, and put it together to show that period peeking its head out from under the blankets.
To see historical change makes us aware of philosophical change. We get a feeling of it. Because other than the fact of what visually see as change, the rest of it is feeling. One has to have an intuitive sense of change. The cosmic clock can’t be looked at through cyberial time. The cosmic clock is some other type of clock, a metaphysical clock. It is a clock that is tied to intuition as opposed to tied to the measurement of motion or the hands around the clock. The movement around the sphere. These are all motions. They are not change.
If we look at the argument, people are hopping across the street just to get to the other side. There are certain things you have to bridge. And there are other things that you don’t bridge, no bridges are necessary. You have to fight a path through it. Between motion and change there is a bridge. They are connected together by argument. We assume change is motion because we change places. In modern times, when changing positions is change, is changing positions vertical or horizontal? Social positions, psychological positions... We see someone and we say, He has really changed. What has changed about him? What is different about him? He is not the same guy any more. There has been a change but we can’t define it. So we say there has been a psychological change. Then we try to put it in the same kind of understanding that we have when we understand motion. We say he is very negative about things. Little by little we describe change again by that which we describe motion. Had we raised motion last night, the dinner people would have been put down. They would have a psychological resistance. They would have the feeling of stupidity, a general sense of lostness.
It has to do with the modern feeling of meaningless. It is meaningless. If change takes place in an atmosphere of that which is meaningless, it has nothing to do with human beings. Change is what is, change, as opposed purely to the prerogative of humans. We are living in a meaningless world now.
Philosophically it is meaningless. So the argument of change is meaningless to modern man. He doesn’t care. He really doesn’t care which way things go. As long as he can hang on a bit. At one time change was so important they raised arguments against it. Today we want change to stop in the political sphere. For example, the United States did not want Nicaragua to change, it wanted it as a Banana Republic. Strategically it was a good idea. Once it became independent, had to deal with it on another level. Like an adult child. You can’t treat them as kids, you have to treat them as adults. You have to listen to their adult problems.
We are not prepared for changes to take place. We don’t have any thoughts concerning it, we don’t have any philosophies concerning it, we don’t have any models concerning it, and the changes are taking place anyway. In 1983 for the lack of any other model we called the changes communism. We don’t believe that the psyche of man reaches a certain state, but it reaches a state where change becomes apparent. It becomes evident. Like the feeling of the poor throughout the world. The change is taking place in the world not because the poor of the world are demanding more food, but because they are there. We are becoming aware of it.
We want things to be like they were. If you were to sit down and write what you consider the most obvious changes, we can ask, what are the elements of change? And we are still hit by it.