Becoming is a philosophical concept that means the process of movement and modification of something. It can be the emergence and development, and sometimes disappearance and regression. Often becoming is opposed to changelessness.
This term in philosophy, depending on the stages of its development or schools and directions, acquired either a negative or a positive connotation. Often it was considered an attribute of matter and was opposed to the stability, stability and immutability of higher being. In this article, we will try to consider the various facets of this concept.
Beginnings and Origins
Becoming is a term that first appears in Europe in ancient philosophy. It signified a process of change and formation.
Natural philosophers defined becoming as the doctrine of things, their appearance, development and destruction. This is how they described a certain unified principle that changes and incarnates.into different forms of existence.
Heraclitus for the first time opposed the formation of the world's being, which eternally "becomes", that is, flows ("panta rey") and is unstable - to the logos (an indestructible principle, law and measure). The latter determines the principles of becoming and puts a limit on it. If Parmenides believed that becoming dissolves into being, then for Heraclitus the situation was exactly the opposite.
Plato, Aristotle and their followers
Plato has material things in eternal development and change. Ideas are eternal, and are goals for the formation of phenomena. Despite the fact that Aristotle was an opponent of Plato and many of the concepts of the latter, he also used this concept in a pallet discourse.
Becoming and development undergo things, realizing their essence, materializing the form and turning the possibility into reality. Aristotle called the highest way of such being entelechy, suggesting that this is a kind of energy.
In a person, such a law of becoming is his soul, which itself develops and controls the body. The founders of the Neoplatonic school - Plotinus, Proclus and others - saw in becoming a cosmic principle that possesses both life and mind. They called it the World Soul and considered it the source of all movement.
The Stoics called this force, thanks to which the Universe develops, pneuma. It permeates everything that exists.
Middle Ages
Christian philosophy was also not alien to this principle. But becoming is, in terms ofmedieval scholastics, development, the goal, limit and source of which is God. Thomas Aquinas develops this concept in the doctrine of action and potency.
There are internal reasons for becoming. They encourage action. Becoming is the unity of potency and ongoing process. In the late Middle Ages, Aristotelian and Neoplatonic interpretations were "fashionable". They were used, for example, by Nicholas of Cusa or Giordano Bruno.
Philosophy of the New Time
The formation of science in the modern sense of the word and its methodology in the era of Galileo, Newton and Bacon has somewhat shaken the belief that everything is in motion. Classical experiments and the principle of determinism led to the creation of a mechanical model of the Cosmos. The idea that the world is constantly being transformed, changed and reborn remains popular with German thinkers.
While their French and English colleagues imagined the Universe as something like a huge clockwork, Leibniz, Herder, Schelling saw it as becoming. This is the development of nature from the unconscious to the rational. The limit of this becoming expands infinitely, and therefore the spirit can change without limit.
The philosophers of that era were extremely worried about the question of the relationship between being and thinking. After all, this is how it was possible to give an answer to the question of whether there are any patterns in nature or not. Kant believed that we ourselves bring the concept of becoming into our knowledge, since it is itself limited by our sensibility.
Mindcontradictory, and therefore between being and thinking there is an abyss that cannot be overcome. We also fail to understand what things really are and how they got there.
Hegel
For this classic of German philosophy, the stages of formation coincide with the laws of logic, and development itself is the movement of the spirit, ideas, their “deployment”. Hegel defines this term as the dialectic of being and "nothing". Both of these opposites can flow into each other precisely through becoming.
But this unity is unstable or, as the philosopher says, "restless". When a thing "becomes", it only aspires to being, and in this sense it does not yet exist. But since the process has already begun, it seems to be there.
Thus, becoming, from Hegel's point of view, is an unrestrained movement. It is also the primary truth. After all, without it, both being and “nothing” have no specifics and are empty, devoid of filling abstractions. The thinker described all this in his book The Science of Logic. It was there that Hegel made becoming a dialectical category.
Progress or uncertainty
In the nineteenth century, many philosophies - Marxism, positivism, and so on - perceived becoming as a synonym for the term "development". Their representatives believed that this is a process, as a result of which the transition from the old to the new, from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex is carried out. The formation of a system of individual elements, suchway is natural.
On the other hand, critics of such views, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, assured that the supporters of the concept of development ascribed to nature and the world laws and goals that do not exist. Becoming is carried out in itself, non-linearly. It is devoid of patterns. We don't know what it could lead to.
Evolution
The theory of development and progress as purposeful becoming was very popular. She received support in connection with the concept of evolution. For example, historians and sociologists began to consider the formation of the state as a process that led to the formation and formation of a new social system, the transformation of the military type of government into a political one, and the creation of an apparatus of violence.
The next stages of this development were, first of all, the separation of administrative bodies from the rest of society, then the replacement of the tribal division with a territorial one, as well as the emergence of public authorities. The formation of a person in this coordinate system was considered as the emergence of a new biological species as a result of evolution.
Modern philosophy and man
In our era, the concept of becoming is most often used in the field of methodology. It is also popular in the discourse of sociocultural processes. The term of modern philosophy "being in the world" can be said to be synonymous with becoming. This is the reality that determines development, makes changes irreversible, is their dynamics. Formationhas a global character. It covers not only nature, but also society.
The formation of society from this point of view is inextricably linked with the formation of man as a special psychological, spiritual and rational entity. The theory of evolution has not given unambiguous answers to these questions, and they are still the subject of study and research. After all, if we can explain the development of the biological nature of a person, then it is very difficult to trace the process of the formation of his consciousness, and even more so to derive some patterns from it.
What has played the biggest role in who we have become? Labor and language, as Engels believed? Games, Huizinga thought? Taboos and cults, as Freud believed? Ability to communicate with signs and convey images? A culture in which power structures are encrypted? And, perhaps, all these factors led to the fact that anthroposociogenesis, which lasted more than three million years, created modern man in his social environment.
