There once was a Thing on a stone,
Which insisted it stood quite alone.
But relations appeared,
And the Thing became weird -
“Am I substance, or all that I’ve known?”
- R.E. Slater and ChatGPT
Look around.
A table. A chair. A book. A tree beyond the window. A person walking down the street. Whatever else we may eventually say about these realities, they first appear to us as things. We distinguish one from another. The tree is not the soil beneath it. The person is not the street upon which she walks. The book is not the table upon which it rests.
Of course, none of these things exists without relations. The tree depends upon soil, water, sunlight, atmosphere, microorganisms, and evolutionary history. The person exists within biological, familial, cultural, linguistic, ecological, and historical conditions. Even the book depends upon forests, machines, authors, languages, publishers, and readers.
But acknowledging these dependencies does not answer a more basic question:
What is that which stands in relation to itself?
Perhaps the tree's relations help explain how it grows without completely explaining what the tree is. Perhaps a person is profoundly shaped through relationships while nevertheless possessing a reality that cannot be reduced to them. Perhaps things must possess certain characteristics or capacities before particular relations become possible.
This possibility reverses the direction from which much of our preceding inquiry has approached reality.
We came to regard relation as more fundamental than process. Process describes activity, transition, and becoming, but activity seems to require differences, conditions, inheritances, interactions, and responses. Process therefore appears to presuppose relation.
But perhaps we stopped one question too soon.
If process presupposes relation, does relation presuppose something that relates?
This question lies close to the intuition behind what has broadly been called substance metaphysics. Its proposal need not be defined as a reality which consists of isolated, static, self-sufficient objects. The more fundamental question is whether individual beings possess some form of reality on their own - some intrinsic character by virtue of which they are capable of changing, acting, persisting, and entering relations with other beings.
Aristotle will become our principal guide. His philosophy asks us to consider individual beings as realities whose matter and form, capacities and activities, potentialities and actualities help explain both what they are and what they may become.
Something grows.
Something moves.
Something breaks.
Something changes.
The metaphysical question hides inside the grammar:
What is that something?
For this essay, we begin there.
We will allow substance metaphysics to make its case before asking where its difficulties arise. Perhaps it is relations that constitute the things that enter into a substance. Perhaps things possess a reality that in some sense precedes their relations. Or perhaps the distinction will prove more difficult than either formulation suggests.
For now, we need not decide.
We need only do what the preceding essay asked of us:
Begin somewhere else.
And this time, we begin with the thing itself, whatever that thing is.
I. What Does It Mean for Something to Be a Substance?
The word substance can be misleading.
In ordinary English, a substance usually means some kind of material - water, iron, salt, oil, wood. Philosophically, however, substance raises a different question: what does it mean for something to possess being as a thing in its own right?
Consider an oak tree.
Its height, mass, shape, color, leaves, branches, and cellular composition change throughout its life. Yet through those changes we continue speaking of the tree. Some realities appear to possess sufficient identity and integrity that properties can belong to them, changes can happen to them, and relations can connect them with other realities.
The distinction becomes clearer when we consider properties. Brownness may characterize bark, a table, or an animal's fur, but we do not normally encounter brownness wandering through the world by itself. We encounter brown things. Weight, temperature, location, and motion likewise appear as characteristics of realities possessing them.
Substance metaphysics takes seriously this distinction between a thing and what can be said of the thing.
This does not make substance static. Indeed, change is one reason the concept becomes philosophically important. A child becomes an adult. A tree loses its leaves. An organism heals. Something can apparently undergo considerable alteration without every alteration producing an entirely new being.
Nor must a substance be isolated. An oak depends upon sunlight, water, soil, atmosphere, biological inheritance, and an ecosystem. Dependence does not automatically eliminate individuality. A thing may require other things in order to exist while possessing characteristics and capacities genuinely attributable to itself.
Here we should distinguish independence from isolation.
To say that something possesses being in its own right need not mean that it exists alone or causes itself. It may mean only that the thing cannot be completely reduced to the circumstances surrounding it. Its relations matter without necessarily exhausting what it is.
