1

The Philosophy of Change

by Dwayne Schulz

Part 1. Things and Events

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once famously remarked „It is not possible
to step twice in to the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you‟.
What he meant was that all things are in constant flux; just as a river consists of a
flow-through of different waters, so everything else in the cosmos is in a state of
perpetual change, of birth, growth, decay and death. This was summed up by a
famous expression “panta rhei” attributed to Heraclitus meaning “everything flows”.

But other ancient Greeks like Zeno argued that change was impossible and thought
up some of the most devious logical paradoxes to prove it. In one Zeno asks us to
imagine an arrow in flight. He considers the fact that the period during which the
arrow is in flight consists of an infinite series of instants and argues thus: (1) At any
given instant the arrow occupies a single space and no other, and (2) during that
instant the arrow is stationary. „How then‟, Zeno asks, „if the arrow is stationary at
every instant during its trajectory can it be said to have moved?‟ Zeno concluded
that motion and change were illusions masking a deeper unchanging reality below.

The paradoxical nature of change which so troubled Zeno can be illustrated with a
few more thought experiments. Consider the fact that every single molecule in the
human body, every atom in every cell, is replaced by different ones every few years
or so. How can you be the same person if, like Heraclitus‟s river, the stuff of which
you are made is constantly turning over and changing?

Or take Plutarch‟s mythical Ship of Theseus, the old planks of which are not only
replaced over the years but gradually re-assembled to form the original ship. Which
is the true ship - the old new one or the new old one?
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Finally, consider a simple loop in a piece of string (call it A) and the section of string
it is made out of (call it B). A and B constitute the same thing and are thus identical,
or A=B. But move the loop down the string to another location.

Loop A has changing string parts, first B then C.

Loop A is now composed of a different section of string C, or A=C. But pieces B and
C are patently different, i.e. B≠C, and this results in a logical contradiction because A
is equal to B and C which are unequal, or (A=B≠C=A)  (A≠A). I hope to give you
some convincing solutions to these paradoxes later on in the talk.

As bizarre as Zeno‟s ideas were that change is unreal, the bias against change runs
deep in the culture of Western civilization. Zeno in fact developed his paradoxes in
support of his mentor Parmenides, the „father of logic‟,‟ who said in his poem The
Way of Truth, that because change implied logical contradiction, being and not
being, it was impossible.

How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into
being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is
extinguished, and destruction unknown. (B 8.20-22)
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Part 2. Essence

Parmenides and Zeno‟s notion that change was impossible was taken up by Plato in
his theory of Forms. He argued that the idea of change without “a real thing” simply
led to confusion. In his book Cratylus, Plato argues in support of Parmenides and
Zeno that below the world of apparent change is a world of timeless unchanging
essences which are templates for ordinary objects on earth, that for each actual
horse there exists somewhere a perfect horse Form of which real horses are but
imperfect imitations.

Plato has Socrates say:

How can that be a real thing which is never in the same state?

…knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always

to abide and to exist, and if the transition is always going on there will always
be no knowledge and according to this view there will be no one to know and
nothing to be known.1

Everyday thought and language seem to support Plato‟s notion that somehow an
unchanging essence must underpin or ground apparent change. We tend to speak
about ordinary objects being subjected to accidental variations or changes of form.
Objects have properties and events happen to them. For example, in declarative
sentences like “John is sick” or “My car was in a smash” or “Venus is in orbit”, we
tend to think of the predicates „being sick, „being in a smash‟ and „being in orbit‟ as
incidental properties or states that the objects (John, My car and Venus) are
subjected to. This manner of thinking lends itself to a model of change in which the
subject is static and change is inessential, occurring as an external force.

This object-property model was formalised by Aristotle who argued that all things
were a combination of matter and form, a theory called hylomorphism. In Aristotle‟s
theory matter was a passive substance or „patient‟ which changed when acted upon

1
Cratylus Paragraph 440 sections c-d.
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by an external force or „agent‟ which gave it form. Ultimately all effects in Aristotle‟s
schema could be traced back to some original First Cause or God he called the
Prima Mobile or Prime Mover.

