DISENIRE. — In the strict sense, it is the coming into being of a being or of any of its determinations, in opposition to perishing or dissolution; in the broad sense, any form of change, in opposition to unchanging persistence.
The fact of becoming has, at all times, constituted one of the most important themes of philosophical reflection. In Indian thought, the vision of becoming as the condition of existence marked by suffering and fallen from its true reality is characteristic. The effort to overcome this condition governs reflections on becoming even where they appear in the form of ontological speculation. The doctrine of the Upanishads and of the Vedanta systems is based on a spiritualism, whether monistic or pluralistic, combined with a phenomenalism of the external world and of empirical personality. In Buddhism, which initially adopted an agnostic stance, there later arose expressions of a universal phenomenalism and, subsequently, various forms of idealism with an actualistic orientation.
Greek thought, on the other hand, started from the problem of finding, beyond mutable things, authentic being as the foundation and root of cosmic and moral order. The first ontological formulation of questions concerning becoming dates back to the Eleatic school: eternity and immutability are considered necessary attributes of being; becoming is unreal and unthinkable. Heraclitus, however, conceived a doctrine that remained isolated in ancient philosophy, according to which cosmic realities arise from the encounter of contrary processes and are unstable unities of opposites.
The inclusion of becoming as a real fact in the philosophy of being is the work of Aristotle (Phys., V, IX; Met., X, XII). The foundation of this solution is the theory of act and potency; becoming is the imperfect actualization of a real possibility and finds its ultimate principle in the pure actuality of the divine Being, the first and unmoved mover of all things. Already in Plato, there occasionally appears (Soph., 247 e and 248 c–249 d) another evaluation of becoming. Life is self-motion, and life must be attributed to the most perfect beings. This positive aspect of becoming, insofar as it is spiritual or vital productivity, gains preeminence from the time when, in the Neoplatonic current, the personal being becomes the key to understanding being in general (cf. Plotinus, Enn., VI, 8).
The biblical doctrine of the living and active God compelled Christian theologians to acknowledge the positive value of productivity and to seek agreement between the demands of ontology and the activism of spiritual existence. This synthesis was achieved in the great classical systems, though with varying emphasis on either moment. In certain Neoplatonic-mystical currents of later medieval thought (Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa), there occurs a transition to a philosophy in which productive and creative act takes precedence over being, first in speculation about God and then, as a result of a latent pantheism, also in psychology and cosmology.
The philosophies of dynamism (Leibniz, Kant) are inspired, while seeking to preserve the reality of substances, by the same motives. The extreme consequences of these appear in modern actualistic systems, for which reality resolves into a continuous arising of fleeting acts that do not presuppose but produce all things. In this sense, Fichte developed an actualism of free action, Hegel a system of the dialectical self-motion of the Idea, and Gentile (Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act, chaps. 3 and 4) an actualism of thinking thought. The philosophers of life (Nietzsche, Bergson) defend a doctrine of purposeless and irrational becoming.
The various problems that have emerged in this development, which concern different parts of philosophy, can be grouped as follows: 1) the relationship between being and becoming; the clarification of the nature and presuppositions of becoming on the basis of supreme ontological concepts and principles (act-potency, substance, time). 2) The problem of the actualization of active potencies through self-motion, a problem studied by the Scholastics especially with regard to free will. 3) The relation between the immutability of absolute being and its supreme immanent and creative activity (v. CREATION; GOD). 4) The teleological problems of becoming (v. FINALITY).