ESSAY FORTY-ONE
The question seemed almost unavoidable. If relations exist, must there not be something capable of being related? Relations require relata. Yet the closer we examined things, the more difficult it became to understand them apart from the relations through which they are constituted, sustained, distinguished, and changed.
Things require relations.
Relations require things.
Neither observation established which, if either, possesses ontological priority.
But while we were examining things and relations, something else had been occurring all along.
Everything was happening, becoming, changing.
Galaxies rotated. Clouds formed. Cells divided. Continents shifted. Languages changed. People remembered and forgot. The things we were trying to understand did not merely exist in relation. They possessed histories.
This introduces a third problem.
Perhaps reality cannot be adequately understood simply by asking what exists and how what exists is related. We must also ask how reality moves from one condition to another.
What is change?
What is movement?
What is process?
What is becoming?
And what if these are not merely things that happen to an otherwise completed reality?
What if change = becoming = happening belongs to how reality exists?
The distinction is important because three claims that initially sound similar are actually quite different:
Reality changes.
Some realities are processes.
Reality is fundamentally processual.
Almost every serious metaphysics can accept the first. Many can accept the second. The third is considerably stronger. It proposes that process is not merely one feature of reality among others but belongs to its fundamental constitution.
Substance metaphysics begins naturally with beings capable of change. Process philosophy asks whether this explanatory direction can be reversed. Perhaps relatively enduring beings emerge within processes already occurring. Perhaps persistence itself sometimes has to be accomplished.
The possibility is simple to state but profound in consequence:
What if reality does not first consist of things that change, but of change from which things emerge?
Essay Forty left us with:
Being ↔ Relation
Now another term enters the inquiry.
Becoming.
I. The Problem of Change
Change is so ordinary that its philosophical difficulty is easy to overlook.
A wound heals. Iron rusts. A storm intensifies. A language acquires new words. A memory fades. A musical performance moves from its opening note toward its conclusion.
We ordinarily describe such occurrences by identifying something and then saying what happens to it.
Something exists.
Something happens.
The thing changes.
This grammatical structure quietly encourages a metaphysical picture:
Being → Change
There is nothing obviously wrong with that picture. Aristotle already demonstrated that a philosophy centered upon substances need not imagine a frozen universe. Through his distinctions between potentiality and actuality, matter and form, Aristotle could describe beings as possessing genuine capacities for transformation. What something can become depends partly upon what it already is.
Process philosophy therefore cannot establish its case merely by pointing out that things change.
The more interesting question is whether an account of what can change also explains why reality is continually changing - or whether change itself deserves greater metaphysical significance.
Consider a heartbeat.
We can speak of the heart as an organ. It has structure, mass, tissues, chambers, valves, and vessels. Yet a functioning heart is not merely an anatomical object to which beating happens as an incidental property. Its contractions, electrical conduction, pressure changes, and circulation belong to what it means for the heart to function as a living heart.
The distinction becomes stark when the beating permanently ceases. Much of the material remains immediately afterward. The organ has not vanished. Yet something fundamental has changed.
This suggests a possibility that substance metaphysics does not necessarily deny but that process philosophy places nearer the center:
Some realities do not merely undergo processes. Their continuing existence as the kinds of realities they are depends upon processes continuing.
That still does not prove that reality itself is fundamentally processual. We therefore need to distinguish the argument carefully. That things change is one claim. That some things exist through continuing processes is another. That the things themselves are ultimately derivative from process is stronger still.
Only the third would establish anything resembling the ontological priority of process.
And so our question becomes more precise:
Is change something that happens to being, or can being itself sometimes be an achievement of change?
II. From Change to Becoming
Several terms now require distinction because change, movement, event, process, flow, and becoming are related without being identical.
Change is the broadest. Something differs from how it was before.
Movement describes transition, most obviously through space but also, in older philosophical usage, transitions between states.
