Reality unfolds through an open process of relational responsiveness...
Reality is eternally unfinished - not because it lacks order,but because creativity itself remains inexhaustible.
The preceding essay argued that relation is more fundamental than substance. Rather than treating relations as secondary connections between independently existing things, Embodied Relational Reality (ERR) identifies relation as reality's ontological primitive. Enduring realities may therefore be understood not as reality's primitive starting points but as embodied histories of relational coherence. Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB) then asks how such relational reality becomes.
This conclusion naturally leads to a deeper question.
If reality is fundamentally relational, how does relational reality become?
The answer proposed in this essay is that relation should not be understood as an inert connection between otherwise independent realities. Relational existence entails responsiveness - capacities through which realities may receive, influence, constrain, enable, resist, and otherwise affect and be affected within ongoing histories of becoming. Relation constitutes; responsiveness expresses mutual affectability; process describes the dynamism through which relational reality becomes. Reality is therefore not best understood as a completed collection of finished entities, but as an open history of relational becoming.
This shift from being to becoming has appeared repeatedly throughout the history of philosophy. From Heraclitus' vision of perpetual change (No man ever steps in the same river twice; for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man), to Bergson's creative evolution, to Whitehead's philosophy of organism, thinkers have recognized that permanence alone cannot account for the creativity, novelty, and development evident throughout the universe. Enduring realities persist not because they escape becoming, but because some relational histories achieve sufficient coherence, embodiment, and persistence to endure within it.
ORPMOB extends this insight by proposing that becoming is neither wholly chaotic nor predetermined. Reality unfolds through an open process of relational responsiveness in which inherited conditions shape without completely determining what may become. New possibilities may arise while previously achieved patterns provide conditions, constraints, and opportunities for further becoming. Persistence and novelty are therefore not simple opposites but possibilities within the generative openness of relational reality.
The pages that follow explore this vision of open relational becoming. They do not abandon being in favor of process, nor replace stability with perpetual flux. Rather, they propose that enduring realities may themselves be understood as achievements within becoming. Some relational histories cohere and persist; others fragment, reorganize, dissipate, or become otherwise. Reality remains unfinished - not because it lacks order, but because its possibilities are never exhausted in advance.
Substance explains what endures.Becoming explains how enduring realities may arise.
Every metaphysical system eventually confronts a fundamental question.
Is reality primarily composed of things that occasionally change, or is change itself more fundamental than the things that temporarily endure?
For much of Western philosophy, the first answer prevailed. Reality was understood to consist of enduring substances possessing stable identities. Change was acknowledged, but permanence remained the deeper principle. Becoming was often treated as secondary - a modification of what already existed.
Yet the world continually presents a different picture.
Stars are born and die. Galaxies evolve. Continents drift. Species emerge and disappear. Ecosystems continually reorganize themselves. Civilizations rise and fall. Human beings mature physically, emotionally, intellectually, and socially throughout their lives. Even the material constituents of our bodies change while personal identity may persist across time.
Everywhere we look, reality exhibits movement, transformation, emergence, persistence, dissolution, and continual change.
The remarkable question, therefore, is not why things change.
The remarkable question is how anything becomes sufficiently coherent to persist amid continual change.
This inversion marks one of the decisive shifts of relational metaphysics.
Rather than beginning with permanence and attempting to explain change, ERR begins with relation as ontologically constitutive, while ORPMOB asks how relational reality continually becomes. Stability is no longer assumed as reality's primitive condition but understood as one possibility within relational becoming. Enduring realities are not exceptions to process; they are relational histories that have achieved sufficient coherence, embodiment, and persistence to endure.
This perspective does not reject being. Rather, it reinterprets being within the ongoing activity of becoming. Being names relatively enduring forms within relational reality. Becoming names the continual dynamism through which such forms may arise, persist, transform, reorganize, or dissolve.
Relation and becoming therefore belong together.
