Heraclitus |

The distinction between process and thing was emphasized to me recently, and ever since, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. And, as often happens in my experience, other sources of knowledge repeat the lesson frequently.

What is a “process?” First, “process” is a word. It is a word we use to describe the, usually predictable or repeated, movement of something through stages (its development). Process usually connotes change, ongoing development, and dynamism.

What is a “thing?” Again, “thing,” firstly, is a word, a concept. A “thing” is an identified, isolated object. It is static. While it can change over time, a “thing” is typically seen as relatively constant. And, even if the thing itself is not seen as constant, the concept is constant in our mind.

Why do I point out that those are both words/concepts? Because words/concepts are different from “reality.” Words/concepts are tools we have developed over time, and that use to describe or get a handle on reality.

It’s important to remember that our words are tools. If and/or when we forget that, we stop considering whether or not our words make any sense – in relation to what we’re trying to describe, either to the other person, or to ourselves.

That said, what really is a “thing?”

THANGS
I ask the question, because I’m interested in what is really “static” or “unchanging” in reality. There’s nothing I’ve been able to find. Everything changes. As Heraclitus said – “everything flows”

The only real “thing” it seems, is the concept of “thing” itself. The ability to isolate elements from processes in order to be able to manipulate them.

For instance, in order to use a tree branch as a tool, we first have to separate the branch from the tree in our minds. We have to “thing” it.

Luckily, trees, or nature generally, helps with this “thinging” process. When a branch breaks off, we get to see that. Suddenly, we differentiate between “pieces” of the tree…there’s the “roots,” the “trunk,” the “branches,” and the “leaves.” Science has differentiated smaller and smaller elements.

This process is sometimes called “reification” (the making-concrete of something) or “nominalization” (making a verb (process/action) into a noun (thing)).

This is part of what Western science does, by the way. The specialty of science is to “thing” processes into smaller and smaller, and more and more discrete pieces. Recently, science has begun to embrace “systems thinking,” which takes the pieces identified by science, and attempts to recognize the interrelationships between those pieces.

However, this approach is a little flawed, since you’re already approaching the process from the perspective of the “pieces” you’ve identified. You’re already going from a thing-to-process approach, instead of from a process-to-process approach.

Be that as it may, let’s delve into some “things” we encounter in daily life that are actually processes, and some of the ramifications of treating them in that way.

Being and Becoming
The “process philosophy” folks started to try to describe this back in the early 1900′s, but unfortunately, came at it from a Western perspective…they couldn’t play with it too much, and eventually, most of them end up getting locked up in weird word-play, instead of creating anything meaningful or useful.

Anyway, one of the main distinctions they made was between “being” and “becoming.” Usually, “being” refers to an imagined static state, a “thing.” “Becoming,” on the other hand, refers to the process of continually coming-into-being. Heidegger I think does a good, poetic job of describing this idea in a mindbending way in his book “The Question Concerning Technology.”

Happy and Happiness
I believe I’ve mentioned this in previous posts, but happy, or the act of feeling good, is a state of “being.” That is, it’s a single instance in a longer process. We’re never “happy” forever.

However, we lay claims to the “pursuit of happiness” as an ideal. But what is “happiness?” Happiness is the extended state of being happy.

Is that a realistic expectation? As part of a process of feeling/living, doesn’t the feeling of being happy come and go? Is it realistic to want to be happy all the time? If that were to happen, how would we know the difference?

The pursuit of happiness, it seems, is unrealistic…

Success and Failure
When we achieve a goal (which takes a process of learning/doing), we call it success. When we don’t achieve that goal, we call it failure.

However, success usually requires multiple “failures.” This dichotomy is unreal. The process of attempting is the process of alternately succeeding and failing.

What matters most in that process is where we focus our attention. If focused on the task, success and failure are important to us. They provide us with lessons about how what we’re doing is leading us closer to our desired goal or further from it.

If we are not focused on the task, success and failure are relatively meaningless. We aren’t looking for lessons. We aren’t trying to get closer to the goal. We’re just going through the motions.

But we can also focus either on success or failure. If we succeed, we may feel good about ourselves, or linger on that success. If we linger too long, we stop trying, we lose momentum, we’re out of process. If we fail, we may feel bad about ourselves, lose momentum, and fall out of process.

If we see the act as process, though, success and failure each have their turns, and each have lessons to offer us. Those perceptions become tools again, that we can use to help to guide our actions.

What is this thing called? Love?
Another place we can see “thing-speak” or nominalization is in the concept of “love.” I’ve written about love before, recently, talking about the process of observing another person’s development without interference…with passion, but without a cherished outcome.

Love, too, I believe, has been nominalized in our culture/language. We talk about being “in love.” Or “loving” something. But usually, it represents a static state – a certain chemical cocktail – attraction – that we name “love.”

When that happens, we aren’t able to know “where our love went” when that cocktail wears off. In the hangover, we wonder, “what happened?!” We were “in love,” and then “out of love.”

Again, I’d suggest that love is something much deeper and broader than the chemical flood called “attraction.” It is something that also encompasses a certain detachment, admiration from afar, pleasure in watching the unfolding, and also – discipline, self-control, vigilance.

