Pages of Becoming

Something is off with the vibe. I am not trying to create polemic or say something to be frowned upon to feel special, to feel like I know or have figured out something that the majority of others have not or cannot. That’s the disclaimer. Now, to me it is plainly obvious that there has been an obsession with progress since pretty much I’ve known myself*. Read more, get more degrees, get a promotion, earn more, receive more respect and authority, have more friends, build more muscle, and so on and so forth. Not that progress is inherently bad (few things are inherently good or bad). But what we implicitly mean by progress might be. The word comes from Latin progressus: a going forward. Pro- means forward, and gressus means to walk. So progress is, strictly speaking, temporal and unavoidable. Behind the word lies an assumption: what is ahead is better than what is behind. Is the reverse imaginable? Could it be that in moving forward, we do not reach the better but rather move further away from it?** Logically speaking, no, since the word better means an improvement from the past stages. So, we will share the assumption, in this context, but still define progress neutrally as the inevitable temporal movement of living matter: forward. So far, so good.

My problem is with the acceleration of progress. It feels to me that, when we speak of progress, we do not mean moving forward, but increasing the rate of moving forward. So it is no longer important that we move forward, but that we do so faster and faster. Who are we trying to catch up with? Anyway, even though moving backwards is impossible, staying in place is (which would mean no progress) or moving forward at the same speed we did a year ago or a decade ago. The issue, for me, is that in the situation we find ourselves in, staying stagnant and moving forward with the same acceleration are essentially the same. If I took two steps yesterday and four steps today, I would take six steps tomorrow to keep the acceleration constant. The danger nowadays is that I will stagnate if I take six steps tomorrow. I need to make seven, or eight, or a hundred. I think this is alarming. 

It is (also) true for living systems that if they do not change, they die. The reason for them to change (structurally) is to keep their identity (organization) stable***. They change to remain the same. For living systems, the results of the speed of change are context-dependent. Changing faster is not better in every situation. There has to be a correspondence between the rate of change of the organism and the demands of its environment, or in other words, its viability conditions. If it changes too fast, it risks a breakdown (same if it changes too slowly). The given speed of change of a living system reveals, in Francisco Varela’s words, that it is possible for that system to be the way it is and to act the way it has acted. In short, the rate of change in a living system reveals that its mode of being, its rhythm, is viable. 

One reason why I find our current situation alarming is that we seem to have no use for the concept of viability anymore. We are demigods, throwing dice and gambling with the environment. Civilization behaves as if consequences do not apply to it, while knowing explicitly that they do and that it will be the first in the line of fire. Granted, there is uncertainty about how dangerous the systems we are creating are, but there is no uncertainty whatsoever about how what we are creating destroys the world that has created us. My problem here is less with a danger to human civilization, which will have brought whatever happens onto itself, and more with the damage to everything besides human civilization: the attack on the conditions of viability of all living systems. 

Living systems change to stay the same. What is the “goal” (apologies to all the anti-teleology folks) of human civilization’s change, of its moving forward now? It seems to me that the purpose is the same. Only now, we have to accelerate more and more to stay the same. We have to change faster and faster and faster to preserve whatever form of identity we have. You see the problem? 

Heaven forbid that acceleration stagnates or slows down. We’ve built a system that might die if we stop constantly innovating (actually, I think it definitely would, but what do I know?). We have to push. There’s no time to stay still. We have to be restless. Build and build and build until there’s no room left. Then free up more room and keep building. Where are we trying to reach? Anyway, there’s no time to pause to ask what we’re doing. We have no time for reflection (who gives a damn about philosophy?). Reflection should work like logic does. Logic constrains our thought. It gets rid of some paths we could have taken, showing that if we did, we would get lost. Reflection should function to constrain progress, to show that just because we can do something, it doesn’t mean that we need to (or should) do it. But the ethos of our times is different. It is one in which ambitious men can be audacious enough to claim that if a technology is not unpredictable, or if you can understand it, it’s not advanced enough****. Well… never mind. You carry on.

I am reminded of Francisco Varela’s remark in his reflections on the Chilean civil war that, if he was interested in doing anything, it was to help create a culture that could undo itself; if he cannot do that, he would rather go skiing (me, I would rather go swimming). We have no way of undoing the system we did create. It seems we have moved beyond the point at which it was possible to take a smaller step forward; we do not seem to have a way of undoing the system in a way that preserves viability not just for us, but for everything else that is not us. A system that cannot undo itself will find it extremely difficult to course-correct. So we have to move on our course, but move faster and faster. 