The idea of substance or matter deriving its form from some external agent of
change was adopted by medieval theologians like Aquinas who used it in support of
the Church doctrine that the body‟s soul derived from God. The substance-form
distinction also informed modern mechanical theories espoused by people like
Descartes and Newton who disagreed with Aristotle‟s physics but retained the idea
that “modes [properties] cannot be clearly conceived apart from the really distinct
substances of which they are the modes”.2 For Descartes, all the properties of
nature could be reduced to the quantitative (mathematical and measurable)
movements of matter whose fundamental property was extension in space or res
extensa. Scientists like Newton and Boyle agreed with Descartes‟ principle
interpreting it in atomistic terms (contra Descartes who subscribed to something like
an ether theory), arguing that nature was nothing but arrangements of impenetrable
„corpuscles‟ within the void of space.

The mechanistic idea left little or no place for real chance or novelty in the world.
Effects were totally determined by their causes and if you only had enough
information and processing power, you could predict with total precision all future
change in what they saw as a clockwork universe. Newton‟s contemporary the
French mathematician and astronomer Laplace summed up the mechanistic attitude
when he said,

[For] an intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set
nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, …

2
Descartes, Principles of Philosophy LXI.
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nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present
before its eyes.3

Newton and Laplace believed in a clockwork universe

The first philosopher of modern times to revive Heraclitus‟s idea of panta rhei and to
mount a systematic critique of the mechanists was the early 19th Century German
philosopher Hegel. Hegel too argued that Becoming or change was fundamental.
However, for him change as it manifested itself in nature and history revealed the
story of an inner essence he called the „World Spirit‟ or the Absolute gradually
unfolding itself through a process he called „the dialectic‟ (i.e. the clash of binary
opposites. in in war, politics and science) culminating in a state of perfect freedom
and unity with God.

In my opinion Hegel‟s Absolute plays the same role as Substance in the philosophy
of the mechanists, and his dialectic is just as deterministic, proceeding as it does
along a singular narrow path towards a pre-determined end. Hegel‟s dialectic
constricts the scope of change choking the multiple and diverse alternatives that
history can take. I will return to this idea soon but the same criticism can be applied
to all theories of history and change which tell a story of uni-linear progress. For

3
Laplace, "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities”.
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example 19th Century anthropologist Henry Morgan asserted that humankind

progressed through a series of stages from “savagery” through “barbarism” to reach
its apogee in “civilization”. Marx also adopted this view arguing that history
progressed from the primitive tribalism via class society and ultimately to
communism. Modern right-wing commentators like Francis Fukuyama‟s also adopt
this view when they say that free-market liberalism represents the “end of history”.
Such views pretend to a philosophy of change but at the end of the day preach
different versions of mechanism in which change proceeds towards some pre-figured
image in an isomorphic movement from same to same, where there really is nothing
new under the sun.

However, the idea that there is more to change than the expression of unchanging
essences, principles or substances, the idea that that the cosmos is animated by a
kind of change which is more unpredictable, diverse and creative has persisted
through the ages. To my mind the first modern thinker who really put this kind of
change at the centre of their philosophy was the French intellectual Henri Bergson.

Part 3. Bergson

At the end of the 19th Century, Bergson argued that the object-property model
misconstrues becoming (or what he called „duree‟,i.e. duration) because it tries to
“think the unstable by means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile”.