If relation constitutes reality's ontological grammar, then becoming is its dynamic expression. Relation establishes the constitutive conditions within which realities may affect and be affected; relational responsiveness expresses this mutual affectability within ongoing histories of becoming. Every achieved configuration inherits conditions from what has preceded it while contributing new conditions and possibilities to what may follow.
Consequently, the universe should not be imagined merely as a completed structure gradually wearing down with time. Nor should it be understood as random flux lacking continuity or intelligibility. It is better envisioned as an unfinished cosmos in which inheritance and openness, persistence and dissolution, coherence and novelty remain possible within the same relational becoming. Its future is conditioned by its past without being wholly determined by it.
In a word,
Reality is never complete.It is always becoming.
Every philosophical age has wrestled with the tension
between permanence and change.
The further question is this:
What is more fundamental - being or becoming?
For much of human history, permanence appeared to be the deepest feature of reality.
Mountains endured for generations. The stars seemed fixed in their courses. Civilizations sought lasting institutions, religions proclaimed eternal truths, and philosophy naturally searched for what remained unchanged beneath the shifting appearances of everyday life. Stability inspired confidence, while change often appeared accidental, temporary, or even threatening.
It is therefore understandable that many early metaphysical systems regarded permanence as more fundamental than becoming. To know something was to identify what remained constant despite the continual alterations of experience.
Yet experience itself continually resisted this conclusion.
Nothing encountered within the natural world remained entirely fixed.
Rivers altered their courses. Forests regenerated through cycles of growth and decay. Species changed across generations. Human beings matured from infancy through adulthood into old age. Living systems persisted through continual exchanges of matter, energy, and information with their surrounding environments. Even the heavens, once thought immutable, gradually revealed histories of formation, transformation, and dissolution.
Reality appeared less like a finished structure and more like an unfolding history.
Among the earliest philosophers to recognize this was Heraclitus, who argued that reality is characterized not by static permanence but by continual becoming. Although often remembered through the image of the ever-changing river, his deeper insight was that apparent stability may coexist with ongoing transformation. The river remains recognizable despite continual change in the waters flowing through it. Change is therefore not necessarily the enemy of persistence but may belong to the conditions through which persistence becomes possible.
Centuries later, Henri Bergson similarly challenged static conceptions of existence. He argued that reality unfolds through creative duration rather than as a succession of frozen moments. Life exhibits genuine novelty, while time is not exhausted by its measurement as a sequence of discrete instants. Bergson thereby restored creativity and becoming to the center of philosophical reflection.
These insights reached perhaps their most comprehensive metaphysical expression in Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism. Whitehead proposed that reality should not be understood fundamentally through enduring substances but through actual occasions arising through inheritance, prehension, concrescence, satisfaction, and contribution to subsequent becoming. Reality therefore appears not as an assemblage of independently existing things but as a profoundly relational process in which each occasion arises from a world already given while contributing itself to what follows.
Whitehead's achievement was profound. He demonstrated how process and relation could replace substance as the dominant explanatory categories of metaphysics, transforming becoming from a secondary characteristic of otherwise enduring realities into a constitutive feature of his account of reality.
ORPMOB stands firmly within this broad process tradition. At the same time, the present project introduces an important distinction. Embodied Relational Reality (ERR) identifies relation rather than process as the ontological primitive, while ORPMOB investigates the processual and metaphysical dynamics through which relational reality becomes. This does not require rejecting Whitehead's actual occasions or his philosophy of organism. Rather, it asks whether the relationality already pervasive throughout Whitehead's metaphysics may disclose a still more fundamental ontological condition.
The question therefore becomes:
What if process does not constitute relation, but expresses the dynamism of a reality already relationally constituted?
If so, Whitehead's great discovery of becoming need not be abandoned. It may instead be situated within a broader relational architecture:
Relation constitutes.
Process becomes.
The following section explores that possibility.
Reality begins not when "something exists."Reality begins when relations persist.
