It Becomes You to Be

The mention of Whitehead in the last post brought to mind the complementarity of being and becoming. Becoming is fashionable in our times, and being therefore sits below the salt, but the paradox is that to behold this fashionable Becoming one must be enduring. To hold these two concepts simultaneously in the mind is the easiest thing in the world. It is the experience of consciousness. But it seems to irk the intellect. Hence in the Ages of Becoming, the enduring self is also pictured as but an instance of the universal flux, and as this age peaked, William James discovered the “stream of consciousness.” That strikes a retrograde like me as a contradiction. In the Ages of Being a similar reduction of one to the other hides in the idea that Ultimate Being is pure act. We can’t have one without the other.

Being, Becoming

Western thought in the twentieth century had a love affair with motion—and a powerfully monistic leaning too. This combination produces process theologies and theories of wholeness (like David Bohm’s). The operant word becomes becoming; being is relegated to the flat-earth past. The impulse is permeating and pervasive; thus for instance consciousness becomes the stream of consciousness; I chuckle to think that we’ve even abandoned peace for the peace process.

The inner motivation for such modes of thought fascinates me. Fluxologies of this sort strike me as detectably counter-intuitive; mind you, counter-intuitive is also supposed to be deep. Sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine that I am a deterministic process, free only in the sense that an uncertainty principle introduces randomness into nature, and that my sense of being me is therefore an illusion. In this I’m not alone, of course. We all feel, think, and act like agents (some of the time, anyway), but the theories suggest that we’re in fact deluded. Therefore, it seems to me, a very strong will must be present in those people who construct monistic theories rather than yielding to intuition. Intuition teaches a self-evident dualism. It teaches that life is different in kind from inorganic matter, that we have but are not bodies, that we have but are not feelings, thoughts, and intuitions.

What is the nature of this will? This will appears, it seems to me, because the people who manifest it cannot deal with the notion that a genuine mystery is present behind reality, the very mystery that makes us who we are, the mystery that, as the Sufis say, is closer to you than your jugular vein. If a genuine agency is detected, even if only in all-too-humble us, it forces a dualistic frame on thought. This problem arises because agency cannot be derived from motion and random processes at all. This means that science can’t quite reach everything; that human lordship isn’t absolute. The presence of a humble agent logically forces us to posit a higher agency, perhaps a hierarchy of beings that, just like us, stand out from the flux and cannot be explained by it. Liberation from this knowledge, which promised such future delights in the past, produces vistas of meaninglessness now in which no one sees the ever becoming process actually land on anything concrete even long enough to order its feathers.