But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no
form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the
continual change of form: form is only a snapshot view of a transition.
Therefore, here again, our perception manages to solidify into discontinuous
images the fluid continuity of the real. When the successive images do not
differ from each other too much, we consider them all as the waxing and
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waning of a single mean image, or as the deformation of this image in

different directions. And to this mean we really allude when we speak of the
essence of a thing, or of the thing itself.4

In other words, in speaking about an object and its forms we are abstracting out
idealized entities from a continuous stream of change, trying to cut out and arbitrarily
privilege one stage above the whole process. This procedure is equivalent to saying
to an 80 year old man that he is but a diminished representation of his „true self‟ as a
teenager. In reality Bergson would argue, the 18 year old and the 80 year old are
equally necessary and valid parts of a single and indivisible process.

Bergson therefore does more than just assert the internal or necessary nature of
change. What he does is to abolish objects and forms altogether arguing that both
are fictional entities invented by our intellect to fix or screen out the fact of perpetual
flux. Bergson argues that that we have a bad habit of distorting the truth of our own
inner experience of time, of treating it like space, as something that is homogenous,
measurable, and divisible.

In contrast to thinking about time in terms of space, Bergson urges us to think about
how our inner sense of time arises from experiencing the flow of heterogenous
qualities or intensities of feeling in what he calls a confused or qualitative multiplicity.
Bergson gives the example of watching the graceful movements of a dancer, and
how our aesthetic experience gradually unfolds from one set of qualities to others.

Thus the perception of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure of
mastering the flow of time and of holding the future in the present. A third
element comes in when … rhythm and measure [allow] us to foresee to a still
greater extent the movements of the dancer. …. Thus the increasing
intensities of aesthetic feeling are here resolved into as many different

4
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
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feelings, each one of which, already heralded by its predecessor, becomes

perceptible in it and then completely eclipses it.

Series of heterogenous intensities ground our inner sense of time

Bergson is encouraging us to pay attention to how we actually experience change as

a continuous stream of different qualitative states merging into each-other, as a flow
of heterogeneous but fused feelings which cannot be analyzed as a series of merely
quantitative or discrete changes. He is highlighting the fact that no situation is ever
truly repeated in consciousness, that every experience is qualitatively unique and
that this perpetual newness or creativity constitutes our sense of the passing of time.

In his book Creative Evolution published in 1907, Bergson argued that our inner
experience of duration, of qualitative multiplicity, was not just a subjective viewpoint
but an objective fact about the behavior and evolution of life in general. He
postulated a universal tendency amongst living things, contrary to the second law of
thermodynamics, towards the production of novelty and diversity, a tendency he
dubbed the elan vital or vital force or as he put it “a ceaseless upspringing of
something new”.

Despite great popularity in his early career, in the inter-war period, Bergson‟s views
were increasingly marginalised as „merely‟ poetic, mystical, feminine and out of
touch with „hard‟ science. Bergson‟s claim about the elan vital was misconstrued as
an argument for some kind of ectoplasm. For these and various other reasons
Bergson faded into relative obscurity.
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However, even whilst Bergson was alive the classical and mechanistic view that had
been propounded by Descartes and Newton was disintegrating in the face of a new
scientific paradigm which was jettisoning substance based accounts in favour of
ones in which “the reality is movement [and] fluid continuity”. For example, in 1929
De Broglie won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that electrical charge in the atom
manifested itself in waves of energy rather than as a corpuscle orbiting the nucleus
like a planet around the sun. In 1926 Heisenberg discovered his famous uncertainty
principle which said that a quantum particle either had a precise momentum or a
precise position but not both at the same time. By 1927 Neils Bohr‟s Cophenhagen
interpretation demonstrated that sub-atomic particles instantaneously co-ordinated
their behaviour without information or a force passing between them through a
mechanical medium by what Einstein famously derided as “spooky action at a
distance”. These discoveries were turning Laplace‟s notion of a precise clockwork
universe into nothing but a fanciful dream. The world was no longer seen to be
composed of Impenetrable atoms moving along sharply defined paths but by pure
processes and nebulous entities like probability fields, collapsing wave functions,
and quantum events.

