Episode #147 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode, though, is on another great philosophical debate, the age-old, classic debate of being versus becoming. I hope you love the show today.

So, with all this recent talk about comedy, I thought it would be fitting to begin our episode here today with a passage from the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his famous book The Will to Power. Nietzsche writes this, “Perhaps I know best why man alone laughs: he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter. The unhappiest and most melancholy animal is, as fitting, the most cheerful.” See, Nietzsche had a special place in his heart for comedy and a special place for it in the work of a philosopher. He famously said that he has a ranking for philosophers, not based on how good their ideas are, not based on how sound their arguments are, but simply by their ability to use humor in their work.

Now, as fans of philosophy, this can initially be a little confusing. Why would Nietzsche ever even consider the legitimacy of a philosopher’s work in terms of how many knock-knock jokes they’re telling? Well, his ultimate point is going to be instructive towards our episode here today, but it’s going to take a couple minutes to get to. The best place to start is going to be all the way back where we began last episode through the work of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his famous debate with another pre-Socratic philosopher, Parmenides.

So, we already talked about Heraclitus: the doctrine of radical flux, the universe being in a constant state of change, not unlike the flowing of a river. Well, if this was Heraclitus, then the opposite can be said of Parmenides. His famous line, if you remember it from all the way back then, is, “What is is, and what is not is not.” Or, in other words, what we mere humans perceive as change that’s going on in the universe all around us all the time is actually an illusion. He calls the illusion that we live in “the way of opinion.” And he thought our flawed senses deceive us in this world of appearances and that actual truth about the state of things is eternal and unchanging.

Now, out of this famous debate between Heraclitus and Parmenides came on of the most famous debates in the history of philosophy: that is the contrast of what is later called “being versus becoming.” But it also happens to be the major through-line of our episode here today, so buckle up, people. Here we go.

A philosopher that favors the concept of being believes that there’s a way that things are in the world, and our job as scientists and philosophers is to go out there and use whatever tools we have available to figure out the way that things are. These people, historically, often look at the world spatially because they often think about existence in terms of subjects and objects. They often favor terms like substances, concepts, forms, eternal truths. The basic idea is this. Look around you. There’s obviously a way that things are. Let’s categorize it and understand what it is.

Now, people that are fans of becoming, on the other hand, or the process-oriented way of thinking that we’ve been talking about the last few episodes, they don’t believe there’s a “way that things are” in the traditional way that phrase is used. Things are fundamentally a process of constant change. We just either don’t live long enough or are born into a historical tradition of ideas or lack the perspective to be able to see it.

Now, Nietzsche wouldn’t have been surprised at all that Heraclitus -- the guy associated with becoming -- he wouldn’t have been surprised that he was a funny guy. Because this is a great example of why Nietzsche values comedy in a thinker’s work. One of the things that makes Nietzsche such a great writer is that he commonly utilizes both comedy and tragedy in his work. See, because part of the essence of both comedy and tragedy, to Nietzsche, is a direct negation of being in this being-and-becoming thing we just set up, which, put another way, is to say that both comedy and tragedy directly concern themselves with a denial or a subversion of the way that things are.

Think about it. Think of the job of a comedian. What do they do? They look at the world around us. They see something most people just see as an ordinary reality of the world and, then, by making fun of it, they show people that this thing isn’t “the way that things are” in some eternal sense. This is just some absurd way that we’re doing things right now that’s eventually going to transform into some other absurd thing that they’ll be sure to make fun of then when we get there.

Think about tragedy. There is a current state of things in the socio-political realm. Great tragedies often include a person or a group of people making some sort of tragic sacrifice for the sake of making a statement about the way that things are and how they need to change.

See, to Nietzsche, one of the marks of a great philosopher is not just to accept the way that things are and never question them. That’s kind of the opposite of your job. So, this is one of the reasons why, when he’s applying his thought to the way that things were near the end of the 19th century, he pointed out how, while many people thought this was the greatest age of technological advancement ever -- sounds familiar -- he also thought this was simultaneously a period of most people’s blind adherence to the masses or a group, which, for Nietzsche, came along with a period of people having an inherent desire for social conformity.

Whenever you say something like, “I am a this; I am a card-carrying member of this group,” you are thinking about your identity in terms that are a lot more like being than becoming. There is a way that things are. There is a way that I am. Here’s how I can nail myself down as a person in relation to the way that things are. But this is not the best way to think about your identity to not only Nietzsche but many of the existentialists.

