The preceding companion essays were written to bring the philosophical themes of the first three sections of the Reality & Metaphysics Series into the lived experiences of ordinary life. While those sectional essays 1-16 developed the conceptual foundations of ontology and metaphysics the four companion essays cited below explored many of the same questions through the language of story, narrative, symbol, trauma, and relational transformation.
But rather than presenting formal metaphysical arguments as we have been doing, these essays examine how stories shape perception, identity, suffering, hope, and the possibility of becoming otherwise than we are. In their own way they remind us that philosophy is never merely an abstract mental exercise but an invitation towards understanding ourselves, our communities, and our world of suffering and beauty around the philosophical jargon we have been exploring.
For without practical engagement, metaphysical reflection becomes little more than mental knowledge without mindful embodiment. Conversely, unintegrated human stories without thoughtful reflection can also lose their capacity to illuminate reality. But together, philosophy and human narrative, invite us into a deeper participation in the ongoing work of becoming.
Learning to Inhabit the Philosophy We Espouse:
Prelude - 11 Questions I Had When Watching the film, "The Wonder" (prelude)
Essay One - Stories that Shape Dark Realities (1)
Essay Two - Reality, Narrative, and Relational Becoming (2)
Essay Three - Movies with Dark Themes: Trauma, Truth, and Becoming (3)
The first three sections of the Reality & Metaphysics Series have laid the philosophical foundations for the work that now follows. We have covered Orientation (I); Narrative, Symbol, Myth, and Transformative Imagination (II); and have presently completed The Philosophy of Reality (III) where we concluded with Essay 16 as the apex essay that drew together the past EPR series with this present ORPMOB series we are currently developing. We now will begin a new section, The Grammar of Relational Becoming (IV).
Each of the previous sections have introduced the question of reality; clarified the relationship between ontology and metaphysics; explored the formative role of narrative, symbol, and imagination; and surveyed the principal philosophical approaches to understanding reality. Together, these essays have sought not to merely present ideas, but to cultivate a disciplined way of thinking - a metaphysical posture that remains open, relational, and attentive to reality itself.
Section IV now marks an important transition.
Where the earlier essays primarily asked:
What have philosophers discovered about reality? - including process relational philosophers.
The essays that follow will ask a different question:
What is reality itself disclosing?
This shift changes the character of the inquiry as we move from historical survey toward constructive philosophy. Though the great thinkers of the past remain indispensable conversation partners, they no longer function as our final authorities. Rather than asking reality to conform to past philosophical systems, we seek a philosophy that corresponds ever more faithfully to reality as it continually discloses itself through contemporary science. This was earlier noted in the title page:
Our commitment to this ideal also reflects the methodological posture of Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB). Metaphysics should not attempt to become science prematurely, nor theology prematurely, nor ethics prematurely. Its task is both more modest and more foundational: our philosophical methodology is to ask what kind of reality makes scientific inquiry, theological reflection, ethical life, and human participation possible in the first place. Philosophy is therefore the metaphysical ground upon which human fields of inquiry may continue their own investigations. We may sum it up this way:
The essays in this section will begin constructing what the metaphysics of ORPMOB proposes as the recurring grammar through which reality appears to disclose itself. The following essays of section IV will suggest that beneath the extraordinary diversity of the universe lies several deeply interwoven patterns that recur across every scale of existence:
Each essay of Section IV will explore one movement within this unfolding grammar of relational becoming.
- Essay Seventeen begins by asking why relation precedes substance.
- Essay Eighteen examines why relation necessarily gives rise to becoming.
- Essay Nineteen considers how becoming repeatedly achieves overcoming, allowing reality to generate richer forms of organization without closing itself to novelty.
- Essay Twenty explores how such overcoming gives rise to enduring coherence, producing relatively stable embodiments within an ever-changing world.
- And finally, Essay Twenty-One argues that every enduring achievement remains fundamentally participatory, existing not in isolation but within larger networks of relational becoming.
Taken together, these essays begin articulating the constructive metaphysics of ORPMOB. They do not claim to offer a finished philosophical system, nor do they presume to explain reality exhaustively. Rather, they seek to identify recurring patterns through which reality appears to disclose itself, while always remaining open to further refinement through continued philosophical inquiry, scientific discovery, theological reflection, and human experience.
The task before us, then, is neither to defend a closed metaphysical system nor merely to repeat the insights of those who have gone before us. It is to continue the philosophical journey with intellectual humility, disciplined imagination, and a willingness to let reality itself remain our greatest teacher. For if philosophy is to remain faithful to its calling, then reality must always remain the measure of philosophy - not philosophy the measure of reality.
As example, a tree exists. It then enters into relationships with soil, water, sunlight, fungi, insects, animals, and other trees.
A person exists. That person then enters into relationships with family, language, culture, history, and community.
A planet exists. It then participates in gravitational relationships with other bodies throughout the universe.
This way of understanding reality has been remarkably influential because it reflects an obvious feature of ordinary experience. The world appears to present itself to us as a collection of things. We encounter objects. We identify individuals. We distinguish one entity from another. We recognize boundaries, differences, and identities.
The question which naturally follows is:
What are these things in themselves?
For much of philosophical history, the answer was sought through the concept of substance.