You know? Cliché is ruling nowadays. And of course, it’s become a cliché to say “in this ever-changing world.” Authors do it, journalists do it (I’ve done it, embarrassingly more than once), YouTubers do it, LinkedIn-ers do it. What does that even mean? No, better: does it mean anything? The world has always been changing because we are temporal beings. So it’s a truism. What we’re really talking about is that the rate of change is increasing. There’s a structural shift from the world changes to the acceleration of change is now the constant. And that’s exactly why we need reflection to put some constraints on whatever we are and will be doing.

* I do not mean biological birth, when we are thrown into the world, as Heidegger has it. I mean the later moment of existential disclosure, when I became a person in the full sense, though I cannot pinpoint when.

** Not that it matters. The past is past, and we cannot walk toward it, only away from it. 

*** Referring here to the work of Francisco Varela.

**** See Dupuy (2009 p.xii): "As another influential visionary, the American applied physicist Kevin Kelly, revealingly remarked, “It took us a long time to realize that the power of a technology is proportional to its inherent out-of-controlness, its inherent ability to surprise and be generative. In fact, unless we can worry about a technology, it is not revolutionary enough.”"

It’s easy to criticize. It’s easy because it requires no effort, and it makes one feel sophisticated. One might think that sophistication demands long-term, stable and sustained effort such as reading, thinking, writing, being present, working, experimenting, hypothesizing, testing hypotheses and so on and so forth. Being critical requires none of these, yet it lets one “argue” or "discuss" with experts (those who have invested effort in their "being", in their "existing") on equal footing (no, I am not laughing).

There is, more often than not, a correlation between how easy something is and how worthless (or worse: dangerous) it is. Early, premature criticism (and it is this criticism that requires no effort) is harmful to whatever party is involved: self–self in self-criticism, self–other in relationships. One has to acquire the habit of withholding criticism, one has to employ epoche à la Husserl (putting one’s own ideas on hold, or in parentheses to be revisited and updated as the interaction goes on). In other, looser, words: One should not ask everything. Sometimes one has to wait for the answers to reveal themselves. How do answers reveal themselves? When there arises a context in which they become part of a whole, related to other answers. This is true for criticism: one has to first wait for the context to reveal itself. But it is waiting that our day cannot tolerate. 

To be able to criticize, one first has to go through a stage where one has to silence both the external and the internal voices. One has to acquire the habit of not taking oneself that seriously. What I have to say in a conversation does not bring me any additional benefit compared to what I gain by listening to others (what do I gain? one step closer to the context!). Taking myself more seriously than whomever I am conversing with traps me in my own mind and vicious loops begin forming. Taking my conversation parther more seriously broadens my horizon, which is no small feat. It is freeing. Empowerment is taking the context more seriously than self.  One has to develop the habit of first understanding the context in which a certain behaviour or idea arises, and then observe where it leads. 

Example. Scenario 1: person A did deed x and then deed y. Scenario 2: person A did deed x and then deed s. The A’s in these two scenarios are not the same A. Second example. Goethe published Faust I around sixty years of age and completed Faust II in his eighties. For roughly twenty years,  Faust I was a tragedy. Then came the second part, ending with “Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.” From that moment on, Faust I was no longer a tragedy but a tragic movement towards salvation. In nuce: The appearance of that second part caused the meaning of  Faust I itself to shift: the first part can no longer be read as the same text once the second exists.

This was a tangent that I took simply because I love mentioning the Faust example. Plus, it is my blog so who can really stop me from doing so? (The correct answer: the rules of quality writing). 

My point in a nutshell: premature criticism is better called dogma, as it aims to drown reflection. It drowns out all the possible paths the conversation partner could take, leading the conversation to a reflexive state of staying within oneself and remaining secure. It is a way of avoiding learning something new or meaningful, out of fear that it might force one to reconsider certain positions one holds in life. Dogma. Premature criticism is indistinguishable from dogma. It stems from the same fire within self and results in the same fire in society at large.

Of course, the important question is how to know when it is the appropriate time to begin criticism. That’s where wisdom comes in. And for wisdom to develop, repeated experimentation is necessary. One does not end in criticism; rather one moves between understanding and criticism, until the criticism feels mature enough, stable enough to incorporate observations and the feelings associated with an idea.

There are problems, there are disturbances, and then there are mysteries. All life lacks something, and what it lacks is precisely what creates value. Craving, the source of suffering, is both a problem and a disturbance: its root lies in the organism, while its object lies in the environment. There are many cases in which problems and disturbances cannot be neatly separated, even though it is of great value to one’s well-being to treat problems as problems and disturbances as disturbances. Mysteries, however, demand neither a solution nor a response. The best one can do is to sit with them and, perhaps, realize that they are the source of creativity. 

