Aristotle's Paradigm

Acaciah Glaze

Humanitas

12/12/13

A Changeless Principle

What if I told you that your life is lie? What if I told you that everything you think you know is actually something you once knew, only for an instantaneous moment in time? A moment so hard to grasp, that it barely exists. Often humans go about their days oblivious to the nonstop change that is happening all around us, as well as inside of us. We treat moments as several strum together snapshots to create a time period called the present. The present being the time period of the “now”, but as soon as you think about, acknowledge, or refer to it, the time has passed already. Change is a problem when it comes to knowing something because to know anything it means to have a relationship with the subject of knowledge. To have a relationship with anything means acknowledging the duality that you have between yourself and the object. This relationship can be physical or conceptual but nonetheless there remains a difference. You are not the ball you’re holding but you are aware that it is a ball, or just that it’s not you; you believe that there is God but you have not been up in the heavens sitting next to it. We cannot be absolutely certain that a ball is a ball or there is a god if we are limited to the senses of our own human body. Especially when we too are always changing, as well as the object. Our connection with the object continually expires. Therefore, we do not actually know anything, we possess this feeling of knowing, that presupposes some an act of “knowing”. Upon hearing this news one might feel empty or purposeless, or question the entire point of life if there isn’t any stability. However, there are three perspectives that propose three different solutions to this problem of stability and change we face every moment of our lives. The three perspectives are the Mythological, Ancient Western, and Modern Western.

The Mythological perspective proposes that this unchanging principle are myths....