A substance was understood as something that exists in its own right, even while participating in changing relationships. A substance which possesses its own underlying individuality or identity despite changing circumstances around it. While its properties may change and relationships may shift, the substance itself somehow remained the stable foundation beneath those changes.
Positively, this methodological approach provided philosophy with one of its most powerful achievements. It allowed thinkers to ask:
what endures through change,
what makes something the same thing across time, and
what distinguishes one form of reality from another?
And yet, as philosophical inquiry continued, deeper questions gradually emerged. Perhaps the most important question was not:
What exists?
but rather:
How does reality generate enduring forms (substances)?
This is a subtle but profound shift.
The first question seeks the foundation beneath reality.
The second asks how that foundation continually comes into being or, endures.
The first begins with things.
The second begins with relational becoming.
This distinction introduces the central concern of this essay:
Are relations merely conditions surrounding things - or, are enduring substances themselves stable embodiments of relational coherence?
In ORPMOB, substance is understood as the latter; as the enduring embodiment of relational coherence.
What is a relation?
Is a relation merely a conceptual connection between otherwise independent things?
Relation is the ontological primitive; its constitutive mode is relational responsiveness through which relations receive, affect, and participate in becoming.
Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB) proposes that relation is not an accidental feature added to otherwise independent substances. Rather, relation is fundamental to the emergence, identity, and persistence of all realities.
The decisive question is therefore not whether relations influence substances. Nearly every philosophy acknowledges that they do. The deeper question is whether what we call a substance is itself an enduring achievement of relational becoming. If enduring identities arise through stable patterns of relation rather than preceding them, then substance is no longer the ontological starting point of reality. It is one of reality's enduring accomplishments.
The existence of trees, persons, organisms, planets, and galaxies is not denied. The question is not whether things exist, but how they came to exist.
A tree is not first an independent substance that later enters into ecological relationships. From its earliest emergence it is constituted through genetic inheritance, atmospheric exchange, microbial cooperation, ecological participation, and continual metabolic interaction. What appears as a stable thing is more accurately understood as an enduring embodiment of relational coherence.
Likewise a person is not less individual because language, culture, history, relationships, and embodiment participate in forming who that person becomes. Those relationships are not external additions to identity; they are among the conditions through which identity emerges.
Individuality, therefore, need not be understood as the opposite of relation. Rather, individuality may be viewed as one of relation's most remarkable achievements. Stable identities are not diminished by participation in wider networks of life; they emerge through them. To become an individual is not to escape relation but to embody it in increasingly coherent and distinctive ways.
Paradoxically, the richer the relational field from which an individual emerges, the richer the possibilities for distinctive individuality itself.
In this sense, relation does not eliminate individuality.
Relation explains individuality because every enduring identity emerges through ongoing patterns of relational responsiveness. Individuality is not diminished by relation; it is continuously constituted through it.
The challenge before contemporary metaphysics, therefore, is not to choose between things and relations, between identity and connection, between stability and change. The deeper task is to understand how these realities belong together.
How does something become a distinguishable thing while remaining inseparable from the relationships that sustain it?
How does a universe composed of processes generate enduring forms?
How does becoming produce being?
Contemporary discussions of consciousness illustrate why these questions have become increasingly important. Rather than asking only how consciousness emerges from matter, an increasing number of contemporary approaches investigate how increasingly complex forms of responsiveness, organization, embodiment, and environmental participation give rise to experience itself. Whatever conclusions these investigations ultimately reach, they reveal a broader philosophical movement: reality is increasingly understood less as a collection of isolated entities than as an unfolding network of dynamic patterns of relation, responsiveness, and emergence.
These questions stand at the threshold between ontology and metaphysics.
Ontology asks how realities exist.
Metaphysics asks why reality possesses the structures through which existence becomes possible.
The preceding ontology series explored the patterns through which relational realities achieve coherence, persistence, and identity. The framework of Emergent Processual Relational Ontology (EPR) described how relational processes become embodied realities.
Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB) now asks a deeper question. If EPR explains how relational processes become embodied realities, ORPMOB asks how those enduring realities should be understood. Its proposal is that, what philosophy has traditionally called substance, may be better understood as an enduring embodiment of relational coherence. In this way, EPR provides the ontological grammar of relational emergence, while ORPMOB explores its metaphysical significance.
Now the metaphysical question deepens.
Why does reality exhibit relational structure in the first place?
Why does relation appear prior to isolation, individuality, substance, or entity?
Why does becoming repeatedly generate coherence?
Why does reality repeatedly produce enduring patterns rather than dissolve into randomness?
These questions begin the constructive work of ORPMOB.
The argument that follows does not begin by rejecting substance metaphysics. Substance represented an important and historically powerful attempt to understand reality. Rather, it asks whether substance might itself be better understood as an achievement of deeper relational processes.
Perhaps things do not first exist and then enter into relationships.
Perhaps things become through relationships.
Perhaps what we call a substance is not reality's primitive starting point but one of its most remarkable achievements - an enduring embodiment of relational coherence.
If this is so, then reality is not fundamentally a collection of independent objects occasionally interacting with one another. Reality is an ongoing field of relational becoming in which stable identities emerge, participate, transform, and contribute to the continuing creativity of existence.
The question, then, is no longer simply:
What is a thing?
The deeper question becomes:
What relationships make a thing possible?