Some of them would say, sure, there is an aspect of you that is being. There is a way that you are right in this split second. But there’s a sense in which by the time you even get to the end of this sentence you will have changed in small, incremental ways. You will be a little bit older. You’ll have developed your views on being and becoming in some small way. You will have moved position spatially. Your body will have run many processes trying to keep you healthy. Your career and relationships will be in a slightly different place. In other words, you may look in the mirror every day, metaphorically speaking, and not notice the small, incremental changes, but everybody would admit that they’re a different person today than they were five years ago. How about this? If we took a snapshot of something you said on Facebook five years ago -- Facebook memories or whatever -- does that encapsulate who you are?

But let’s say you were trapped in one of these groups where your identity feels like something given to you each day, like something branded into your side so the other members know you’re one of them. You can start to feel a little stuck, Nietzsche thinks, like there’s something static and fixed about who you are. And this can lead to a sort of malaise that Nietzsche describes in great detail. Thinkers of the time tried to offer antidotes to this malaise. They recommended turning back to religion or turning back to the great poets and literary works of the past -- the thinking being to try to revive some semblance of sentimentality that existed in a former world.

But Nietzsche thought none of these things could offer you any sort of real relief from this problem. The only thing that could offer you relief, to Nietzsche, was human will: taking action, to affirm life as a creative, ongoing act; to exert your will to power. In other words, to get away from viewing our identity in terms of being and to see yourself more in terms of becoming.

And here’s the big point. We recognize this intuitively when it comes to our own identity. But think of all the parallels to the way scientists and philosophers have been trying to create categories and brand an identity into the universe itself. The same way there’s no static, fixed, eternal you; there is no static, fixed, predictable stability in the universe. And in both cases the only way you could possibly think that there is is because you’re only viewing it from your incredibly narrow perspective that you have access to.

Look around you right now. Pick something in the world around you that is a stationary object. Now, from your obvious, single-person perspective, what rational person could ever think that that thing is not some static entity that’s a fixture in the universe? But look at it from a different perspective. Take a few steps back. In fact, take a few lightyears worth of steps back and look at that thing from a different perspective outside of our solar system. And what you’ll actually see is that it’s hurling through space at almost 70,000 miles an hour and is spiraling around a nuclear explosion that’s also hurling through space.

You may not be able to see it from minute to minute, but -- take a coffee table, for instance. Looks like a static piece of wood when, in reality, it’s been undergoing a constant, slow process of decay from the moment it was removed from a tree. When you view things in terms of being instead of becoming, you instantly bring to bear a host of metaphysical assumptions that determine not only the questions you think are worth asking about the universe but the very way you see the concepts of truth and knowledge at all.

Now, both Nietzsche and Bergson are part of this movement in the late 19th century that came to be known as naturalism. But they were very different from a lot of the other naturalists. Good portion of these naturalists were what is called material reductionists: not only the idea that the material world should be the primary object of our study but also that everything about the universe could be understood if only we understand the most fundamental physical parts that make things up.

The way I think every philosophy professor in existence has ever described this goes like this: we have a certain psychology that is in many ways mysterious to us, but it can be understood by appealing to a more fundamental field known as biology. Now, our biology is incredibly complex but, in many ways, it can be understood by our knowledge of this elaborate confluence of chemical reactions -- atoms, molecules -- that we know as chemistry. But those atoms and molecules can be better understood when we look at them through the lens of physics. Physics begats chemistry, which begats biology, which then begats psychology. In other words, the thinking is, if we can just thoroughly understand the physics and the material components that make something up, then we can understand higher processes like psychology that remain mostly mysterious to us.

But process philosophers from around this time like Bergson thought the material reductionists were way off here. Came up with an example to try to illustrate one of their main arguments here. Bear with me, please.

Picture you’re going to Ikea to try to pick out an end table. You find one; you grab some meatballs on the way out and head home to put it together. Now, in example A, you follow all the directions and put that end table together perfectly. I mean, the thing is glowing when you’re done with it. It’s the perfect form of an end table. But, in example B, you decide to get a little more creative. Let’s say this time you don’t give a hootenanny about the directions. You got the shelf sticking off to the side. You got some diagonal pieces. You take all of the remaining bolts and position them on top like they’re playing a kickball game against each other. Maybe a couple towers, you know?

