This ordering has shaped nearly every major metaphysical tradition. Classical substance metaphysics, much of modern philosophy, and even many contemporary ontologies have begun by asking how independently existing realities become related. Their differences often concern the nature of those realities or the character of their relations, but the order of explanation has remained remarkably consistent.
The preceding essays in this series have gradually suggested another possibility. Rather than beginning with enduring entities, we have explored reality as fundamentally relational, continually becoming, and persistently open. Relation has appeared not as an accidental connection between already existing things, but as the living activity through which coherence, persistence, participation, and increasingly stable forms continually emerge.
The question before us therefore becomes both simple and profound:
What changes if relation, rather than relata, is reality's ontological primitive?
This essay proposes that the reversal is not merely linguistic, conceptual, or methodological. It is ontological. Rather than explaining relations through independently existing relata, it asks whether relata themselves are better understood as enduring achievements of relational becoming. This then becomes the ontological reversal by reprioritizing relation over relata.
If this proposal is sound, then one of metaphysics' oldest assumptions quietly gives way to another. Reality no longer begins with isolated things seeking connection. It begins with relation itself, and through relation the enduring worlds we inhabit continually become.
At stake is not simply the importance of relation, for few philosophers would deny that relations profoundly shape the world we inhabit. The deeper question concerns explanatory priority:
Does reality begin with independently existing relata that subsequently enter into relations?
Or do enduring relata themselves emerge through the continual activity of relation?
For much of Western philosophy, the former has been assumed. Whether understood as substances, objects, entities, or beings, relata have ordinarily been regarded as metaphysically primitive. Relations explain how already existing realities interact, cooperate, conflict, or endure, but they do not ordinarily constitute those realities. The explanatory movement therefore proceeds from relata to relation.
The proposal developed throughout ORPMOB reverses that order. It begins not with independently existing entities but with relation itself. Relation is understood as the ontological primitive - the fundamental condition through which becoming, coherence, persistence, participation, and increasingly stable forms of existence continually emerge. What we ordinarily call relata are therefore not the beginning of metaphysical explanation but among relation's most remarkable achievements.
This reversal should not be mistaken for a denial of enduring realities. Mountains, galaxies, organisms, ecosystems, persons, and civilizations are not illusions to be dissolved into fleeting processes. They are genuinely real. The question is not whether relata exist, but how they become. ORPMOB proposes that enduring realities persist because relational activity continually achieves, preserves, and renews coherent forms across time.
The task of this essay is therefore neither to reject the metaphysical tradition nor merely to invert its vocabulary. Rather, it is to examine whether the explanatory order of relata-based ontology itself should be reprioritized after that of relation-based ontology. If relation is indeed more fundamental than relata, then many familiar metaphysical categories - identity, persistence, embodiment, consciousness, participation, and meaning - must be reconsidered in light of that more primitive reality.
The argument that follows traces this ontological reversal from its classical formulation through its processual development and finally toward a relational metaphysics in which enduring worlds are understood as the continual achievements of relation itself.
The eye first sees things. Philosophy later asks how they become.
The history of Western metaphysics has largely begun with what appears most immediately evident: the existence of enduring things. Human experience presents a world populated by mountains, rivers, stars, trees, animals, and persons. These entities appear sufficiently stable to be identified, named, classified, and distinguished from one another. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophy first sought to understand reality by asking what kinds of things exist before asking how those things relate.
Within the classical tradition, this intuition found its most influential expression in Aristotle's doctrine of substance. Substances were understood as the primary realities of the world - entities possessing their own identity and persistence through change. Although substances could enter into countless relationships, those relations were ordinarily regarded as secondary to the existence of the substances themselves. A relation described how independently existing realities were connected; it did not constitute their existence.
This ontological ordering proved remarkably fruitful. It provided a stable framework for logic, natural philosophy, ethics, and theology. Enduring entities could be classified according to their essential properties, their accidental qualities distinguished from their necessary characteristics, and causal explanations could proceed from identifiable things acting upon one another. The language of substance became deeply woven into the fabric of Western philosophical reflection because it corresponded closely to the apparent stability of ordinary experience.
