Wisdom of the West

 Imagine you are an ancient ship owner. Your personal wooden vessel we'll call the "Theseus".

You launch the Theseus to lead your private fleet in pursuit of adventures all around the world. As time goes by, pieces of the Theseus weaken, erode, or get damaged in various battles and tight squeezes. As each piece gets damaged, you replace it with an identical piece of wood your shipbuilders manage to locate wherever it is you stop to lick your wounds and prepare for your next sally. Traveling in your armada you also have a supply ship. Periodically, it travels back and forth to your native land taking all the booty you've plundered and retrieving your mail and your favorite wines and goats, etc. Each time it returns, it takes the discarded pieces of the ship in its hold as ballast. You've instructed the captain of the supply vessel to store each and every one of these pieces, old masts, boards, ropes, etc. from the Theseus in your warehouse near the docks. By the time you sail back to your home port, you have replaced each and every piece of your original Theseus with new ones. What's more, once you return you discover that your industrious warehouse manager has taken all the pieces you shipped back, restored them, and constructed another ship from them, identical in every respect to the ship in which you first set sail those many years ago.  (See Plutarch, Life of Theseus; Th. Hobbes, De Corpore, 2.11)

Here's the question: Which of the two ships (or both) (or neither) rightly bears the name "Theseus"? Are they the same ship or merely identical copies?

Is the Theseus (a) the refurbished ship in which you sail home, or (b) the reconstructed ship made from all the origninal parts waiting for you in the docks by the warehouse or (c) both or (d) neither?

Philosophers love these sorts of puzzles. Solutions hinge on such things as whether we privilege proper names ("Theseus") or things themselves (any change in which destroys the original identity) or the component parts of whole things (the refurbished ship) or practical functions (what it means to be a ship). It challenges us to question what it means to "be" a "thing" or "the same".

Similarly, seeing Michael Apted's documentary 56 Up reminds me that people change over time. They grow. They degrade. They even change their names sometimes. The molecules composing their bodies change (though not, apparently, the electrons and quantum particles). How are the children in 7 Up the same persons as the near-geezers in 56 Up? What does it mean to "be" a "person"?

One way of looking at it is to think of, say, Suzy as the same person at each temporal interval. Thus "Suzy" has the same personal identity throughout the course of her life's changes. But, in the same way we might say Suzy has changed her hair color or painted her nails red, we say she is 'Suzy at time T1,' 'Suzy at time T2,' ... .

Of course, with living beings, the notion of consciousness throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the gears. We might then want to say that despite all the physical changes she's been through, Suzy's consciousness remains the same over the course of years. Suzy is psychologically continuous. Well, maybe. Fifty-six year old Suzy might be aware of having been through a painful divorce in her 40s—something that profoundly changed her, whereas seven year old Suzy would have no way of knowing this. Fifty-six year old Suzy might know what it means to suffer depression or to experience sexual ecstasy or to feel profound guilt and self-loathing, whereas seven year old Suzy in all likelihood would not. How, it seems prudent to ask, is this continuous?

The problem with this sort of analysis is that it attempts to preserve/privilege the concept of 'Being'. In Heraclitean terms, the river doesn't change, and Suzy is the same no matter at which point we enter her life (or she enters the river). This is handy for such things as language, naming and reference, analysis, understanding, etc. But, as Wittgenstein says, because of this we need to be wary of the things language does to our perceptions and understanding of reality. "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language." (Philosophical Investigations, § 109)

But, it seems to me, it is fundamentally delusional. Phrased another way: How is it that Becoming or Process (rather than Being or Stasis) is not considered the primary mode of existence?

Heraclitus's ancient intuition, a brief and, to my mind, profound insight into the true nature of things, was eventually overshadowed by the more pragmatic Platonic and Aristotelian and Christian notions of ideals and substances and attributes and souls that dominate Western thought to this day. Don't get me wrong, these latter concepts are important. But they have the potential to stand in the way of our recognizing and coming to grips with the true, that is to say fluid, nature of Reality and Becoming.

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Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

As best as we can discern, change is the fundamental force of all existence.

Nothing that exists stands still. Nothing remains the same.

Becoming is the form this fundamental force of change takes in living beings.

Living beings are conceived, assembled molecularly, born; they grow, mature, deteriorate, die, and decompose.

Human beings have created the notion of Selfhood to account for the experience of individuality, of bodily separateness, over the conscious, temporal course of this process.

Selfhood is constructed, named, bequeathed an Identity.

Identity is a function of memory. Identity subsumes the on-going accretion of experience into itself.

Identity implies the unreality of Becoming and, thus, Change.

Identity privileges/presupposes stasis, unity, continuity over both space and time and over Change and Becoming.

The notion of the Self is an illusion, masked/projected by the construct Identity.

It makes no sense to speak of an Authentic Self.

No Self can be called Authentic because Selfhood itself is an illusion. A 'fiction', if you will.

