Accounting for Change
John Deely on Aristotle
John Deely’s massive Four Ages of Understanding is a maverick history of Western philosophy that puts semiotics in the foreground and sees C.S. Peirce as the key figure in contemporary philosophy. It’s a maverick history because of Deely’s conviction that semiotics overturns modern philosophy’s preoccupation with distinguishing philosophy from natural science and because of his claim that the most important developments in modern philosophy have taken place outside the academy. In Deely’s telling, Augustine rises to the forefront of Western intellectual history, the Middle Ages (“The Latin Age,” in Deely’s scheme) play a critical role, and virtual unknowns like John Poinsot displace Descartes and Locke as the founders of a generative modern philosophy.
Along the way, Deely provide substantial summaries of the great philosophers of the Western tradition. His treatment of Aristotle is magnificently concise and magnificently informative.
Aristotle’s work must be set in the context of Parmenides’s monist denial of change and Heraclitus’s dualist affirmation of the primacy of change. Parmenides’s argument was: “nothing comes into being from what is not. But a being either is or is not. If it is, it cannot become something else, for in that case it would become what it is not, and something would come from what is not. And if it is not, it cannot come to be, for if it did, it would come into being from what is not.” We sense change, but that’s mere illusion; change is ontologically impossible (38-9). Aristotle thinks Heraclitus is right about the reality of change, but Heraclitus simply accepts change without explaining it. The task of philosophy is to account for change.
The atomist Democritus at least attempted to explain change, but Aristotle considered his attempt unsuccessful. For atomists, “the coming to be, development, and movement of bodies” occurs as a result of rearrangements of atoms in space. But this begs the question. Rearranging atoms is a form of motion, and that motion is already a kind of change. Atomists thus explain change by assuming change. They don’t explain anything, but only posit that local motion, a change of position, is the most basic form of change (62). Monists do just the same thing: Change, they say, is a product of “condensation and refraction,” but that idea, as much as atomism, assumes change in the process of trying to explain it. (Note the direction of Aristotle’s thought here: Change can only be explained by something changeless.)
At the heart of Aristotle’s solution is his belief that “being is said in many ways.”