This is where substance metaphysics begins to press upon our previous inquiry. A friendship requires friends. A collision requires things capable of colliding. A chemical reaction requires entities possessing characteristics that permit particular reactions.
From this perspective, relation may be real without being first... or, an ontological primitive.
Perhaps things possess natures, properties, powers, or forms that make relations possible. Hydrogen and oxygen do not interact in every imaginable fashion. A stone responds to pressure differently from a living cell.
What enters a relation may help determine what that relation can become - but does not compose that thing or substance which experiences relation in its own right.
That observation does not establish that substance is ontologically fundamental. It does, however, explain why substance metaphysics remains philosophically compelling.
Before explaining a thing entirely through what surrounds or relates to it, substance metaphysics asks us to look again at the thing itself.
What kind of being is it?
What allows it to persist?
What can it become?
And what must be true of it for particular relations to become possible?
These questions lead naturally to Aristotle and to the Greek term ousia, conventionally translated as substance. Aristotle's concern was not simply to populate reality with self-contained objects. He wanted to understand what it means for particular beings to be what they are, undergo change, and nevertheless possess intelligible continuity.
In his world, substance will prove considerably more dynamic than it first appears.
II. Aristotle and the Reality of the Individual Thing
Aristotle begins characteristically with the world we encounter: animals, plants, artifacts, movement, growth, generation, and decay.
What requires explanation is not simply that these realities exist, but that particular things change in characteristic ways. A horse grows older and remains a horse. A tree loses its leaves and remains the tree whose leaves were lost. An acorn develops into an oak rather than a bird or stone.
Aristotle's term ousia stands near the center of this inquiry. It concerns what something is and what deserves to count most basically as a being.
One of his most influential answers directs attention toward individual things: This horse. This tree. This human being.
In the Categories, individual substances occupy a distinctive position as subjects of predication.
A predicate is the part of a sentence or clause that contains the verb and tells us something about the subject - what the subject is, does, has, or experiences. Every complete sentence normally contains both a subject and a predicate. A predicate is therefore more than simply a verb: it may include the verb together with its objects, complements, modifiers, or helping verbs.
In philosophy “predicate” is often used more specifically for what is said or asserted of a subject. The oak is green. “The oak” is the subject; “is green” is the grammatical predicate. But philosophically, green is what is predicated of the oak. We say the tree is tall, the horse is brown, the person is tired. Tallness, brownness, and tiredness belong to something. The individual substance is not simply another characteristic within the list of characteristics attributed to it.
This suggests a kind of ontological priority. Reality appears populated by beings that are something in themselves before everything true about them has been enumerated.
Aristotle's mature metaphysics complicates this picture considerably. Substance leads into questions of essence, matter and form, actuality and potentiality, generation and destruction. Interpreters continue to debate how the account in the Categories relates to the investigations of the Metaphysics. We need not resolve those debates here.
The central intuition is enough for our purpose:
changes appear to happen to particular things or beings.
A tree may gain and lose branches, alter its size, exchange matter with its environment, and enter changing ecological relationships while retaining sufficient continuity for those events to constitute a history of this tree. Yet that continuity is not unlimited. If the tree burns completely to ash, we no longer say merely that the tree has changed. We say the tree has ceased to exist.
Substance metaphysics therefore provides a way of distinguishing a thing changing → from one thing ceasing to exist → while another begins.
But what makes the substance the kind of thing it is?
A pile of lumber and a living oak may contain some similar materials, yet they are not the same kind of being. Nor can the oak's identity reside merely in its exact matter, since a living organism continuously exchanges matter with its environment.
Aristotle's answer moves beyond the picture of substance as a self-contained chunk of material. What a thing is depends upon what it is made from, but also upon its organization, form, capacities, and characteristic activities.
An eye is not merely biological material. It is an organ organized in a particular way and capable, under appropriate conditions, of seeing. A living organism is not simply its chemical ingredients placed beside one another.
Substance begins to look less like inert stuff and more like organized being.
