We began with a simple question:
Are relations merely things that things have, or are relations partly what things are?
The question becomes more difficult once we ask what a “thing” is.
Aristotle gave Western philosophy an extraordinarily durable answer. A substance is something that exists in its own right. Other things—qualities, quantities, relations and so forth—are predicated of it.
The distinction is powerful.
A horse can be brown, large, fast or standing beside another horse. These properties and relations can change while the horse remains the same horse.
The substance provides the underlying identity.
But our previous post left us with a problem. What if the stability of the thing is itself an achievement of relations? What if what appears to be an independently existing substance is actually a relatively stable mode of organisation within a larger reality?
If so, substance may still be real.
But perhaps it should no longer have the philosophical privilege of being the starting point.
One of the most radical attempts to rethink this possibility came from Spinoza.
Substance without substances
Spinoza begins with substance.
But almost immediately, he transforms what the word means.
For Aristotle, there can be many individual substances: this horse, that tree, this person. For Spinoza, substance in the strict sense is that which exists in itself and is conceived through itself.
There can therefore be only one substance.
God, or Nature.
Everything else is not an independently existing substance alongside it. Individual things are modes: determinate ways in which the one reality exists.
This is a remarkable inversion.
Instead of beginning with many independent things and asking how they are related, Spinoza begins with a single immanent reality within which individual things are determinations.
The world is no longer fundamentally a collection.
It is a unity expressing itself in differentiated forms.
We need not accept Spinoza's metaphysics to see the conceptual possibility he opens.
What if individuality does not require ontological independence?
A thing can be real without being self-sufficient.
From independence to dependence
This matters because the traditional concept of substance carries an intuition of independence.
A substance exists in itself.
A relation, by contrast, seems dependent upon the things it relates.
But suppose the dependence runs in both directions.
The organism depends upon its environment, but the environment as experienced by that organism is also partly constituted by the organism's activity. A species depends upon ecological relations that its own behaviour simultaneously modifies. A society depends upon individuals, while those individuals acquire many of their possibilities through social relations.
Dependence does not necessarily mean that something is unreal.
It may be a condition of its particular kind of reality.
Spinoza's modes offer one philosophical way of thinking this.
The individual is not an illusion because it is dependent.
Its reality consists precisely in being a determinate expression of a more fundamental reality.
That is already a considerable shift away from an ontology in which independence is the measure of being.
The problem of individuality
But a new question immediately appears.
If there is only one substance, what distinguishes one thing from another?
Spinoza's answer involves modes, attributes and determinate causal relations. Individual things are not arbitrary fragments cut out of an undifferentiated whole. They have definite structures and relations within Nature.
This is important.
A relational ontology cannot simply dissolve individuality into unity.
If everything is related to everything else, then “relation” explains nothing unless we can also explain differentiation.
There must be relatively stable differences within the whole.
Spinoza therefore offers us one side of a problem that will recur throughout our genealogy:
How can unity and difference coexist?
How can things be genuinely distinct without being absolutely independent?
How can a world be one without becoming homogeneous?
These questions are still with us.
Relation without externality
Spinoza's conception of causation is equally significant.
In a substance-centred ontology, one thing can be imagined as an independent entity that acts upon another independent entity. Causation is then a relation between already constituted things.
Spinoza's immanent conception is different.
Things do not stand outside Nature and then enter into causal interactions with it. They are modes within Nature. Their causal powers belong to the same reality in which their effects occur.
This eliminates a particularly strong form of externality.
The world does not consist of objects first and relations second.
There is one reality, internally differentiated into an enormous multiplicity of determinate modes.
Again, we need not become Spinozists to recognise the significance of the move.
The question “What is this thing independently of its relations?” begins to look less fundamental.
We might instead ask:
What pattern of dependence makes this thing what it is?
That is much closer to the relational question with which we began.
Conatus and persistence
Spinoza also gives us an intriguing way to rethink persistence.
Every mode strives to persevere in its being—conatus.
At first glance, this might seem to return us to the old substance-centred picture. Here is an individual thing trying to maintain itself.
But the Spinozist individual is not an isolated substance.
Its persistence depends upon the organisation of its relations.
An organism maintains itself by continuously interacting with what surrounds it. Its power of acting depends upon the relations through which it is affected and through which it affects other things.
Persistence therefore becomes dynamic.
The individual is not simply sitting there waiting to be acted upon.
It is an activity of maintaining a determinate organisation within a larger field.
This takes us back to the river and the whirlpool.
A whirlpool persists because a pattern of relations continues to organise the flow of water.
The pattern is real.
But it is not independent of the process that sustains it.
Power rather than possession
This also changes how we might understand what something can do.
