If relations are not merely connections between things, then the identity of things can no longer be entirely separated from the processes in which they participate.
This creates a deeper problem.
We are accustomed to distinguishing being from becoming. Being is what something is. Becoming is what happens to it. A tree is a tree; it grows, loses leaves, survives storms and eventually dies. The changing events belong to its history, while its identity seems to belong to something more stable beneath them.
But what if the stability is itself something that has to be maintained?
What if being is not the opposite of becoming?
What if a thing can be what it is only by becoming what it is?
The question reaches back to one of the oldest tensions in Western philosophy.
Heraclitus and the river
Heraclitus is usually introduced as the philosopher of change.
Everything flows. Nothing remains the same. The image of the river has become almost inseparable from his name.
But the philosophical problem is more interesting than the slogan suggests.
If everything changes, how can anything remain identifiable?
If the river is never composed of exactly the same water, in what sense is it the same river?
The obvious answer is that its identity lies in something other than its material constituents. The river persists as a pattern of activity: water flows through a channel, under particular conditions, constrained by banks and terrain, replenished by sources and altered by tributaries.
The river does not persist despite the fact that its constituents change.
Its persistence is a consequence of the organised way in which they change.
This suggests a different conception of identity.
The identity of a thing need not be the identity of something that remains unchanged. It can be the persistence of a relation through change.
A whirlpool is an even simpler example. The water composing it is continually replaced. Yet the whirlpool can persist for minutes or hours as a recognisable structure.
Its being consists in a becoming.
The problem of permanence
Parmenides approached the same problem from almost the opposite direction.
If what is truly real must be what it is, then genuine change appears impossible. What becomes must either come from what is or from what is not. But what is cannot become something else without ceasing to be what it is, while what is not cannot provide anything at all.
The argument is radical because it exposes an assumption that is easy to overlook:
How can something become different while remaining something?
The problem is not merely that things change.
The problem is how identity and change can belong to the same reality.
Parmenides responds by giving priority to being. Becoming becomes philosophically suspect because it seems to require reality to emerge from non-being.
The tension between Parmenides and Heraclitus therefore reaches deeper than the contrast between permanence and flux.
It is a question about what kind of identity change permits.
Can something remain itself through transformation?
Or does genuine identity require the exclusion of change?
Plato's response
Plato's philosophy can be read partly as an attempt to navigate this tension.
The sensible world changes. Yet knowledge seems to require something stable enough to be known. If everything were perpetually changing, how could we have reliable concepts of anything?
Plato therefore gives philosophical priority to forms that provide intelligibility beyond the instability of sensible things.
The move is enormously productive.
It allows philosophy to distinguish appearance from intelligible structure, and it makes possible a conception of knowledge in which what is genuinely knowable is not simply whatever happens to be present at a particular moment.
But it also reinforces a powerful association:
stability belongs to being; change belongs to becoming.
The distinction will survive in many forms.
Yet perhaps the river suggests another possibility.
What if the stable form of something is not what remains untouched by change, but the organisation through which change occurs?
Then becoming need not be the enemy of intelligibility.
It may be one of the conditions of intelligibility.
Aristotle's reconciliation
Aristotle makes one of the great attempts to reconcile these possibilities.
His distinction between potentiality and actuality allows change to become intelligible without reducing it to the impossible emergence of something from nothing.
An acorn can become an oak because becoming is not arbitrary. The acorn has capacities, and the oak is not simply an unrelated state that happens to follow it.
Change has an organisation.
This is one of Aristotle's great achievements. Becoming is no longer sheer flux. It can be understood as the actualisation of possibilities already belonging to a thing.
The distinction is extraordinarily fertile.
But it still tends to preserve the substance as the bearer of becoming. The acorn has a potentiality; the oak actualises it. The thing changes, but the thing remains the primary subject of change.
Our previous question therefore returns.
What if the capacities of the acorn cannot be understood independently of its relations?
Its development depends upon soil, water, light, temperature, microorganisms, other plants, animals and an entire ecological history. Its potentiality is not simply something sealed inside it.
The possibilities available to a thing depend partly upon the relational structure in which it exists.
Potentiality begins to look less like a possession and more like a relation to what can become.
Becoming as relation
This changes the meaning of becoming.
A thing does not simply move from one state to another.
It moves through a field of possibilities.
The field is not an abstract collection of alternatives waiting to be selected. It is structured by what already exists, by the relations among things, by constraints and by affordances.
A seed does not have an unlimited number of futures. Nor does it have one future mechanically determined in advance.
Its possible development depends upon the conditions in which it finds itself.
The same seed can become a tree under one set of conditions, fail to germinate under another, or become food for another organism under another.
The possibilities are relational.
This gives becoming a temporal direction that a static conception of being tends to obscure.
What something can become depends upon what it has become already.
