Being, Becoming And Territory

This paper argues that the distinction between the philosophy of becoming and the philosophy of being is ontologically prior to the distinction between Chinese and Western philosophy, and accordingly, there are more profound resonances between Chinese philosophies of becoming like Daoism and Western philosophies of becoming like that of Deleuze than there are between Daoism and Confucianism. This paper explains the distinctive features of the philosophy of becoming and shows the strong resonances between Daoism and the Deleuzean tradition of philosophy in their common atheistic rejection of teleology from nature, in their championing of natural decentralized assemblages over human hierarchies, and in their affirmation of creative life as becoming without being. Deleuze develops these features into a thoroughgoing ontological scheme, which this paper explores in order to show how the philosophy of becoming accounts for being, identity and stability through the concept of territorialization. These features stand in stark contrast to the philosophy of being, which in the case of Platonism champions transcendent beings that never enter into becoming (being without becoming) and in the case of Confucianism understands becoming as the emulation of role models and the purpose of becoming as being good exemplars of such ideal roles. Both Platonism and Confucianism, therefore, show their idealism in the championing of ideal role models, and both discover these ideal models of being through the faculty of memory (reminiscence in the case of Plato, and the memory of yao and shun 尧舜 in the case of Confucianism).