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Is the flame on my burner a thing, or something that keeps happening?

Joel D'Souza Fellow
· 5 replies
Existence & beingBuddhistGreek & RomanProcess philosophyA. N. WhiteheadAristotleHeraclitusNagasena#change#flame#process#substance
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I run a kitchen in Dubai, twenty-two cooks, nine countries, and on a slow afternoon I was staring at a gas flame. It keeps the same shape and colour for hours, but nothing in it stays: the gas comes in, burns, and is gone. Is the flame a thing? Or is it an event that happens to look like a thing?

Same with our stock. We keep a master stock going for weeks, topping it up and straining it. My sous-chef says it is "the same stock" it was in March. Not one drop from March is in it.

And same with the kitchen itself. Of the people who opened it with me, two are left. Customers still say "this kitchen has always done the best biryani in Karama".

Someone told me philosophers argue about "substance" versus "process" and this is the argument. Can someone explain the two sides simply, and tell me which side the flame is on? I don't need the answer to be tidy. I just want to know what the argument actually is.

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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Here is the argument in its simplest form.

    Substance view: the basic things are enduring bearers of properties. Change is something that happens to them. The flame, the stock and the kitchen are things that persist while their parts or qualities change.

    Process view: the basic items are happenings. What we call things are stable patterns in the flow. The flame is the clearest case: it is nothing but a pattern of burning that keeps renewing itself.

    Each side has a cost. The substance view must say what persists when every part and quality has been replaced. The process view must explain why the world presents itself to us as solid furniture.

    Heraclitus called the cosmos an ever-living fire, kindled and quenched in measures. His fragment B12 says that on those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow. (The famous "you cannot step into the same river twice" is Plato's report, not Heraclitus's words, and the original seems more interested in how sameness survives the flow.) In the twentieth century Whitehead built a metaphysics whose basic units are events.

    So: if a persisting pattern is enough to be a thing, your flame is a thing. If the pattern is just how the happening looks to us, it is a process.

    Helpful · 2

Other answers

  1. Hicham Ouazzani

    Fellow

    I think Aristotle would like your stock. For him a substance is a this-something made of matter and form, and the form is what makes it the kind of thing it is. Matter can flow through while the form stays; that is how he thinks about living things, which take in food and lose material all their lives and remain the same animal. My cedar ceilings are the opposite case: the matter stays and I impose the form once. A flame is somewhere awkward between, which is why it is a good question.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Nirmala Jayasekara

    Fellow

    The flame is also one of the oldest Buddhist examples. In the Milindapañha, Nāgasena asks the king whether the flame of a lamp in the first watch of the night is the same as the flame in the last watch. Neither the same, nor another, is the answer: it is a continuity that depends on the oil and the wick. Vasubandhu later argued that everything is like this, existing only for a moment and replaced by a successor. On that view your stock, your kitchen and you are all lamp flames.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Joel D'Souza

    Fellow

    Thank you, Giulia and Nirmala, that is what I wanted. "Neither the same nor another" is exactly how my stock feels. It also explains why my sous-chef gets offended when I say it is "just a recipe we keep repeating". To him it has a history, and the history is the thing.

  4. Bec Doyle

    Fellow

    Winemakers have a version too. A sherry solera is a stack of barrels where you draw from the oldest row and top it up from the next, so some soleras have been running for generations and are spoken of as one wine. Nobody thinks the wine is the barrels, and nobody thinks it is a single batch. I have always thought of it as a process that has learned to look like a thing.

    Helpful · 1