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Growing up, my older brother was a good student, interested in science. We shared a bedroom, so I benefited from his knowledge at night as we lay in our beds and he regaled me with facts of all kinds, with specializations on such topics as the behavior of dinosaurs and the age of volcanoes. One scientific idea he talked about particularly stimulated my imagination—and has stayed with me to this day.
Throughout our bodies, our cells die and regenerate over and over again. Altogether, he told me, the cells in our bodies get turned over at least once every seven years. It turns out that this isn’t precisely right: Different cells regenerate at very different rates, and a small number of cells in the heart and in the brain will be the same when I die as when I was born. But for the most part, the seven-year rule is true, which leads to the strange conclusion that I am literally a different physical person from the one I was just a few years ago.
I still ponder that philosophical question today. I feel like the same person, year after year. Is this a reality that transcends my physical self or an illusion? This is not an original query, of course, nor a solely biological one. It is a philosophical debate that has raged for millennia.
Christians, for example, believe that each of us has an unchanging, permanent essence called the soul. Buddhists, however, believe that a core self is an illusion, and they focus instead on the anatman, or “not-self.” Even within the same philosophical tradition, such as that of the ancient Greeks, disputation on this issue went back and forth: Does the true essence of a person or thing reside in its unchanging nature, being, or in the fact that it is in flux, becoming. Plato argued the former; his student Aristotle, the latter.
So which is your view, and how does that guide the way you live? Whatever belief you hold, I will not tell you that you’re wrong. But I will say that where you come out on this question—whether you believe that you are primarily being or becoming—says a great deal about how you see the world. And this might also predict how happy you are about your life and future.
Plato believed that behind the visible, material world, which is always subject to change, lies a more fundamental, invisible universe of absolutes—“that which is Existent always and has no Becoming,” in his words. Natural science was the study of the mutable physical environment, but philosophy, which combined intelligence and reason in the “luminous realms,” studied the changeless eternal. To give an example: Veterinary science studies individual dogs, which are growing, changing, and dying, but philosophy alone can ponder the unalterable essence of perfect dogginess. (Indeed, philosophers ask the eternal question of whether Dog exists.)
Plato’s pupil Aristotle agreed that science provides an account of what we see but diverged from his teacher’s argument that an unchanging ideal was the true essence of things. On the contrary, given that the material universe was in a constant state of change—in substance, quality, quantity, and place—the change itself was part of the true nature of things. As such, becoming was Aristotle’s focus, rather than some perfect, invisible being. To understand the dog at its core was precisely to witness its growth, change, and death, not to ponder an unseen, transcendent dogginess.
From Aristotle’s belief in becoming, we can understand how he derived his belief in our essential nature. Our essence is an evolving one, as we change as people, he thought. You are who you are becoming. Your virtue as a human individual is not related to any static, unchanging identity; it is about the person you are turning into—who you are today, as opposed to who you were yesterday, or could be tomorrow.
This becoming, he amplified, is largely in your hands, not determined by nature. “None of the moral virtues arises in us by nature,” Aristotle wrote. “For nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.” You truly are, in Aristotelian terms, the life story you are writing through your actions and habits; as the historian and philosopher Will Durant summarized Aristotle’s view, “We are what we repeatedly do.”
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle gives this example of how the process works: “By abstaining from pleasures we become temperate, and it is when we have become so that we are most able to abstain from them.” In other words, through your habits of moderation, you create yourself as a temperate person—and that becomes your essence.
Now that we’ve defined how a Platonist sees the world and how an Aristotelian does, which are you in the way you live? The answer will depend on whether you see yourself chiefly in terms of an unchanging identity or a changing story. Arguably, given the dominance of identitarian thinking in contemporary culture, more and more people are in the former camp, because they define themselves primarily according to categories of race, religion, class, gender, or ideology. In contrast, though their way is less in vogue, Aristotelians see themselves as moving through growth and change, encountering and developing virtue, knowledge, enlightenment, even love.
None of this is to say that the choice between Platonism and Aristotelianism is a binary absolute. Neither being nor becoming is exclusively true or exists to the exclusion of the other. We all have some unchanging characteristics, and we also change in many ways. The philosophical camp that you fall into will depend on how you principally define yourself, and what you choose to pay attention to in others as you move through the world.
For example, if you are a Catholic, you might define that affiliation as involving unquestioned and unchanging beliefs, or rather as striving to grow in their Catholic faith. Both ways can be true—you can be a Catholic and think about becoming a better one—but one is more important to how you see yourself. Similarly, you can choose to see yourself as poor or as someone striving to improve their lot in life.
For Platonists, I am this and you are that, which fosters bonding social capital, in which people create social bonds over a shared identity. But this inevitably leads to in-groups and out-groups and conflict. Aristotelians are more likely to develop bridging social capital, in which social ties connect people in different walks of life as part of the same dynamic story of improvement and progress.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, these two philosophical approaches have different effects on happiness. Scholars have shown this in creative ways. In 2016, sociologists asked participants in an experiment to label themselves through moral identities, such as the degree to which they were “fair” or “honest,” and then they were rated by other participants according to these categories. Put another way, the first group was invited to see themselves in Platonic terms, as being essentially fair or honest, or unfair or dishonest.
The researchers found that the more strongly participants defined themselves this way, the unhappier they were when others involved in the experiment assessed their degree of these qualities differently. The people who didn’t set so much store by their identities were happier. This is consistent with the prickliness we see about getting identifiers right: If your sense of self is deeply tied to being a Harvard graduate, say, you will be very unhappy if someone mistakenly says you went to Ohio State.
On the Aristotelian side, research has consistently shown that when people see themselves as engaged in change and capable of progress, they are happier. One 2012 study of psychotherapy patients showed that when patients considered themselves subjects in a narrative of development, they had a sense of agency and their mental health improved.
Without prejudice toward either philosopher, what we can say with confidence is that you will have a better chance of realizing happiness if you can see yourself as a dynamic agent of your own progress. If you’d like to become more Aristotelian in your self-understanding, here are three steps to get you started.
1. Find the person you want to be.
To shake yourself out of a static identity, try devising a concrete goal that will require progress and change. A good way to do this is through analyzing what you admire about a real person or people you look up to. Aristotle himself recommends this when he writes, “Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts.” The goal is not to grab a new fixed identity but to improve in virtue by following a concrete model of what success looks like.
2. Break down your model’s traits into component parts.
The person you want to emulate doubtless has a bundle of characteristics you like, and perhaps some you don’t. Write them all down. Let’s say that you would like to emulate her honesty, work ethic, and creativity but not her occasional haughtiness. The first three are approach goals; the last is an avoidance goal.
3. Make a plan.
To be a good Aristotelian, you need a plan to transform yourself in each dimension of your desired improvement. One handy way to do this was popularized by Benjamin Franklin, who sought to transform himself by setting out a calendar grid: Each week, he would seek to intensively practice one of the 13 virtues he wanted to cultivate. So, week one: temperance. Week two: frugality. Week three: sincerity. And so on.
Our culture today is likely to push you to be a Platonist—to define yourself as being a particular sort of person, with a fixed, permanent character. This is certainly convenient for businesses and political parties: It makes you a repeat customer, a reliable voter, a faithful donor. Having such an immutable identity can be appealing if it also gives you a sense of belonging as “one of us,” not “one of them.”
But it can also leave you stuck in circumstances that you might not like, and that will make you less happy than you could be. Instead, become more of an Aristotelian, and that can set you free.