An event is an occurrence. A glass shatters. Lightning strikes. A door closes. Something happens that can, at least approximately, be distinguished from what preceded and followed it.
A process is temporally extended activity. The crack spreads through the glass. A storm develops. A wound heals. A language evolves. Processes possess duration and internal succession.
Flow emphasizes continuity. It directs attention away from discrete states toward the transitions connecting them.
Becoming makes the strongest metaphysical suggestion. Something becomes actual that was not previously actual in precisely that form. Becoming therefore concerns not merely difference but the production of a new actuality from prior conditions.
These distinctions immediately create difficulties.
Is an event simply a short process?
Is a process a sequence of events?
Or do we divide a continuous becoming into events because human thought finds bounded occurrences easier to identify?
Consider a piece of glass falling from a table. We might identify the impact as an event: the glass shattered. Yet high-speed observation would reveal fractures propagating through the material across an interval. What appears instantaneous at one scale becomes processual at another.
The distinction between event and process may therefore depend partly upon scale, description, and the boundaries we impose upon what happens.
Becoming raises a still larger question.
Suppose a biological lineage develops a structure that allows a new kind of locomotion. The novelty does more than add another actuality to the world. It can open environments, behaviors, ecological relationships, and evolutionary pathways that were unavailable to that lineage before.
In such cases becoming appears to move in two directions:
possibility → actuality
but also:
actuality → new possibilities
What becomes can alter what can subsequently become.
This does not prove that becoming is metaphysically fundamental. A substance philosopher can interpret such novelty through changing substances and their powers. A physicalist can appeal to physical processes. A structural realist may describe transformations of structure.
But the phenomenon deserves explanation.
If the actual history of reality can alter the possibilities available to later reality, then history is not merely a sequence of interchangeable states.
What happens matters.
The question process philosophy presses is therefore not simply whether reality changes.
It is:
What kind of reality must reality be for becoming to be possible at all?
III. What If Change Is Not Secondary?
Process philosophy changes where explanation begins.
Instead of beginning with an enduring thing and asking how it changes, it asks whether at least some enduring things might themselves arise from sufficiently stable patterns of activity.
The contrast can be stated simply:
Substance-first: Being → Change
versus:
Process-first: Becoming → relatively stable forms of Being
Neither formula should be exaggerated. Substance metaphysics can contain sophisticated accounts of change, and process metaphysics need not deny recognizable individuals. The disagreement concerns explanatory priority.
Consider a traffic jam.
At first this seems an almost comically ordinary example. Yet it poses a surprisingly difficult ontological question. A traffic jam can persist for hours on a highway. Cars enter at the rear and eventually leave at the front. After enough time, none of the automobiles that originally constituted the jam may remain within it. Yet the traffic report still refers to the congestion.
More strangely, the traffic jam itself can propagate backward along the highway even though nearly every automobile within it is attempting to move forward. What, exactly, is moving backward? Not a particular collection of cars. Not a fixed piece of matter.
What persists is an organized pattern of movement and constraint produced through continually changing participants.
A wave presents something similar. The wave moves across water, but the water itself does not travel with the wave in the same manner. What propagates is an organized disturbance through a medium.
Such examples suggest that continuity need not always depend upon material sameness. Sometimes it depends upon organized recurrence. This is where process philosophy acquires considerable explanatory force. Instead of asking only:
What remains the same while something changes?
we can ask:
What pattern of activity must continue for something to remain the kind of reality it is?
The shift is substantial.
A reality need not always be imagined as a static bearer of changing properties. It may instead be a temporally extended organization whose recognizable continuity depends upon ongoing activity.
This does not establish that everything is fundamentally process. A boulder and a traffic jam may not possess the same ontological character. The temptation to derive a universal metaphysics from especially convenient examples should be resisted.
But process philosophy has already forced an important concession.
At least some realities seem easier to understand as organized happenings than as enduring things to which happenings are subsequently added.
The question is how far that insight reaches.
IV. A Reality That Happens
Consider a hurricane.