The question begins with the primacy of relation. Yet relation itself may possess an essential character that has not always been fully appreciated. If realities become through relation, then relation must also be capable of receiving, responding, and participating in the ongoing movement of becoming. Later essays will explore this dynamic character of relation more fully. For now, it is enough to ask what relationships make enduring realities possible in the first place.
Every philosophical tradition begins somewhere. For much of Western thought, that beginning was the conviction that reality is most fundamentally composed of things. Mountains, trees, rivers, animals, stars, and human beings all appear before us as distinct entities possessing their own identities. They endure through time, retain recognizable forms, and can be distinguished from one another. It was therefore natural for philosophy to ask not first how these realities relate, but what each reality is in itself.
From this seemingly simple observation emerged one of the most influential ideas in the history of philosophy: the concept of substance.
The search for substance was never an arbitrary intellectual exercise. It arose from genuine philosophical questions that continue to deserve our respect. If everything around us changes, what accounts for continuity? If a child grows into an adult, in what sense is that person still the same individual? If a tree loses its leaves each autumn only to blossom again in spring, what persists through these changing appearances? Human experience continually confronts us with both permanence and change, identity and transformation. Substance became philosophy's attempt to explain how these belong together.
Among the ancient philosophers, no one developed this insight more systematically than Aristotle. While recognizing that things undergo continual change, he argued that change itself presupposes something that changes. Beneath the shifting properties of a thing lies an enduring reality that makes it the kind of thing it is. Color may change, size may change, location may change, relationships may change, yet the underlying substance remains the bearer of those changing attributes.
This was an extraordinary achievement. It provided philosophy with a stable grammar for discussing identity, causation, persistence, and knowledge. If nothing endured through change, then language itself would become unstable. Science could discover no regularities. Ethics could speak of no enduring morals. History would lose continuity. Substance offered a way to preserve intelligibility within an ever-changing world.
Over the centuries, this framework proved remarkably fruitful. Medieval philosophy incorporated it into theological reflection, where substance became central to discussions of creation, personhood, and the nature of God. Early modern philosophers challenged many aspects of Aristotle's system, yet they often retained the assumption that reality ultimately consists of independently existing entities. Whether one reads Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, or Leibniz, the central question remains largely unchanged: What is the fundamental thing that exists?
Even the rise of modern science did not immediately overturn this orientation. The extraordinary successes of physics and chemistry seemed to reinforce the search for ever more fundamental constituents of reality. Molecules were understood in terms of atoms, atoms in terms of subatomic particles, and particles in terms of increasingly fundamental structures. Although the scientific picture became progressively more sophisticated, the underlying intuition often remained the same: if we could only discover the smallest or most basic things, we would uncover reality's ultimate foundation.
Nor is this intuition confined to philosophy or science. It continues to shape ordinary human experience. We naturally speak of "things" before speaking of relationships. We introduce ourselves as individuals before describing our communities. We point to objects before considering the networks that sustain them. Everyday language itself encourages us to imagine a world composed of independent entities that subsequently enter into various forms of interaction.
For this reason, substance metaphysics should not be dismissed as a historical mistake. It emerged because it corresponds to something genuine within experience. The world does present itself as populated by enduring realities. We encounter persons, organisms, mountains, rivers, and galaxies that possess remarkable stability across time. Any adequate metaphysics must account for this enduring character of reality rather than explaining it away.
The question, therefore, is not whether substances exist. Open and Relational Process Metaphysics has no interest in denying the reality of enduring things. The deeper question is whether substance is best understood as reality's beginning or as one of reality's achievements.
This distinction marks a decisive turning point. Classical metaphysics largely asked how enduring substances enter into relationships. ORPMOB asks whether enduring substances themselves emerge through ongoing relational processes. Rather than rejecting the insights of the classical tradition, it seeks to reinterpret them within a broader metaphysical horizon.
The importance of this shift should not be underestimated. If substance is primary, then relations remain secondary features connecting already complete realities. But if relation is primary, then what we call a substance may instead be the enduring embodiment of countless relational processes unfolding across time. Identity is not abandoned; it is reinterpreted. Stability is not denied; it is explained differently. Enduring things remain fully real, but their reality is understood as the achievement of an ongoing relational becoming rather than the starting point from which becoming proceeds.
It is precisely here that contemporary philosophy finds itself standing at a crossroads. The classical tradition has given us a profound account of persistence and identity. Yet many of the most significant developments in philosophy, science, biology, ecology, and even consciousness studies increasingly suggest that the deeper grammar of reality may not begin with isolated substances after all. The enduring question is no longer simply, What is the thing itself? Increasingly, we are led to ask, What makes the thing possible in the first place?
That question leads naturally into the next stage of our inquiry. Before relation can be proposed as more fundamental than substance, we must first understand why the substance-centered picture, despite its many strengths, no longer seems sufficient to account for the richness, dynamism, and interconnectedness of the world we have come to discover.
Every philosophical framework illuminates certain features of reality while leaving others in the shadows. The remarkable success of substance metaphysics should therefore not surprise us. It provided a coherent account of persistence, identity, and continuity that shaped philosophy for more than two millennia. Even today, much of our language, our scientific reasoning, and our everyday experience continue to rely upon its assumptions.
Yet philosophy advances not because earlier insights are discarded, but because reality continually presents questions that those insights alone cannot fully answer.