In a substance ontology, powers can appear as properties possessed by things.
A knife has the power to cut. A person has the ability to walk. A seed has the potential to grow.
But powers are exercised only within relations.
A knife cuts something. A person walks across a surface. A seed grows within conditions that permit growth.
The capacity is neither entirely inside the thing nor entirely imposed from outside.
It exists in a field of possibilities.
Spinoza's language of power and affect moves in this direction. Things increase or diminish one another's capacities through their encounters.
A relation can therefore alter what a thing is capable of doing.
This is a crucial step toward a relational conception of affordance.
The world is not merely populated by objects with fixed properties.
It is populated by beings whose powers vary with their relations.
The strange case of freedom
Spinoza's philosophy produces one of its most famous paradoxes here.
He is often regarded as a determinist. Everything follows from the necessity of Nature.
Yet he also develops a conception of freedom.
Freedom, for Spinoza, is not arbitrary independence from causation. It is understanding and acting through the causes that constitute us rather than being passively determined by causes we do not understand.
This gives us another reason to be suspicious of the idea that freedom requires independence.
An entity does not become more free by escaping all relations.
There is no such escape.
Freedom may instead consist in acquiring a different relation to the relations that constitute one's possibilities.
The idea will reappear in many forms later: in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, pragmatism and contemporary theories of agency.
It is another way in which the privilege of independence begins to weaken.
Not yet relational ontology
Yet Spinoza should not simply be recruited as an early member of a modern relational school.
His philosophy remains profoundly different from what we are developing.
His single substance is eternal and necessary. Our concern has increasingly centred upon becoming, historical contingency and the generation of new possibilities.
Spinoza's Nature does not simply become something genuinely novel in the open-ended sense that later process philosophies will explore.
Nor is his relation our relation.
His ontology remains organised around substance, even though substance has been transformed beyond recognition.
Indeed, that is precisely why he is useful.
He shows us that the category of substance can be radically reconfigured without abandoning it.
The philosophical move is not:
substance is false; relations are true.
It is:
perhaps the independence we have associated with substance is not required for individuality or reality.
That is subtler—and more productive.
From things to modes
The concept of a mode is especially suggestive.
A mode is not simply an object sitting inside a larger container.
It is a determinate way in which the larger reality is expressed.
This gives us a different image of the world.
Instead of imagining reality as:
thing → relation → thing
we might imagine:
a field of relations → relatively stable modes within that field
The difference is considerable.
In the first picture, relations are secondary. They happen between things.
In the second, things are patterns that emerge within a relational order.
That does not mean the second picture must deny the existence of things.
It means that thinghood itself becomes something to explain.
Why is this pattern stable? Why does this boundary persist? Why does this organisation endure? Why does it disappear? What relations sustain it, and what relations transform it?
These questions turn ontology toward dynamics.
The price of unity
But Spinoza also shows us the danger on the other side.
If we move too far from independent substances, we can end up making the unity of reality so fundamental that individuality becomes difficult to explain.
If everything is ultimately one, why are there many things?
A relational ontology therefore faces a double danger.
On one side lies substantialism: treating things as fundamentally independent and relations as secondary.
On the other lies holism without differentiation: treating the whole as fundamental while leaving the individuality of its parts unexplained.
Neither is sufficient.
We need an account in which relations can constitute relatively autonomous individuals without reducing those individuals to mere appearances.
The task is not to choose between things and relations.
It is to understand how things can emerge as relatively stable forms of relation.
Losing privilege, not losing substance
Perhaps this is the right way to understand what Spinoza contributes to our genealogy.
Substance does not have to disappear.
It has to lose its privilege.
The question is no longer simply:
What exists independently?
It becomes:
What kinds of relatively stable existence can arise within a reality of dependence and interaction?
This is a very different question.
It allows us to take individuality seriously without treating individuals as metaphysically self-sufficient.
It allows us to take relations seriously without treating things as illusions.
And it opens a path toward understanding persistence as an activity rather than a possession.
The river persists through its flow.
The organism persists through its exchanges.
The society persists through the relations that reproduce it.
The concept persists through its uses, interpretations and transformations.
In each case, identity is neither pure permanence nor arbitrary change.
It is organised persistence within relation.
Spinoza therefore leaves us with a possibility that will become increasingly important:
perhaps reality is not fundamentally made of things that happen to stand in relations. Perhaps relatively stable things are themselves achievements of a deeper relational order.
But this still leaves a question.
If things emerge from relations, what makes one relation productive rather than another? What makes difference itself capable of generating new forms?
For that, we need to move from relation and dependence toward something more dynamic.
We need to ask what happens when difference itself begins to do work.
And that is where Hegel waits for us.
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