Where does becoming collide?

In metaphysics, becoming is the category of change, flux, and process, set against being, the category of what stays fixed and self-identical. The contrast is ancient, with Heraclitus holding that all things flow while Parmenides held that true reality is changeless, and it was revived in the modern process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, whose 1929 Process and Reality argued that the basic units of the world are momentary events of becoming rather than enduring substances. Gilles Deleuze later radicalised the idea, treating becoming as pure transformation that escapes any fixed identity. Here the referent is an ontological category about the nature of reality itself, not one person's growth, a learned social role, or a kind of novel.[1][2]

Unit

A category of reality: process and change as against static being

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Argued philosophically through metaphysical analysis and the history of ideas, not measured

In personality psychology, becoming names the continuous, forward-moving formation of the individual self across a lifetime: the person is treated not as a fixed bundle of traits but as a self in the making, growing toward its own goals. Gordon Allport's 1955 Becoming: Basic Considerations for a Psychology of Personality made this the organising theme, placing the developing proprium, the core of selfhood that a person feels as their own, at the centre of personality. The referent is one human being's psychological growth over time, not a claim about the nature of reality, a role acquired through social learning, or a literary form.[3]

Unit

One individual's ongoing self-formation over a lifespan

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through case study, personal documents, and the close reading of a single life

In sociology, becoming names the step-by-step social process by which a person acquires a role or identity through learning and interaction with others. Howard Becker's 1953 study Becoming a Marihuana User traced how a person comes to use and enjoy a drug only after learning, from other users, to perform the act, to notice its effects, and to define those effects as pleasant, a sequence that became a model for the interactionist idea of the deviant career. Here the referent is entry into a social role built up through shared activity, not the metaphysics of change, a private inner development, or a genre of writing.[4]

Unit

A person's entry into a social role, traced as a learned sequence

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Studied through participant observation and interviews reconstructing the stages of the career

In literary theory, becoming names a distinctive image of the hero in the novel: a protagonist who is not fixed but changes and grows together with the surrounding world. Mikhail Bakhtin's essay The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism, published in English in 1986, singled out the novel of emergence, in which, as he put it, we meet the image of man in the process of becoming, and argued that such a hero rises alongside a world that is itself in historical motion. The referent is a formal feature of a genre and its portrayal of character, not a metaphysical category, a psychological process in an actual person, or a route into a social role.[5]

Unit

A genre feature: the represented hero who emerges over the narrative

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified through close reading and the historical typology of novelistic form