TO BE OR TO BECOME

(Also see my related entries Art As Being Rather Than Becoming, posted on February 13^th, 2013, and Being And Becoming, posted on February 2^nd, 2014.)

The philosophical problem of Being and Becoming brings us back again to the monumental question, first posed by Anaximander, differently, and mutually contradictorily, answered by Parmenides and Heraclitus, and then that contradiction attempted to be overcome by the Atomists and Plato. Democritus’ solution was logically, physically and structuralistically superb: a host of Parmenidean permanent ones was engaged in a Heraclitean flux, therefore, the permanence was inside of the indivisible, whereas the change was outside it, in the shifting relationships of the basic structural units, the atoms. Everything was splendid about such an explanation, except just one thing: being cruelly mechanistic and non-teleological, it denied edification to human morality, and made the very purpose of learning and knowledge as such, non-teleological, in other words, purposeless. That is if we had a good purpose in mind, understanding that its only alternative, bad purpose, was unthinkable and unacceptable. (For, the concept of “Jenseits von Gut und Böse” had not been invented yet, in Plato’s time!) Having introduced the concept of The Good as the highest form of existence, and teleology as a concomitant of morality, Plato had to come up with something quite different, infinitely more complex and complicated than atomism, since by going teleological, he introduced an additional and highly convoluted factor into the equation, which from now on would have to be accounted for in virtually any philosophical contemplation.

Here is a key passage from Plato’s Dialogue Timaeus, where Timaeus says this (27d5-28b2):

“First, I must distinguish between that which always is, and never becomes, and which is apprehended by reason and reflection; and that which always becomes and never is, and is conceived by opinion with the help of sense. All that becomes and is created is the work of a cause, and fair is what the craftsman makes after an eternal pattern, but whatever is fashioned after a created pattern is not fair.”

We shall return to the much-important Dialogue Timaeus, and to the larger context of this brief passage, in our remaining Platonic entries, but so far let us recapitulate the essence of Being and Becoming.

The problem of being and becoming is the problem of permanence and change where being is equivalent to permanence and becoming is equivalent to change. Then how do we get from a permanent single form to all those ever-changing and multiple particulars? To Plato the answer appears simple: one thing can have many reflections. But those reflections are only illusions of the real thing whereas all commonsense particulars are real to us, while their Platonic form, or idea, although by no means an illusion, is at least a generalization, or abstraction, once again, from the commonsense point of view and it is  impossible to imagine an abstraction in reality. Given a choice between a down-to-earth triangle, roughly traced in the sand, and its ghostly ideal counterpart, corresponding to every demand imposed on it by mathematics, it is hard to agree that a perfect abstraction can be real, and our figure in the sand can not, although the incoming wave makes the last point moot.

It is much easier to imagine our immortal soul as being, in the sense of permanence, and our physical body as becoming, in the sense of change, such as growing up, then growing old, coming into being, as we say, perhaps, inaccurately, from the standpoint of Platonic philosophy, but quite understandably, from the point of common sense, and then passing away, or ceasing to be, as we may say. As it turns out, common sense and philosophy clash in all these considerations to the point of providing basically antipodal definitions, as applied to the concepts of being and becoming. Philosophers are trying to convince us that we are talking about apples and oranges here, that philosophy is deep and refined, whereas our common sense is shallow and crude. But this is exactly how philosophy as such gets a bad name! In order to restore a good doxa to her, she must be reconciled to the common sense, and this is really not too much to ask, is it?!

In the passage from the Timaeus above there is an extremely curious phrase which must not pass unnoticed: “All that becomes and is created is the work of a cause…”

It is only everything becoming (that is, belonging to the illusory world of the senses), which belongs to the causality chain as an effect and then the cause of the next effect, etc. Being is uncreated, that is, uncaused. There is therefore no causality in Plato’s reality. (The role of being as the starting first cause is rather vague and the logic behind the eternal and permanent, suddenly becoming creative, is elusive, and probably not at all clear to Plato himself.) It is therefore logical to exclude all traces of causality, even the first cause, from the realm of Being. (We shall discuss it in greater detail in the entry on Plato’s Cosmogony.)

The question of Plato’s causality is interestingly picked up by George Long, in the following passage from his Introduction to the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius: “…When Plato says, ‘Nothing ever is, but is always becoming,’ he destroys by this not all practical, but all speculative notions of cause and effect. The whole series of things as they appear to us, must be contemplated in time, that is, in succession, and we conceive or suppose intervals between one state of things and another state of things, so that there is a priority and sequence, and interval, and Being, and a ceasing to be, and beginning and ending. But there is nothing of the kind in the Nature of Things. It is an everlasting continuity.”

There are two big points here: Is Plato’s dictum such a blow to causality as it seems, at least to Dr. Long? Why should the continuity of becoming be free from causality? Isn’t this a matter of interpretation, rather than of fact? To the contrary of what Long says, even Hegel’s dialectics is a continuum of becoming. How else would a synthesis occur except by the thesis becoming this something else through the inbreeding act of copulation with its closest living relative, the antithesis?

And the other one, only slightly related to it, does the concept of time involve a discreteness similar to the quantum theory? In this case, it is indeed impossible to see time as anything but succession, and the notion of an everlasting continuity becomes the conceptual bridge between time and timelessness. In such a case, Plato’s nothing ever is, may be interpreted as a blow against the discreetness of time, in the sense that ‘is’ allows us to relate to ‘was’ and ‘will be,’ but not in the sense of the Biblical name I AM for God, which, on the contrary, eliminates the past and the future from the equation, making the present time non-historical, and representative of timelessness.

By the same token, Plato’s “always becoming” is taken out from the discreetness of time, but still remains ambiguous, which puts it smack back into the center of gravity of that imponderable magic bridge floating in-between time and timelessness.