Whilst Bergson cannot be said to have predicted these developments in physics in

any detail, his philosophy was remarkably prescient to the extent he argued that
science was discovering more and more that the apparent unchanging substances of
the world were but the play of ever more subtle and elusive processes. In 1907 he
wrote,

In vain … shall we seek beneath the change, the thing which changes: it is
always provisionally, and in order to satisfy our imagination, that we attach the
movement to a mobile. The mobile flies for ever before the pursuit of science,
which is concerned with mobility alone. In the smallest discernible fraction of a
second, in the almost instantaneous perception of a sensible quality, there
may be trillions of oscillations which repeat themselves. The permanence of a
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sensible quality consists in this repetition of movements, as the persistence of

life consists in a series of palpitations.5

Atomic phenomena seem to be the result ever more subtle and elusive processes

But Bergson saw the elan vital as manifesting itself mainly in living organisms. He
called living organisms “zones of indetermination”, more than simple robots which
reacted automatically to chemical and physical forces. So, somewhat ironically
Bergson was accepting the picture that had been passed down from Aristotle and
Descartes of matter as a passive and brute substance requiring an external agent to
animate and organise it. Had Bergson studied the revolution in quantum physics
unfolding in his own time he may have been tempted to abandon that picture, and to
generalise the elan vital to the matter in general and the cosmos as a whole.

Part 4. Whitehead

One philosopher who did believe that matter and nature were processes rather than
substances was Alfred North Whitehead, a younger contemporary and fellow traveler
of Bergson‟s. Whitehead was famous as a mathematician and logician before he
turned to metaphysical philosophy in the 1920s. In his view an ordinary thing of the
world like an atom, a person, a chair or a planet is not a static and homogenous
object but a relatively stable balance of forces, a coalition of divergent tendencies or
processes in temporary equilibrium, what he called an event.

5
Bergson, op cit.
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AN Whitehead

Whitehead gave the example of Cleopatra's Needle on the Victoria Embankment in

London as an example of an apparently static object that is actually a series of
events cascading through time and history. One writer summaries Whitehead‟s
lesson about Cleopatra‟s Needle thus:

Its granite was sculpted by human hands, sometime around 1450 BCE. It was
moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria in 12 BCE, and again from Alexandria to
London in 1877-1878 CE. And some day, no doubt, it will be destroyed, or
otherwise cease to exist. But for Whitehead, there is much more to it than
that. Cleopatra's Needle isn't just a solid, impassive object upon which certain
grand historical events– being sculpted, being moved –have occasionally
supervened. Rather, it is eventful at every moment. From second to second,
even as it stands seemingly motionless, Cleopatra's Needle is actively
happening. It never remains the same. "A physicist who looks on the part of
the life of nature as a dance of electrons, will tell you that daily it has lost
some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it
gets dirtier and is occasionally washed" (ibid., 167). At every instant, the mere
standing-in-place of Cleopatra’s Needle is an event: a renewal, a novelty, a
fresh creation.6

6
Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead Deleuze and Aesthetics.
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Cleopatra’s Needle, thing or event?

In Whitehead‟s opinion the ultimate components of the world are what he calls
“actual occasions'', the smallest units of becoming, infinitesimals which perish the
second they are born at the cusp of existence. According to Whitehead each actual
occasion is a novelty which becomes “datum” for, or is inherited by later occasions
once it passes out of existence, that is a point of origin or a source for later
occasions without being a deterministic cause of them. Complexes of related actual
occasions make up ordinary events and objects like Cleopatra‟s Needle. The point
is that insofar as an object like Cleopatra‟s Needle or a hydrogen atom can be said
to exist at all, „it‟ must be perpetually re-constituted, repeated or re-approached by
more subtle, subterranean forces over and over again, there is no sense in which
things persist through time as if by inertia.7

Whitehead‟s notion that identities only exist in an ideal sense is more obvious for
objects whose constituents turn over at a faster rate. Think about a wave in the
ocean for example. It consists of different bodies of water molecules banging into
one another in succession, and yet we speak about it as a single self-same thing. A
whirlpool, an object like Jupiter‟s Red Spot, and even a social instituition like
parliament have changing constituents but can be idealised as retaining a single
identity throughout. Whitehead is urging us to think about all objects in the world in a
similar fashion, as relatively stable or repeated patterns of underlying processes, as
forms continuously made and remade in a flowing medium, what I call “Rheamorphs”

7
Shaviro, Ibid, p.20.
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from the Greek word “Rhea” meaning flow, and the Latin word “morph” meaning
form.

