Aristotle's Parmenides: The Subject Of Change

Change is defined as the transition from one thing into something else, which Aristotle and his predecessors describe as "coming-to-be”. Theories on how this alteration occurred and what was subject to change vary among the pre-Socratics, and one such philosopher of this era went so far to claim that change is logically impossible. The Greek philosopher Parmenides argues that all change was merely an illusion and that reality, which only is, is unchanging. He uses the word “is” to demonstrate what is being. When the word “not” is added after “is”, it shows what is not being. Anything that exists in the world is, and can never become that which is not. Hence, what is exists in a state of permanency with no potential to be otherwise.

Parmenides’
further illustrates this ultimate permanency by elaborating on the two entities required for change to occur: the initial object and the resulting object. While the latter is obviously a being, that which is; the problem arises when attempting to find how the initial object came to be. Since what already is has no potential for coming-to-be, Parmenides neglects any notion of potentiality or lacking for initial objects. Instead, he argues that the only two alternatives for anything is being or non-being. These translate to what is and what is not, and are subject to the same stability. Thus, if the initial object is then it is a being, making it a completely separate being from the resulting object. The crunch of Parmenides’ argument is that both beings exist independently of each other and cannot come-to-be anything else. All objects remains stagnate in their place of being, as what is; the possibility for coming-to-be a different object cannot be since this thing too is a being of its own.

This formulation is known as Parmenides’ false dilemma, which Aristotle was able to reject by drawing a distinction of his own. He uses the issue with initial object to respond to Parmenides’ claim; stating that the initial object was in fact a being but also, at the same time in a way a non-being; and vice versa. For Parmenides’ conclusion to be true, we must accept the premise that initial objects are simplistic, merely being or non-being. Aristotle improves his theory of change by introducing the initial object as a compound rather than a simple, distinct from the resulting object. The initial object, for example, may be a child who cannot speak German; this is in one way being and in another way not being simultaneously. The initial object is something that which is because it is an actual child, and also something that is not for the child is not German-speaking.

In such cases as above, Aristotle would acknowledge one part of Parmenides’ theory- “nothing can come to be from what is not”; seeing as a German-speaking child cannot come from utter nothingness.
To fill in this gap in between being and nothing, he discusses three distinct principles underlining the “subject of change”: form, matter, and lack (or privation). What comes to be is form and what had been replaced is privation, with matter remaining the same throughout this process. Thus, Parmenides’ being can be further broken down into two types of Aristotelian beings, being-in-actuality (form) and being-in-potentiality (matter). These provide the foundation for change since being-in-actuality, which is the same as being in reality, gives rise to being-in-potentiality. Since being has its own unique actuality and potentiality, it is not one and the same with everything that which is. To illustrate this, imagine the being of a grain of sugar and its lacking the being of a strand of hair or bit of soil. It is this lack of other forms which allows for its capacity to become; i.e. change into something different. Parmenides did not have a theory for coming-to-being and consequently ceasing-to-be, which Aristotle solved by rejecting an object’s definition as either being or
non-being