We give it a name. We locate it on maps. We speak of where it is going, how large it has become, and how long it has existed. In ordinary language it behaves remarkably like a thing.
Yet what is the hurricane?
It is not a fixed body of air or water. Matter and energy continually enter, move through, and leave the system. Its organization depends upon atmospheric pressure, ocean temperature, moisture, rotation, convection, and surrounding weather conditions. Its boundaries are real enough to matter enormously but not sharp in the way the surface of a manufactured object appears sharp.
The hurricane forms. It intensifies. It moves. It reorganizes. It weakens. Eventually it ceases to exist as a hurricane. At what point did it become a thing rather than a happening? But perhaps that question already assumes too much. The hurricane may be real precisely as an organized atmospheric process. Its identity need not depend upon possessing an unchanging material core.
This changes how we think about stability.
Stability and change need not be opposites.
A system can remain recognizable because changes within it remain sufficiently organized. A maintained pattern may be dynamically stable precisely because activity continually sustains it.
Stability can be something activity accomplishes.
This observation weakens the intuition that whatever is most real must be whatever changes least.
A process ontology pushes the proposal farther. Perhaps many of the apparently enduring realities around us are temporally extended organizations whose persistence depends upon histories of interaction, transformation, and renewal.
Under this description, reality ceases to resemble a completed inventory of objects.
It becomes historical.
This does not mean that process implies progress. Hurricanes destroy. Diseases spread. Ecosystems collapse. Stars exhaust their fuel. Societies can become more violent as readily as more humane.
Process is not another word for progress.
Becoming is not another word for improvement.
To say that reality happens is not to say that what happens is good.
The process claim is ontological rather than moral:
Reality may be temporally productive rather than merely temporally occupied.
By temporally productive, we mean that time is not simply a container in which already constituted things happen. What happens through time produces new actualities, configurations, relations, and possibilities. Reality does not merely exist in time; reality becomes through time. This is what is meant by the word, "productive." Another substitute for productive might be "creative" -
Reality may be temporally creative rather than merely temporally occupied.
The present would then be more than a location through which already constituted realities pass. What happens in the present participates in producing what follows.
But this raises another difficulty.
If a hurricane is fundamentally processual, where exactly does this process begin and end?
V. Philosophies of Change, Process, and Becoming
The philosophical problem is ancient, but its history is not simply a succession of thinkers repeating that everything changes. Different philosophers progressively altered what change itself was understood to mean.
We might describe one trajectory as:
Flux → Change → Duration → Transition → Event → Process → Becoming
Heraclitus stands near the beginning. The surviving fragments resist the simplified slogan that everything merely flows, yet they repeatedly draw attention toward transformation, opposition, tension, and an ordered world that cannot be equated with immobility. The famous river imagery captures the puzzle: waters differ, yet the river remains intelligible as a river.
Heraclitus makes change difficult to ignore.
Aristotle makes change intelligible.
His account of potentiality and actuality explains how something can become otherwise without requiring that being dissolve into chaos. Change occurs because existing realities possess determinate capacities. An actuality can emerge from a genuine potentiality grounded in what a thing is.
This matters because process philosophy cannot claim change as its exclusive discovery. The deeper disagreement concerns whether beings finally explain becoming or becoming helps explain beings.
Henri Bergson intensifies the problem by turning attention toward duration. For Bergson, lived time cannot be adequately represented by arranging static moments beside one another as though time were simply another spatial dimension divided into identical units. Duration is experienced as continuity in which past and present interpenetrate.
Imagine a melody. If we isolate every note and treat each as a self-contained object, we lose something essential. The melody exists through the ordered continuity by which earlier notes remain relevant as later notes arrive. Its temporal character cannot simply be removed while leaving the melody unchanged. There would be no melody.
Bergson therefore makes duration difficult to reduce to a collection of states.