In Relationship, or In a Relationship
The distinction was made to me recently between being in relationship, or being in a relationship.

If we are in relationship, we are in process. We recognize the dynamic as unfolding and developing, as demanding attention, awareness, discipline, care.

If, on the other hand, we are in a relationship, we are in a static thing. We’ve already killed the dynamic before it’s even had a chance to begin.

Exercise
Fine, Josh, but, again, what does this have to do with exercise?

Well, the first example that comes to mind is the concept of “being in shape.” “Being in shape” is actually the ongoing process of “doing in-shape.” If someone is “in shape” and stops there, they rapidly will fall “out of shape.”

Similarly, we refer often to static, controlled exercises. As I’ve said before, while this type of control may be necessary in times of rehabilitation, or intense concentration, it must reflect the process of rehabilitation, or it’s worse than useless.

For instance, when I had my first ACL surgery, the PT’s put me on the leg extension/curl machine afterward. While that is fine, it’s far from enough.

ACL tears frequently mean that the person’s motor-program is faulty…is leading them into dangerous uses of their limbs. Simply doing exercise to strengthen the muscle on either side of the joint may stabilize it, but does nothing to prevent future injuries.

The Gardener
Living in process is like gardening (flowers or food). You go through process with the plants. You try to offer only as much as they need to thrive. It requires a lot of work, a lot of diligence – both to provide for the plants, and to keep yourself from going too far.

And the rest is out of your hands.

It’s tempting to live in a world of black-and-white, yes/no, on/off. I’ve been a big user of this type of worldview over the course of my life, with varying results. It seems, for me, to be most common at the early stages of things. When I’m learning something new, or just starting a project. At that point, the only thing I can rely on is my past experience, and it is much easier to deal with the new thing in a binary, all-or-nothing fashion. It automatically excludes certain possibilities, and makes action easier.

Later, when doing that no-longer-new thing, the relationship has become more complex. Intricacies have been revealed that won’t allow for that dialectical approach.

This is true in any relationship I’ve had, hence “relationships” in the title. I mean personal relationships, relationships to my culture, myself, ideas, or activities.

I recently started reading the Yuan Dao again, which really highlights a concept central to “Eastern” philosophies – change. While the Tao Te Ching does the same, to me, it doesn’t expose an aspect of change necessary for change to happen a well as maybe the Yuan Dao (a commentary on and exposition of the concepts in the Tao) does – the constant underlying change.

There are two ways I look at this – First, there has to be a “ground” or framework from which something can change. There has to be a “normal” for you to notice “abnormal.” The second point, though, is that most of the distinction that we make between something in its original state, versus the “new” thing we end up dealing with is based on ideas of constancy we get from the way we use thought and/or language.

The trick, it seems to me, is that even the “constant” undergoes change. Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher, said “everything changes, and nothing remains still,” and “you cannot step into the same river twice” (because the river changes before you’ve stepped into it again).

Many Western approaches to his statements take the black/white approach – “oh, he only believed in change,” or “oh, there was nothing constant.” But if you read the rest of the fragments of his work, there is the concept of Logos, which seems to be the fount or wellspring of all things, and the “logic” of the process of change. I’ll mention this again in a second, as its something I think we need to start considering and teaching in our lives/practices/schools.

In the river example, by calling/naming it a river, we’ve created a static “thing” in our minds that we can refer back to. I think this is the “tool-making” process of language. By creating “things” out of processes, we create static entities that we can manipulate, that we can use or try to change the way we want to.

The reality is much different, however, because these “things” never truly transform into static entities. They continue to change every second, which may (or may not) cause us problems down the road, when we want that “thing” that we’ve defined in our mind to behave a certain way (the way it was defined when we “thinged” it), and it does not comply. The river changes course, constantly shifts, seeks its own path, and overflows its banks or bursts the dykes or dams we make to contain it. At the very least, the river’s flow wears down the things we put in its path, and we have to constantly do maintenance to our methods of control.

I think this happens sometimes for people as they age. They may have defined themselves based on the look of their face at the age of 28, or 18, or how fit they were then, or their athletic accomplishments (or failures). As they grow older, those things change, they fade, they become impossible or possible only in different ways.

By remaining attached to the earlier concept, the person causes themselves emotional pain and eventually they begin to suffer.

In our culture, now, when that happens, the response is often to continue to exert control. Get botox injections, take hormone replacement therapy, plastic surgery, etc.

In that approach, the lesson is lost. The meditation on change never occurs, except in a black and white mode, where change is the enemy to be destroyed.

Unfortunately, as with a couple of other things I’ve been talking about with friends recently (like the ability to create interest in yourself for certain things) we aren’t taught much about change in our schooling, or our culture generally speaking. Maybe it’s because it makes it more difficult to govern, our societies or our lives. Maybe the subject-matter is too deep (Heraclitus was called “the obscure”). But I wonder what would happen if we did begin to meditate on change more frequently, and the constant underlying change.

Not only that, but what would happen if we began to understand that our “constant”s could be malleable. That we could shift our understanding of some “thing” that we thought we understood…that we weren’t tied to the opinion or approach we first formed when we started something…

…that we could change.

Tag Archives: heraclitus

Process versus Thing

Relationships, and the constant underlying change