Formation is a philosophical concept, which means a process of movement and modification of something. This may be the emergence and development, and sometimes - the disappearance and regression. Often becoming is opposed to immutability.
This term in philosophy, depending on the stages of its development or on schools and areas, acquired either a negative or a positive connotation. Often it was considered an attribute of matter and contrasted with stability, stability and invariability of higher being. In this article we will try to consider the various facets of this concept.
Origin and Origin
Formation is a term that first appears in ancient philosophy in Europe. It meant a process of change and formation.
Natural philosophers defined becoming as the doctrine of things, their appearance, development and destruction. So they described a certain single source, which changes and is embodied in different forms of existence.
Heraclitus for the first time contrasted the formation of the being of the world, which always “becomes”, that is, flows (“pantha rei”) and is unstable - the logos (indestructible principle, law and measure). The latter defines the principles of formation and sets the limit for it. If Parmenides believed that becoming dissolves in being, then for Heraclitus the situation was exactly the opposite.
Plato, Aristotle and their followers
Plato has material things in eternal development and change. Ideas are eternal, and are goals for the formation of phenomena. Despite the fact that Aristotle was an opponent of Plato and many of the concepts of the latter, he also used this concept in a pan of discourse.
Formation and development undergo things, realizing their essence, materializing form and turning opportunity into reality. Aristotle called the highest mode of such being Entelechia, suggesting that it was a kind of energy.
In man, such a law of formation is his soul, which itself develops and controls the body. The founders of the Neoplatonic school - Plotinus, Proclus and others - saw in the formation of the cosmic principle, which has both life and mind. They called it the World Soul and considered it the source of all movement.
The Stoics called such a force, thanks to which the Universe develops, pneuma. It pervades everything that exists.
Middle Ages
Christian philosophy was no stranger to this principle. But formation is, from the point of view of medieval scholastics, the development, purpose, limit and source of which is God. Thomas Aquinas develops this concept in the doctrine of action and potency.
There are internal causes of formation. They inspire action. Formation is the unity of potency and the ongoing process. In the later Middle Ages, the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic interpretations were “fashionable”. They were used, for example, by Nikolai Kuzansky or Giordano Bruno.
The Philosophy of New Time
The formation of science in the modern sense of the word and its methodology in the era of Galileo, Newton and Bacon was somewhat shaken by the conviction that everything is in motion. Classical experiments and the principle of determinism led to the creation of a mechanical model of Cosmos. The idea that the world is constantly being transformed, changed and revived remains a popular German thinker.
While their French and English colleagues imagined the Universe as something like a huge clockwork, Leibniz, Herder, Schelling saw it becoming. This is the development of nature from the unconscious to the rational. The limit of this formation is expanding infinitely, and therefore the spirit can change unlimitedly.
Extremely disturbed the philosophers of that era and the question of the relationship of being and thinking. After all, it was precisely in this way that it was possible to answer the question whether there are any laws in nature or not. Kant believed that we ourselves bring the concept of formation into our knowledge, since it is itself limited by our sensuality.
Reason is contradictory, and therefore there is a gap between being and thinking that cannot be overcome. Nor are we able to understand what things really are and how they became so.
Hegel
For this classic of German philosophy, the stages of formation coincide with the laws of logic, and development itself is a movement of the spirit, ideas, their “deployment”. Hegel defines the term “dialectic of being” and “nothing” with this term. Both of these opposites can flow into each other precisely due to formation.
But this unity is unstable or, as the philosopher says, “restless”. When a thing "becomes", it only rushes to being, and in this sense it does not exist yet. But since the process has already begun, it is as it were.
Thus, formation, from Hegel's point of view, is a rampant movement. It is the primary truth. Indeed, without it, both being and “nothing” have no specifics and are empty, devoid of filling abstractions. The thinker described all this in his book Science of Logic. It was there that Hegel made becoming a dialectical category.
Progress or Unknown
In the nineteenth century, many philosophical movements - Marxism, positivism, and so on, perceived formation as a synonym for the term "development". Their representatives believed that this was a process that resulted in a transition from the old to the new, from the lowest to the highest, from simple to complex. The formation of a system of individual elements is thus natural.
On the other hand, critics of such views, such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, assured that proponents of the concept of development attribute to nature and the world laws and goals that do not exist. The formation is carried out by itself, nonlinearly. It is devoid of patterns. We do not know what it can lead to.
Evolution
The theory of development and progress as purposeful formation was very popular. She received support in connection with the concept of evolution. For example, historians and sociologists began to consider the formation of the state as a process that led to the formation and formation of a new social system, the transformation of the military type of government into a political one, and the creation of an apparatus of violence.
The next stages of this development were, first of all, the separation of administrative bodies from the rest of society, then the replacement of tribal divisions by territorial ones, as well as the emergence of public authorities. The formation of man in this coordinate system was considered as the emergence of a new biological species as a result of evolution.
