Now change only one thing. Do not remove matter. Do not remove stars or planets. Do not remove life or people. Do not even remove whatever smallest realities we might imagine beneath everything else.
Remove only relation.
For the sake of the experiment, suppose that everything exists entirely from itself. Nothing depends upon anything else for what it is. Nothing receives anything from anything else. Nothing gives anything to anything else. Nothing becomes different because something else exists. Everything simply is.
At first, this seems easy enough to imagine.
Let there be two things. Call them A and B. A exists and B exists, but neither affects the other. Neither constrains the other. Neither receives anything from the other. Neither registers the other's existence. Perhaps we should place them some distance apart, except distance is already a relation. We cannot say A is near B or far from B, above it or beneath it, approaching it or moving away from it. All of those descriptions require a between.
So let A and B simply exist. Add C. Add ten thousand more A, B, and C's. Add a trillion if we like. Our imaginary reality can contain as many independent things as we wish, but multiplying things does not solve our problem. There are more things, yet still no arrangement among them, no shared structure, no organization, no interaction. Nothing that happens to A matters to B. Nothing B does changes C. Nothing C becomes alters anything encountered by A.
We have produced multiplicity. But have we produced a world?
Perhaps multiplicity alone does not make a world.
Let us try something more familiar. Put a star into our imaginary reality. We want to keep the star while removing relation, but a star is not simply a thing sitting by itself. What we call a star exists through the organization of matter, gravity, pressure, temperature, nuclear processes, energy, and countless physical conditions. Remove all of those relations while somehow preserving "the star," and what exactly have we preserved? We can continue calling something a star, but increasingly the word refers to something unlike any star we have ever known. No interactive matter. No gravity holding it together. No pressure, temperature, nuclear processes, energy, etc. All cease to matter.
Next, let's think of a tree. Keep the tree, but remove its relations. Remove the soil from which it receives nutrients, the water moving through its roots and tissues, the sunlight, atmosphere, cellular organization, biological inheritance, surrounding organisms, and the seed from which it developed. We promised ourselves that we would keep the tree, yet the more thoroughly we remove its relations, the harder it becomes to identify what remains as a tree. More or less the tree ceases to be a tree in a relational world that doesn't exist.
Try ourselves. Keep a person, but remove ancestry and genetic inheritance. Remove the body understood as countless cells functioning together. Remove food, air, water, and environment. Remove developmental history. Remove language learned from others, culture received from generations already gone, family, community, and every relationship through which a life has been formed. Remove memory insofar as memory carries a past life into a present one. We need not claim that nothing remains. Perhaps something does. But whatever remains becomes increasingly difficult to recognize as the person with whom we began.
Something peculiar is happening to our experiment. We began with the confidence that we could remove relation while leaving the things intact. Instead, the more carefully we remove relation, the more the things themselves begin to disappear. Their identities become thinner. Their capacities vanish. Their structures dissolve. Their histories fade. The things remain largely because we keep insisting that they remain.
We removed relation.
Could we have realized how much would disappear with it?
Even more so, something stranger is happening. Our imaginary reality is not merely losing its things.
It is losing its story.
Nothing can inherit anything from anything else. Nothing can carry the consequence of something else forward. Nothing happening here can matter there. Nothing that happened then can enter into what happens now. Perhaps an isolated reality could somehow change entirely from within itself. Let us grant even that possibility. Something was one way and then became another. But could its change become consequential beyond itself? Could one change accumulate with another? Could something produced by an earlier occurrence become a condition for something that occurs later? Could such a reality acquire a history?
The reality we know does this everywhere. Stars form from prior cosmic conditions. Elements formed within stars become conditions for later stars, planets, and chemistry. Life inherits chemistry. Organisms inherit biological histories. Ecosystems inherit the consequences of organisms and environments interacting across generations. Human beings inherit bodies, languages, cultures, technologies, institutions, stories, achievements, wounds, mistakes, and possibilities from worlds already underway before any of us arrive.
Our relationless reality can inherit none of this. Nothing builds upon anything else. Nothing damages anything else or repairs anything else. Nothing transforms a condition received from something before it. Nothing leaves anything behind for something else to encounter. There may still somehow be occurrences, but it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a history. A history is more than a list of disconnected happenings. A history exists because what happened can matter to what happens afterward.
Without that relation, yesterday may somehow have happened, but yesterday cannot enter today. The past cannot be carried forward. There may still be change, but not the becoming of a world that becomes from what it has already become.
Our disappearing reality has now lost more than connection. It has begun losing becoming itself. There is no cumulative formation, no inherited differentiation, no evolving organization, no lives shaped through previous lives, no memories carrying yesterday into today, no possibilities opened because something happened and no possibilities closed because something else happened. Nothing gathers. Nothing carries forward. Nothing becomes consequential beyond itself. Reality cannot accumulate its own becoming.
And now the paradox becomes clearer.
A reality could contain countless things and still contain no world.
Perhaps bare existence remains. Perhaps our isolated A, B, and C persist somewhere, although even the word somewhere has become difficult to use. But worldhood has disappeared. There is no shared reality in which things become consequential to one another, no relational conditions within which organization can arise, no inherited history through which what has become can participate in what becomes next.
In our thought experiment we had removed what increasingly appeared to be one of reality's most basic conditions: its relationality.
And what happened? Our story, the universe's story, all stories immediately disappeared into a meaningless, changeless, becoming-less void.
ACT II
Perhaps now, we have taken the experiment far enough. Let us put relation back.
Let A matter to B. Let B affect C. Let C alter something A encounters later. Let there be a between again. Suddenly there can be distance, arrangement, interaction, structure, and organization. Things can constrain one another and enable one another. They can combine and separate. They can form patterns. Difference can begin to matter.
