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Being or Process — A Philosophical Line of Development
Thomas Schüller (ORCID 0009-0003-9799-6747) · Syntagma Forschung · Wien · Fassung 1.1 · 28.10.2026 · CC BY 4.0 · Kennung in Klärung
Companion paper to the Vienna Interpretation
The Underlying Question
The history of philosophy can also be understood as an ongoing attempt to grasp the fundamental structure of reality. The early Greek philosophers already raised questions that remain unresolved today: Is reality something stable and unchanging, or does it consist of continuous change and process? Behind all observable change, is there a deeper unity — or is change itself the actual ground structure of reality?
This question cannot be settled by simple observation, because both answers find support in experience. On the one hand, things appear durable enough to be named, recognized, and ordered. On the other, any closer look shows that nothing truly stands still. It is precisely from this twofold experience that the entire line of development below draws its tension.
Antiquity: Being and Becoming
Parmenides formulated one of the most radical positions in ancient philosophy. For him, true being was unchanging, indivisible, and timeless. Change, motion, and coming-into-being ultimately appeared, within his view, as incomplete perception or illusion. If something truly is, then it must already be; nothing can arise out of non-being. Reality thereby possesses a deep underlying unity and continuity, while the world of changing appearances forms only the deceptive realm of mere opinion.
Opposed to this stood Heraclitus, who regarded continuous change itself as the basic principle of reality. The authentic river fragment (DK 22 B12) stresses that things preserve their identity precisely through change — upon those who step into the same rivers, ever different waters flow. The familiar sharpened form, that one cannot step twice into the same river, is a Platonic paraphrase (Cratylus 402a) and shifts the point from persistence-through-change toward sheer flux. On either reading, everything is in motion and reorganizes itself continuously; stability appears only as a temporary order inside an ongoing process. At the same time, this flux was not chaotic for Heraclitus: a pervading measure, the logos, holds the opposites in tensioned unity.
A tension already emerges here that runs through large parts of the history of philosophy: the tension between stable being and dynamic becoming.
Aristotle attempted in part to reconcile these opposites. Motion, change, and development were understood by him not as mere illusion, but as transitions between possibility and actualization. Things possess potentials that become actualized under certain conditions. With the distinction between form and matter, and the doctrine of the four causes, change became systematically describable for the first time without being denied. Reality thereby arises neither as fully static nor as entirely chaotic, but organizes itself through form, matter, cause, and motion in ordered transitions.
Later ancient traditions also engaged with relational and processual structures. The Stoics described an ordered, interconnected reality in which processes, cause and effect, and cyclical dynamics remain coupled through an all-pervading logos. Each individual state appears here embedded within a larger, self-organizing whole.
Eastern Traditions: Balance and Dependence
In Daoism, too, reality appears not as a rigid fixed order, but as a dynamic balance of opposing forces within continuous change. Opposites such as yin and yang are not separate substances but coupled states of a continuous flow. Reality is understood less as a collection of things than as a movement that is least disturbed when one does not work against it.
Buddhist philosophy additionally emphasizes impermanence, non-isolation, and the mutual dependence of all states. In the idea of dependent origination, nothing exists fully on its own; each state arises out of conditions and at the same time forms a condition for others. The notion of a fixed, isolated substance thereby gives way to a thoroughly relational web.
Modern Period: Separation and Unity
With the modern period, perspectives shifted again. Descartes separated mind and matter and thereby laid an important cornerstone for the mechanistic models of science. Reality increasingly appeared as an analyzable system of clearly distinguishable objects and causes, one that can be decomposed into clear and distinct parts. This separation enabled enormous methodological progress, yet it came at the price of a split whose consequences continue to occupy philosophy today.
At the same time, philosophers such as Spinoza sought once more a deeper unity behind the differing forms in which reality appears. Instead of two separate domains, Spinoza thought a single substance, within which mind and matter are only different aspects of the same whole. Reality appears here as a relational order in which each state follows necessarily from the context of the whole.
Kant shifted the question further onto the conditions of human perception itself. Reality never appears to the human being fully independently, but always within particular structures of cognition and perception. Space, time, and the categories are not mere properties of things but conditions under which experience first becomes possible at all. With this, not only reality itself but also the observer moved more firmly into the center of philosophical attention.
The 19th Century: Movement and Perspective
Later thinkers such as Hegel increasingly understood development as a dynamic process of contradiction, change, and historical movement. Reality is here not what lies unchangeably present, but what unfolds continuously through tensions, their sublation, and renewed tension. The seemingly fixed reveals itself as a moment within a more encompassing movement. The popular formula "thesis–antithesis–synthesis" is often attributed to Hegel, but does not come from him; it traces back to Fichte and its popularization by Chalybäus, and Hegel himself rejected such external schemata.
Nietzsche fundamentally called fixed truths and absolute perspectives into question, emphasizing the role of interpretation, perspective, and continuous reinterpretation. What appears as a stable fact is, on this view, always already interpreted, classified, seen from a standpoint. The question of being thereby shifts once more: no longer only what reality is, but from which position and by which means it appears at all as the determinate thing it is taken to be. The sharpened formula "there are no facts, only interpretations" comes from the Nachlass (posthumously compiled as "The Will to Power"), not from a work Nietzsche himself published.
The 20th Century: Process and Relation
In the 20th century, philosophy shifted increasingly toward process, relation, and systems dynamics. Heidegger regarded being no longer merely as an object-state, but as a fundamental existential context. The decisive distinction lies between the individual entity and being itself, which never simply lies present but, as a horizon of meaning, first opens up that and how something can appear at all.
Whitehead developed, with process philosophy, a model in which reality does not consist of fixed things but of events, relations, and ongoing processual organization. What we perceive as things are relatively stable patterns within a continuous occurrence; the fundamental level is not substance but the event and its linkage with other events.
In parallel, the modern sciences developed similar dynamics. Quantum physics, field theory, thermodynamics, cybernetics, systems theory, and research on complex networks increasingly describe reality no longer as a rigid collection of isolated objects, but as a relational dynamic of coupled states, probabilities, fields, and continuous interactions. Concepts such as feedback, self-organization, and open systems shift the view from what a system is to how it continuously sustains and reorganizes itself.
The Vienna Interpretation
The Vienna Interpretation understands itself, within this development, not as a final answer but as a further framework of observation. Stability and change appear here not as absolute opposites. Systems remain stable enough to make orientation, perception, language, science, and technology possible, yet at the same time they reorganize themselves permanently on different levels. Reality thereby appears neither fully rigid nor fully chaotic, but as a relational order within the continuous dynamics of open systems.
The historical line thus shows less a sequence of refuted errors than a recurring field of tension. The question of stable being and dynamic becoming reappears in ever new constellations: among the Greeks as the opposition of Parmenides and Heraclitus, in the modern period as the tension between mechanistic separation and substantial unity, in the 20th century as the shift from substance to process. The Vienna Interpretation takes this tension not as a problem to be solved but as a structural feature of reality itself: concepts stabilize orientation, while the underlying processes remain dynamic, open, and never fully concluded.
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