As human understanding expanded, philosophers and scientists alike began encountering phenomena that resisted explanation in purely substance-centered terms. Increasingly, the world appeared less like a collection of independently existing things and more like a dynamic web of interactions, dependencies, and histories. Objects remained real, but they no longer appeared fully intelligible apart from the relationships that constituted and sustained them.
This realization did not arise from a single discipline. Rather, it emerged gradually across many different fields of inquiry, each approaching reality from its own perspective yet often arriving at remarkably similar observations.
Biology provides one familiar example. An organism cannot be adequately understood merely by listing its constituent parts. Cells exist within tissues, tissues within organs, organs within living systems, and living systems within ecological communities. At every level, the identity of the whole depends not simply upon the existence of its components but upon the organized relationships among them. Remove those relationships, and the organism ceases to be what it is, even if many of its physical components remain.
Ecology extends this insight still further. No species exists in complete isolation. Every organism participates within larger networks of climate, geography, nutrient cycles, symbiotic partnerships, competition, and cooperation. A forest is not simply a collection of individual trees. It is an evolving community whose members continually shape one another's possibilities for growth, adaptation, and survival. Increasingly, what appears fundamental is not merely the individual organism but the relational field within which that organism lives.
Evolution likewise transformed our understanding of identity. Species are no longer viewed as fixed substances possessing immutable essences. They are historical achievements emerging through countless generations of adaptation, inheritance, variation, and environmental interaction. Identity itself becomes a story of becoming rather than the expression of an unchanging essence.
Even physics, long regarded as the discipline most closely associated with the search for ultimate constituents, has repeatedly complicated the classical picture. The deeper inquiry proceeded into matter-based science, the more difficult it became to describe fundamental reality simply as a collection of independently existing particles. Increasingly, interactions, fields, symmetries, and patterns of organization occupy the center of scientific explanation. Whatever one's interpretation of modern physics, it has become increasingly difficult to separate what a thing is from the network of relations through which its observable properties emerge.
These developments should not be misunderstood. None of them proves that relation is metaphysically fundamental. Scientific theories are not themselves metaphysical conclusions, and philosophy should resist the temptation to convert contemporary science directly into ontology or metaphysics. Nevertheless, they do reveal something important. Across many independent disciplines, inquiry repeatedly encounters the same intuition: things become intelligible through their relationships.
Perhaps nowhere is this shift more evident than in contemporary discussions of mind and consciousness. Increasingly, researchers explore cognition not as an isolated process occurring within a detached brain but as something profoundly shaped by embodiment, environmental interaction, developmental history, social participation, and ongoing engagement with the world. Once again, the emphasis moves away from isolated entities toward dynamic patterns of relation. Whether these approaches ultimately succeed remains an open question. Their significance lies elsewhere. They suggest that the explanatory center of gravity is slowly shifting from substance to relation.
This cumulative movement does not require us to abandon substance. Rather, it invites us to reconsider its place within a larger metaphysical picture.
Perhaps substances are not the starting point of reality.
Perhaps they are among reality's most remarkable achievements.
If this is so, then substance itself is no longer reality's primitive category but one of its enduring accomplishments. What classical metaphysics regarded as the foundation of reality becomes, within ORPMOB, one of reality's most remarkable achievements.
This possibility changes the nature of the philosophical question. Instead of asking how independently existing things enter into relationships, we begin asking how sufficiently stable things emerge from ongoing relational processes. The focus shifts from static identity to dynamic formation, from isolated existence to participatory becoming.
Such a shift does not diminish the reality of enduring beings. On the contrary, it deepens our appreciation for them. If stable identities are not simply given but continually achieved, then every enduring reality represents an extraordinary accomplishment of the relational universe itself. Persistence becomes not the denial of becoming but one of becoming's greatest expressions.
We now stand at the threshold of a different metaphysical imagination. The question is no longer whether relations exist alongside substances. Few philosophers have ever denied that they do. The deeper question is whether relations merely connect already existing realities or whether they participate in constituting the realities themselves.
It is here that the constructive proposal of Open and Relational Process Metaphysics begins. Before relation can be understood as reality's most primitive grammar, we must first ask what a relation actually is, how it gives rise to enduring identities, and why reality repeatedly generates coherence rather than fragmentation. Those questions lead us beyond the classical metaphysics of substance toward a genuinely relational understanding of being itself.
If the limitations of substance metaphysics invite us to look more deeply into the nature of reality, then the next question becomes unavoidable:
What is a relation?
At first glance, the answer appears almost self-evident. A relation is commonly understood as a connection between two or more already-existing things. A parent stands in relation to a child. A planet stands in relation to its star. Two neighboring trees stand in relation through their shared soil and competing root systems. In each case, the things appear to exist first, while the relation simply describes how they are connected.
This understanding is both natural and useful. It accurately describes many aspects of ordinary experience. Yet it also carries with it an assumption inherited from the substance tradition: that relations are secondary to the realities they connect.
But suppose we reverse the question.
Instead of asking how independently existing things become related, we ask how distinguishable things become possible at all.
The change may seem slight, yet it transforms the entire metaphysical landscape.
A newborn child does not first exist as a complete, self-contained individual and then gradually acquire relationships. From the first moments of existence - and indeed before birth - the child is already constituted through innumerable relationships: genetic inheritance, maternal development, biological exchange, environmental conditions, language, culture, affection, nourishment, and countless forms of social participation. These relationships do not merely surround the child. They participate in making the child the unique individual he or she becomes.
