The earliest articulations of relational thinking emerge where cosmology, myth, and philosophy intersect. In these frameworks, being is never conceived as isolated substance, but as a field of interdependent processes and potentialities. Possibility is enacted not through static entities, but through the relations that constitute them.
Heraclitus provides a seminal articulation: everything flows. Becoming is primary, and stability is a perspectival construct imposed upon a dynamic field. In this view, potentiality is inseparable from relation — the currents of flux define what can and cannot be actualised. Similarly, early Vedic texts and Daoist cosmologies emphasise the co-emergence of forces and patterns, the interweaving of elements, and the mutual shaping of world and observer.
These early relational ontologies illuminate key construal strategies:
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Processual framing — the world is structured as an ongoing series of interactions rather than discrete objects.
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Participatory potential — agents and phenomena are co-constitutive; the possible is enacted through relational engagement.
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Field awareness — individuation is perspectival, arising from the broader relational horizon rather than intrinsic essence.
Modulatory voices enrich this reading. Daoist notions of wu wei emphasise harmonisation with relational currents rather than imposition of form. Similarly, the cyclical cosmologies of Vedic thought foreground a patterned potential, where relational structures themselves dictate the rhythms of emergence.
In sum, early thought already recognises a principle central to meta-genealogy: possibility is relationally conditioned. Construal, even in its most primordial forms, is enacted within networks of dependence, participation, and flow. This insight lays the groundwork for subsequent developments in abstraction, ethics, and symbolic ordering, revealing that the becoming of possibility has always been a matter of relational orchestration rather than accumulation of facts.
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