You want to go to work, but there is a car accident on the way. You want to do your job as a journalist, but your government is authoritarian and everyone who writes ends up in jail. You want to be active, but your health does not allow it. You want to be with your family, but they live in a different country and you do not have the money for tickets. You want to do sports, but you are tired. You want to read, but you cannot focus. You want to sleep, but your mind and heart are racing. You want to write, but your mind is as dull as a piece of brick. You want to belong among interesting people, but you are hardly the sharpest tool in the shed. But wait—where do these thoughts come from?

Above, some are external issues such as a car accident, an authoritarian government, illness, lack of money, or geographic separation. These are problems. Problems are encountered. Others are internal issues such as lack of focus, tiredness, a racing mind, dullness, a sense of inadequacy, or the desire to be important. These are disturbances. Disturbances are suffered. The question of where thought comes from, however, is a mystery. Mysteries interrupt orientation.

A problem, πρόβλημα in Greek, is an obstacle, something thrown in front of you. πρό (pro) means before, and βλημα comes from the verb βάλλειν (ballein), which means to throw. Problem is a passive word, as opposed to, for example, metabolism (μεταβάλλειν), which means to throw beyond*. Metabolism is the internal process of continuous change in living systems, a process from within. Problem, by contrast, is something encountered from without: something that throws itself before me, something that meets you, interrupts you, blocks your path. A problem is thus external, something to be removed from the path in order to reach a destination, something that demands a response. The existence of a problem indicates the existence of a goal. This is to say that problems are intrinsically teleological: they always exist in relation to a predetermined goal (a car crash on the road to work is not a problem for me on a weekend). As a conceptual shorthand, let us label this understanding of problem Greek.

Now, a disturbance. This word has a Latin root: dis-, meaning apart, in different directions, and turbare, meaning to stir, to agitate (hence the related word turbulence). Disturbāre, as a verb, means to throw into disorder. Whereas a problem is something that is thrown into your path, a disturbance is a disordering of what was already there, something amiss, out of place. With the word disturbance, we are dealing not with an external obstacle but with an internal tension, an agitation. Things are stirred apart, unsettled from their previously ordered state. Let us label this understanding Roman, again purely as a conceptual shorthand. In Roman Stoicism, what creates issues is not the external situation itself but the judgment toward it. Whatever the external event may be, it is neutral, not valued in itself. Whether it becomes an issue depends on how one takes it, that is, on whether it generates an internal disturbance and to what degree. Examples include feeling insulted, feeling wronged by fate, anxiety about reputation, or anger at what cannot be controlled. All of these are internally generated, rather than being thrown into one’s path, that is, externally presented.

We can thus call a problem a first-order event and a disturbance a second-order event. In lived experience, the two are often closely linked: an external problem gives rise to an internal disturbance. Because this is the pattern we are familiar with, because we are so used to encountering roadblocks in our path and feeling the tension they create within us, we often overlook the possibility that disturbances can arise even when there is no corresponding problem. We can experience agitation, tension, or suffering where there is, in fact, no external obstacle or even a goal.

Imagine you go to the doctor and tell her that you are not feeling all that well. She looks at you, as if she already has all the test results she might need after one careful glance, and tells you that she knows what is wrong with you: you are alive. Every living form, she says, is subject to suffering. You start feeling worse than you did when you walked into her office. Now you not only feel unwell, but you feel bad because you do not feel very well and are afraid that this is how you will have to feel for as long as you are alive. The attentive doctor notices your reaction and says, in a soft voice, “But we have the cure.” You wonder what it might be. She tells you that there are eight steps you have to follow in order to minimize suffering, and that if you are devoted and disciplined enough, you will reach a state of bliss, the cessation of suffering. This is the Buddha’s core teaching, the so-called Four Noble Truths: we all suffer; we know what causes suffering; suffering can end; and to bring about its end, we must follow the Noble Eightfold Path. I will not go into the details of the path here. What matters for my purposes is the second noble truth: that we know what causes suffering. Suffering arises from craving (taṇhā): craving for sense pleasure, the wish for agreeable experiences to continue or intensify; craving for being or becoming, the wish to be someone, to secure identity, status, or continuity; and craving for non-being, the wish for things to end, disappear, or be other than they are.