William James makes transition philosophically important. His famous description of consciousness as a stream resists the picture of experience as a collection of isolated mental atoms. Experience includes movement, conjunction, tendency, and passage. The transitions are not merely empty gaps separating supposedly more substantial moments.
James's radical empiricism pushes the insight farther: relations and transitions may themselves belong to what is experienced rather than being constructions externally imposed upon disconnected experiences.
Alfred North Whitehead makes the strongest move of all.
He makes becoming ontological.
Whitehead's mature metaphysics replaces the traditional picture of fundamentally enduring substances with a reality whose basic actualities are occurrences - what he calls actual occasions or actual entities. What appears to us as an enduring object can then be understood through organized continuities, or “societies,” of occasions.
Becoming is no longer merely something that happens to an already finished actuality.
Becoming is how actuality comes to be.
Yet Whitehead also complicates the very hypothesis we are investigating.
His process is relational through and through. An actual occasion does not emerge in isolation. Its becoming incorporates antecedent reality and contributes to the reality inherited by what follows.
Whitehead therefore does not straightforwardly give us:
Process → Relation
His philosophy suggests something more entangled.
Process is relational. Relation is processual.
The more seriously we take Whitehead as a process philosopher, the harder it becomes to use him as evidence that process simply possesses ontological priority over relation.
This is important.
Our task is not to make Essay Forty's substance metaphysics lose so that process philosophy can win. Nor is Whitehead being recruited to return us covertly to a relational metaphysics we already prefer and have developed.
The encounter has produced a genuine difficulty from within process philosophy itself.
If becoming is inherently relational, perhaps asking whether process comes before relation misconstrues both.
Still, process philosophy has made one major contribution impossible to overlook:
Temporality may belong inside ontology rather than merely surrounding it.
A reality may not first become complete and then be placed into time.
Its history may also belong to what it is.
VI. Can Persistence Itself Be Processual?
Consider a coral reef.
A reef may persist for centuries or millennia, yet its persistence bears little resemblance to that of a manufactured object sitting undisturbed on a shelf. Organisms live, reproduce, compete, cooperate, and die. Calcium carbonate structures accumulate. New organisms colonize older structures. Currents bring nutrients and remove waste. Storms damage portions of the reef. Temperatures change it. Species distributions shift within it.
The reef has material continuity, but it is not materially identical through time.
It possesses structure, but the structure changes.
It is biological, geological, ecological, and historical at once.
What, then, persists?
The question suggests that persistence itself may take several forms. There can be material persistence, structural persistence, organizational persistence, functional persistence, and historical persistence. Different realities may endure in different ways.
Process philosophy's strongest insight may therefore be less radical than the claim that everything is process - and for that reason perhaps more difficult to dismiss:
Persistence may not be the absence of change. Persistence may be an achievement of organized change.
This reframes a problem that substance metaphysics taught us to ask.
Instead of assuming that persistence supplies the stable background against which change occurs, perhaps some forms of persistence are themselves continuously produced.
Personal identity makes the issue especially vivid.
The adult is not materially identical to the infant. The body has developed. Memories have accumulated and disappeared. Beliefs have changed. Relationships have formed and dissolved. Capacities have emerged that the infant did not possess.
Yet the adult can look at an old photograph and say:
I was that child.
What grounds that statement?
Substance metaphysics can interpret it as the persistence of one being through extensive change.
Process philosophy can ask whether identity instead - or additionally - involves continuity within a developing history.
Perhaps something endures.
Perhaps a sufficiently integrated history continues.
Perhaps both descriptions capture something real.
But process philosophy now encounters a problem analogous to the one faced by substance metaphysics.
What makes one process one process?
The hurricane emerged gradually from atmospheric conditions that preceded it. The reef cannot be separated completely from the ocean, organisms, climate, and geology through which it exists. A human life emerges from biological, familial, cultural, ecological, and historical processes that extend beyond any individual.
Where does one process end and another begin?
This is a problem of process individuation.
