Being v. Becoming, Pt. 4: What's in a Name?

 Imagine you are an ancient ship owner. Your personal wooden vessel we'll call the "Theseus".

You launch the Theseus to lead your private fleet in pursuit of adventures all around the world. As time goes by, pieces of the Theseus weaken, erode, or get damaged in various battles and tight squeezes. As each piece gets damaged, you replace it with an identical piece of wood your shipbuilders manage to locate wherever it is you stop to lick your wounds and prepare for your next sally. Traveling in your armada you also have a supply ship. Periodically, it travels back and forth to your native land taking all the booty you've plundered and retrieving your mail and your favorite wines and goats, etc. Each time it returns, it takes the discarded pieces of the ship in its hold as ballast. You've instructed the captain of the supply vessel to store each and every one of these pieces, old masts, boards, ropes, etc. from the Theseus in your warehouse near the docks. By the time you sail back to your home port, you have replaced each and every piece of your original Theseus with new ones. What's more, once you return you discover that your industrious warehouse manager has taken all the pieces you shipped back, restored them, and constructed another ship from them, identical in every respect to the ship in which you first set sail those many years ago.  (See Plutarch, Life of Theseus; Th. Hobbes, De Corpore, 2.11)

Here's the question: Which of the two ships (or both) (or neither) rightly bears the name "Theseus"? Are they the same ship or merely identical copies?

Is the Theseus (a) the refurbished ship in which you sail home, or (b) the reconstructed ship made from all the origninal parts waiting for you in the docks by the warehouse or (c) both or (d) neither?

Philosophers love these sorts of puzzles. Solutions hinge on such things as whether we privilege proper names ("Theseus") or things themselves (any change in which destroys the original identity) or the component parts of whole things (the refurbished ship) or practical functions (what it means to be a ship). It challenges us to question what it means to "be" a "thing" or "the same".

Similarly, seeing Michael Apted's documentary 56 Up reminds me that people change over time. They grow. They degrade. They even change their names sometimes. The molecules composing their bodies change (though not, apparently, the electrons and quantum particles). How are the children in 7 Up the same persons as the near-geezers in 56 Up? What does it mean to "be" a "person"?

One way of looking at it is to think of, say, Suzy as the same person at each temporal interval. Thus "Suzy" has the same personal identity throughout the course of her life's changes. But, in the same way we might say Suzy has changed her hair color or painted her nails red, we say she is 'Suzy at time T1,' 'Suzy at time T2,' ... .

Of course, with living beings, the notion of consciousness throws a bit of a monkey wrench into the gears. We might then want to say that despite all the physical changes she's been through, Suzy's consciousness remains the same over the course of years. Suzy is psychologically continuous. Well, maybe. Fifty-six year old Suzy might be aware of having been through a painful divorce in her 40s—something that profoundly changed her, whereas seven year old Suzy would have no way of knowing this. Fifty-six year old Suzy might know what it means to suffer depression or to experience sexual ecstasy or to feel profound guilt and self-loathing, whereas seven year old Suzy in all likelihood would not. How, it seems prudent to ask, is this continuous?

The problem with this sort of analysis is that it attempts to preserve/privilege the concept of 'Being'. In Heraclitean terms, the river doesn't change, and Suzy is the same no matter at which point we enter her life (or she enters the river). This is handy for such things as language, naming and reference, analysis, understanding, etc. But, as Wittgenstein says, because of this we need to be wary of the things language does to our perceptions and understanding of reality. "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language." (Philosophical Investigations, § 109)

But, it seems to me, it is fundamentally delusional. Phrased another way: How is it that Becoming or Process (rather than Being or Stasis) is not considered the primary mode of existence?

Heraclitus's ancient intuition, a brief and, to my mind, profound insight into the true nature of things, was eventually overshadowed by the more pragmatic Platonic and Aristotelian and Christian notions of ideals and substances and attributes and souls that dominate Western thought to this day. Don't get me wrong, these latter concepts are important. But they have the potential to stand in the way of our recognizing and coming to grips with the true, that is to say fluid, nature of Reality and Becoming.

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Being v. Becoming, Pt. 3

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Finally.

Nearly a year ago I posted my excitement upon hearing that Michael Apted was releasing another documentary in the "Up" film series, this time "56 Up". It is playing for one week only here in the ATL, and I got to opening night on Friday. It did not disappoint.

The series comprises footage of about a dozen British men and women at the ages of 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49, and now 56. There are interviews with people who are currently lawyers, teachers, a taxi driver, a forklift operator, a scientist, librarians, a local politician, a musician, and homemakers. Some have dropped out over the years. Each film brings the viewer up to date with each subject, showing highlights of the interviews from each of the past films.

We can follow these British members of m-m-m-m-my generation discussing their hopes and dreams, their feelings about love and family, work and play, and sense of self and society at each step along the way. In this most recent film, we catch up with them where they are today, reflecting on the persons they had been—their beliefs about what the future held for them at the time—and the realities of their lives today. There are stories of divorce, estrangement, love, fulfillment, disappointment, happiness, madness. The list goes on. It is the ultimate 'Reality' show.

What struck me as I watched the film: It felt like a reunion—in a good way. I felt like I was reaquainting with old friends, catching up on the stories of their lives, as well as contemplating my own life's journey.

It's an unparalleled filmic document. It shows us what film can be, even though there's really no plot. Not even a car chase. Just interviews and B-roll of about a dozen middle-aged British men and women. [One cool thing about the series is watching the development of film technology over the last 49 years, from grainy black-and-white to shitty color to hi-def.]

It made me ask myself what were my own hopes and dreams when I was 7, 14, 21, ... etc. Who was that callow tad? Where are the insightful interviews of him? Why isn't there B-roll footage of his life?

Oh, I can tell you where I was living and with whom at each of those points in my life. And what I was doing (school-wise, work-wise, play-wise, etc.). But I simply cannot recall what it was like to be in my skin at any of those ages, to think the thoughts I was thinking at those times, to feel what I must have been feeling despite my own predilection for acute self-awareness.

How, I wonder, am I (or any of us, for that matter) the same person I was (we were) at any of those staging points along my (our) life's way. I certainly have the same name as he did. And I bear a remarkable facial and physical resemblance to him, though, admittedly, the proportions have changed. I am not so young-seeming as he, either. Less hair, grayer hair, a bit slacker around the mid-section. Maybe wiser.

I'm reminded of J.M. Coetzee's novel Summertime. Here's the blurb:

"A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on Coetzee in his thirties, at a time when he was living in a run-down cottage in the Cape Towm suburbs with his widowed father—a time, the biographer is convinced, when Coetzee was finding himself as a writer. ...Summertime is an inventive and inspired work of fiction that allows J. M. Coetzee to imagine his own life with a critical and unsparing eye..."

Perhaps I'll write a personal essay of my own or even a fictionalized account of myself at each of these random-year points in my own life focusing on what has changed and what has remained the same, what can be known and what only imagined. Maybe even as part of this Being v. Becoming serial post.

P.S. It looks as if all of the films are findable on the YouTubes, in discrete 15 minute segments. Do yourself a favor.