This matters because substance metaphysics is sometimes caricatured as an ontology of static objects that must somehow be persuaded afterward to interact. Aristotle's substances are not like that. They grow, act, develop, acquire and lose characteristics, and eventually cease to be.
His stronger claim is subtler:
Change requires something capable of changing. Activity requires something capable of acting. Development requires a being whose capacities make certain developments possible.
The individual thing is therefore not what remains after change has been removed from reality. For Aristotle, it helps make change intelligible.
And the distinction that carries much of that explanatory burden is matter and form.
III. Matter, Form, and What Makes a Thing What It Is
If substances are individual things, we immediately confront another question:
What makes a thing the thing that it is?
Matter alone seems insufficient.
Bronze may become a statue, vessel, tool, or shapeless mass. Wood may become a table, beam, door, or fuel. Living organisms continuously acquire and release matter while remaining recognizable organisms. If identity required exactly the same material throughout existence, living beings would be difficult to explain.
Aristotle therefore distinguishes matter from form - hylē from morphē or, in related contexts, eidos. The philosophical tradition deriving from their combination is commonly called hylomorphism.
A bronze statue provides the familiar illustration. Bronze is its matter, but bronze alone does not explain why this quantity of material constitutes a statue rather than an ingot or bowl. Melt the statue and much of the bronze remains while the statue disappears. Something has ceased to exist even though its matter survives.
With living beings, form means considerably more than external shape. An oak cannot be adequately described merely by listing its chemical ingredients. Those materials exist within an organized living being - roots, vascular tissues, leaves, cells, metabolic processes, genetic inheritance, and developmental capacities operating together.
Form concerns something about the organization and character by virtue of which the thing is the kind of being it is.
This has important consequences for the substance-first view.
A thing is not merely a passive location at which external relations occur. Its organization and capacities contribute to how it responds. Environment supplies conditions, opportunities, constraints, and causes, but the nature of the being encountering those conditions also matters.
An acorn placed in fertile soil may germinate.
A pebble will not.
The difference cannot be attributed to the soil alone.
This gives us a stronger sense of intrinsic being. Intrinsic need not mean unrelated or causally independent. It means that at least some truths about a thing concern what the thing itself is and cannot be completely explained by listing its external relations.
The oak participates in relations as an oak.
Substance metaphysics therefore asks us to consider whether what enters a relation contributes something to the encounter. Things may possess determinate ways of being that make some interactions possible, others impossible, and still others transformative.
Matter and form also help Aristotle speak about continuity through change. Organized beings can undergo considerable material alteration while retaining characteristic organization and activity.
Substance, then, is not merely an enduring lump beneath changing properties. It is better approached as a particular organized being whose matter and form belong together in making it the kind of thing it is.
That answer, however, creates another problem.
If an organized being can change considerably while remaining itself:
How much can something change and still remain the same thing?
IV. Persistence Through Change
Change requires both difference and continuity.
If nothing changed, there would be little reason to speak of becoming. But if everything changed so completely that nothing persisted, it would become difficult to say that something itself had changed. We might instead have one thing disappearing and another replacing it.
Ordinary language quietly assumes this distinction. The tree grows. The child matures. The house deteriorates. Each sentence attributes change to something. There is sufficient difference for change to occur and sufficient continuity for earlier and later conditions to belong to the same being.
This is one of the attractions of substance metaphysics. Substance gives change a subject.
Aristotle's distinction between accidental and substantial change helps clarify the intuition. Some characteristics may change while the substance remains. A person may become older, warmer, educated, tired, or sunburned without becoming a new substance on each occasion. Substantial change is more radical: the substance itself comes into, or passes out of, existence.
The distinction does not solve every difficult case. It tells us, however, that persistence is not the absence of change. It is the continuity of a being through change.
Living organisms make this especially striking because persistence may require activity. A living body exchanges matter and energy with its environment. Cells are replaced. Wounds heal. Metabolism continually transforms materials. An organism that ceased all such activity would not thereby become more perfectly itself. Rather, it would die.
Substance therefore need not oppose persistence to process. A substance may persist through ongoing activity.