Nor was this approach confined to classical philosophy alone. Although modern philosophy transformed many aspects of metaphysics, it generally retained the assumption that independently existing entities possessed explanatory priority. Whether conceived as physical particles, material bodies, individual minds, or autonomous selves, reality was still commonly understood to consist of discrete beings whose relations were subsequent to their existence.
Even many contemporary discussions continue to begin with this same intuition. Scientific inquiry frequently investigates the interactions among already identified systems, while philosophical analysis often asks how independently existing agents, organisms, or objects enter into networks of causal, social, or conceptual relation. The language changes; the explanatory order often remains.
The enduring strength of this tradition should not be underestimated. It reflects one of humanity's most persistent experiences of reality: that stable things appear to precede their relationships. Yet precisely because this assumption has become so familiar, philosophy rarely pauses to ask whether the order of explanation itself deserves reconsideration.
The question before us is therefore not whether enduring relata exist. They plainly do. The question is whether their apparent stability should also determine the starting point of ontology. Must relation always be understood as something that occurs between already existing realities? Or might enduring realities themselves arise through the continual achievement of relation?
That question marks the threshold of the ontological reversal.
What appears permanent may itself be an achievement of becoming.Reality persists because becoming never ceases.
If the classical tradition gave explanatory priority to enduring substances, the twentieth century witnessed one of metaphysics' most significant reorientations. Rather than treating reality as fundamentally composed of static entities that occasionally change, Alfred North Whitehead proposed that becoming itself constitutes the more fundamental character of existence. Reality is not first a collection of enduring things. It is an ongoing creative advance in which moments of experience continually arise, inherit from the past, and contribute to the future.
This transition from substance to process marked a profound philosophical achievement. Whitehead did not deny the reality of enduring entities. Instead, he sought to explain how relatively stable forms emerge from the continual succession of actual occasions. Persistence, identity, organisms, societies, and civilizations are therefore understood as achievements of ongoing process rather than as immutable substances existing independently of change.
The importance of this reversal cannot be overstated. Whitehead demonstrated in his processual grammar that permanence itself may be interpreted as an achievement of becoming rather than its denial. Stability becomes dynamic rather than static; identity becomes continuity rather than immobility; reality itself becomes creative, temporal, and participatory.
Yet the processual turn also raises another question.
If reality is fundamentally becoming, what makes becoming itself possible?
Process describes continual activity, succession, inheritance, and creative advance. It explains how realities unfold through time. But does process itself presuppose something still more primitive? What is the condition that enables occasions to inherit, affect, respond, cooperate, and contribute to one another at all?
The proposal developed throughout ORPMOB is that relation precedes even process in the order of metaphysical explanation. Becoming is not an alternative to relation. Becoming is relation in activity. Every process already presupposes relational responsiveness through which inheritance, novelty, coherence, and persistence become possible.
The movement from substance to process therefore represents not the conclusion of metaphysical inquiry but one of its most important transitions. ORPMOB gratefully receives Whitehead's processual vision while asking whether its deepest explanatory foundation lies in relation itself. If so, process becomes one of relation's most profound expressions rather than its metaphysical beginning.
This possibility carries us beyond the transition from substance to process toward a still more fundamental question:
Can relation itself be understood as reality's ontological primitive?
Relation is not something reality possesses. Relation is what reality does.Relation is not one feature of reality. It is reality continually becoming itself.
If the movement from substance to process represents one of the great achievements of twentieth-century metaphysics, it also invites a further question. Every process, however dynamic, appears already to presuppose relations. Becoming is never isolated becoming. Every act of becoming inherits from what has preceded it, responds to its surrounding conditions, contributes to future possibilities, and participates within a wider field of reality. Process is therefore never merely temporal. It is irreducibly relational.
This observation suggests that relation may occupy an even more fundamental place within ontology than process itself. Rather than asking how independently existing realities become related, or even how stable realities emerge from continual becoming, we may ask a still deeper question:
What makes becoming itself possible?