Whitehead's philosophy represents one of the most significant metaphysical developments of the twentieth century. Rather than treating reality as a collection of enduring substances, he described it as a continual creative advance composed of actual occasions of experience. These occasions arise through their inheritance of an already-existing world, prehend that world, integrate their many influences through concrescence into momentary unity, achieve satisfaction, perish as immediate subjects, and contribute themselves objectively to subsequent occasions. Reality therefore exists not as static being but as an ongoing process of becoming.
This achievement cannot be overstated. Whitehead transformed metaphysics by showing that process need not be secondary to reality but may be understood as intrinsic to it. Change is not merely what happens to reality. Becoming belongs to the way reality exists.
Yet his remarkable account invites one further question.
Not simply,
What are actual occasions?
But rather,
What makes actual occasions possible?
This question does not reject Whitehead's philosophy. Rather, it asks whether the relational character already present throughout his account may disclose an ontological condition more fundamental than the particular metaphysical units through which Whitehead described becoming.
Every actual occasion already inherits a past. It prehends other occasions. It integrates multiple influences through concrescence into a unified experience. It reaches satisfaction before contributing itself objectively to subsequent becoming. Every stage of its becoming is already constituted relationally.
Inheritance is relational.
Prehension is relational.
Concrescence is relational.
Satisfaction gathers relational influences into momentary unity.
Objective immortality contributes that achieved occasion to future relations.
The actual occasion therefore never appears in isolation. Within Whitehead's own metaphysics, it becomes only through an already relational world.
This observation suggests a further possibility.
Perhaps relation is not merely something that actual occasions perform.
Perhaps relation names a constitutive condition through which actual occasions themselves become possible.
Here the distinction between ERR and ORPMOB becomes especially important. ERR proposes relation as reality's ontological primitive. ORPMOB does not therefore need to identify Whitehead's actual occasions as the earliest embodiments or ultimate units of relational reality. Rather, it receives actual occasions as one powerful metaphysical account of how relational becoming may be conceptualized.
Whitehead asked, in effect,
What are the ultimate units through which becoming occurs?
The present inquiry asks a somewhat different question:
What ontological condition must already obtain for distinguishable realities, interactions, histories, or processes to become possible at all?
ERR answers: relation.
For an actual occasion, as Whitehead describes it, never exists independently of inheritance, prehension, concrescence, satisfaction, or objective immortality. Every one of these activities is relational. Remove relation conceptually and there is nothing to inherit from, nothing to prehend, nothing to integrate, and no achieved occasion capable of entering into subsequent becoming. The actual occasion is therefore not merely relational in its activity; its intelligibility already presupposes a relational world.
Suppose, then, that relation is primitive.
Relation constitutes.
Relational responsiveness expresses mutual affectability.
Process describes the dynamism through which relational reality becomes.
Becoming opens possibilities for novelty, continuity, transformation, coherence, dissolution, and further becoming.
Some relational histories achieve sufficient coherence, embodiment, and persistence to become distinguishable enduring realities.
Those enduring realities remain participants within wider relational histories that may sustain, constrain, transform, or dissolve them.
Reality then appears as an open history of relational becoming.
This is not intended as a necessary causal sequence in which relation inevitably produces increasingly complex or coherent forms. It is instead a philosophical grammar describing how distinguishable and enduring realities may become possible within a relational universe. Becoming remains generative without predetermining what must emerge from it.
The distinction between Whitehead and the present proposal is therefore subtle but significant. Whitehead offers an extraordinarily rich metaphysical account of reality's becoming through actual occasions. ERR asks the prior ontological question of what makes relational existence possible, while ORPMOB explores the metaphysical dynamics of a reality already understood as relationally constituted. Actual occasions consequently need not be rejected, nor need they be adopted as the literal first embodiments of relation. They remain an important Whiteheadian proposal with which this inquiry remains in sustained conversation.
Consequently, becoming cannot be understood independently of relation. It is neither perpetual change nor movement for its own sake. Rather, ORPMOB understands becoming as the continual realization of possibilities within relational histories through responsiveness, inheritance, openness, constraint, and novelty. Some possibilities become coherent and persist; others fragment, dissipate, reorganize, or disappear. No outcome is guaranteed in advance.
