Becoming is what?

Becoming is a philosophical concept, which means the process of movement and modification of something. It can be the emergence and development, and sometimes - the disappearance and regress. Often becoming opposed to immutability.

This term in philosophy, depending on the stages of its development or schools and directions, acquired a negative or positive connotation. Often he was considered an attribute of matter and opposed stability, stability and immutability of the higher being. In this article, we will try to consider the various facets of this concept.

Origin and origin

Becoming is the term that first appears in ancient philosophy in Europe. It meant a process of change and formation.

Natural philosophers defined becoming as the doctrine of things, their appearance, development and destruction. So they described a single unified principle, which changes and is embodied in different forms of existence.

Heraclitus first contrasted the emergence of the existence of the world, which always "becomes", that is, flows ("pant rai") and is unstable - logos (indestructible principle, law and measure). The latter determines the principles of becoming and sets the limit for it. If Parmenides believed that becoming dissolves in being, then for Heraclitus it was exactly the opposite.

Plato, Aristotle and their followers

Plato's eternal development and change are material things. Ideas are eternal, and are goals for the emergence of phenomena. Despite the fact that Aristotle was an opponent of Plato and many of the latter's concepts, he also applied this concept in pod discourse.

Formation and development endure things, realizing their essence, materializing the form and turning the opportunity into reality. The highest way of such being Aristotle called entelechy, suggesting that this is a kind of energy.

In man, 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 the formation of the cosmic principle, which possesses both life and reason. They called it the World Soul and believed it to be the source of all movement.

Stoics called such a force, thanks to which the universe develops, pneumatic. It permeates everything that exists.

Middle Ages

Christianity, too, was not alien to this principle. But becoming is, from the point of view of medieval scholastics, development, the goal, the limit and source of which is God. Thomas Aquinas develops this concept in the doctrine of action and potency.

There are internal causes of becoming. They induce to action. Becoming is the unity of potency and the process that is being carried out. In the late Middle Ages, the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic interpretations were "fashionable." They were used, for example, by Nicholas of Cusa or Giordano Bruno.

Philosophy of the New Time

The emergence of science in the modern sense of the word and its methodology in the era of Galileo, Newton and Bacon has been shaken by 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 transformed, changed and reborn, remains a popular German thinkers.

While their French and English colleagues imagined the universe as something of a huge clockwork mechanism, Leibniz, Herder, Schelling saw in it becoming. It is the development of nature from the unconscious to the rational. The limit of this formation is infinitely expanding, and therefore the spirit can change unlimitedly.

Extremely worried the philosophers of that era and the question of the relationship between being and thinking. After all, this could be the answer to the question of whether there are any regularities in nature or not. Kant believed that we ourselves introduce the concept of becoming into our knowledge, since it is itself limited by our sensuality.

Reason is contradictory, and therefore there is an abyss between being and thinking, which it is impossible to overcome. We also fail to understand what things really are and how they became such.

Hegel

For this classic of German philosophy, the stages of formation coincide with the laws of logic, and the development itself is the movement of the spirit, ideas, and their "unfolding." Hegel defines this term as the dialectic of being and "nothingness." Both these opposites can flow into each other precisely because of 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 is as it were.

Thus, from the standpoint of Hegel, becoming is an unrestrained movement. It is also the primary truth. After all, without it, being and "nothing" have no specifics and are empty abstractions that are not filled with content. The thinker described all this in his book The Science of Logic. It was there that Hegel made the formation a dialectical category.

Progress or uncertainty

In the nineteenth century, many philosophical currents - 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 a transition is made from the old to the new, from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex. The formation of a system of individual elements is thus natural.

On the other hand, critics of such views, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, assured that proponents of the concept of development ascribe nature and the world laws and goals that do not exist. Formation is carried out by itself, nonlinearly. It is devoid of regularities. We do not know what it can lead to.

Evolution

The theory of development and progress as a 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, the creation of an apparatus of violence.

The next stages of this development was, first of all, the separation of administrative bodies from the rest of society, then the replacement of tribal divisions into territorial ones, as well as the emergence of institutions of public authority. The formation of man 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 notion of becoming more often applies 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 a reality that determines development, makes changes irreversible, is their dynamics. Formation is global in nature. It covers not only nature, but also society.

The emergence of society from this point of view is inextricably linked with the formation of man as a special psychological, spiritual and rational essence. The theory of evolution did not give 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 man, it is very difficult to trace the process of formation of his consciousness, and even more to withdraw from it some regularities.

What played the biggest role in what we became? Work, and language, as Engels supposed? Games, as he believed? Taboo and cults, as Freud was convinced? Ability to communicate with signs and transmit images? Culture, in which the power structures are encrypted? And, perhaps, all these factors have led to the fact that anthroposociogenesis, which lasted more than three million years, created a modern man in his social environment.