The same observation extends far beyond human life.
A tree is not first a complete substance that later encounters sunlight, soil, rainfall, fungi, insects, and atmospheric exchange. Its very existence is inseparable from these ongoing relationships. Remove them, and one has not merely altered the tree's circumstances. One has altered the very conditions through which the tree continues to be a tree.
Even what appears to be the simplest physical object exists only within a wider field of interactions. Gravity, electromagnetism, quantum fields, thermodynamic exchange, spatial location, temporal duration, and countless other conditions continually participate in the persistence of every physical reality. Whatever interpretation one adopts regarding contemporary physics, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine anything existing in complete independence from the relational context through which its observable properties arise.
These examples point toward a profound metaphysical possibility.
Perhaps relations do not simply connect identities.
Perhaps they participate in generating them.
This is the decisive shift proposed by Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming.
Relation is no longer viewed as an external bridge stretched between independently existing realities. Rather, relation becomes one of the very conditions through which enduring realities emerge, persist, and transform. Identity is not abandoned, but neither is it understood as self-generated. Every enduring identity is the achievement of an ongoing relational history.
This proposal should not be mistaken for the claim that individuality is an illusion. Quite the opposite. Individuality becomes more remarkable precisely because it is continually achieved rather than simply given. Every organism, every person, every ecosystem, every society, and perhaps every enduring physical structure represents a relatively stable pattern within an ongoing field of relational becoming.
Seen in this light, identity itself acquires a dynamic character.
To be is not merely to possess existence.
To be is to participate in a continuing process through which existence is sustained, renewed, and expressed.
Persistence, therefore, is not the opposite of change. It is one particular form of successful change. Stability is not the absence of becoming but the achievement of becoming. Endurance becomes the continual renewal of coherence across time.
Here we may also return to the insight introduced earlier regarding relational responsiveness.
Relations are not inert connections existing like lines drawn between otherwise isolated points. Every genuine relation exhibits varying degrees of responsiveness - the capacity to receive, influence, constrain, support, resist, or transform. Relation names the enduring structure through which realities belong together. Responsiveness names the dynamic activity through which those relations remain alive.
This understanding helps explain why reality exhibits both remarkable stability and extraordinary novelty. Stable patterns endure because relational processes continually renew their coherence. Novelty emerges because those same processes remain open to new possibilities of participation. Reality neither freezes into absolute permanence nor dissolves into perpetual chaos. It continually negotiates between continuity and transformation.
At this point the meaning of relation has changed significantly from the way it first appeared at the beginning of this essay. Similarly with the word embodied in the previous EPR ontology.
Originally, relation seemed to describe something occurring between already-existing things.
Now relation begins to describe the very grammar through which things themselves become distinguishable.
Identity no longer precedes relation. Identity emerges through relation. Being no longer stands outside becoming. Being is continually embodied within becoming.
This, perhaps, is the deepest shift required of a relational metaphysics. It asks us to imagine that the world's enduring realities are not exceptions to process but its finest achievements. Every stable identity - from atoms to galaxies, from organisms to civilizations, from persons to communities - is not evidence against becoming but testimony to becoming's extraordinary capacity to generate coherence without sacrificing openness, persistence without denying change, and individuality without abandoning participation.
The remainder of this essay will develop this proposal further by considering how twentieth-century process philosophy, especially in the work of Alfred North Whitehead, transformed the classical understanding of relation into one of the most comprehensive metaphysical visions ever attempted. Yet the proposal advanced here will also suggest that Whitehead's profound insights can themselves be extended. If relation constitutes the grammar of reality, then our task is not merely to repeat Whitehead's system, but to continue the conversation he so brilliantly began.
If relation is more than a convenient way of describing interactions between independently existing things, then we should expect this deeper grammar to reveal itself repeatedly across the natural world. A metaphysical proposal gains credibility not merely through logical consistency but through its capacity to illuminate diverse domains of experience. If relation truly belongs to the architecture of reality itself, its presence should become increasingly apparent wherever reality is carefully examined.
This expectation is, in many respects, what has gradually unfolded throughout the history of human inquiry.
The closer we investigate the world, the more difficult it becomes to isolate anything entirely from the wider context within which it exists. Every discipline arrives at this realization in its own language, according to its own methods, and for its own purposes. Philosophy speaks of participation, biology of ecological interdependence, physics of interaction and field dynamics, psychology of development and embodiment, sociology of communities and institutions, and systems theory of networks and emergent organization. Their vocabularies differ, yet they repeatedly point toward a similar intuition: realities are increasingly understood through the patterns of relationship that sustain them.
This convergence should not be overstated. These disciplines do not thereby prove a relational metaphysics. Scientific discoveries do not automatically settle philosophical questions, nor should philosophy hastily transform empirical observations into metaphysical conclusions. Such reductions misunderstand the proper task of both disciplines.
Yet philosophy is also responsible for recognizing when independent fields begin revealing remarkably similar structures. When biology, ecology, evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, neuroscience, systems theory, and contemporary physics all increasingly emphasize interaction, organization, history, and mutual dependence, philosophy is justified in asking whether these recurring patterns disclose something deeper about reality itself.
