Penn Humanities Forum
on Change 2008–2009, Tenth Anniversary
Topic Director: Peter Struck Associate Professor of Classics, Penn
In awed and majestic tones, Heraclitus portrayed
the cosmos in a state of constant flux. For his student Cratylus,
this vision was nothing short of terrifying. If a person cannot
step twice into the same river, even during the course of
a single step the river will not stay the same. Cratylus spent
the last years of his life in transfixed silence, moving only
a finger.
The Penn Humanities Forum anticipates a happier
fate for the participants in its tenth anniversary year on
Change, though not one free of controversy. Clearly, kaleidoscopes
and rollercoasters are not everyone’s cup of tea, but
for some at least, change is as welcome as life itself, with
its discrete stages and cycles. Ideas flourish and deepen mutatis mutandis; modulation and variation give music
its savor; revolution and conversion power utopias. Metamorphosis,
metempsychosis, and metaphor are the stuff of wonder, and
the long arcs of evolution, migration, and civilizational
rise and fall determine what it is to be human.
For others, however, change suggests instability
and epistemological drift. Proteus was a monster, after all,
and “mutabilitie” for Spenser, as for any Platonist,
summarized the pain and limitation of mortal existence. Misogyny
equated Woman with flightiness and inconstancy, and hysteria
with an unstable womb. Change does not sit well with champions
of authenticity and purity, forcing questing heroes to leave
the steady state of home for life-threatening chaos. For thinkers
like Boethius, the only place for the philosopher was at the
still, unmoving center of Fortune’s wheel. A millennium
and a half later, Saussure taught us to bracket off diachrony
if we wish to grasp structure and system.
Some have tried to avoid this either/or. By
marking out periods and paradigm shifts, scholars have attempted
to conceptualize change, transforming flux into algorithm.
How many have sought solutions like the middle way of Paul
Ricoeur, who pictured the "self" as integrating
change over time and thus rendering it non-destructive? Even
Darwinian evolution, so threatening and controversial, draws
lines of continuity through biological history. Themes and
variations entail one another. Meaningful consistency is impossible
in the absence of change.
In 2008-2009, the Penn Humanities Forum invites
scholars, students, and the Philadelphia public to its tenth
anniversary, a Year of Change.
May, 2007
Peter Struck, Topic Director
Wendy Steiner, Director, Penn Humanities Forum
