Thank you, Will McMahon, for a timeless question.
It was Harry Truman who famously demanded someone find him an economist with only one hand. The problem: Truman was fed up with wishy-washy inconclusive answers; he didn’t want an economist to represent both sides of the argument with equal weight. No. He wanted clear-cut, practical advice that he could act upon as President of the world’s greatest economic power.
Often I have struggled with this point exactly. Harking back to my days as an undergraduate, I arrived at university expecting to discover all the answers. Yet I usually left feeling confused and frustrated. I was hungry for knowledge, and what I received in return was endless dilemmas, cryptic puzzles, and confounding conundrums. Not quite the return I had expected for my £27,000.
I should hope, then, that one would now be pleased to hear me answer the question with a full-throated, whole-hearted, unequivocal yes: permanence is an illusion! Well, kind of…
The thing is, the question cries out for a referent: What is it, precisely, that’s supposed to be permanent in the first place? Of course, one might reply: “Anything or everything!” But this only pushes the question aside; rather, we need to determine what are the any- and every-things of which we speak. For surely it can’t be the case that a non-thing is permanent; a non-thing is nothing, after all, and how can nothing be something – how can nothing be anything?
Confused? Good. So you should be. And, while you’re here, welcome to my world.
Now, in an attempt to try and bring a semblance of order to the discussion, it may or may not help to consider some examples: Is a rock is permanent? What about God or the Higgs boson? Are numbers permanent? Or perhaps some of the logical laws which govern them? What about the laws of morality? Will it always be the case that one should not kill, regardless of whether there’s anybody to kill or not? A bubble? And what about holes? In fact, now that you mention it, do holes even exist? Or are they just an illusion of the space that engulfs them? Ah ha! Maybe it’s the set of all of the above. But, then again, can sets be, urgh… permanent?
The point I’m trying to make is this: the question about permeance seems to depend on more fundamental questions about what exists. But such questions can’t simply be taught or dictated. In fact, it’s questionable whether we’ll ever have any conclusive answers.
Be that as it may, it doesn’t mean there aren’t any suitable candidates out there; in the philosophical jargon, these views are normally divided between the categories of Realist and Nominalist. Realists hold that abstract objects exist, while nominalists the contrary. In my view, if nominalism is true, if abstract objects do not exist, then it seems that permanence is indeed an illusion. The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli beautifully describes all objects as events. The sticking point, as your question suggests, is that our way of seeing objects is contextualised by the relatively short duration in which we inhabit the Earth, and thus things seem permanent when they are perhaps not. Yet, I’m almost certain Plato would disapprove. To view only that which is physical is to miss what really counts. And for Plato, what really counts is that which is permanent, namely, the essence of ideas.
So, is permanence an illusion? I haven’t the foggiest. Alas, I’m just as confused today as I’ve ever been.
What do you think? Is anything permanent? Let us know in the comments.
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Having studied philosophy at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at the University of London, Birkbeck College, I am now an employee of the Erasmus School of Philosophy, Rotterdam, where I work as both a teacher and junior researcher in philosophy. Currently I’m engaged in a NWO funded project in social choice theory, looking specifically at personal preference and resource depletion. I see philosophy as an interconnected whole and so I tend to read widely. I also think – like many of my colleagues – that philosophy is sorely absent from much of public discourse. But, then again, I would say that…