We are used to thinking of a thing as something that exists first and enters into relations afterwards.
A tree stands in a forest.
A planet moves through space.
A person encounters another person.
But look more closely.
What makes the tree the tree it is?
Its roots relate to the soil.
Its leaves relate to light and air.
Its growth relates to seasons.
Its boundary is maintained through exchanges with what surrounds it.
Remove these relations, and the thing does not simply remain the same thing with fewer properties. Its very persistence is affected.
The relations are not additions to the thing.
They are part of what allows it to remain a thing.
The same is true of the planet. Its identity as a planet depends upon relations of motion, mass, orbit and gravitational interaction. Change those relations sufficiently and what counts as the same kind of object may change with them.
This suggests that we have been putting the relation in the wrong place.
We imagine:
thing → relation
But perhaps it is often closer to:
relation → stability → thing
A thing can be a relatively stable pattern within changing relations.
This does not dissolve things into relations. The tree is still a tree. The planet is still a planet.
But their being what they are is not independent of the relations through which they persist.
And this brings us back to construal.
To construe something as a thing is to recognise a pattern of stability within a field of relations.
The thing appears because something holds together.
Perhaps, then, the world is not made intelligible by first finding its things and then discovering their relations.
Perhaps relations are already working behind the things we see.
And once we begin to notice them, the apparent solidity of the world becomes something more interesting:
a stability achieved within becoming.
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