The world starts returning.
Atoms combine. Molecules form. Stars organize. Planets emerge. Water flows. Cells organize. Organisms develop. Life inherits. Environments change. Species alter environments and are altered by them. Something can become because something else has become.
But relation does more than reconnect isolated things. Something more interesting begins to happen. Relations participate in making things what they become.
The tree returns, but not as an isolated object to which soil, sunlight, water, atmosphere, cellular organization, biological inheritance, and ecological environment are later attached. Those relations participate in what the tree is and what it can become. The person returns, but not as a completed self to whom body, ancestry, language, memory, culture, community, and history are subsequently added. Those relations participate in the person's becoming. Stars, organisms, ecosystems, persons, communities, and worlds return not merely because things can touch one another again, but because relation allows differentiated realities to become what they are in relation with other realities.
And now we notice something we were not originally looking for:
The world does not merely return.
The world begins becoming again.
What happens can matter. What matters can persist. What persists can enter into what happens next. The past begins entering the present. History returns. Inheritance returns. Possibility returns. Something that happens now can alter what becomes possible later.
A star can produce elements that become conditions for later stars, planets, chemistry, and living bodies. An organism can alter an environment, and the altered environment can become a condition inherited by other organisms. A human action can change a family. A discovery can change a culture. A technology can alter a landscape. An injustice can become an inherited wound. An act of compassion can open possibilities that did not exist before it. A story can survive the storyteller.
The consequences of becoming can travel.
The past is no longer sealed behind what has happened. It is carried forward within what happens next. The world becomes from a world already altered by becoming.
And somewhere in this restored reality something else has appeared. We put relation back, but once relational becoming could become consequential, reality began doing more than reconnecting what had been separated. New organizations became possible. New capacities appeared. New realities emerged. Some of those realities became capable of affecting the conditions from which still further realities could become.
We have stumbled into generativity.
What becomes can matter beyond itself. What has become can participate in what becomes possible afterward. The reality we restored is not merely relational. Its relations can become consequential for further becoming.
Eventually the whole story gathers into one remarkably simple sentence:
What becomes can alter what can become.
ACT III
Now end the experiment and return to the reality in which we actually live.
Look around.
We do not encounter isolated A's, B's, and C's. We encounter stars formed through physical relations, planets shaped through histories, matter organized into structures, life emerging within chemistry, organisms inheriting biological worlds, and ecologies formed through innumerable participants. We encounter people born into bodies, families, languages, cultures, environments, histories, and possibilities they did not create.
We inherit a world already underway, and we participate in what it becomes.
Some realities affect other realities. Some respond. Some organisms remember. Some participants anticipate. Some imagine possibilities that do not yet exist. Some act intentionally. Some eventually become capable of recognizing that their actions may alter what others inherit.
The reality we encounter does not look much like a collection of finished things that occasionally happen to bump into one another. It looks far more like a world in which what things are, what they become, and what they make possible cannot be separated easily from the relations through which they exist.
None of this proves a philosophy. Our disappearing story does not prove Embodied Relational Reality. It does not prove an Open and Relational Process Metaphysics of Becoming. It does not prove Generative Relational Realism. That was never the purpose of our imaginary journey.
We asked something simpler. What if reality was not relational?
We tried to preserve things, but their organization began disappearing. We tried to preserve identity, but histories disappeared. We tried to preserve becoming, but nothing could carry its consequences forward. We tried to preserve a universe, but increasingly there was no world.
Then we put relation back.
Things could matter to other things again. Organization became possible. Difference became consequential. Histories accumulated. The past entered the present. Possibilities changed. Reality began becoming from a reality already altered by becoming.
Perhaps, then, relation is not merely something that happens within reality. Perhaps relation belongs to what makes reality capable of becoming a world.
And perhaps generativity is not something added afterward to an otherwise completed relational universe. Perhaps it is already present wherever relational becoming becomes consequential enough that what has become can enter into what becomes possible next.
We need not decide everything our little experiment might imply. It has already done enough.
We imagined a reality without relation. We removed only one thing, and slowly almost everything disappeared. Then we put relation back, and the things returned with histories, possibilities, consequences, and futures.
And the world began again...
ACT IV
It's not hard to notice that every answer about reality seems to leave another question waiting to be answered.
Our lengthy inquiry into reality has led us toward a reality understood as relational, becoming, and generative. But ours is not the only philosophical road by which human beings have attempted to understand what reality is. Other traditions begin elsewhere, ask different questions, use different languages, and arrive at different accounts of what may be fundamental.
That should make us curious.
What might reality look like from within those other philosophical worlds? What questions have they asked that we have not? What have they seen that our own way of thinking may have made less visible? And what might happen if, for a while, we allowed those philosophies to speak entirely in their own right?
Our experiment with relational reality may therefore end here.
But our curiosity about reality certainly has not.
In our next exploration, we will turn toward other philosophies of reality, examining each as a serious account in its own right, through its own questions, language, concepts, arguments, and philosophical development. Only after allowing these different approaches to speak for themselves will we ask what their similarities, differences, strengths, and difficulties might teach us about the question with which this inquiry began: What is reality?
And so, the journey continues...
- R.E. Slater
Where nothing could form, fall, or rise.
No here, no there,
No anywhere -
But let one thing matter to something again,
And worlds will grow where no worlds had been.
For whatever may come, and whatever may be,
Becomes in relation - and so do we.
And nobody knew what a nobody was for.
Leaving no trace, no footprint, nor even a mark.
The universe vanished in colorless gray,
Wiping all of its meaning completely away.
To toast to the cosmos and toast to the club!
Then a world full of worlds started becoming again -
And that, my dear friend, is how worlds can begin!
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