Now, place example A right next to example B. That perfectly assembled end table in no way resembles that abstract art project you made at all. But the materials that make them up are exactly the same. The materials that make something up are not the entirety of what something is. The same way you can’t know everything about me by just studying the atoms in my body, you can’t know everything about the universe by just analyzing it spatially or at a material level. You can have some understanding, for sure. But there’s clearly more that’s going on here.

Might that be a more fundamental, underlying process that the scientific approach of the late 19th century can just never get access to because they’re thinking of things so spatially? Might philosophers of the past been so completely off in terms of metaphysics because they’re beginning from a set of metaphysical presuppositions that have been taken as gospel from the time of Plato? For process philosophers, this Newtonian methodology of analyzing the universe is an outdated scientific paradigm that runs into very important barriers, and we need to recognize its limitations.

Remember, thinkers like Bergson are living in the wake of the work of Charles Darwin. We never made much headway with the Newtonian model when it comes to understanding a lot of the nonmaterial components of the process of life: how it began, where it’s directed, for instance. Thinkers like Bergson want to look at other elements of existence that we also haven’t made much headway in, and he wants to look at them from the same process-oriented perspective: things like consciousness, things like meaning, things like aesthetics. And this is why Bergson is so interested in internal human experience.

Now, there was a massive scientific revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. Dozens of thinkers, including Albert Einstein, general and special relativity -- these people fundamentally changed the set of presuppositions science was using when trying to understand things. New process philosophers were also living during this time. Fully aware of the work of Henri Bergson was the thinker Alfred North Whitehead.

By the way, before I forget, the actual pronunciation is “Henri Bergson [ɑ̃ʁi bɛʁksɔn].” But, look, that’s not happening here today. I’m not doing that. Alfred North Whitehead, on the other hand, now, that’s something I can say perfectly.

Maybe I should start this section on Whitehead by saying that this can all seem extremely hostile to science. But, almost invariably, these thinkers are not at all opposed to science. They’re opposed to the way that science has become this monolith of truth in the eyes of people that live in modernity. The way we’ve been doing science so far is absolutely great at studying the material of the universe. And, pragmatically, it does amazing things for us when being able to manipulate the material world around us and create things that make for greater possibilities.

But, to a process philosopher, you can’t just say, “Hey! Look at this method I have. It’s really great at studying rocks. It undeniably provides tons of useful benefits to us because of our understanding of those rocks. Therefore, it must be capable of understanding everything about existence, not that it has very real limitations built into it because it was ultimately created by human beings. No, whatever limitations there may seem to be, you just need to study more rocks, and the truth of the universe will be revealed to you.”

Moving away from being and more towards becoming may be as instructive towards understanding our own identity as it is towards understanding the universe, because one thing’s for sure to a process philosopher: any comprehensive account, when it comes to understanding the universe, needs to include things like meaning and consciousness and aesthetics and many other things that science has formerly left us in the dark on, because these things are just as much a part of the universe as a rock is. We can’t be satisfied with just understanding rocks.

Now, this is the place that Whitehead wants to begin his metaphysical analysis. We talked about the Newtonian paradigm and this new paradigm that came along, and what’s being referenced there is the famous book that we talked about on an earlier episode, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And in it he talks about how there hasn’t just been one scientific revolution that occurred all the way back during the time of Sir Francis Bacon. History is punctuated by many different scientific breakthroughs that caused the scientists of the time to change the entire set of assumptions that they enter into experiments with. These dominant assumptions determine not only the research that gets funding or the thinkers tenured at universities, but they shade the very hypotheses that the scientists of the day think are even reasonable to explore.

We can see this pretty clearly when it comes to this Newtonian method getting piled on top of by this new method. We can also see this paralleled in philosophy in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Living during the time of the development of general and special relativity, he can be seen as wanting to throw out the old metaphysical paradigms of philosophy to try to create a new one that corresponds and works together with these incredible breakthroughs in the sciences. Metaphysics, to Whitehead, is not just about explaining how the physical world is the way that it is, like many philosophers have done in the past. Metaphysics is the realm that he says sets the conduct of discussions, the actual framework that we use to even be able to have a conversation about the way things are in the universe. Whitehead wants us, ultimately, to reimagine metaphysics and think about it in a whole new way.