If things require explanation because their boundaries and identities can be difficult to establish, processes inherit the same difficulty. Calling something a process does not by itself explain what makes it this process rather than some larger or smaller process of which it is a part.
Process philosophy therefore gains explanatory power but not explanatory immunity.
Still, it has accomplished something important.
Even if process is not ultimately fundamental,
persistence no longer looks quite as static as it once did.
Some things may endure precisely because something continues to happen.
VII. Does Becoming Require Relation?
We can now return to the question announced by our title.
What if process comes before relation?
At first, the proposal seems plausible. If reality is fundamentally activity, perhaps relations emerge when processes encounter one another.
But can we actually describe a process containing no relation?
Movement implies transition between positions or states. Change distinguishes what was from what becomes. Development connects earlier and later phases. Causation, insofar as it is real, connects occurrences across some order of dependence.
Process seems difficult to isolate from relation.
The reverse problem appears just as quickly.
Can relation in an evolving universe be adequately conceived without process?
Physical interactions have consequences. Ecological relations alter organisms and environments. Human relationships develop, deepen, weaken, and sometimes disappear. Relations in such cases are not simply motionless lines connecting already completed entities.
They participate in what happens.
So perhaps:
Relation → Process
because processes require differences, connections, transitions, and conditions.
But perhaps:
Process → Relation
because processes generate new configurations, boundaries, entities, and possibilities of interaction.
This reciprocal difficulty exposes an even deeper question:
Does becoming require something that becomes?
The question mirrors the problem inherited from Essay Forty.
There we asked:
Can there be relation without relata?
Now we must ask:
Can there be becoming without something that becomes?
A substance metaphysician may say no. Becoming presupposes some being whose possibilities are actualized through change.
A process philosopher can reverse the explanation. What we call the “thing” that becomes may itself be constituted through a sufficiently continuous history of becoming. The entity need not exist in completed form prior to the process that produces and sustains it.
But that answer introduces its own difficulty. If the identity of the entity is explained by its process of becoming, what establishes the continuity by which we recognize successive phases as belonging to the same becoming?
The problem does not disappear.
It moves.
And process brings another unavoidable dimension with it.
Time.
Every process seems to contain some form of succession. Something precedes; something follows. An event occurs. A transition unfolds. Becoming distinguishes what has become from what is becoming.
Does process therefore require time?
Or might the ordered succession of processes help constitute what we mean by time?
We should not attempt to settle that question here. Time will eventually require its own sustained examination. For now it is enough to notice that process cannot be made fundamental without raising questions about temporality along with it.
Essay Forty left us with:
Being ↔ Relation
Essay Forty-One now adds:
Being ↔ Relation ↔ Becoming
But these arrows are not an answer.
They identify a problem.
VIII. Being, Relation, and Becoming
Our inquiry began with things.
Things led us toward relations.
Relations and things led us toward change.
Change led toward process.
Process led toward becoming.
And becoming has returned us to things and relations ↺
Something interesting has happened along the way.
Each category appears capable of explaining something about the others while also requiring them for aspects of its own explanation.
Being gives us something capable of persistence, relation, and change.
Relation gives us connection, dependence, differentiation, and conditions through which beings can affect and constitute one another.
Becoming gives us transition, history, transformation, and the production of realities that were not previously actual in the same form.
Yet being must explain how it is constituted and sustained.
Relation must explain what is related and how relations acquire efficacy.
Becoming must explain continuity, individuation, and what it means for something to become.
The explanatory arrows run in more than one direction.
We might call this a problem of reciprocal explanation.
That is not the same as saying that being, relation, and becoming are equally fundamental. Nor does it establish that all three are metaphysical primitives.
- Perhaps one eventually explains the others.
- Perhaps two are mutually constitutive.
- Perhaps all three arise from something more fundamental.
- Perhaps the search for a single ontological primitive imposes upon reality a simplicity reality itself does not possess.