The proposal advanced here is that relation constitutes reality's ontological primitive. Relation is not one property among others, nor merely one category within an already existing world. It is the condition through which any world becomes possible. Wherever reality becomes, relation is already present.
This claim should not be misunderstood. To say that relation is ontologically primitive is not to imagine free-floating relations existing independently of anything whatsoever. Nor is it to reduce reality to abstract networks or conceptual structures. Rather, it is to recognize that nothing becomes except through participation in relations of inheritance, responsiveness, mutual influence, openness, and emergent coherence. Relation is never an addition to reality. It is the very activity through which reality continually constitutes itself.
Within this framework, becoming is not replaced but more deeply understood. Becoming is relation in activity. Every emergence, every persistence, every transformation, and every creative advance expresses relational processes already at work. Process therefore becomes one of relation's most profound modes of expression rather than its metaphysical foundation.
The implications are considerable. If relation possesses explanatory priority, then many familiar metaphysical categories require reinterpretation -
Identity becomes enduring relational coherence.
Persistence becomes sustained relational continuity.
Embodiment becomes stabilized relational organization.
Participation becomes the ordinary mode through which reality relationally unfolds.
Even novelty arises not from isolated spontaneity but from the continual reinterpretation of inherited relations within new contexts.
The ontological reversal therefore consists in more than reversing philosophical vocabulary. It reorders metaphysical explanation itself. Reality does not begin with independently existing relata that subsequently establish relations. Rather, enduring relata gradually emerge wherever relational activity achieves sufficient coherence, persistence, and stability across time.
From this perspective, the fundamental metaphysical question is transformed. We no longer ask primarily:
How do relations connect existing things?
We ask instead:
How do enduring things continually emerge through relation?
That shift defines the ontological reversal.
Relata are not reality's primitive beginning
but one of its most remarkable achievements.
How do relata become?
Within the classical tradition, this question rarely arose because relata were assumed from the outset. They formed the starting point of metaphysical explanation. Relations described how already existing realities interacted, but the existence of those realities required no further account.
A relational ontology begins elsewhere. If relation is ontologically primitive, then enduring relata must themselves be understood as achievements rather than assumptions. The existence of stable entities becomes something requiring explanation rather than something presupposed.
This shift transforms one of metaphysics' oldest questions. Rather than asking how relations unite independently existing things, we ask how sufficiently coherent patterns of relation gradually acquire the persistence, stability, and identity we ordinarily recognize as enduring realities.
Relata therefore do not suddenly appear.They continually become.Every enduring reality represents a history of relational achievement.
How?
Through innumerable acts of inheritance, responsiveness, adaptation, participation, and self-organization, relations progressively generate more coherent patterns capable of sustaining themselves across time. Stability is not imposed upon becoming; it emerges from becoming's own relational activity.
Within ORPMOB, coherence occupies a central place in this account. Relations need not produce enduring forms. Many remain fleeting, fragmentary, or unstable. Yet wherever relational activity achieves sufficient coherence, persistence becomes possible. What endures is not relation's opposite but one of its greatest accomplishments. Relata are therefore stabilized embodiments of relational coherence.
This understanding also explains why reality exhibits such remarkable diversity. Galaxies, ecosystems, organisms, conscious persons, languages, cultures, and civilizations differ enormously in structure and complexity. Yet each may be understood as a distinct scale at which relational coherence has achieved sufficient stability to persist while remaining open to further becoming. Endurance and openness therefore coexist rather than compete. Every relatum is simultaneously stable enough to endure and open enough to continue becoming in innumerable expressions of continual diversity.
Seen in this light, identity itself acquires a new meaning. Identity is not an immutable essence hidden beneath change. Nor is it merely the temporary aggregation of unrelated parts. Identity is the continuing achievement of relational coherence through time. Every enduring relatum remains itself precisely because it continually renews the relational patterns that constitute its existence.
The question, then, is no longer whether relata are real. They are among reality's most remarkable achievements. The deeper question is how they continually arise, persist, transform, and sometimes dissolve through the ongoing activity of relation. ORPMOB answers that question by locating the source of persistence not in an underlying substance but in the continuing coherence of relational becoming.
