Becoming

Reality understood as process rather than as things - what is, taken to be what is happening.

Theme: Being and reality
Tradition: Greek
Term: γίγνεσθαι · gignesthai
Term fixed: c. 500 BC

In plain terms

Ordinary thought treats the world as things that then undergo changes. First there is a tree, and afterwards the tree grows. Becoming is the suggestion that this has it backwards - that there are processes first, and that what we call things are stable patterns inside them.

On that view a tree is not an object that happens to be growing. It is a slow event, no more a fixed thing than a wave is, and it looks like an object only because we are watching at the wrong speed.

The test is which one you have to explain. If things are basic, change needs accounting for. If process is basic, it is stability that needs accounting for - and stability turns out to be the harder of the two to find anywhere in nature.

As a philosopher would put it

Heraclitus holds that everything gives way and nothing stays, unified not by a substance but by logos, the measure the changes keep. Parmenides replies that what is cannot come from what is not, so coming-to-be is impossible and the changing world is opinion rather than truth. Plato's answer partitions reality: the Forms are, the sensible world becomes, and knowledge is possible only of the first.

Aristotle dissolves the problem with potentiality and actuality - what comes to be was already there potentially, so nothing arises from nothing and change needs no contradiction.

Process philosophy is the modern return. Whitehead makes actual occasions rather than enduring substances the basic units, so that what exists is a becoming and an object is a route through it; Bergson argues that intellect necessarily spatialises time into instants and therefore always misses duration, which has to be grasped by intuition instead.

Where you meet it

Niagara Falls is not where it was. The gorge below it is eleven kilometres long, and the falls cut it themselves, retreating upstream by roughly a metre a year for the last twelve thousand years. Engineering works have slowed it; it has not stopped.

Stand at the railing and you see a thing. It has a name, a shape, a fixed position on every map. But nothing you are looking at was there a second ago, and the shape itself is a stage in a process moving at walking pace over millennia. The falls are not an object that erodes; the erosion is what the falls are.

The map is not wrong, exactly. It records a pattern that is stable relative to a human life. It just quietly converts an event into a place, which is the conversion the whole argument is about.

What is actually disputed

Whether process is basic or derivative.

Substance metaphysics holds that change requires something that changes, and that a process with nothing undergoing it is not a coherent notion; talk of events is shorthand for what enduring things do. Process philosophers reply that this is grammar rather than physics - subject and predicate are a feature of Indo-European syntax, not a discovery about nature - and that a physics of fields and events fits the process picture more comfortably than the thing picture.

The deeper disagreement is Parmenides's and has never been settled: if becoming is real, something comes from what is not. Every subsequent answer either restricts what nothing means or denies that the change is real.

Commonly confused with

Change c. 500 BC Change is something a thing undergoes. Becoming is the claim that the process is what there is, with no underlying thing required.

Defined against

Being The founding pair of the subject, and the argument that organises everything after it

Philosophers

Heraclitus Everything gives way; the unity is the measure, not the material
Parmenides of Elea Denies coming-to-be outright, and forces every later answer
Aristotle Potentiality and actuality, which make change describable without contradiction
Alfred North Whitehead Actual occasions rather than enduring things
Henri-Louis Bergson Duration, and why the intellect always misses it

Works

Fragments The flux, in the only form it survives
On Nature The denial
Metaphysics Where the contradiction is dissolved
Creative Evolution Duration against the spatialised time of the sciences
The Phenomenology of Spirit Becoming as the movement of thought itself

Schools

Heraclitean School Where flux is fundamental
Eleatic School Where it is impossible
Process Philosophy The twentieth-century return
Peripatetic school (Aristotelianism) The dissolution that held for two thousand years
Lebensphilosophie Where life rather than substance is basic

Related concepts

Being c. 475 BC · Change c. 500 BC · Time c. 397 · Potentiality c. 330 BC · Actuality c. 330 BC

Heraclitus made change the fundamental fact around 500 BC; Parmenides denied it within a generation, and the pair have set the terms ever since.