- Or perhaps being, relation, and becoming are conceptual abstractions from one reality that cannot finally be divided according to the categories through which we investigate it.
At this point, we do not know.
But process philosophy has changed the inquiry.
It has shown us that an enduring reality need not be understood as a reality protected from change. Sometimes endurance occurs through change. It has shown that histories may belong to what realities are rather than merely recording what happens to them. It has shown that temporality may belong inside our account of actuality. And it has shown that becoming cannot easily be separated from either the beings that become or the relations through which becoming occurs.
We therefore arrive not at:
Being → Relation → Becoming
nor:
Becoming → Relation → Being
but at the more difficult recognition:
Being ↔ Relation ↔ Becoming
Not a solution.
A map of the problem.
Conclusion: What If None Comes First?
We asked what reality might look like if process came before relation.
For a while, the possibility seemed promising. Traffic jams persist while their constituent vehicles change. Hurricanes exist through organized atmospheric activity. Coral reefs endure through generations of biological and geological transformation. Human identity unfolds through histories that cannot simply be removed from what persons become.
Process philosophy therefore gives us good reason to reconsider a familiar intuition:
Reality does not merely seem to be. Reality happens.
But process did not finally free itself from relation. Relation did not free itself from beings. And beings did not remain untouched by becoming.
Perhaps one of these will eventually prove fundamental.
Perhaps none will.
At this point another philosopher might reasonably enter the conversation and wonder whether we have made the problem unnecessarily complicated.
Why suppose that reality itself must be divided among metaphysical categories such as substance, relation, process, and becoming?
Why not begin instead with what the natural sciences investigate?
Particles. Fields. Energy. Spacetime. Chemical systems. Organisms. Brains. Ecosystems. Galaxies.
Perhaps being, relation, and becoming are not competing metaphysical foundations at all.
Perhaps they are different descriptions of what physical reality is and does.
If so, the next question is unavoidable:
What if reality is fundamentally physical?
And once again, we begin somewhere else.
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Aristotle. Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Heraclitus. The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments with Translation and Commentary. Edited and translated by Charles H. Kahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Process, Duration, and Experience
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen, 1910.
James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1912.
James, William. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890.
Whitehead and Process Metaphysics
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: Macmillan, 1933.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan, 1925.
Contemporary Process Philosophy
Dupré, John, and Daniel J. Nicholson, eds. Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.
Seibt, Johanna. “Process Philosophy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. First published October 15, 2012; substantive revision May 26, 2022.
For the modern transition toward processual understandings of reality, Henri Bergson's Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution develop the importance of duration, temporality, and creative development. William James's The Principles of Psychology is especially important for the stream of consciousness, while Essays in Radical Empiricism extends James's concern with experience, relations, and transitions into a broader philosophical setting.
The most systematic modern process metaphysics remains Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality. Readers approaching Whitehead for the first time may also find Science and the Modern World and Adventures of Ideas more accessible entrances into his criticism of substance-centered thinking and his attempt to understand nature dynamically. For Essay Forty-One in particular, Whitehead's concepts of actual occasions, becoming, prehension, and societies are relevant because they show how persistence can be reconstructed through organized patterns of events rather than assumed as the fundamental starting point.
Contemporary process philosophy extends well beyond Whitehead. Nicholas Rescher's Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy offers a systematic philosophical account of process as a metaphysical category. Johanna Seibt's work on process ontology is particularly useful for contemporary attempts to formulate process metaphysics without simply reproducing Whitehead's categorical scheme. Work in the philosophy of biology has likewise renewed interest in organisms as dynamically maintained processes rather than static substances, especially John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson's edited volume Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology.
Taken together, these thinkers trace an important philosophical movement from the ancient problem of change toward increasingly processual accounts of duration, transition, event, persistence, and becoming. They have been chosen not because they speak with one voice, but because together they help us understand why philosophers have repeatedly wondered whether reality is adequately described by what is, or whether what happens must also belong to our account of what is real.
