examining processes.

During the last class, one of the major topics of discussion was that of Hegel’s “processes”. Just for a slight recap, Hegel says the truth of a things existence is the “process” that that completes that thing, or makes that thing what it is. For example, the truth of a tree, would be the process that occurred from the time that an acorn hit the ground till the time that it grew into a tree, and then for whatever reason the tree ceased to exist.

Now the question I posed during this discussion was about how accidents and potentiality apply to this system. Accidents would be those things that intervene in the natural course of processes for the subject, in this example a tree. For example, if the acorn were to fall on hard ground and not be able to start the process of rooting itself, or if an animal ate it, these would be just two examples of the great many accidents that could befall the natural course for this tree, and hinder it. Potentiality is what the tree is all of the possible outcomes that the tree as in being itself, as well as what the tree could have become if accident had not befallen it, basically the fact that, had not the squirrel eaten the acorn, it would have become a mighty oak, or that if it had gotten more light it could have grown taller, so on and so forth.

The response to this question from Dr.J was that all of the accidents, and all of the potentialities that did, or could have befallen the natural process of the tree are the “truth” of what the tree was. Therefore, the tree was an acorn that was eaten by the squirrel but also could have been an oak. These things are both true about the tree, and yet it never became an Oak as proof that it could be, so it is in a sense false.

My new inquiry into this question is this: is the truth of the tree also not the past that existed before it? Is it not also true then that the acorn was attributed to a tree that then is attributed to many potentials, and accidents, leading back to another tree, and on infinitum into an infinite regress? It seemed at first to me to be easily dismissible, but after some thinking about it, is not the “truth” of the tree that part of the process of it coming into being the tree that it as an acorn fell from? It seems to me that the lines between processes are not very clear at all, at least when history is involved.