Change/Becoming is not an (Aristotelian) accident/attribute that happens to the (Aristotelian) substance/being.

Change just is.

Becoming is the norm, the fundament of experience. Beings participate/are immersed in the process of Change. Beings Become.

Your Self is not the same now as it was when you began reading this. For one thing, you have gained the experience of reading this. Thus, you are a different Self now than you were a few moments ago. Though it doesn't feel that way.

Being/Selfhood/Identity is an ultimately futile resistance to the reality of Change/Becoming. A negation of Reality. All things, as the man said, must pass.

This resistance of the Self to the omnipresence of Change/Becoming creates a sort of friction that feels substantive. Feeling is stubborn, reactionary (or, better, reactive), and Self-centric, but is crucial to the Selfhood/Identity illusion. (See this serial post, Thyrophobia, remembering to read from the last post to the first.)

"You cannot step into the same river twice." Heraclitus

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

"Lawd help me I can't change. Lord I can't change." Lynard Skynard
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This post is a first pass on what is perhaps the central theme of Western literature, and because it touches so many different fields it is my favorite kind of topic. The topic is: Change. Transformation, transfiguration, metamorphosis, evolution, correction, development, differentiation, integration, becoming, etc.

It is an article of faith in serious literature that change is possible and indeed desirable in characters. It is what we look for when we read. But is that mere fiction? Can people really change?

Let's look at some "real world" beliefs:

Freudian psychoanalysis believes change is possible only if one confronts and recognizes the role childhood (primarily sexual) traumas played in forging one's psyche.

Marxian analysis believes change is possible only if the social conditions that determine one's identity are first rectified.
Maoism believed "re-education" was the route to change in the people. Stalinism saw very little room for change and opted for strategies of eradication.

Darwinian analysis is more deterministic: we are who we are by virtue of our genetic make-up and change in human nature only occurs incrementally over the long haul of generations.

Christianity holds that human nature is fallen and can only be changed if our fallen soul is somehow driven out and replaced by the Christ-soul—some hold this conversion or "second birth" is an instantaneous result of professing faith, others that it occurs through a lifetime of good works. Yet, for the most part, Christianity does not believe in the perfectibility of humanity. Salvation is a supernatural thing and is determinative of one's status in the afterlife, not in reality.

Humanism believes human nature is essentially good and merely needs proper nourishment to self-actualize. I'm not sure that is precisely change.

As on most things, philosophers are split. The majority, classical position believes human beings are unchanging substantive entities (Being, essence, Monad, etc.) with a changing list of contingent properties. The minority position believes that existence preceeds essence: that becoming trumps being, and change is the primary feature of human identity.

Sociologically, as a matter of principle, caste- or class-based societies do not believe in change—in fact, they are formed precisely in opposition to it and can be violently resistant to ideas of progress or change.

Politically and juridically: The U.S. has a prison population of over two million, nearly one in one hundred adults—one of the, if not the, highest rates and greatest numbers of prisoners of any country in the world. Are Americans worse as a people or is our legal system simply meaner? A society's belief in the possibility of change is reflected in its theory of criminal jurisprudence: punishment/retribution, isolation, deterrence, rehabilitation. For example, a society which holds humans are capable of change will sport a theory closer in nature to rehabilitation and deterrence. A society that believes humans are incapable of changing will adhere more to a punishment/retribution, isolation theory of criminal justice and will, as a result, have a higher population imprisoned.

Here, in the U.S., this is an election year. One of the big issues is change. There seems to be an outcry for change from the status quo. Some say the status quo we need change from is the regime of the past seven years—the Bush/Cheney regime. Others say it is from the past fifteen years, somehow likening the Clinton presidency to that of Bush.

The common thread is that there can be change within the system given our form of government.

I'm not so sure.

Why? See, e.g., here. Though ostensibly we have freedom of choice between (usually) the representatives of two parties, these candidates can only sail through the process on the winds of big money. And the only change in sight appears to be this:

If anyone is reading this little blog o' mine, I'm going to be out-of-pocket until at least the 7th of January. But I'll leave you with this thought (the same one I'll be pondering this week): if adapting to an accelerating pace of change and diminution of resources is necessary for survival, what place is there for first (enduring, unchanging) principles? And: is the answer to that question precisely the topic of this blog? Is that where we might find wisdom?

Best wishes for the New Year, especially now we're past the dark night of the solstice!

I think it's safe to say our perceptions of the world and our place in it have undergone remarkable changes in recent times. The pace of change and the growth of knowledge at times seems overwhelming. Our evolving understanding of the extent and duration of the physical universe, our growing recognition of the building blocks of life, our awareness of our environment and our impact on it, our sense of ourselves as one species among many sharing the same space and limited resources: all these are fresh. And though these observations might seem obvious, these changes have impacted us in ways we can't begin to fathom. Where, then, is wisdom to be found?