Let us return to the word metabolism. We said that it means throwing beyond in Greek, and that it names a process in which the organism takes what is outside, transforms it within, and throws it out again. Why does it do that? Because the organism needs energy; it is constantly active because it needs energy; it needs energy because it is constantly active and so on and so forth. In short: Living is a dynamical process of constant transformation. A living being is never a finished product (when it finishes, it dies), "nor a finishable one, but one that remains in flux in order to attain and sustain a dynamic coherence." Life rests by changing (cf. Heraclitus B84a: μεταβάλλον ἀναπαύεται — changing, it rests; that which changes comes to rest). Living is a process of taking and giving and caring. The last point is crucial: a living system is a system of care. The reason a bacterium follows a sugar gradient rather than a salt gradient is that it can metabolize sugar. Care precedes reflection; it is bio-logic before it is dia-logic. An organism suffers before it thinks. What the bacterium cares about is what it can care about: food. It cannot care about something it cannot perceive, something to which it is not sensitive. The living system thus selects, by itself, what is relevant in its environment. It creates a form of self-referentiality in the world, because what it does always refers back to its needs.

Think about breathing. You breathe in (you take). You breathe out (you give). Whatever happens while the breath is within you is largely neutral to you; you are indifferent to it. This is a helpful analogy (which I owe to Sebastjan Vörös) for what it means that all living forms suffer. Because we are always lacking something, we rely on the world to receive it. At the same time, there are countless things we cannot even perceive, things to which we remain indifferent. If we were not, by definition, creatures in perpetual need, there would be no craving (taṇhā). In this sense, suffering is a roadblock thrown into the path of being. But it is not fully external to it, because it is a side effect of the very process of living: the goal of any living being is to continue existing and living existence is characterized by lack, by need. Suffering is a good example of how a problem and a disturbance come together. In this sense, it is a condition of exposure. Being alive necessarily means being exposed to that which is not you. In other words, living is the self perpetually meeting the non-self. This exposure implies a lack, a need, a want, a dependence. Since the link between self and non-self can never be broken as long as the self is alive, dependence takes the form of continuous craving. At the same time, this exposure also implies a surplus: value and meaning. Take the bacterium away, and the sugar gradient has no meaning.

Because we are biologically determined to always lack something, and thus to always crave something, we have extrapolated this structure into the domain of thought. In doing so, we have developed the capacity for internal struggles, that is, disturbances in the absence of external roadblocks or problems. This creates a second layer of suffering generated by the very instinct of lack, the instinct to crave, and not necessitated by the perpetual lack that accompanies living. There are times when we do not even know what we are lacking, when we do not know what we crave, or whether we crave anything at all. Yet we engage in mental gymnastics to supply reasons for our discomfort. We think: because I feel bad, there must be a reason, the sadness must come from somewhere.

Where feelings or ideas come from is a mystery. This does not mean that the question has no answer. It means that it has multiple answers, often with an equal claim to being correct. A mystery is a question for which we alone must decide when an answer is sufficient, or when reflection can stop, at least for now. (Spoiler alert: the mystery will likely return, again and again, and each time a different answer may feel sufficient.) Heinz von Foerster captured this neatly when he said that only those questions that are, in principle, undecidable can we decide (Nur die Fragen, die im Prinzip unentscheidbar sind, können wir entscheiden).

The reason I undertook this exercise of trying to draw some boundaries between problems, disturbances, and mysteries, fully aware that these boundaries are uncomfortably murky, is that I have a sense that clarity here matters. Treating problems as problems, that is, as issues that are externally thrown into our path toward a goal; treating disturbances as disturbances, that is, as internally generated tensions in response to an otherwise neutral situation; and treating mysteries as mysteries, that is, as questions that make us stop and think, "I do not know how to begin thinking about this", questions we can return to day after day, year after year, and find new, more nuanced or unexpected answers to, may help clear some fog from the mind. 

Our minds are crowded and dusty. Perhaps this is a problem. Perhaps it is a mystery. 

* "1. The organism selects and takes in matter from its environment, from what is beyond it, and throws it into its metabolic pathways. 2. This ingested matter is transformed by biochemical processes, thereby being thrown beyond its original state. 3. Finally, once transformed and utilized, it is thrown back to the environment, to the beyond." (Dere, 2025, p. 24)

Interestingly, the word wisdom has Germanic roots. It comes from Proto-Germanic wīsaz, i.e., seeing, knowing. This comes from the Proto-Indo-European root weyd-: to see, to know. This root appears in Sanskrit veda (knowledge, sacred insight) and in Latin video (“I see”).