The significance of this convergence lies not in any single scientific discovery but in the cumulative direction toward which these discoveries seem to point. The universe increasingly appears less like an assemblage of isolated parts and more like a dynamic history of ongoing participation. Entities remain distinguishable, yet their identities are increasingly understood through the relationships that make them possible.
Even our ordinary experience quietly reflects this same pattern. No language is learned in isolation. No culture develops apart from historical inheritance. No ecosystem survives without countless reciprocal exchanges. No civilization emerges independently of generations that precede it. No human life unfolds without continual participation in communities, traditions, environments, and relationships extending far beyond the individual self.
These observations are so familiar that they often escape our notice. Yet familiarity should not diminish their philosophical importance. Sometimes the deepest truths are those that become nearly invisible precisely because they are woven so completely into everyday existence.
This is one reason why relational metaphysics initially appears almost counterintuitive. We naturally perceive enduring things more readily than we perceive the relational histories through which those things have come to be. The mountain stands before us; the geological processes that formed it remain largely unseen. The mature forest commands our attention; the centuries of ecological succession that produced it are easily forgotten. The person standing before us appears as a completed individual, while the innumerable relationships that shaped that life remain mostly hidden beneath the surface.
Substance therefore possesses an undeniable phenomenological advantage. We first encounter stable realities. Only later, through deeper reflection and investigation, do we begin uncovering the complex relational histories that sustain them. A relational metaphysics does not deny this ordinary experience. It seeks to explain it.
Indeed, one might say that reality itself possesses two complementary faces.
One face presents enduring forms.The other reveals ongoing becoming.
The first invites us to speak of identity.The second invites us to speak of relation.
Neither is illusory. Both belong to reality. The philosophical question concerns not which face is real, but which more adequately explains the other.
Open and Relational Process Metaphysics proposes that the explanatory movement proceeds from relation toward identity rather than from identity toward relation. Enduring realities remain fully real, yet they are understood as relatively stable achievements arising within a deeper process of relational becoming. Identity, persistence, and coherence therefore remain central metaphysical categories, but they are no longer treated as reality's ultimate beginning. Instead, they become among reality's most remarkable relational-accomplishments.
This shift also helps explain why reality repeatedly exhibits both continuity and creativity. Every enduring form inherits the relational achievements of the past while remaining open to novel possibilities for the future. Reality neither i) endlessly repeats itself nor ii) abandons its history. It continuously carries its past forward into new forms of becoming.
Seen from this perspective, relation is no longer simply one category among many.
It becomes the living grammar through which reality continually articulates itself.
And it is precisely this profound intuition that Alfred North Whitehead sought to express with unparalleled philosophical rigor. His process philosophy did not merely add relations to an existing substance metaphysics. It proposed that becoming itself constitutes the deepest character of reality, and that every enduring actuality emerges through processes of relational participation. Whatever revisions contemporary philosophy may wish to make to Whitehead's system, the magnitude of this insight cannot easily be overstated.
Few philosophers have altered the course of metaphysics as profoundly as Alfred North Whitehead. While many thinkers before him recognized the importance of relation, Whitehead was among the first to ask what would happen if relation were not treated as one category among many but as the very grammar through which reality unfolds.
This question represented far more than a minor adjustment to classical metaphysics. It required a reversal of its most fundamental assumptions.
For much of Western philosophy, becoming had been understood as something that happened to substances. Change was real, yet it remained secondary. Substance endured while becoming described the alterations through which substance passed. Whitehead proposed something far more radical. Reality, he argued, is fundamentally composed not of static things but of events of becoming. Enduring entities are not the starting point of existence; they are the relatively stable achievements of ongoing processes.
This reversal transformed nearly every major category of metaphysical thought:
Identity could no longer be understood as simple permanence. Instead, identity became continuity achieved across successive moments of becoming.
Causation was no longer the external action of one independent substance upon another. Every actual occasion inherited the world that preceded it, integrating that inheritance into a new act of becoming.
Persistence ceased to mean resistance to change. Persistence became the successful continuity of relational process across time.
Even the distinction between subject and object acquired a new character. Every actuality both inherited a world already given, and contributed something genuinely new to the world that followed. Reality became simultaneously receptive and creative, conditioned and innovative, inherited and transformative.
Perhaps nowhere is Whitehead's genius more evident than in his refusal to choose between permanence and change.
Western philosophy had often treated these as opposing principles. Some traditions emphasized eternal stability, others perpetual flux. Whitehead instead proposed that permanence itself emerges through ordered processes of becoming. Stability is not the denial of process but one of process's greatest accomplishments.
This insight remains extraordinarily fertile.
It explains why reality exhibits remarkable continuity without requiring an unchanging foundation beneath every change. It allows novelty to become genuinely meaningful rather than merely apparent. It situates creativity within the ordinary unfolding of existence itself rather than reserving it for exceptional moments alone.
For these reasons, Whitehead's philosophy remains one of the most comprehensive attempts ever made to rethink metaphysics in relational terms. His work continues to influence philosophy, theology, ecology, complexity theory, education, and numerous other disciplines because it provides a conceptual language capable of integrating change, relation, and persistence within a single coherent vision.
Seen from this perspective, the history of metaphysics itself begins to acquire a deeper continuity:
Aristotle sought to explain the endurance of being.
Whitehead sought to explain the creativity of becoming.
Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming asks a further question: How does becoming repeatedly generate enduring forms of being?