The question becomes one of identity:
What makes later stages, stages of this being, rather than stages of another being?
For Aristotle, form and essence contribute to the answer. The identity of a living thing does not depend upon retaining every molecule or accidental property. What matters more deeply is the continuity of the organized being whose development those changes express.
Human biography gives the question existential force. A person at seventy differs profoundly from the child she was at seven. Her body, knowledge, relationships, convictions, and circumstances may all have changed.
Yet she can still say: I was that child.
But she can also say, I am no longer that child.
Whatever account we eventually give of personal identity, the statement expresses the same puzzle.
Identity appears capable of spanning considerable transformation.
Contemporary metaphysics contains extensive disputes about persistence through time, and personal identity adds problems of body, brain, memory, and psychological continuity. We need not settle them here.
The substance-metaphysical intuition is simpler:
Change becomes intelligible because something can remain itself while becoming different.
But something cannot become just anything whatsoever. If change belongs to a particular being, perhaps what that being is includes not only its present condition but something about what it is capable of becoming.
That takes us to potentiality and actuality.
V. Potentiality, Actuality, and the Powers of Things
A thing is more than what it happens to be at this moment.
A child can learn a language she does not presently speak. Glass can break without presently being broken. A musician sitting silently remains capable of playing music. Reality therefore seems to contain not only what particular things are, but what they can do or become.
Aristotle develops this distinction through potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (energeia, and in some contexts entelecheia).
Potentiality concerns capacities or possibilities belonging to a being.
Actuality concerns their realization or active expression.
The distinction helps answer an ancient problem: how can genuine change occur?
On one extreme, if something can become only what it already is, nothing genuinely changes. But on the other extreme, if anything can become absolutely anything, change becomes unintelligible.
The world we encounter seems otherwise.
Change is constrained by what things are capable of becoming.
An acorn is not presently an oak, nor does it contain a miniature tree hidden within it. It possesses capacities for a characteristic development that may be realized under appropriate conditions.
Those conditions matter. The acorn may be eaten, burned, crushed, diseased, or deprived of water.
Potentiality is not destiny.
Yet the environment does not supply an unlimited range of possible identities. What develops depends partly upon the being encountering conditions and transforming through those conditions (as versus overcoming conditions).
What a thing is, helps determine what it can become.
But what conditions are available also determines how it transforms.
The same point extends beyond living things. Glass can shatter because of its material structure. Salt can dissolve under appropriate conditions. Iron can oxidize. Different materials exposed to similar forces respond differently because their structures and capacities differ.
Relations matter.
But what enters the relation matters too.
Potentiality and actuality therefore produce a more dynamic conception of substance. A substance is not merely a finished object occupying space. Its way of being that will include capacities that may remain unrealized.
Aristotle nevertheless gives actuality priority in important respects. We understand capacities partly through the activities toward which they are directed: the capacity to see through seeing, the capacity to build through building, the developmental possibilities of an organism through the characteristic activities of its mature form. This contributes to the teleological dimension of Aristotle's philosophy of nature.
We need not adopt that entire framework to appreciate the metaphysical point.
Potentiality explains why change can be real without being unconstrained. It explains why different things under similar circumstances may respond differently. And it shows why being and becoming need not be competitors.
Things need not dissolve into becoming in order to change. Their capacities for change may belong to the kinds of beings they are.
We have now reached the central problem.
Individual beings appear capable of possessing form, continuity, capacities,and characteristic possibilities. Relations affect them and may be necessaryfor those capacities to become actual.
But perhaps relation does not create the relata from nothing.
Perhaps things bring something of their own to the encounter.
So we must finally ask:
Must things first exist before they can be related?
VI. Must Things Exist Before They Can Be Related?
The challenge can be stated simply:
Can there be a relation without something that is related?
Friendship requires friends. Distance requires terms between which distance obtains. A collision requires things capable of colliding. A chemical bond requires entities capable of bonding. Parent and child, predator and prey, planet and star, organism and environment - relations appear to be relations between, among, or within something.
This seems to suggest an order:
First there are things; then those things stand in relations.
