Relation to the world· Nature and the livingdifficulty
Being and becoming
Is the real, at bottom, what endures or what becomes?
Everything we see is born, changes, and perishes; and yet we look everywhere for what endures: stable laws, identical things, a self that stays the same. Is the ground of the real an immutable being of which change is only the surface, or a flux in which stable things are merely temporary slowings? On the answer hangs even the way we understand the world: through fixed forms or through processes.
Permanence of being
1What really is can neither come to be nor perish: change, whereby a thing is and then is not, contradicts being itself. Sensible becoming is appearance, the opinion of mortals or a world of shadows; thought reaches the true only by rising to what endures, immutable Being or the eternal Forms.
Explore this position →Platoexplicit
The sensible, in perpetual becoming, cannot be an object of knowledge: nothing stable is to be found in it to know. What really is are the intelligible Forms, immutable and eternal, of which changing things are only participations. Yet Plato grants becoming its own consistency: the sensible world is not nothing, it is a moving image of eternity.
Timaeus, 27d-28a · Republic, VI-VII · Cratylus, 439c-440
Hylomorphism (Aristotle)
named middle1Change is neither an illusion nor the dissolution of all things: it is the passage from potentiality to actuality within a substance that persists. The form endures while the matter is transformed: the seed becomes a tree without ceasing to be that living thing. Being and becoming do not exclude each other; becoming is the way beings realize themselves. Aristotle is the emblem of this middle way, but any thought of substance persisting through change inhabits it.
Explore this position →Aristotleexplicit
Against Parmenides, who made change unthinkable (being cannot come from non-being), Aristotle distinguishes potentiality and actuality: becoming is not an emergence out of nothing but the actualization of what was potential, within a persisting substrate. Substance endures through the change of its accidents, form realizes itself in matter: being and becoming cease to be rivals, becoming is the way beings accomplish their form.
Physics, I.8 · Metaphysics, IX (Theta)
Becoming and flux
2You cannot step into the same river twice: the real is process, flow, continuous creation, and stability is only a slow rhythm or a construct of the mind. Things are not substances that endure but events in the making; to grasp the world is to follow its movement rather than freeze it into concepts.
Explore this position →Hegelexplicit
Nothing fixed comes first: pure being, wholly indeterminate, is indistinguishable from nothing, and their truth is becoming. Every determination arises from a negation, and every figure carries within it the contradiction that drives it beyond itself, to be (aufgehoben) in a richer figure. Against 's motionless being, truth is process. The triad "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" is, incidentally, not his.
Science of Logic, Doctrine of Being (being, nothing, becoming) · Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §§86-88
Buddhismexplicit
Impermanence (anicca) is the first of the three marks of existence: every conditioned phenomenon arises, transforms, and ceases, with no substance subsisting beneath the flux, neither in things nor in us (anattā, non-self). Taking things to be stable is precisely the illusion that breeds attachment and suffering; wisdom consists in seeing arising and ceasing.
Dhammapada, 277-279 (the three marks) · Samyutta Nikāya, 56.11
Nature is a principle of motion and change.Aristotle · Physics, III.1 (200b)
What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which is always becoming and never is?Plato · Timaeus, 27d
Whatever is subject to arising is subject to ceasing.Samyutta Nikāya · SN 56.11, Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta