Change: It is in Everything

There are a lot of things that a person doesn’t know, whether it be about himself or about other things. I learned a lot more about myself and about other things through the topics discussed. This blog will explain to you a topic which I learned.

When we think of change, we think of a thing forming itself from something to another. Two factors come at play here, motion and becoming. These two are related in terms of change, when something changes, we assume that it is in motion towards something; when something changes we know that that thing becomes something else, an example of this would be when a boy grows up to be an adult, he becomes more mature than before.

There are four elements of change. The first would be the subject of the change, the one which changes, second is the point from which the change occurs, this is the status of the subject before the change occurred, next is the point to which the change ends, the status of the subject after the change, lastly, the process of change itself. An example of this would be the change of a green leaf to yellow. The subject of the change is the leaf; the point from which it changed was when it was green, while the point to which it changes is when it becomes yellow.

Many people have studied change, they have come up with different ideas, and later on theories, three significant philosophers have made important ideas on change, they are Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Aristotle. Heraclitus based his ideas on the senses. He says that all things are always changing, nothing is permanent. He also said that the more you change the more you remain the same; I believe this statement is true because it is in our nature to change, and when we change the closer we are to that nature. The other philosopher Parmenides based his belief on the idea that our senses deceive, stating that changes are illusory. Those two philosophies made on change have some flaws which make them less believable to other people. Heraclitus did not take into account things such as truth and God, both of which is never-ending. In the case of Parmenides, he states that changes are illusory, but if they are, wont death and pain be illusory too. He somehow says that killing a person is just an illusion; this is not right because the subject of morality is not taken into account, and he failed to see that our senses are the ones which make us have the ability to know things. The last would be Aristotle. He based his ideas on both senses and reason. He says that in all kinds of change, something goes away from the subject, something comes into the subject, and something stays of the subject. When you turn on a television, you’ll notice that the blackness of the screen or it being motionless is gone, on the other hand, the screen goes from being motionless to being in motion, the factor that stays with the subject is that it is still a tv.

There is an act and a potency in every thing. The act is everything that a thing is, for example, a person is a person, that is one of his acts. The potency is everything a thing can be, an example would be that a kid has a potency of being a man.

A being is made up of substance and accidents. The substance is the core of a thing; the accidents are those things that make you what you are, these are like the attributes of a being. There are two kinds of change. These are the substantial change and the accidental change. The substantial change is a change wherein a substance ceases to be and is transformed into another distinct substance. An example of this would be burning a table, its substance from being a table changes to a substance of ash. The other change would be the accidental change, wherein the substance, while remaining in itself undergoes certain alterations. An example of this would be the changing of a green leaf to yellow, it itself remains to be a leaf but it changes its appearance.

As you can see, change is in every thing, it is the passing of one thing to another which it was not before. I hope you learn a lot more in this study of change.