If that order is correct,
relation may be indispensable without being ontologically fundamental.
This is the substance-metaphysical challenge in its strongest form. It does not deny relation, dependence, interaction, or transformation.
It asks whether relation presupposes relata.
Consider two stones several feet apart. Their distance is a relation. Move one and the distance changes. Remove one and that particular relation disappears. The relation appears dependent upon the things between which it obtains.
Causal interaction strengthens the intuition. Suppose a hammer strikes glass. The event depends upon an interaction between hammer and glass, but the outcome also depends upon what the interacting things are. Replace the glass with rubber or steel and the same kind of impact produces different consequences.
The relation of impact does not by itself explain what happens.
The characteristics and capacities of the relata contribute to the event.
From a substance-first perspective, this is exactly what we should expect. Things possess structures, properties, and powers affecting which relations are possible and what those relations can do. The relata are not empty placeholders waiting for relation to give them all their determinate character.
The substance metaphysician can therefore reverse a familiar relational formulation.
Instead of saying:
Relations make things what they are,
we might say:
What things are helps determine which relations are possible and what those relations can do.
Relations can nevertheless transform things. Friendship, education, trauma, language, community, and love may profoundly change a person. Environmental conditions transform organisms. Materials acquire new properties through combination. Nothing in a substance-first ontology requires denying this.
But transformation seems to require something capable of being transformed.
This leads to an important distinction between dependence and constitution.
Something may depend upon relations without being wholly constituted by them.
A human being depends upon biological ancestry, caregivers, food, atmosphere, culture, and innumerable other conditions. Such dependence does not by itself demonstrate that the person possesses no intrinsic reality.
The question is not whether a thing can exist without anything else.
It is whether everything the thing is, can be reduced to its relations with everything else.
If not, intrinsic being retains explanatory importance.
Persistence intensifies the challenge. A person can change friendships, employment, location, beliefs, social roles, and physical condition while remaining recognizably the same person. An artifact may move from owner to owner and place to place without becoming a new object. If identity consisted simply in the totality of present relations, every relational change would appear to threaten the identity of the thing.
Substance offers another possibility.
Relations may modify a being without exhausting its identity.
Some may be constitutive, others accidental; some enduring, others temporary. The substance provides sufficient continuity for different relations to belong to the history of the same being.
We can therefore formulate the substance-first argument more carefully:
Relations require relata, and relata must possess enough determinate being for there to be something capable of entering, sustaining, changing, or leaving a relation.
But an important qualification is necessary.
The fact that relations require relata does not by itself prove that relata are ontologically prior to relations.
A relational philosopher could agree that every actual relation has relata while arguing that those relata themselves become determinate only through relations. Relation and relata might be mutually constitutive, yet distinguishability need not establish ontological priority between either.
This is precisely where the question becomes philosophically interesting.
Substance metaphysicians insist that we cannot explain relations while leaving their terms unexplained. The things entering relations seem to possess enough character to make differences to what happens. Relation may explain connection without completely explaining what there is to connect.
Our earlier inquiry asked whether process presupposes relation.
Substance metaphysics now asks us to continue one step further:
If process presupposes relation, does relation presuppose something that relates?
Perhaps it does.
But whether that establishes the ontological priority of substance remains open.
For now, substance metaphysics has accomplished what we asked of it.
It has given us a serious alternative account of where metaphysical explanation might begin.
VII. What Substance Metaphysics Allows Us to See
A philosophy earns our attention partly through what it enables us to notice.
Substance metaphysics asks us to take seriously the integrity of individual beings. The world appears populated by organisms, persons, objects, materials, and structures possessing distinguishable identities. Relational metaphysics should be cautious about explaining those individuals or beings away too quickly in favor of underlying relations, processes, systems, or structures.
Second, it also gives considerable weight to persistence. Changes belong to beings. Histories are histories of something. Substance provides a way of understanding how identity may span alteration without requiring immobility.
Third, it highlights differential response and causal capacity. Different beings respond differently under similar conditions because what they are matters to what can happen. Not everything can become everything.