Objects are static ideals of rheamorphs (patterns in a flowing medium).

Part 5. Deleuze

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze described the underlying movement behind
the apparent identities of direct perception as “difference in itself”. Deleuze argued
in his book Difference and Repetition published in 1968 that the concept of identity
as it has been developed in traditional Western logic and philosophy marginalises or
displaces the reality of difference. To categorise or partition a phenomenon under a
general predicate or to unify it under a concept is to suppress the repetition of
difference, the ongoing process of diversification or self-differentiation occurring
below the surface. As one writer has put it, for Deleuze, “Identity is only a cloak
thrown over deeper pure differences”. 8

Deleuze argued that identities or unities emerge from a field of latent potentiality
which he calls the Virtual. The identities, individuals, objects and things of
immediate perception or actuality emerge from the Virtual like stars forming in the
nebulae of deep space or crystals growing in solution. Deleuze is arguing that
Reality is driven by a subtle but restless energy that is forever trying on new forms
only to discard them at a later date in a never-ending play of differentiation. Every
form in actuality is an imperfect, limited and ultimately temporary solution to the

8
Hughes, J. Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition.
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insoluble problem of the Virtual which exceeds its limited manifestations like a river
that is forever bursting its banks. In some sense the Virtual contains all the multiple,
divergent and opposing directions selected by the Actual. It is therefore like a
dynamo that not only works to produce the seemingly regular, repetititious, and
cyclical changes underpinning identity but also the irregular and aberrant changes
which lead to branching and genuine differences.

Ultimately what people like Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze are arguing for is the
idea that creative change is a fundamental and ubiquitous tendency in nature that
nothing is ever truly repeated, and is as Locke once said of time “a perpetual
perishing” as well as a new creation, that every morning and every breath is unique,
unprecedented and new. On this view, an effect is only partly determined by its
antecedent causes. There is always an aspect of the unfolding present which
cannot be traced back to the past, an aspect which is unprecedented and truly
different from any thing that came before. In Whitehead‟s words, “Creativity is the
universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact”.9

Part 6. Instants and Duration

I think we are now in a position to resolve some of the paradoxes mentioned at the
beginning of this talk. Bergson‟s advice about the follies of trying to think the mobile
in terms of the immobile is the key. Bergson‟s diagnosis of Zeno‟s arrow is that we
simply cannot divide an event or a process into a series of instantaneous points of
zero duration, that the concept of a moving arrow „being at an instant‟ is a fiction to
begin with. Instants are frozen abstractions, attempts to capture the moving by
means of the immobile. Once we realise that time cannot be decomposed into a
series of instants, that all parts of a duration are themselves durations, that in any
given period during the arrow‟s flight it is never stationary, the paradox disappears.

9
Whitehead, AN. Process & Reality, 1929, Pt. I, ch. 2, sec. 2
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As for human identity, the Ship of Theseus, and the loop of string paradoxes, I think
Bergson would say something similar – that there is no one true form that can be
isolated as the essence of a sequence of different forms in a process of continual
change. No inner soul which survives changes in bodily and mental composition, no
Real Ship of Theseus that persists through the ship-building process, and no self-
same Loop that survives the flow of different string parts10. To assert the existence of
an essence is merely to abstract out an idealised form from a process of continual
transformation – the only reality is the whole and indivisible process of change itself.

