Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Becoming and flux
Axis: Being and becoming — Is the real, at bottom, what endures or what becomes?
You 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.
Movements 1
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
Philosophers 2
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
Russellexplicit
Russell's world is made of events rather than of things that last: substance, that permanent subject supposed to bear changing properties, is in his eyes an error inherited from grammar, which analysis dispenses with by defining an object as a . This is not a philosophy of flux, however: he devoted a famous critique to , arguing that making lived duration the privileged access to the real mistakes an intuition for an argument. What is at stake is what abandoning substance obliges one to admit: for Russell, events and laws, not a creative becoming.
The Analysis of Mind (1921) · The Analysis of Matter (1927) · "The Philosophy of Bergson" (1912)