Finally, substance metaphysics warns against confusing dependence with disappearance. A being may depend upon innumerable conditions while remaining a genuine individual. Dependence may be a truth about the substance rather than a relational argument against substance.
These insights complicate any easy opposition between a world of isolated things and a world of relations.
Perhaps things are more relational than some forms of substance metaphysics have allowed.
But perhaps relations require more substantial beings than some relational metaphysics have admitted.
That leaves us with a productive question:
If reality consists neither of isolated things nor of relations without things, where does ontological priority belong?
To answer that, however, we must now place substance itself under pressure.
VIII. Where the Question Becomes Difficult
1. The closer we examine an individual thing, the harder it becomes to say exactly where the thing ends and its conditions begin.
Consider the oak one final time.
Its genetic inheritance comes from prior organisms. Its development depends upon sunlight, water, minerals, atmosphere, temperature, microorganisms, and ecological conditions. Its characteristic form unfolds only within an environment capable of supporting its development.
This does not prove that the oak is merely its relations.
But it makes intrinsic being harder to isolate.
The difficulty becomes sharper with persons. Human bodies depend continuously upon environmental exchange. Languages are inherited from communities. Concepts are learned. Identities develop through families, cultures, memories, institutions, friendships, conflicts, and histories we did not create.
A person is clearly more than any single relationship.
But would the person be the same person apart from all relationship?
2. Substance metaphysics must also confront the problem of composition.
If a substance is an individual thing, what makes its parts one substance rather than many smaller things gathered together?
A living organism consists of organs, tissues, cells, molecules, atoms, and more fundamental physical constituents. Many of these possess organization and activity of their own. Yet together they participate in something we identify as one organism.
Why one?
Aristotle appeals importantly to form. The parts belong to the organism through the organized actuality of the living whole. But this answer introduces an intriguing complication. If organization helps make many parts one being, then organization - and perhaps relations among parts - appears to be doing significant ontological work.
A heart removed from a living body remains materially similar, for a time, to the heart within it. Yet what it is as a functioning organ depends upon its place within the organism. A neuron possesses characteristics of its own, but much of what it does depends upon its connections with other cells.
The parts matter.
So does their organization.
Neither appears easily reducible to the other.
3, Persistence raises a related difficulty. If almost every component of something changes while its organization continues, what exactly carries its identity? If the answer is form, organization, or continuity of activity, substance begins to depend upon patterns extending across changing components and through time.
The individual thing remains real, but its reality may not reside in an independently existing core.
Contemporary science complicates the picture further. Ordinary experience presents tables, stones, organisms, planets, and persons as individuals. Scientific investigation reveals layers of composition beneath them. Molecules consist of atoms; atoms possess internal structure; physical descriptions invoke particles, fields, interactions, symmetries, and systems whose behavior does not always resemble the self-contained objects of ordinary experience.
This does not eliminate substance metaphysics. Contemporary philosophers continue to develop sophisticated accounts of substances, essence, powers, objects, persistence, and hylomorphic organization.
*Hylomorphic organization is a philosophical and scientific concept asserting that structure or organization is a fundamental, irreducible ingredient of reality. Rooted in Aristotle’s ancient theory of hylomorphism (from the Greek hyle, meaning "matter," and morphe, meaning "form"), it states that a physical object is never just a random heap of physical parts; it is a composite of matter and the organizing principle that gives those parts a unified identity and unique causal powers.
But it prevents us from assuming that the apparent individuality of ordinary things tells us where ontological fundamentality finally lies.
Perhaps some things are substances while others are aggregates.
Perhaps substances exist at several levels.
Perhaps only certain fundamental entities qualify.
Perhaps organisms provide better examples of substances than artifacts or inert objects.
Or perhaps individuality itself emerges through organization and interaction.
Substance metaphysics therefore faces the same demand we will place upon every philosophy in this section:
What does the account explain, and what must it assume in order to provide that explanation?
Substance explains why properties belong to something, why things may persist through change, why different beings respond differently to similar conditions, and why relations appear to require relata.