Part 7. Vibrant Matter & Creative Change

Another important aspect of a substance or essence based ontology which can be

criticised is that it tends to rank phenomena hierarchically. If we assert the existence
of an inner essence or substance we privilege one form above others, that is we set
up a hierarchy in which one form is the true and the others merely derivative
imitations or primitive precursers.

For example in the now outdated medieval notion of a „Great Chain of Being‟,
revived by 19th Century naturalists, nature and evolution are portrayed as moving
from more primitive forms towards more complex and sophisticated ones reaching its
apogee with the human civilization and consciousness. All organisms are ranked on
a scale with simple organisms like bacteria at the bottom, more complex beings like
mammals in the middle and humans at the top.

Evolutionary biology however teaches us that there is no march of progress in

nature, that each organism is more or less successful in its own terms and ecological
niche. Also recent biology points to the importance of phenomena such as
horizontal gene transfer between species by viruses and a process called endo-
symbiosis.11 These discoveries are breaking down the idea of completely separate

10
So either we have A=B or A=C but not both, the notion of A persisting through a change in string parts is true
only ideally, as a useful fiction, a manner of speaking, or a facon de parler.
11
Frank Ryan‟s recent book Virolution tells how the presence of foreign DNA in the genomes of every
creature testifies to the importance of symbiotic relationships especially those involving viruses and
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species or a „tree of life in which genes are exclusively passed down the generations
through distinct lineages. A new image of the evolutionary process is emerging as
an “impenetrable thicket of interrelatedness”12 where species lines regularly merge
and hybridize. Biological science is now telling us that life cannot be organised into
sharply differentiated species let alone a hierarchy because every organism is
deeply enmeshed in inter-species genetic flows. Life is a messy network rather than
a neat hierarchy. The idea that humans are at the pinnacle of evolution is now
defunct, we are just one creature amongst many and may like 99% of every species
that has existed one day disappear into the evolutionary night.13

These findings show that the forms of nature are „rheamorphs‟ which have a
tendency to flow and blend into eachother via what Deleuze and his sometime
collaborator Felix Guattari referred to as rhizomorphic or transversal flows which link
them up into dynamic and heterogenous multiplicities, networks, ecologies or
assemblages.

The structure of life: Darwin’s tree or a ‘dense thicket of inter-relatedness’; a rhizomorph?

bacteria. See also biologist Lynn Margulise‟s work on symbiosis in the evolution mitochondria and
eukaryotic cells.

12
Lawton, Graham, “Why Darwin Was Wrong About The Tree of Life”, New Scientist, 21 January
2009.
13
See the works of evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould
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The hierarchic model of nature not only motivated a great deal of 19th and 20th
century biology but anthropology, criminology, eugenics and politics as well. It led to
the ranking of people according to their distance from an arbitrarily elevated
archetype (the white, middle-class European). Those down the scale were treated
as if they were mere castoffs, inferior imitations, deformations or primitive precursors
of the real thing. As one anthropologist puts it,

A ladder to success arose from the primitive to that of the civilized, from the
tribal village of Africa to London and the splendour of the Strand. The cultures
of the world came to be seen as a living museum in which individual societies
represented evolutionary moments captured and mired in time, each one a
stage in the imagined ascent to civilization. …14

The above ideas ultimately led to the Holocaust. The genetic and historical truth of
course is that transversal flows between different human „races‟ and cultures bind us
into a single albeit internally differentiated continuum.

The genetic endowment of humanity is a single continuum. From Ireland to

Japan, from the Amazon to Siberia there are no sharp genetic differences
among populations. There are only geographic gradients. The most remote
society on earth contains within its people fully 85 percent of our total genetic
diversity.15

Science in general is now disproving the hierarchic model which posits dead and
unorganised matter at the bottom, complex and dynamic life in the middle and
human consciousness at the top. Take chaos theory, it demonstrates that even the
simplest of non-linear physical processes can generate startling levels of
unpredictable and complex behaviour. Mandelbrot‟s fractals for example suggest
bedazzling levels complexity to the material world and show us that repetition or
iteration of very simple algorithms generate spirals of self-similarity, of branching and
diversification at every turn rather than homogenous regularity or sameness. I spoke

