BECOMING. - In the strict sense it is the coming into being of a being or of any of its determinations, as opposed to perishing or falling apart; in the broad sense, every form of change, as opposed to persistence unaltered.
The fact of becoming has, in all times, constituted one of the most important themes of philosophical reflection. In Indian thought the vision of becoming as the condition of an existence that is suffering and fallen from its true reality is characteristic. The effort to overcome this condition governs reflections on becoming even where they present themselves in the form of ontological speculation. The doctrine of the Upanishads and of the systems of Vedanta is based on a spiritualism, monistic or pluralistic, combined with a phenomenism of the external world and of the empirical personality. In Buddhism, which in its beginnings adhered to an agnostic attitude, expressions of a universal phenomenism later arose, and still later various forms of an idealism with an actualistic orientation.
Greek thought, by contrast, started from the problem of finding, beyond mutable things, authentic being, as the foundation and root of the cosmic and moral order. The first ontological formulation of the questions concerning becoming goes back to the Eleatic school: eternity and immutability are considered as necessary attributes of being; becoming is unreal and unthinkable. Heraclitus, on the other hand, conceived a doctrine that remained isolated in ancient philosophy, according to which cosmic realities are born from the encounter of contrary processes and are unstable aggregates of opposites. The insertion of becoming as a real fact into the philosophy of being is the work of Aristotle (Phys., V, IX; Met., X, XII). The foundation of the 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 and 248 and 249 d) another valuation 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 the upper hand from the time when, in the Neoplatonic current, the personal being becomes the key for the understanding of being in general (cf. Plotinus, Enn., VI, 8).
The biblical doctrine of the living and operative God compelled Christian theologians to take account of the positive value of productivity and to seek harmony between the demands of ontology and the activism of spiritual existence. The synthesis was achieved in the great classical systems, albeit with differing emphasis on either the one or the other moment. In certain Neoplatonic-mystical currents of the later Middle Ages (Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa) the transition takes place to a philosophy in which the productive and creative act has primacy over being, first in speculation about God and then, as a consequence of a latent pantheism, also in psychology and cosmology.
The philosophies of dynamism (Leibniz, Kant) are inspired, even while seeking to save the reality of substances, by the same motives. Their extreme consequences appear in the modern actualist systems, for which reality resolves itself into a continuous springing forth of fleeting acts that does not presuppose but produces everything. In this sense Fichte developed an actualism of free action, Hegel a system of the dialectical self-motion of the idea, Gentile (Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, chaps. 3 and 4) an actualism of "thinking thought." The philosophers of life (Nietzsche, Bergson) defend a doctrine of afinalistic 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 the 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 the free will. 3) The relation between the immutability of the absolute being and its supreme immanent and creative activity (v. CREATION; GOD). 4) The teleological problems of becoming (v. FINALITY).