But it must also explain what gives a thing its unity, where its boundaries lie, how its identity persists, and how much of what it is can genuinely be distinguished from the conditions through which it exists.
The difficulty can be stated from both directions.
If we begin with relation, we must explain:
What is related?
If we begin with substance, we must explain:
What makes the thing the unified, organized, dependent being that it is?
Neither question is trivial.
We began this essay asking whether things must exist before they can be related. Substance metaphysics has given us strong reason to take that possibility seriously.
But the closer we examine the thing, the more we encounter organization, dependence, interaction, inheritance, and conditions extending beyond it.
The thing does not disappear.
Yet neither does relation.
And so the question remains:
Does relation require things that already possess being, or does the being of things itself depend upon the relations through which they become the kinds of things they are?
We do not yet know.
That is precisely why the metaphysical encounter matters.
Conclusion: A World of Things
Suppose, then, that we begin with things.
The world looks somewhat different.
Instead of asking how relatively stable beings arise within a more fundamental reality of relation or relational becoming, we begin with individual beings and things and ask what they must be like in order to possess properties, undergo change, exercise capacities, persist through time, and enter relations.
Aristotle has shown us that this need not produce a world of static or isolated objects. Substances may possess matter and form, actuality and potentiality. They may change while retaining identity. They may develop through continuous interaction with environments upon which they depend.
Substance need not mean stasis.
Nor does intrinsic being require independence from everything else.
The stronger insight is simpler:
Things may contribute something to their own to reality.
What something is - its organization, form, properties, capacities, and history - helps shape what can happen next.
From here the substance-first challenge becomes difficult to dismiss:
Relations require something that can be related.
But we have also discovered that this statement does not settle the question of ontological priority. The relata themselves may depend upon organization, interaction, inheritance, and relationships for much of what they are.
We had previously asked whether process presupposes relation.
Substance metaphysics has now asked whether relation, in turn, presupposes relata.
What seemed like an endpoint has become another stage in the question.
The closer we examined individual beings, the harder it became to separate them cleanly from the conditions through which they exist. Organisms depend upon environments. Persons develop through histories and relationships. Complex beings derive their unity from the organization of their parts. Capacities become actual within enabling circumstances.
The substance remains visible.
But so do its relations.
We therefore end somewhere more interesting than where we began.
We have not discovered that substance metaphysics is simply correct. Nor have we found reason to dismiss it as an obsolete philosophy of static things. We have encountered a serious metaphysical possibility:
Perhaps reality contains beings possessing genuine integrity, capacities, and continuity that cannot be completely reduced to their relations.
And that possibility leaves us with two questions.
If relations are fundamental:
What is it that stands in relation?
If substances are fundamental:
What makes the substance the unified, changing, dependent being that it is?
Perhaps one question will eventually prove more fundamental.
Perhaps neither can be answered without the other.
We do not yet know.
That uncertainty is not a failure. It is what we hoped might happen when we reopened the question of reality. We began somewhere other than relation and discovered that the alternative possesses explanatory force of its own.
For a while, we have inhabited a world of things.
We have seen why philosophers might begin there.
But substance is only one possible beginning.
What if reality does not begin with enduring things at all?
What if what appears to us as a thing is better understood as a relatively stable moment within something more fundamental - activity, event, transition, occurrence, change?
Then our starting point shifts once again.
Not from relation to substance.
But from thing to happening.
And so our next question becomes:
What if process comes before relation?
Primary Sources
Aristotle. Categories. Translated by J. L. Ackrill. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
The Categories contains one of Aristotle's earliest and most influential treatments of primary substance, especially the distinctive role of individual beings as subjects to which properties may belong.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Books VII-IX (Zeta, Eta, and Theta) are especially important for Aristotle's investigations of substance, matter and form, essence, potentiality, and actuality.
Aristotle. Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
The Physics provides important background for Aristotle's understanding of nature, change, causation, potentiality, and natural development.
Aristotle and Substance
Cohen, S. Marc, and C. D. C. Reeve. “Aristotle's Metaphysics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University.