14
Wade Davis, The Wayfinders.

15
Ibid
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about how advances in quantum physics destroyed mechanistic substance based

accounts of change showing that even at the smallest scale matter exhibits qualities
like unpredictability and deep connectedness. Some modern cosmologists like Lee
Smolin see cosmic structure as fundamentally life-like, as an open process of
creative evolution and ongoing development rather than the result of a strictly
repetitious application and unfolding of eternal law.16 The discovery of dark flow in
the cosmic microwave background also suggests massive entities beyond the
horizon of the visible universe and the possibility that the cosmos is a vastly bigger,
more complex and open process than current theories allow.

The mechanistic ideas of unilinear progress, hierarchy and deterministic change

therefore seem redundant in the light of today‟s biology and physics which are
revealing more and more that the domain of matter is not dumb, inert, unchanging
and lifeless but intelligent, eventful, creative and vibrant, a rejuvenation in modern
form perhaps of the ancient Greek idea of hylozoism - that a degree of sentience and
“vital life permeates the whole cosmos down to the lowliest stone”. 17

I think the philosophic lesson of this „vibrant materialism‟18 is that we are not
separate from nature but just one amongst many of its teeming and interdependent
collectives. A metaphysics which understands creative change as a fundamental
force of nature and the cosmos does justice to the fact that agency is not a uniquely
human trait but one common to all life forms and matter in general facilitating a more
respectful approach to the cosmic, terrestrial, ecological and biotic assemblages
from which we emerged and in which we are embedded.

16
Smolin, L. The Life of the Cosmos, 1997 – argues that physical law and constants evolve. and
massive entities beyond the horizon of the visible universe and an open cosmic meta-structure
bending into other scales and dimensions.

17
Merchant, C.The Death of Nature, 1980: 278)

18
Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. 2009.
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Nature displays spirals and branches of ever-deepening diversity not uni-linear progress or
hierarchy

Finally, the fact that spontaneity, pure chance or randomness are built into the very
fabric of existence guarantees an open future and a world of contingent possibilities.
It is this fact which grounds our free will and the need for creative thinking to tackle
ever new problems and emerging opportunities. Admittedly, like Marx said, we do
not make ourselves under circumstances of our own choosing, but we are as
Whitehead liked to say less subjects of Nature than super-jects from Nature, i.e.
beings who are both subject to, and who supersede, the dictates of
circumstance. The philosophy of change is therefore not only a philosophy of great
explanatory power but offers tremendous hope as well.
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Some quotes on change and vibrant matter

Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its
adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence.

Whitehead, Part 5, 337, Process & Reality

This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made. But it always
was and will be: an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going
out.

Heraclitus

I maintain also that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived

in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance
in general…. I even hold, with the majority of the ancients, that the whole of nature is
full of force, of life and of souls.

Leibniz to the Electress Sophe

I believe that as long as the world has lasted and will last, it has always had and will
have forms of matter that are more or less subtle in an infinity of degrees, and that
what is subtle in our view is always crude in comparison to an infinity of other forms
that are more subtle. Also, I do not believe that there is a primary element, as
Descartes imagined.

Leibniz to Andre Morell

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We are aware that everything finite, instead of being inflexible, is rather changeable
and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by the dialectic of the finite, by which
the finite, as implicitly other than it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or
natural being, and turn suddenly into its opposite.

Hegel

Everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance
but as Subject as well.

Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)

In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with

something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What happens `really' in an atomic event?' Observation ... selects of all possible
events the one that has actually happened ... Therefore, the transition from `possible'
to `actual' takes place during the act of observation'.

Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy 1958, p.54

This existence of ours is as transient as Autumn clouds. To watch the birth and
death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is a flash of
lightning in the sky. Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

The Buddha