Relation and becoming therefore belong inseparably together.
Relation provides reality's ontological constitution.
Becoming describes the dynamic expression of relational reality.
Reality is not composed of independently existing things that only subsequently enter into relations.
Reality is an open history of relational becoming within which distinguishable and enduring realities may emerge.
Becoming is neither perpetual preservation nor perpetual novelty.It is the continual negotiation between inheritance and possibility.
Having established that relation constitutes reality's ontological condition, a further question naturally follows.
What is becoming?
The answer is not as simple as continual change.
Many things change without necessarily generating novelty or greater organization. Mountains erode. Machines wear out. Stars exhaust their fuel. Biological organisms eventually decay. Such transformations undoubtedly belong to becoming, but change by itself does not adequately describe the generative openness of relational reality.
Neither does becoming simply mean movement.
Movement may relocate an object without fundamentally altering its character. Repetition may preserve an existing pattern without generating anything genuinely new. Mere succession likewise tells us little about the relational conditions through which novelty, persistence, transformation, or dissolution become possible.
Becoming therefore cannot be reduced to motion, alteration, or the simple passage of time.
Instead, ORPMOB understands becoming as the dynamic realization of possibilities within relational histories.
Reality does not merely change.
Reality continually becomes through relation.
Every present configuration inherits conditions from prior relational histories while remaining open, to varying degrees, to possibilities not wholly determined by that inheritance. Relational responsiveness names the affectability through which realities receive, influence, constrain, enable, resist, and otherwise respond within these changing conditions. Becoming therefore unfolds through the continual interplay between what has already been realized and what remains possible.
Every becoming inherits.
Every becoming occurs within conditions of relational responsiveness.
Every becoming contributes conditions and possibilities to what may follow.
But inheritance does not dictate repetition. Responsiveness does not guarantee adaptation. Openness does not guarantee novelty. And novelty, where it occurs, does not guarantee coherence.
Some relational histories stabilize. Others transform.
Some achieve new forms of coherence. Others fragment or dissolve.
Some possibilities become embodied and persistent. Others remain unrealized or disappear as conditions change.
Becoming therefore names neither inevitable progress nor perpetual dissolution. It names the open dynamism of relational reality through which inherited conditions and unrealized possibilities continually meet.
Becoming is neither perpetual preservation nor perpetual novelty.
It is the continual negotiation between inheritance and possibility.
Persistence is achieved.It is never simply given.
Questions naturally follow in the wake of becoming -
If reality is fundamentally becoming, why does it not dissolve into perpetual instability?
Conversely, if enduring realities genuinely exist, why is the future not already completely determined?
ORPMOB proposes that both conclusions misunderstand the nature of becoming. Becoming is neither unrestricted novelty nor rigid preservation. It is the open realization of possibilities within relational histories shaped by inheritance, responsiveness, constraint, and changing conditions.
Reality may therefore exhibit multiple relational functions that interact, constrain, and enable one another rather than operate in isolation. This mutual enablement may be understood as a form of relational cooperation or complementarity - not cooperation in the moral or intentional sense, but in the more fundamental sense that differing relational functions may jointly contribute to possibilities unavailable to any one function alone.
This observation suggests an important feature of relational reality. If relation constitutes the ontological primitive, then relations cannot be understood merely as isolated connections linking otherwise independent entities. Relational histories establish conditions through which subsequent relations may be enabled, constrained, redirected, sustained, transformed, or dissolved. Reality therefore need not persist through a single governing principle. Persistence, where achieved, may arise through the interaction of complementary relational functions.
ORPMOB proposes that this relational complementarity provides one way of understanding how enduring forms become possible without making endurance necessary. Inheritance, openness, responsiveness, novelty, coherence, and participation do not compete for metaphysical priority. Nor do they constitute a deterministic sequence. They describe distinguishable dimensions that may interact within relational becoming, each contributing possibilities unavailable to the others alone.
