BEING AND BECOMING

[By all means see my very pertinent mini-entry Art As Being Rather Than Becoming (posted on February 13^th, 2013), where I argue contra Plato over this question of Permanence and Change, which Plato obviously borrows from Heraclitus, in the way that he represents it. That other entry does not touch upon this connection between Heraclitus and Plato, in order to keep it short and single-pointed, but here is a good place to mention it. It goes without saying that I am digging far deeper into this connection in my Plato cluster of entries, to be posted later on.]

The classic philosophical problem of Being and Becoming, also known as the problem of Permanence and Change, has been addressed by almost every philosopher from antiquity to modern times. Anaximander is credited as being the first to ask the big question: How can one being become many? But it was Heraclitus who was the first to answer it, in his own way, and therefore, it is only fitting for us to discuss this problem under his (and Nietzsche’s) auspices.

Nietzsche says that, through sheer intuition, Heraclitus approached Anaximander’s problem of Becoming and illuminated it by a divine flash of lightning. Louder than Anaximander, Heraclitus exclaimed: “I see nothing but Becoming. Be not deceived! It is the fault of your limited sensibility-- and not the fault of the essence of things-- if you believe that you see firm land anywhere in the ocean of Becoming and Passing. You need names for things, just as if they had a rigid permanence, but the very river in which you bathe a second time is no longer the same one which you entered before.”

Nietzsche believes that the Heraclitean perception of being as the present dimensionless dot separating the past from the future, in which configuration only the becoming has any reality (or rather, actuality), is akin to Schopenhauer’s view of time expressed in the latter’s magnum opus Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, and thus summarized by Nietzsche:

"Just as Heraclitus conceived of time, so did Schopenhauer, who says of it repeatedly that in it every instant exists only insofar as it has annihilated the preceding one, its father, in order to be itself effaced equally quickly; that the past and the future are as unreal as a dream; the present is only the dimensionless and unstable boundary between the two; that, like time, so space, and again, like the latter, so also everything that is simultaneously in space and time, has only a relative existence only through and for the sake of a something else of the same kind as itself, i.e., existing only under the same limitations. This truth is in the highest degree self-evident, accessible to everyone, and for that reason it is only attained with great difficulty; but all who have this truth before their eyes must also proceed at once to the next Heraclitean consequence, and say that the whole essence of actuality is, in fact, activity, and that for actuality there is no other kind of existence and reality, as Schopenhauer likewise expounds: “Only as active does it fill space and time: its action upon the immediate object determines the perception in which alone it exists: the effect of the action of any material object on any other is known only insofar as the latter acts upon the immediate object in a different way from that in which it acted before; and it consists in this alone. Causes and effects therefore constitute the whole nature of matter; its true being is action. The totality of everything material is therefore very appropriately called in German Wirklichkeit, actuality, a word far more expressive than Realität, that is, reality. That upon which actuality acts is matter, its whole being and essence, consist only in the orderly change that one part of it causes in another, and is therefore wholly relative, according to a relation, which is valid only within the boundary of actuality, as in the case of time and space.”

This classic definition of becoming as activity, whereas being as a permanent state is chimera, reminds me of the unusually profound saying that those who want to do something are always preferable to those who want to be something. Here lies the difference between being and becoming, permanence and change, and inasmuch as these concepts are concerned, this almost closes the matter, except to add that permanence as such does in fact exist, but only in the realm of timeless eternity, in other words, with God. Heraclitus does not deny permanence as such, wisely, as he sees it in the permanent laws that govern the world, space and time. In Nietzsche’s summary, “I contemplate Becoming,” Heraclitus exclaimed, “And what do I behold? Lawfulness, infallible certainty, equal paths of Justice, condemning Erinyes behind all transgressions of the laws, the whole world as the spectacle of a governing justice and of demoniacally omnipresent natural forces subject to justice’s sway. I don’t behold the punishment of what has become, but the justification of Becoming. When has sacrilege, when has apostasy manifested itself in inviolable forms, in laws esteemed sacred? Where injustice sways, there is caprice, disorder, irregularity, contradiction; where however law and Zeus’ daughter Dike rule alone, as in this world,-- how could the sphere of guilt, expiation, judgment, or the place of execution of all condemned ones be there?”

What is being described here, however, sounds more like the ideal alternative world of permanent eternity than the world which we poor mortals are forced to inhabit. Thus, the problem of permanence and change can be successfully resolved by a recourse to common Christian theology, distinguishing this world, where injustice sways, and where the only way out is becoming, rather than being, and the next world, with God, where alone, being becomes the eternal reality.