Rather than rejecting either tradition, ORPMOB seeks to understand how each illuminates one indispensable aspect of reality. If Aristotle explained why realities endure and Whitehead explained how realities become, ORPMOB asks how enduring realities continually emerge through relational becoming.
Not unremarkably, Whitehead himself would have resisted treating his own philosophy as a completed system. His understanding of reality was always open, emerging, and becoming more than it was.
Throughout his writings he repeatedly insisted that speculative philosophy must remain responsive to experience. Every metaphysical scheme is provisional. No conceptual framework exhausts reality itself. The task of philosophy is not to construct an immutable intellectual monument but to develop conceptual schemes that correspond ever more adequately to the world they seek to understand.
In this respect, Whitehead offered more than a particular metaphysical doctrine. He offered a philosophical method. Reality comes first. Experience remains primary. Conceptual schemes exist to illuminate reality rather than to replace it.
This methodological humility may prove to be one of Whitehead's greatest legacies. His philosophy remains open because reality itself remains open. Every generation inherits not only his conclusions but also his invitation to continue the work of speculative inquiry. It is precisely this invitation that Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming seeks to accept.
The goal is not to abandon Whitehead's insights, nor merely to preserve them unchanged. Rather, it is to ask whether the relational vision he inaugurated may itself continue to develop. If philosophy is faithful to reality rather than to its own traditions (such as process), then even the greatest philosophical achievements remain invitations to extend, rather than conclusions to close, speculation.
Whitehead carried metaphysics beyond the primacy of substance toward the primacy of becoming.
The next question naturally follows.
What if becoming itself discloses an even richer grammar?
What if relation, becoming, coherence, participation, and the responsive character of reality together describe recurring patterns that Whitehead himself had only begun to illuminate?
These questions do not diminish Whitehead's accomplishment. They honor it. For the greatest philosophers do not close conversations. They begin them.
The constructive proposal developed throughout these essays should not be understood as a departure from Alfred North Whitehead so much as a continuation of the philosophical project he began. Whitehead did not present his metaphysics as a completed system beyond revision. Rather, he repeatedly emphasized that philosophy must remain responsive to reality itself, continually refining its conceptual schemes as experience, inquiry, and understanding deepen. If reality remains the measure of philosophy - and not philosophy the measure of reality - then fidelity to Whitehead requires more than repeating his conclusions. It requires continuing his method.
Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB) is offered in precisely this spirit. It does not seek to replace process philosophy but to participate in its ongoing development. Its task is neither to preserve Whitehead unchanged nor to revise him merely for the sake of novelty. Rather, it asks whether the relational vision he inaugurated may continue to unfold as philosophy enters into conversation with contemporary science, evolutionary biology, ecology, systems theory, consciousness studies, and the many disciplines that have matured since Process and Reality first appeared.
This proposal therefore remains intentionally provisional. Like every speculative philosophy, ORPMOB must ultimately be judged not by its elegance alone but by its capacity to illuminate reality more adequately than competing frameworks. No metaphysical scheme should ever become immune to revision, for reality continually exceeds every conceptual structure human beings construct. Philosophy remains an ongoing conversation between thought and experience, between imagination and observation, between inherited wisdom and newly disclosed realities.
The purpose of ORPMOB is not to construct another closed metaphysical system. Its purpose is to identify recurring patterns through which reality appears continually to disclose itself. These patterns are not presented as immutable laws imposed upon existence, but as an emerging grammar repeatedly encountered across diverse domains of inquiry.
Relation gives rise to becoming.
Becoming repeatedly achieves overcoming.
Overcoming gives rise to coherence.
Coherence remains fundamentally participatory.
Enduring realities (traditionally called substances) emerge as enduring embodiments of relational coherence.
Together these movements describe a universe that is neither static nor chaotic, neither mechanically determined nor wholly indeterminate. Reality appears instead as an open, relational, and creative process through which enduring forms continually emerge without ever exhausting the possibilities of further becoming.
The language of "grammar" is intentionally chosen. Grammar does not dictate what may be spoken. Rather, it describes the recurring patterns through which meaningful speech becomes possible. In a similar way, ORPMOB does not claim to describe every detail of reality. It proposes a conceptual grammar through which the remarkable diversity of reality may become more intelligible. As language generates innumerable expressions from a relatively simple grammatical structure, so reality may generate astonishing diversity through a relatively small number of recurring relational patterns.
These patterns should never be understood as isolated metaphysical principles. Each presupposes and enriches the others. Relation continually becomes. Becoming repeatedly overcomes limitation through the emergence of novel possibilities. Overcoming gives rise to increasingly stable forms of coherence. Yet coherence never withdraws from participation; every enduring reality continues to exist within wider networks of relation that both sustain and transform it.
Throughout this essay another possibility has quietly emerged as well. We have spoken of relation as reality's most fundamental grammar, yet closer examination suggests that relations themselves are not inert structures. Every genuine relation is characterized by relational-responsiveness - the capacity to receive, influence, constrain, support, resist, and be transformed. Relation names the enduring structure through which realities belong together. Responsiveness names the dynamic activity through which those relations remain alive. They are not competing metaphysical primitives but complementary descriptions of the same ontological reality: relation describes its structure; responsiveness describes its living activity.