Without inheritance, there could be no historical continuity.
Without openness, there could be no unrealized possibility.
Without responsiveness, there could be no mutual affectability within changing relational conditions.
Without some degree of coherence, there could be no persistent organization.
None of these dimensions alone is sufficient to explain enduring relational organization. Their interaction may enable forms of coherence, embodiment, persistence, novelty, and transformation that no single function could produce independently. Cooperation, in this metaphysical sense, therefore names neither universal harmony nor guaranteed progress. It names the possibility that relational functions may become mutually enabling within particular histories of becoming.
Inheritance carries forward conditions established through prior relational histories.
Openness leaves room for possibilities not wholly determined by those histories.
Responsiveness expresses the capacity to affect and be affected within present relational conditions.
Novelty names possibilities becoming realized in forms not reducible to simple repetition.
Coherence names degrees of relational integration through which some configurations may become organized and persistent.
Participation situates every relational achievement within wider histories and relations through which it may be sustained, constrained, transformed, or dissolved.
Reality therefore need be neither wholly predetermined nor wholly chaotic. Relational becoming occurs through the interplay of continuity and possibility. Achieved coherence becomes part of the inherited conditions for subsequent becoming. Inheritance carries both possibilities and constraints. Responsiveness occurs within those inherited conditions, while openness leaves room for outcomes not completely specified by what has preceded them.
Some possibilities deepen coherence. Others weaken it. Still others redirect existing patterns, fragment, dissipate, or disappear altogether. Reality therefore continually realizes relational possibilities without guaranteeing that any particular possibility will endure. Persistence is achieved. It is never simply given.
Consequently, ORPMOB proposes a metaphysical possibility beyond either isolated competition or static equilibrium. Some enduring realities become possible through forms of relational cooperation in which differing functions, processes, or participants mutually enable conditions for continued organization. Cooperation is therefore significant within relational becoming, but it should not be mistaken for a universal law requiring harmony, complexity, or progress. Competition, conflict, constraint, disruption, and dissolution likewise belong to relational reality.
This understanding helps explain how reality may exhibit both remarkable stability and extraordinary creativity.
Galaxies preserve recognizable structures across immense spans of time while continually evolving.
Living organisms inherit genetic and ecological histories while responding to changing environments.
Human consciousness inherits memory, language, embodiment, and culture while generating possibilities for new understanding.
Communities preserve traditions while revising, contesting, abandoning, or transforming them through changing historical circumstances.
Scientific knowledge preserves earlier discoveries while remaining open to correction, revision, and occasionally substantial conceptual transformation.
Across these examples, recurring relational functions become visible, although not necessarily in identical forms or degrees at every scale of reality. This recurring pattern suggests what may provisionally be called the Cycle of Relational Becoming - not a universal sequence through which every reality must pass, but a philosophical grammar for describing recurrent dimensions of relational histories. Later essays will examine this grammar in greater detail.
| Relational Function | Primary Orientation | Without This Function... |
|---|---|---|
| Inheritance | Carries prior conditions forward. Gives becoming historical continuity. | Without inheritance → no continuity between relational histories; persistence and identity become unintelligible. |
| Openness | Leaves possibilities incompletely determined by inherited conditions. | Without openness → no genuine alternative possibility; becoming becomes fully determined by what has preceded it. |
| Responsiveness | Expresses mutual affectability within present relational conditions. | Without responsiveness → relation becomes causally or dynamically inert. |
| Novelty | Names the realization of possibilities not reducible to simple repetition. | Without novelty → relational histories could only reproduce already-realized patterns. |
| Coherence | Names degrees of relational integration and organization. | Without coherence → no sufficiently integrated organization capable of persistence. |
| Participation | Situates realities within wider relations and histories of becoming. | Without participation → no relational extension into wider histories of influence and becoming. |
These are not separate processes. They are distinguishable and potentially complementary dimensions of relational becoming:
Without Inheritance → no historical continuity.