The present is therefore not simply a location between past and future.
It is a condition from which further possibilities emerge.
The Stoic contribution
The Stoics provide another important step.
Their cosmos is not a collection of independently existing things accidentally interacting. It is an organised whole in which things are interdependent and events unfold through causal relations.
The Stoic conception of logos gives order to this unfolding, while their understanding of causation makes events intelligible as parts of a connected whole.
There are problems here for a modern relational ontology. Stoic determinism leaves little room for the open-ended generation of genuinely new possibilities.
Yet the Stoics make something important visible:
the world can be understood as a process whose parts acquire their significance through their participation in a larger order.
The individual event is not fully intelligible in isolation.
This idea will repeatedly return in later philosophy, although the meaning of “order” and “process” will change.
Becoming without a predetermined destination
There is an important danger here.
Once we say that things become through relations, we might imagine that becoming simply follows a larger predetermined pattern.
But relational becoming need not imply predetermined development.
A relation can constrain without determining.
The environment of an organism can make some futures more accessible than others without specifying exactly which future will occur. A social structure can make some actions difficult and others easy without determining what an individual will do. A conceptual framework can make some questions almost invisible and others obvious without dictating the answers.
Becoming therefore occurs within conditions of possibility.
The conditions matter.
But they do not necessarily dictate the outcome.
This distinction will become increasingly important.
If every becoming were simply the unfolding of a predetermined potential, then possibility would add little to our understanding of reality. The future would already be contained in the present.
But if relations alter what is possible, then becoming can generate novelty.
What becomes actual can change the field from which further actualisations emerge.
Possibility can create possibility.
Bergson and the irreducibility of duration
This question becomes especially important much later in Henri Bergson.
Bergson objects to treating time as though it were simply a sequence of spatially arranged states. If time is reduced to a series of points, change becomes something that happens between already defined states.
But lived duration is different.
The past does not simply disappear when the present arrives. It remains operative within the present, altering what the present can become.
A melody provides a simple analogy. A note is not experienced merely as an isolated sound. It carries the traces of what came before and anticipations of what might follow.
The present is therefore thick.
It is not simply one state replacing another.
Bergson's importance for relational thought lies partly here: becoming cannot always be reconstructed from a collection of static states. The relations among moments are themselves constitutive of the process.
Time is not merely the container in which becoming occurs.
Becoming has its own temporal structure.
Whitehead takes the further step
Alfred North Whitehead pushes the argument much further.
For Whitehead, the basic realities of nature are not enduring substances that occasionally undergo events. Reality is fundamentally a process of events and relations.
An actual occasion becomes what it is through its relations to other occasions.
The world is therefore not constructed from finished things and then connected together.
It is a world in which entities emerge through processes of relation.
This is much closer to the position toward which our questions have been moving.
But even here, we should resist simply adopting Whitehead's vocabulary and declaring the problem solved.
The important discovery is conceptual rather than doctrinal.
Once being is understood through becoming, and becoming through relation, the apparent opposition between thing and process begins to dissolve.
A thing can be a relatively stable achievement of becoming.
The stability of the pattern
This returns us to the river.
We can now see two different senses in which it persists.
One is material persistence: some water remains within it for a time.
The other is relational persistence: the pattern of flow continues.
The second is often more important.
The river is not defined by having the same water.
Nor is it defined merely by having a particular geographical location.
Its identity lies in a dynamic organisation of relations.
This does not mean that every change leaves its identity untouched. A river can dry up. Its course can change. A dam can transform it. It can cease to be recognisable as the river it once was.
So relational identity is not infinitely elastic.
A pattern persists only within conditions that sustain it.
This gives us a more subtle conception of identity.
Identity is neither absolute permanence nor unrestricted change.
It is relative persistence within transformation.
And that phrase may prove important.
From being to becoming
We began with a question about relation.
If relations can help constitute things, then the identity of a thing cannot be entirely separated from its relations.
We then encountered a deeper question.
If a thing's identity depends upon patterns of relation that persist through change, perhaps becoming is not something that happens to being from the outside.
Perhaps being is what a relatively stable pattern of becoming looks like.
This does not abolish things.
It changes how we understand them.
An organism is a process that maintains a relatively stable organisation. A river is a process of flow. A society is a process of reproduction and transformation. A language is a process through which patterns of distinction persist and change. A concept is a historical achievement that can acquire new relations and therefore new possibilities.
The world begins to look less like a collection of objects moving through time and more like a field of relatively stable patterns emerging within processes of relation.
But this creates another problem.
If becoming is fundamental, what explains the apparent stability of the patterns that become?
What allows a process to hold together long enough to be recognised as something?
And what happens when the relations sustaining one form reorganise themselves into another?
To answer that, we may need to return to the thing itself—and ask whether substance has been given too much of the work to do.
That is where another philosophical possibility opens.
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