Change
Change, the quality of impermanence and flux, has had a chequered history as a concept. In ancient Greek philosophy, while Heraclitus saw change as ever-present and all-encompassing, Parmenides virtually denied its existence.Ovid produced a classic thematic handling of change as metamorphosis in his Metamorphoses.
Ptolemaic astronomy envisioned a largely static universe, with erratic change confined to less worthy spheres.
Medieval thought fostered great respect for authority and revelation, severely cramping any encouragement of change.
Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz harnessed mathematical concepts into calculus to provide mathematical models of change. This constituted a major step forward in understanding flux and variation.
With the rise of industrialisation and capitalism, the importance attached to innovation grew, and social and political upheavals and pressures often forced change by violent revolution (as in North America in the late 18th century and in later imitators). By the late 20th century much business and New Age thought focussed enthusiastically on transformation in management, in function and in mental attitudes, while ignoring or deploring changes in society or in geopolitics. And Madison Avenue receives payment to repeat the litany of the fad for change: In the fast-changing world of today, you need ... productX.
Cultural attitudes to change itself may fall into one of at least two categories:
- the view that change is random, lacking determinism or teleology.
- the view that change is cyclical, whereby one expects circumstances to recur. This concept, often seen as related to Eastern world views such as Hinduism or Buddhism, nevertheless had great popularity in Europe in the Middle ages, and often appears in depictions of the wheel of fortune.
Compare identity and change, globalisation.
Depending on context, the term 'change' may in particular refer to:
Change is also the name of a commune in the Côte-d'Or département in France.
sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature and twines her loosened
nicest in his song.
This it was which, in spite of his essentially modern character as a
it made him, in the truest sense of the word, a mythological poet.
among whom mythologies have their rise. Those Nature myths which,
very basis of Shelley's poetry. The lark that is the gossip of
billows, the clouds that are snorted from the sea's broad nostril,
incarnation and reincarnation, pass in a thousand glorious
Nature. For with Nature the Wordsworthians will admit no tampering:
poet should follow her as a mistress, not use her as a handmaid. To
picture set for his copying, but a palette set for his brush; not a
might quarry stones for his own palaces. Even in his descriptive
the clear, recognisable scenery of Wordsworth, but a landscape that
fantasies. The materials for such visionary Edens have evidently
him into such scenes as never had mortal eye beheld. "Don't you
Shelley with the Lake poet is that he loved Nature with a love even
Nightingale and Stockdove sums up the contrast between the two, as
"creature of ebullient heart," who
Had helped him to a valentine.
- Love with quiet blending,
the "serious faith and inward glee."
But if Shelley, instead of culling Nature, crossed with its pollen
marvellous and best apology. For astounding figurative opulence he
fecundity but in images. The sources of his figurative wealth are
been as conscious an effort for him to speak without figure as it is
of his imagination the commonest object becomes encrusted with
.
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