Without Openness → no unrealized possibility.
Without Responsiveness → no mutual affectability.
Without Novelty → no realization beyond repetition.
Without Coherence → no integrated persistence.
Without Participation → no extension into wider relational histories.
Together these relational functions describe an open architecture of becoming through which enduring realities may sometimes emerge.
Reality may become -
i) sufficiently coherent for some relational configurations to persist,
ii) sufficiently open for unrealized possibilities to become available, and
iii) sufficiently responsive for inherited conditions and emerging possibilities to affect what becomes next.
Between inheritance and possibility lies the open architecture of relational becoming.
Every enduring reality is a history of relational coherence.Reality does not endure by resisting becoming.Reality endures by continually becoming.
The preceding discussion has argued that becoming is neither chaotic nor arbitrary. Rather, it unfolds within relational histories involving inheritance, openness, responsiveness, novelty, coherence, and participation. These functions do not guarantee persistence, nor must they appear identically at every scale. Yet their interaction helps describe how some relational histories may achieve sufficient organization, embodiment, and continuity to endure.
Yet one important question remains.
What may becoming make possible?
One answer is both simple and profound:
Enduring worlds.
One misunderstanding has accompanied philosophies of becoming from their earliest beginnings. If reality is always becoming, many assume that nothing can genuinely endure. If everything continually changes, permanence appears impossible, identity becomes illusory, and the world seems to dissolve into an endless succession of fleeting events.
ORPMOB rejects these conclusions.
Becoming does not eliminate persistence.
It makes persistence possible without requiring permanence.
Persistence is not the absence of becoming.
Persistence names the continuity achieved when relational histories become sufficiently coherent, embodied, and organized to endure.
Enduring realities arise within histories containing innumerable relational conditions and interactions. Inheritance carries prior conditions forward. Responsiveness allows realities to affect and be affected within present circumstances. Openness leaves possibilities incompletely determined by what has preceded them. Coherence, where achieved, may allow relational configurations to become sufficiently integrated to persist. Endurance therefore need not mean the preservation of absolute sameness. It may instead describe continuity maintained amid ongoing relational change.
Identity may be understood in a similar manner.
Identity is neither absolute permanence nor perpetual difference.
Rather, identity names recognizable continuity achieved and maintained through relational histories.
A river remains recognizable as the same river not because the same water forever occupies its channel, but because changing waters, landscapes, tributaries, ecological relations, and historical conditions may together sustain a sufficiently continuous relational pattern.
A living organism remains itself not because every molecule remains unchanged, but because biological organization maintains sufficient continuity amid continual metabolic exchange, environmental interaction, growth, repair, and transformation.
Human persons likewise persist through changing configurations of memory, embodiment, experience, relationships, interpretation, and conscious responsiveness. Change is continual, yet recognizable identity may persist because sufficient relational continuity is maintained across time.
Being, therefore, need not be understood as the opposite of becoming.
Enduring forms of being may be understood as relatively persistent embodiments within relational becoming.
This insight reaches far beyond biology or human experience.
Across multiple scales of reality, enduring worlds may arise where relational histories achieve forms of organization sufficient for persistence.
Stars preserve recognizable structures while continually transforming their internal composition.
Galaxies may maintain recognizable organization while evolving and interacting with neighboring systems.
Ecosystems may persist while organisms are born, mature, die, migrate, compete, cooperate, and are replaced.
Cultures inherit traditions while preserving, contesting, revising, or abandoning them within changing historical circumstances.
Languages evolve while maintaining sufficient continuity for communication across generations.
Scientific knowledge preserves earlier achievements while new discoveries may extend, qualify, revise, or sometimes overturn previous understanding.
Across these examples, recurrent dimensions of relational becoming become visible:
Inheritance.
Openness.
Responsiveness.
Novelty.
Coherence.
Participation.