A thinker that’s pretty similar to Whitehead in some ways is the guy we did a six-part series on before named Gilles Deleuze. And Deleuze similarly talks about metaphysics in a way that may seem pretty foreign to a lot of people unfamiliar with process philosophy precisely because he’s looking at things more from the metaphysical framework of becoming rather than one focused on being. The same way a scientist living in the early 19th century might hear someone talking about science in a post-Einstein world and be utterly confused, might even say, “This is pseudo-science. This is not even worth reading; it’s so out there and incomprehensible,” so too might someone who’s not familiar with the concept of becoming and this process-oriented approach -- they might try to understand Deleuze and have a really hard time wrapping their head around it.

Now, of course I’m not talking about superiority of thought, just a difference in metaphysical approach. Deleuze would say things sometimes like, I want people to think of me purely as a metaphysician, which initially might seem kind of weird because, “That’s great, Deleuze, but I just got done reading your work on politics. About to start reading your work on epistemology. Remember that? Remember the whole rhizome thing with the googly roots connecting in seemingly chaotic ways? How about all you had to say on aesthetics?”

But, to someone like Deleuze, these things are all derived from metaphysics. The fact philosophers in the past have tried to subdivide these nonmaterial things into their own categories and study them on their own as though they’re not interrelated to each other and not interrelated to existence at large, this is a good example of why we run into this paradox of the fact that, as human beings, we are simultaneously the only tools we have to try to understand the chaos of existence but, man, do we take what seems like a good idea and run too far with it sometimes.

Nietzsche might interject here and describe us all as “human, all too human.” You know we like to think that we’re rational people. “I’m not crazy. You’re crazy! I have the arguments to back up my beliefs. The other side doesn’t. Just a bunch of animals over there.” But Nietzsche would say, hold on a second. We have a long history of thinkers telling us that we’re these rational creatures. Human reason is the only thing that separates us from the apes. You want to be as rational as possible at all times; that’s a rule. But, even at our best, are we really that rational? Just as our rational minds exist perched inside of an animal body and we don’t even consider that fact sometimes, so too do we try to harness the chaos of the universe with tools that are human, all too human.

Language is a big one for Nietzsche. A lot of people don’t like the fact that Bergson doesn’t want to talk about what processes are or exactly what they’re like. But that’s the problem. Whenever we have to try to describe anything, we have to go through language. But there’s no guarantee that this symphony of grunts we’ve created is capable of describing anything accurately beyond basic human interactions. And you could argue, it’s not even very good at doing that. But we try, don’t we? We want to remain optimistic. Language is all that we have. Maybe it is capable of accurately describing everything.

Process philosopher might see this as a similar line of thinking as the person that’s overly optimistic about the limitations of science. And maybe this is the reason process philosophers seem to be so interested in humor. Because when you truly consider the levels of existence that we’re trying to access here and then you consider the utterly broken tools we have to do the job with -- to go back to the quote at the start of the show -- maybe the only thing that the most melancholy of creatures can do -- this subspecies of primate on this tiny, blue dot -- maybe the only thing we can really do about existence is laugh.

Nietzsche thought, once you accept a negation of being, a movement towards becoming, once you accept that there isn’t a way that things are about you or the universe, you can finally start to wrestle with two of the biggest problems that lie at the heart of the human condition. Number one is how terrifying existence truly is. I mean, we all know by now that, no matter how static and fixed the world may seem, no matter how much there may seem to be a solid way that things are that isn’t going to change, that entire façade can chip away in a matter of hours, and you can find yourself face to face with an entirely new world and the reality you’ve been living in the whole time.

Nietzsche says the other problem we have is a constant campaign we have to fight against the limitations of knowledge. Once you accept that we don’t have access to objectivity or eternal truths, once you accept that all you have access to is a perspective and all we have access to is intersubjectivity, how can you reliably decide what you’re going to believe? How can you stop other people from believing in things that are patently false? How do you know that what you believe isn’t totally wrong? More relevant to us living in the world today, who gets to give people their views on the order of things?

This show is never going to try to give you answers to any of these questions. But, whatever answers you end up finding, consider the fact that if you ever feel stuck in either of these problems Nietzsche lays out, that there are a lot of people out there who have claimed to have found a way out. Being and becoming. Whether you’re looking at yourself or looking at the universe, the absolute best way this “way out” has ever been described in the history of the world -- and it’s actually not even close -- I leave you with that description here today. And I say this from a completely objective, nonbiased perspective at the top of my mountain, while all you listen from the bottom of the mountain. Okay, maybe I’m a little biased.

“I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth. And truth rewarded me.” -- Simone de Beauvoir

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.