Plato's Theory of Being and Becoming: Forms Explained

The Paradox of Being and Not-Being

Plato's theory of Being and Becoming, and its relation to the Forms, is rooted in the dichotomy between being and not-being. Prior to Socrates, the Sophists — from Parmenides to Gorgias — had argued that because it was impossible by definition for Nothing to exist, it was equally impossible to describe or vocalize a negative state, and therefore impossible to utter falsehood. As Plato frames the problem in the Sophist: "And now arises the greatest difficulty of all. If Not-being is inconceivable, how can Not-being be refuted?" All that could be said must be somehow true, since false speech would not be speech at all and therefore could not be uttered. Being was arranged across a divide from an incomprehensible and impossible Not-Being. In addition, the nature of Being itself was somewhat suspect, as it was seen alternately as a great static or fluctuating Oneness, or as a multitude of ones — and either position had serious flaws.

When Plato, through his dramatic persona Socrates, arrived at a solution for the paradox of Being and Not-Being, that solution was that both Being and Not-Being are inherent in all things and defined not by the negation of one another but by the clarification of each other's properties. It then became apparent that the truth or reality of a thing is determined by the degree to which its professed or apparent nature aligns with an objective standard — whether metaphysical or experiential. This idea of a standard by which Being could be judged, apart from interaction with Not-Being, leads naturally to the idea that there are abstracted complex "Forms" — sets of ideals or defining characteristics. The Forms, by which the truth of other things can be judged, are abstract, complete, and relatively static. Actual reality, however, is concrete and incomplete: the "falseness" of not being fully ideal runs through all reality, distorting it from the Form. Because of that incompleteness, actual reality is not actually Being at all, but Becoming.

This clarification is also grounded in the Being/Not-Being debate, because that debate had suggested that Being was static and that falsehood and Not-Being were impossible partly because contradictory things could not both be true of one object — for example, that it was both moving and at rest. Motion and change were therefore largely illusory, or were evidence of the fragmentation of reality. In response, the relationship between Forms and their expressions came to be understood as a tension between the overarching Being of archetypes and norms and the transitory Becoming of physical, perceptual reality. To understand the significance of Being and Becoming in Plato's theory of Forms, then, it is necessary to understand that the issue of Being and Becoming is in many ways the same as the issue of Being/Not-Being, and as such is bound up with questions of language and truth that make it fundamental to the theory of Forms.

Historical Context: Parmenides, Heraclitus, and the Sophists

The preceding explanation of the relationship between Being/Not-Being and Being/Becoming deserves further historical perspective. Plato did not develop his idea of Forms in a vacuum. In his dialogue Parmenides, Plato shows how Socrates received serious critiques and direction on his theory of Forms from the older philosopher Parmenides, whose intelligent questioning and rhetorical skill effectively dismantled the younger philosopher's convictions — at least for the space of that conversation. Throughout his works, Socrates consistently references other philosophers and schools of thought, most notably the Sophists, whom he both vilified and credited with theories denying the very possibility of truth or falsehood.

So Plato and Socrates inherited from these forerunners a body of thought that may have distorted their own vision to some degree. As the introduction to the Project Gutenberg edition of Plato's Sophist suggests, the view was that "no Being or reality can be ascribed to Not-being, and therefore not to falsehood, which is the image or expression of Not-being. Falsehood is wholly false; and to speak of true falsehood, as Theaetetus does (Theaet.), is a contradiction in terms... The fallacy to us is ridiculous and transparent... It is a confusion of falsehood and negation, from which Plato himself is not entirely free." Yet this was a vast, overarching preoccupation among philosophers at the time, and much of what might now seem somewhat absurd in the argument was then a very serious question — whether full human communication was truly possible, and whether humans could genuinely affect the world around them or whether the world was essentially unchangeable.

