On Being and Becoming summary

OK – it’s time to roll up your sleeves, because we need to get a bit of difficult philosophy out of the way. We need to understand the difference between being and becoming. Now, what on earth does that mean?

To put this into context, this distinction is arguably the most fundamental in all of philosophy, and it harkens back to the very beginnings of the Western philosophical tradition.

So we’ve just learned that humans are existentially free. But this freedom is, admittedly, a two-edged sword. Because with freedom comes responsibility – and, as anyone who has children knows, responsibility can be terrifying.

Much existentialist literature and philosophy deals with the psychic repercussions of human freedom. For example, in Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, the character Raskolnikov commits murder on the basis that, in a godless world, he must be free to do anything he pleases. Ironically, however, his sense of freedom makes him feel even more responsible for his actions, and he spends much of the novel tormented by guilt.

If you’ve ever commuted to work in a packed subway, then you know what it feels like to merge into the crowd. 

Being in a crowd is a unique way of being in its own right. In the midst of a crowd, we tend to start acting in unison with the people around us. Ask yourself: Have you ever been in an audience and just started clapping simply because the people around you were clapping? This is a trivial example perhaps, but it does make one wonder just how much of our behavior is a result of unthinking imitation of the people around us. The crowd is a mode of being that defines modern society, and it presents a real danger to anyone who wants to live an authentic life.

All this talk of authentic individuality – a bit egocentric, no? And isn’t it insensitive to say that people are always free when so many people are oppressed?

These are common criticisms of existentialism, but, in fact, many existentialist writers anticipated these criticisms and accounted for them in their philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir, for example, argued that in order for us to live fully fledged authentic lives, we have to recognize each other's freedom.

In his book The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus describes a peculiar kind of experience that he calls the absurd. As he describes it, all of us are struck every now and then by the odd feeling that the world we live in is a strange and unbelievable place. In these moments, we look to the world for answers to the meaning of our existence, but the world responds with mute indifference.

From this description, It’s quite clear that existentialist accounts of the world differ radically from those found in scientific journals. Of course, existentialists don’t reject the scientific method. But what interests them more is how the world appears to us from our human perspective.

Over the last two centuries, since the rise of the industrial revolution, our relationship to the natural world has become dangerously imbalanced.

By producing and consuming en masse, we’ve eviscerated natural ecosystems and polluted our planet. We’ve flattened mountains, cleared forests the size of nations, and choked our oceans with plastic. And, of course, through the mass burning of fossil fuels, we’ve precipitated a changing climate and put the planet on the road to catastrophe.