Thus the ontological reversal reaches its constructive conclusion. Relation no longer explains merely how things connect. It explains how enduring things continually become.
V. The Consequences of the Reversal
Change the beginning, and everything that follows is reinterpreted.
If relation possesses ontological priority, many familiar concepts must be reconsidered. Identity, persistence, embodiment, causation, participation, consciousness, and even meaning can no longer be understood primarily as properties of independently existing entities. Instead, each becomes an expression of ongoing relational coherence continually achieved across time.
Identity is no longer the possession of an isolated substance but the continuing integrity of relational organization. Persistence becomes the renewal of coherent patterns rather than the endurance of immutable essences. Embodiment becomes the stabilization of relational processes within increasingly organized forms. Participation is no longer an optional activity between independent beings; it is the ordinary condition through which reality itself continually unfolds.
This reversal also reshapes our understanding of explanation. Rather than reducing complex realities to smaller constituent parts alone, relational metaphysics asks how coherent wholes emerge through progressively richer patterns of organization.
Explanation therefore moves simultaneously downwards toward constitutive relations and upwards toward emergent forms. Neither reduction nor emergence alone proves sufficient. Both become complementary expressions of relational becoming.
The same transformation extends across every scale of existence. Galaxies, ecosystems, organisms, conscious persons, societies, civilizations, and cultures may all be understood as distinct achievements of relational coherence operating under different conditions and degrees of complexity. Diversity is therefore not an exception to relational ontology but one of its natural consequences.
Perhaps most importantly, the ontological reversal alters philosophy's understanding of permanence itself. Stability no longer opposes becoming; permanence becomes one of becoming's highest achievements. What endures does so because relational coherence continually succeeds in renewing itself amid an open and changing reality. Persistence is therefore not resistance to change but the continuing achievement of coherent relational becoming.
The consequences extend beyond metaphysics alone. Once relation becomes reality's ontological primitive, ontology, science, theology, ethics, ecology, psychology, and social philosophy all inherit a different starting point. Each discipline continues to ask its own distinctive questions, yet each now does so within a universe whose deepest grammar is relational rather than substantial.
The ontological reversal therefore does not simply replace one philosophical vocabulary with another. It offers a different way of understanding reality itself. Every enduring world, every living organism, every conscious person, every community, and every civilization becomes intelligible as an expression of relation continually achieving coherence across time.
Change ontology's beginning, and reality tells a different story.
Once relation becomes the beginning, everything else becomes an achievement.
Relation gives rise to becoming;becoming gives rise to worlds.
The ontological reversal proposed throughout this essay ultimately offers more than a revised explanation of relation and relata. It presents a different architecture for understanding reality itself. Every metaphysical system begins somewhere. Once that beginning is established, the remainder of the system unfolds according to its own internal logic.
Classical metaphysics began with enduring substances.
Process metaphysics began with becoming.
ORPMOB begins with relation.
From this beginning, the architecture of relational metaphysics unfolds naturally:
Relation is reality's ontological primitive.
Wherever relation occurs, responsiveness becomes possible.
Responsiveness gives rise to becoming as inherited relations are continually interpreted, renewed, and transformed.
Becoming, in turn, gradually achieves coherence.
Coherence stabilizes into enduring forms. These enduring forms become the relata that populate the worlds we inhabit.
Relation therefore does not replace reality's diversity; it explains how that diversity continually emerges.
This architecture also reveals why reality exhibits both permanence and openness. i) Stable worlds arise because coherent relations successfully endure across time. ii) Yet those same worlds remain open because relation itself never ceases. Every relatum participates within wider networks of relation that continually invite further transformation, adaptation, and creative advance. Reality therefore remains simultaneously ordered and unfinished.
The same architecture extends across every scale of existence. Physical structures, biological organisms, ecological communities, conscious persons, human cultures, civilizations, and perhaps realities still beyond our present understanding all participate within this common grammar. Their differences arise not from different ontologies but from different expressions, organizations, and depths of relational coherence.
