The same but changing

About 2,500 years ago the Greek philosophers Parmenides and Heracleitus argued a basic question: Is life a matter of being or becoming? Parmenides taught that change is an illusion. His disciple Zeno posed a number of “paradoxes” to prove it, the most famous being Achilles and the tortoise: If Achilles challenges the tortoise to a race, he can never win because the distance to cover can be infinitely divided. I don’t get it, but the point is, reality is static.

Heracleitus insisted that nothing is static; all is change. One cannot step into a river twice, because the water of the first step is not the same as the water of the second.

Practical people don’t think overlong about infinite division or feet in the river, but the debate between Parmenides and Heracleitus, stripped to its essence, has shaped whole societies as well as individuals. Is reality static or is it con­tinually in flux? Is there a basic unalterable human nature, or can people and cultures be shaped to fit a desirable mold?

Arthur Brooks posed a similar, more pointed question in The Atlantic last October: “Are You a Platonist or an Aristotelian?” Plato, with his theory of ideal forms, might be seen as a more refined Parmenidean. All creatures, he taught, conform to a transcendent ideal that defines their nature. A Jack Russell terrier and a Great Dane may look and act like different species but share an essential “dogginess” that no amount of time and circumstance can alter.

His student Aristotle was more of the Heraclitean school. Change was the essence of nature; today’s dog is not yesterday’s dog. Brooks recalls learning from his brother that the cells making up every human body turn over at least once every seven years. Therefore, “I am literally a different physical person from the one I was just a few years ago,” even though “I feel like the same person, year after year.”

Brooks applies the conundrum to today’s obsession with identity. Those contemporary Platonists who base their personal “truth” on how they identify—by race, gender, ideology, etc.—often find themselves stymied by circumstances or how others see them. “Identity” can become a trap. As a student of human happiness, Brooks favors Aristotle: “You will have a better chance of realizing happiness if you can see yourself as a dynamic agent of your own progress.”

But if selfhood means anything, there must be an essential self, a being that is immutably Ben or Asaph or Samarra, who will somehow survive its death and (most of us believe) live on in some fashion. We are continually surprised at how fast babies develop and kids lunge from childhood to adolescence. Yet we accept that newborn Ben is the same as septuagenarian Ben, strange as it may seem. To freeze at a certain age and never grow older would be stranger still.

Change is where things happen. But not just for the sake of happening. For one summer during my teens I became addicted to the daytime soap opera Dark Shadows. As with any soap, change was the attraction: Every day, new plot developments and twists and secondary characters tracing their arcs across umpteen episodes. Would she, won’t he, could she, will he—and suddenly I realized the show had no being, only becoming. It had no goal. When the novelty wore off, so did the attraction.

That’s the problem with Heracleitus. Change for the sake of change ultimately satisfies no one.

But Parmenides has his problems, too. Everybody wants to be somebody, and not necessarily Somebody with a capital S. We simply want to know ourselves. Project yourself back to middle school or junior high and recall how desperate you were to know how to act. The swift changes of adolescence had swept you away from who you were. You may have tried to pick up cues from the cool kids, or deliberately be non­conformist, only to find that neither were “you.” “Just be,” was the advice of the ’60s. Be what? “Just do it,” Nike advised a couple of decades later. Do what, and why?

God says, “I am”—the ground of all being. Grounded in Him, we can be, and become: “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.”

Too bad Heracleitus and Parmenides never read Paul. I’m glad we can.