Relation to the world· Nature and the living
Permanence of being
Axis: Being and becoming — Is the real, at bottom, what endures or what becomes?
What 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.
Philosophers 1
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