A useful scholarly introduction to Aristotle's metaphysical project, including substance, matter and form, actuality and potentiality, and being.
Loux, Michael J. Primary Ousia: An Essay on Aristotle's Metaphysics Z and H. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
A sustained examination of Aristotle's mature theory of substance and the relationship among individual substances, matter, form, and essence.
Witt, Charlotte. Substance and Essence in Aristotle: An Interpretation of Metaphysics VII-IX. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Especially helpful for the relationships among substance, essence, potentiality, and actuality.
Substance in Contemporary Metaphysics
Robinson, Howard. “Substance.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University.
A broad introduction to substance beyond Aristotle, including independence, properties, objects, substrata, bundles, persistence, and contemporary theories of substance.
Loux, Michael J., and Thomas M. Crisp. Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction. 4th ed. New York: Routledge, 2017.
A useful introduction to contemporary debates concerning substance, properties, particulars, identity, and modality.
Oderberg, David S. Real Essentialism. London: Routledge, 2007.
A contemporary defense of real essences and the proposition that what things are helps explain their characteristic properties, powers, and possibilities.
Further Questions
Readers wishing to continue beyond the scope of this essay might pursue questions of mereology, persistence, essentialism, powers ontology, hylomorphism, emergence, and fundamentality. What makes an individual thing one thing rather than an aggregate? What distinguishes essential from accidental properties? Are organisms better examples of substances than artifacts? Do substances exist at one fundamental level or at several? Can intrinsic being finally be distinguished from the relations through which a thing exists?
Our purpose has been more limited.
We have asked what reality looks like when metaphysical inquiry begins with the individual thing.
The answer has proved neither simple nor antiquated.
Substance metaphysics remains one serious response to the question:
What must something be before anything can happen to it, through it, or between it and something else?
| Question | Substance-Metaphysical Response |
|---|---|
| Where does metaphysical inquiry begin? | With individual beings possessing sufficient identity and integrity to be what they are. |
| What is a substance? | A being capable of possessing properties, undergoing change, exercising capacities, persisting through time, and entering relations. |
| What makes a thing what it is? | In the Aristotelian account, matter and form belong together in constituting a particular organized being. |
| Is substance simply matter? | No. Matter alone does not explain why particular materials constitute one kind of being rather than another. |
| Must substances be static? | No. Substances may grow, act, develop, change, and eventually cease to exist. |
| How can something change while remaining itself? | Some characteristics may change while sufficient continuity of the individual being persists. |
| What is potentiality? | A capacity belonging to a thing for particular activities, changes, or developments not presently actual. |
| What is actuality? | The realization or active expression of a capacity. |
| Can anything become anything? | No. What a thing is helps constrain what it can do or become. |
| Are substances independent of everything else? | Not necessarily. Profound dependence need not entail reduction to those dependencies. |
| What are relations? | Real connections, interactions, dependencies, or comparisons among beings. Their reality does not by itself establish their ontological priority. |
| Why might things come before relations? | Relations appear to require relata - something capable of standing in relation. |
| Does the need for relata prove substance priority? | No. Relata might themselves depend upon relations for some or much of their determinate being. |
| What does substance metaphysics explain especially well? | Individuality, persistence, differential response, intrinsic capacities, constrained possibility, and the apparent need for subjects of properties and change. |
| Where does substance metaphysics become difficult? | Unity, boundaries, composition, persistence through extensive change, and the extent to which beings can be distinguished from their constitutive conditions. |
| What is the strongest substance-first question? | Can there be a relation without something that is related? |
| What is the strongest question in the other direction? | If relations require things, what makes those things the unified, organized, dependent beings they are? |
| What remains unresolved? | Whether things are ontologically prior to relations, relations are prior to things, or their interdependence requires a deeper metaphysical account. |
If process presupposes relation, does relation presuppose something that relates?
Substance metaphysics gives us good reason to take that question seriously.
But our encounter has produced its own question:
If relations require things, what makes those things what they are?
We therefore leave without forcing a resolution.
Things have required explanation.
Relations have required explanation.
And the question of which, if either, possesses ontological priority remains open.
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