We speak easily of things.
A stone is a thing. A tree is a thing. A planet is a thing.
It seems that things simply exist, and that relations come afterwards. The stone exists; then it has a position, encounters another stone, casts a shadow.
But consider what makes the stone the same stone from one moment to the next.
Its material changes. Its position changes. Its surroundings change.
Something nevertheless persists.
What persists is not simply a piece of matter. It is a pattern of distinctions that allows us to treat what changes as belonging to the same thing.
This does not make the stone imaginary.
It means that thinghood is not exhausted by material presence.
A thing has a boundary, but the boundary is meaningful only in relation to what lies beyond it.
It has an identity, but identity depends upon what counts as change and what does not.
It persists, but persistence is intelligible only across difference.
The thing, in other words, is already relational.
We might therefore have begun at the wrong end.
Instead of asking how things enter into relations, we might ask:
What relations make something available as a thing?
The question is larger than it first appears.
For if thinghood depends upon relations, then the world is not first populated by finished things which subsequently acquire properties.
Things may instead be achievements of stability within becoming.
And that gives us a curious thought.
Before there is a thing, there need not be nothing.
There may be something happening that has not yet become available to us as a thing.
Perhaps the world does not begin with things.
Perhaps things are ways in which a world becomes distinguishable.
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