On Parmenides, Thomas McFarlane writes: "It was to Parmenides contrary to the logos for any real change to take place at all. In particular, it was impossible for a One Being to become many. For if the unity and being of the One are taken seriously, the One cannot in reality become other than what it already is — no manifold world can actually proceed out of the One, no opposites actually exist to transform into each other. Therefore plurality, becoming, change, motion, flux, and so on, are not real, despite what our senses may lead us to believe." (McFarlane)

Plato would take this idea of the united, unchanging One and agree that it applied to Being. However, he synthesized it with an earlier theory by Heraclitus, which suggested that though the world is one, it is one in eternal flux. "All Flows," Heraclitus suggests, and in this there is a perpetual cycle of life and death, of seasons, of movement and rest, and so forth. This constant flux was driven by the transformations and dualities of opposites: "the flux of existing things is characterized by the transformation between pairs of contrary principles... everything is One through the dynamic transforming of opposites into each other. Yet, Heraclitus sees structure in this flux." (McFarlane) Plato would suggest that both theories were true to some degree — that while what he called Being is indeed immune to change, that which he called Becoming is in constant flux. The world of Forms (which is the manifestation of the One) is essentially unchanging; the expression of those Forms in the world of shadows (which is human reality) is changeable and mutable. To return to the metaphor of the cave, one might add that the flickering of firelight casts moving shadows on the wall even when the objects casting those shadows have not moved.

Not-Being as Relation: Plato's Resolution

This idea was supported by a sophisticated, if not entirely tidy, argument regarding transformation over time: at every individual moment in time, the transforming thing is not actually transforming — it either is or is not in a given state. So things do not flux when viewed as abstractions frozen in time, but when they come to life through the intervention of time or other beings, they begin to Become. The Being self, which is an abstract Form, is therefore different from the experientially based Becoming self. That deformation from the One Being to the One Becoming was an idea unique to Socrates at the time, yet it could not have arisen without the intervening arguments regarding Being and Not-Being.

As was mentioned earlier, Parmenides and his Sophist contemporaries proposed several variations on the theme that there cannot be a thing which is not. This is inherent in the "numbering" nature of language itself — in speech, one always refers to a Not-Being thing as a thing, an "it," or some other object-term that implies selfhood. It is self-contradictory to say that there is a thing which is not a thing, or that there does exist "some thing which does not exist." The negation of being assumes a being to be negated, and therefore simultaneously performs an assumption and a destruction of being, rendering the claim meaningless.

Plato proposed that the way around this dilemma was not to consider Not-Being as a form of negation, but rather as a form of relation. "Not-Being" is a particular variety of being, even as injustice is a form of justice, or poor grammar is still a form of speech. Not-Being is, precisely, the Other of Being — it is everything which lies outside the form-ulated definition of the Being thing, and which must also exist in order that the Being thing can be seen in relief. The "Not-Being" of alive may only be dead or unborn, but the "Not-Being" of white can include the entire rainbow. Being, one quickly notices, is far more specific than Not-Being — yet it also cannot be understood without it. White, for example, has no real meaning if there are not other colors to compare it to that are not-white.

Plato addresses this directly in the Sophist:

"We have discovered that not-being is the principle of the other which runs through all things, being not excepted. And 'being' is one thing, and 'not-being' includes and is all other things. And not-being is not the opposite of being, but only the other... And the essence of the not-beautiful is to be separated from and opposed to a certain kind of existence which is termed beautiful. And this opposition and negation is the not-being of which we are in search, and is one kind of being. Thus, in spite of Parmenides, we have not only discovered the existence, but also the nature of not-being — that nature we have found to be relation." (Plato, Sophist)

Conclusion: Being, Becoming, and the Unity of Plato's Philosophy

Being and Becoming are very central to Plato's theory of the Forms, because they represent the modes of existence held individually by Forms and by the expression of those Forms. Being is the proper term for the existence of a Form, just as Becoming is for its product or appearance. Yet these terms matter not only because they activate the theory of Forms, but also because they are the link between the theory of Forms — one of the "truths" espoused by Plato — and the theory of Being and Not-Being.