← Back to the axis

Relation to the world· Nature and the living

Becoming and flux

Axis: Being and becomingIs 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.

Who holds this position

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 1

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