Within this framework, metaphysics recovers its proper task. It neither replaces the sciences nor anticipates theology, ethics, or the humanities. Rather, it seeks the most fundamental grammar capable of making all of them intelligible. Science investigates the relational patterns embodied within nature. Theology may interpret those patterns through the language of divine participation. Ethics asks how relational beings ought to live together. Yet each begins from the same ontological reality: a universe whose enduring forms continually emerge through relation.
The architecture proposed here therefore remains intentionally modest. It does not claim to answer every philosophical question, nor does it pretend to eliminate mystery. Instead, it offers a coherent starting point from which further inquiry may proceed. If relation truly constitutes reality's ontological primitive, then the diverse disciplines of human understanding need not compete for reality's foundation. They participate together in exploring its continually unfolding expressions.
The ontological reversal thus reaches beyond a single metaphysical proposal. It becomes an invitation to rethink reality itself - not as a universe composed of isolated things that occasionally relate, but as a universe in which relation continually gives rise to the enduring worlds through which existence becomes known.
Reality does not first become many and then relate.Reality relates, and thereby becomes many.Relation does not interrupt reality.Relation is the way reality itself becomes.Every world begins in relationthen endures through coherence.
If so, the ontological reversal is not merely another philosophical theory. It becomes a different way of seeing. Of understanding. Of explaining. Reality no longer begins with isolated things seeking connection. It begins with relation itself, and through relation the worlds we inhabit continually become.
The task that follows belongs not to metaphysics alone but to every discipline that seeks to understand reality. Each will ask its own questions. Yet all may begin from the same recognition:
Reality begins with relation.
Classical Metaphysics
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. Physics. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. Various editions.
Process Philosophy
Cobb, John B., Jr. A Christian Natural Theology. Westminster John Knox Press.
Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Westminster Press.
Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism. Cornell University Press.
Hartshorne, Charles. Reality as Social Process. Free Press.
Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics. SUNY Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. Free Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. Free Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. Free Press.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. Free Press.
Relational Ontology
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Scribner.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford University Press.
Nicolescu, Basarab. Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity. SUNY Press.
Contemporary Metaphysics
Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. Routledge, 1975.
Bhaskar, Roy. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. Verso, 1993.
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press.
Lowe, E. J. The Four-Category Ontology. Oxford University Press.
Mumford, Stephen. Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
van Inwagen, Peter. Metaphysics. Routledge.
Ladyman, James, and Don Ross. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford University Press.
Ontic Structural Realism and Structural Ontology
French, Steven. The Structure of the World: Metaphysics and Representation. Oxford University Press.
French, Steven, and James Ladyman. "Remodelling Structural Realism." Synthese.
Ladyman, James. "What is Structural Realism?" Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.
Physicalism and Philosophy of Science
Ellis, Brian. Scientific Essentialism. Cambridge University Press.
Kim, Jaegwon. Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton University Press.
Papineau, David. Thinking About Consciousness. Oxford University Press.
Complexity, Systems, and Emergence
Juarrero, Alicia. Dynamics in Action. MIT Press.
Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe. Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, Sandra D. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford University Press.
Prigogine, Ilya. Order Out of Chaos. Bantam Books.
Rosen, Robert. Life Itself. Columbia University Press.
Capra, Fritjof. The Web of Life. Anchor Books.
VI. Unpublished ORPMOB Manuscripts
Slater, R. E.
———. Essays XVII–XXII, The Grammar of Relational Becoming.
———. Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB). Ongoing philosophical essays.
The ontological reversal proposed in this essay does not conclude metaphysical inquiry. It reorients it. If relation possesses explanatory priority, then every subsequent philosophical question must begin from a different starting point. The task ahead is therefore not to defend relation repeatedly, but to explore the rich diversity of realities continually emerging through its activity. The essays that follow undertake that larger architectural task.
- Aristotle
- Aquinas
- Whitehead
- Hartshorne
- Cobb
- Rescher
- Structural realism
- Physicalism
- Emergence
- Complexity
- Systems theory
- Ecology
That breadth reinforces the essay's central claim that we no longer are speaking within the Whiteheadian process tradition; but engaging the larger metaphysical conversation by proposing where ORPMOB fits within it.
