The game
Itwas with a chapter on "becoming" that Jean Wahl began his "journey through philosophical concepts", arguing that "the reaction against the thought of becoming... largely explains the entire development of metaphysics in the West after Heraclitus"(Traité de métaphysique, 1953, p. 33). Without denying becoming, which remained at the bottom of the picture, Western philosophers sought to identify what was stable and regular in the world, admitting that for there to be science, it must be possible to observe and generalize, without the objects we study evading examination: "we take knowledge of everything insofar as it is one and the same and has something universal about it" (Aristotle, MetaphysicsB, 999 a, 29). In so doing, philosophers have sometimes failed to recognize that the Heraclitean world in the background, unstable and versatile though it is, offers human action a margin of freedom, and creative opportunities, which leave the world's inhabitants the possibility and responsibility of shaping it in their own way - except that, if becoming excludes any form of permanence, it will destroy as it goes along what we have tried to build..
As Wahl notes(ibid., p. 49), "in the midst of this ceaseless becoming of the world, there are productions of this becoming..." (works of art, living beings) that resist becoming! The philosophers of becoming we have mentioned (Bergson, Whitehead, Simondon) have, in fact, managed to introduce a dose of permanence into their universe of becoming. Bergson, for example, while marveling at the fluidity of our mental states, refers to the "solidification in our memory" of certain sensations, impressions and ideas(Essai..., 1889, p. 127). "Since, in order to create the future, something of it must be prepared in the present, and since the preparation of what will be can only be made by the use of what has been, life from the very beginning endeavors to preserve the past and to anticipate the future in a duration in which past, present and future encroach on each other and form an undivided continuity: this memory and this anticipation are, as we have seen, consciousness itself" (Bergson, Conf. Huxley, 1911, Œuvres, p. 824).