These are not competing metaphysical principles, nor should they be understood as a necessary sequence through which every reality must pass. They are distinguishable dimensions of relational becoming whose interactions may enable continuity, transformation, novelty, organization, and persistence. Consequently, enduring realities should not be understood as exceptions to process but as possible achievements within relational becoming.
A mountain is not static because it never changes. Its recognizable form may endure across immense spans of time even while geological processes continually alter it.
A forest persists not because individual trees are permanent but because overlapping histories of growth, decay, death, regeneration, competition, cooperation, disturbance, and ecological interaction may sustain a recognizable ecosystem across time.
Even civilizations endure only insofar as sufficient continuities of memory, institutions, practices, relationships, interpretation, and participation persist amid historical change.
Every enduring reality may therefore be understood less as a finished object than as an ongoing history. Its persistence does not place it outside becoming. Rather, persistence describes the relative continuity achieved within relational histories that remain subject to further change, transformation, disruption, and dissolution.
This understanding also reframes the traditional opposition between being and becoming. Being is not abandoned in favor of process. Nor is process understood as the denial of enduring realities. Rather, being and becoming describe distinguishable but inseparable dimensions of relational reality.
Being names relatively enduring forms within relational reality.
Becoming names the ongoing dynamism through which relational reality unfolds.
Neither can be adequately understood apart from relation.
Reality therefore is not best understood as a collection of static objects moving through an external flow of time. It may instead be understood through relational histories in which coherence, persistence, novelty, transformation, and dissolution remain continually possible.
Every persistence becomes part of the inheritance conditioning further becoming.
Every becoming occurs within possibilities shaped but not wholly determined by that inheritance.
Every achieved coherence remains open to further participation, transformation, or dissolution.
Reality therefore remains unfinished - not because it lacks stability, but because no achieved form exhausts the possibilities of further becoming.
Reality does not move toward completion.
Reality moves toward ever richer participation.
Every achievement then becomes the beginning of another history.
Alfred North Whitehead. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected Edition. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
———. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Free Press, 1967.
———. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968.
———. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press, 1967.
Henri Bergson. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998.
Heraclitus. Fragments. Various editions.
Process Philosophy and Metaphysics
John B. Cobb Jr.. A Christian Natural Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1965.
———. Process Theology as Political Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982.
Charles Hartshorne. Reality as Social Process. Boston: Beacon Press, 1953.
David Ray Griffin. Reenchantment Without Supernaturalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
———. Unsnarling the World-Knot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki. God, Christ, Church. New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1982.
Catherine Keller. Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge, 2003.
Thomas Jay Oord. The Death of Omnipotence and Birth of Amipotence. Grasmere, ID: SacraSage Press, 2023.
Science, Complexity, and Emergence
Fritjof Capra. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1997.
Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi. The Systems View of Life. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Ilya Prigogine. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books, 1984.
John H. Holland. Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995.
Stuart Kauffman. At Home in the Universe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Terrence Deacon. Incomplete Nature. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.
Sean Carroll. The Big Picture. New York: Dutton, 2016.
Cosmology, Evolution, and Systems
Lynn Margulis. Symbiotic Planet. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Gregory Bateson. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: Dutton, 1979.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Ervin László. Science and the Akashic Field. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2004.
Brian Swimme. The Universe Is a Green Dragon. Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1984.
Related Philosophical Perspectives
Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
Charles Sanders Peirce. The Essential Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
William James. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
John Dewey. Experience and Nature. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1958.
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.
Why Were These Authors Chosen?
ERR and ORPMOB stand within this broader conversation while advancing a distinct relational proposal. Embodied Relational Reality (ERR) identifies relation as reality's ontological primitive, while Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming (ORPMOB) explores the metaphysical dynamics through which relational reality continually becomes. Becoming thereby opens possibilities for coherence, embodiment, persistence, identity, novelty, participation, transformation, and dissolution without predetermining which possibilities must be realized.
In that respect, this essay seeks not merely to summarize the process tradition but to extend its insights through a more explicitly relational ontology and metaphysics of becoming.
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