This insight remains provisional, and its implications will be explored more fully in later essays devoted to consciousness, agency, participation, and artificial intelligence. For the present, it is sufficient to recognize that reality may prove even richer than our earliest formulations suggested. Philosophical inquiry does not diminish when it discovers new depths within its own concepts. It matures.
In this sense, ORPMOB is less a finished metaphysical system than an invitation to continued inquiry. It seeks to preserve what the substance tradition understood so well - the reality of enduring beings - while embracing Whitehead's profound insight that endurance itself is achieved through becoming. It further proposes that becoming repeatedly tends toward overcoming, coherence, and participation, not as deterministic necessities but as recurring possibilities through which reality progressively embodies richer forms of existence.
The philosophy offered here therefore asks neither that we abandon the past nor that we become captive to it. Aristotle remains one of our indispensable conversation partners. Whitehead remains among the greatest architects of relational metaphysics. Yet neither philosophy nor reality stands still. Each generation inherits not only the conclusions of its predecessors but also the responsibility to continue asking whether reality is inviting deeper understanding.
If there is one conviction that unites the entire Reality & Metaphysics Series, it is this: philosophy must remain faithful to reality before it remains faithful to itself. Systems serve inquiry; inquiry does not serve systems. Every metaphysical proposal - including this one - must therefore remain open to correction, refinement, expansion, and even transformation as reality continues to disclose itself.
The task of philosophy is never finally completed because reality itself is never finally exhausted.
To participate in philosophy is therefore to participate in the ongoing adventure of becoming itself.
This essay began with one of philosophy's oldest and most enduring questions:
What is a thing?
For more than two millennia, Western philosophy answered this question by seeking substance - the enduring reality that persists through change, grounds identity, and makes knowledge possible. This was no small achievement. The substance tradition provided philosophy with an intellectual grammar capable of explaining continuity, persistence, and the remarkable stability that characterizes much of our experience of the world.
Yet every genuine philosophical achievement also opens the possibility of deeper questions. As inquiry broadened through philosophy, science, history, ecology, biology, and contemporary studies of consciousness, another question gradually emerged:
How do enduring realities come to be?
This shift does not deny the reality of enduring things. It asks how their endurance itself becomes possible.
The proposal advanced throughout this essay is therefore neither a rejection of substance nor an abandonment of the philosophical tradition that preceded it. Rather, it asks whether substance itself might be better understood within a more fundamental metaphysics of relational becoming.
Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming proposes that relation is not merely something occurring between already-existing realities. Relation belongs to the very grammar through which realities emerge, persist, and continually become.
If this proposal proves fruitful, then one of the central assumptions of classical metaphysics undergoes a profound reinterpretation.
Substance is no longer reality's primitive starting point.
Substance is the enduring embodiment of relational coherence.
Identity is therefore not opposed to relation.Identity is relation achieving enduring coherence across time.
Being is not opposed to becoming.Being is continually embodied within becoming.
Enduring realities remain fully real, but their reality is understood as one of becoming's greatest achievements rather than its presupposition.
Seen from this perspective, the world begins to appear differently.
A forest is more than a collection of trees.
A person is more than an isolated individual.
A society is more than the sum of its members.
Even the universe itself appears less as an assembly of independent objects than as an ongoing history of relational becoming through which increasingly coherent forms continually emerge.
Whether this proposal ultimately proves adequate remains an open philosophical question. Every metaphysical scheme must remain provisional because reality continually exceeds every conceptual framework we construct. Philosophy remains faithful to its calling only insofar as it allows reality itself - not inherited systems, personal preference, or disciplinary boundaries—to remain its final measure.
For this reason, Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming should be understood not as a finished system, but as an invitation to continued inquiry. It invites us to ask not merely what things are, but how realities become sufficiently relational for enduring things to emerge. That question leads naturally into the essays that follow.
For if relation is reality's most fundamental grammar, then becoming is its living expression.
The philosophical journey, therefore, has only just begun.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Aristotle. Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Plato. Parmenides. Translated by Mary Louise Gill and Paul Ryan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996.
Plato. Sophist. Translated by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993.
Process Philosophy
Cobb, John B., Jr., and David Ray Griffin. Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1976.
Griffin, David Ray. Reenchantment without Supernaturalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Hartshorne, Charles. Reality as Social Process. New York: Hafner Publishing, 1953.
Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Contemporary Philosophy and Metaphysics
DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
Deacon, Terrence W. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.
Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester: Zero Books, 2011.
Ladyman, James, and Don Ross. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude. London: Continuum, 2008.
Segall, Matthew David. Physics of the World-Soul. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021.
Complexity, Systems, and Emergence
Capra, Fritjof, and Pier Luigi Luisi. The Systems View of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Holland, John H. Emergence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Kauffman, Stuart A. At Home in the Universe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Morin, Edgar. On Complexity. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
Suggested Further Reading
Keller, Catherine. Face of the Deep. London: Routledge, 2003.
Oord, Thomas Jay. The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence. Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2023.
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. The Fall to Violence. New York: Continuum, 1994.
Why Were These Authors Chosen?
One last note. When comparing Essay XV's "Embodiment of Becoming" to this present Essay XVII, "The Primacy of Relation," the bibliography feels broader and more mature than the earlier one. This is because it mirrors today's essay's own movement - from the ancient debate over substance to the contemporary search for a relational metaphysics. In that sense, the bibliography is quietly telling the same story as the essay itself.
