We usually think of process as something that happens to things.
A tree grows. A river flows. A person ages. A society changes. A star forms and eventually disappears. In each case, it seems that there is some thing, and then there is a process through which that thing changes.
But this picture quietly gives priority to the thing.
The process is what happens to it.
What happens if we reverse the order?
What if a thing is not something that exists first and then enters into processes, but a relatively stable achievement of processes already under way?
This is the move by which process begins to become ontology.
It is not simply the claim that everything changes. That claim is ancient. Heraclitus already made change impossible to ignore. Nor is it the claim that things have histories. That is also familiar.
The stronger claim is that becoming may be more fundamental than the things that become.
The question then changes.
Instead of asking:
What is this thing?
we can ask:
What process makes this thing possible?
And perhaps, more radically:
What relations must continue to occur for this thing to continue to exist?
Duration Is Not a Series of Instants
One of the most important modern attempts to think this way came from Henri Bergson.
Bergson was dissatisfied with the tendency to treat time as though it were a spatial dimension: a series of discrete points laid out one after another. If time is reconstructed as a collection of instants, then change becomes a succession of states.
At one instant, the thing is A.
At another, it is B.
The process seems to consist in the transition between them.
But something important has disappeared.
Our actual experience of time is not ordinarily like that. The past does not simply vanish when the present arrives. Memory, expectation, habit and anticipation mean that what has been continues to affect what is happening now.
Bergson called this duration.
Duration is not merely a longer interval of clock time. It is qualitative continuity: the way a process carries its past into its present while remaining open to what comes next.
A melody provides a simple example.
A note is not experienced in isolation from the notes that preceded it. The significance of the present note depends partly upon what has already happened. And yet the future notes are not simply contained in the preceding ones. The melody can continue in more than one way.
The present therefore has a peculiar structure.
It inherits.
It transforms.
It opens.
This is close to something we have encountered elsewhere: the past is active in the present, but the future is not simply waiting there in finished form.
Process is therefore not merely movement through a pre-existing sequence.
It is the production of a sequence whose later possibilities are altered by what has already occurred.
The Present Changes the Future
This point matters for ontology because it changes what we mean by becoming.
If a process were simply the unfolding of a predetermined sequence, then becoming would add little to our account of reality. The future would already be fixed; the process would merely reveal it.
But genuine process involves something stronger.
What happens changes what can happen next.
A river encountering an obstruction does not merely move more slowly. Its channels may divide. Its banks may erode differently. New paths become possible and others disappear.
An organism does not merely pass through predetermined states. Its encounters alter its capacities for subsequent encounters.
A society does not simply move from one configuration to another. Institutions, technologies, conflicts and habits alter the conditions under which subsequent actions become possible.
The process therefore modifies its own possibility-space.
This gives becoming a directional character.
What becomes actual changes what can become possible next.
That is why process cannot be adequately understood as a succession of static states. The relation between one moment and the next is not merely temporal. The earlier moment helps constitute the possibilities of the later one.
The process carries its own history forward.
Whitehead: Events Before Things
Alfred North Whitehead pushed this insight further.
For Whitehead, the basic units of reality are not enduring substances that occasionally undergo events. Reality is fundamentally composed of events or processes of becoming.
This does not mean that tables, trees, people and stars are unreal.
It means that their apparent stability has to be explained.
An enduring thing is not a primitive fact from which process begins. It is a pattern of continuity produced through processes.
Whitehead's language is famously technical, but one of his most important ideas is relatively simple: an actual occurrence comes into being through its relations to what has already occurred.
An event does not emerge from nowhere.
It inherits a world.
And in becoming something new, it contributes to the world that subsequent events will inherit.
Reality is therefore not a collection of independent entities connected by external relations.
It is a history of inheritances.
Each becoming receives something from what came before and transforms it into something that can be inherited by what comes after.
This gives relation a temporal depth.
A relation is not merely a connection between two things that already exist.
It can be part of the process through which something becomes what it is.
Becoming Does Not Mean Chaos
There is an obvious danger here.
If process is fundamental, might everything become unstable? If nothing is ultimately a fixed substance, what prevents reality from dissolving into flux?
The answer is already implicit in our previous post.
Structure is what process can preserve.
A whirlpool persists even though the water composing it is continually changing.
An organism persists because metabolic processes continuously replace, regulate and reorganise its material.
A language persists because countless acts of speaking reproduce patterns that no individual speaker possesses.
A society persists because institutions, practices and expectations are repeatedly enacted.
In each case, persistence is not the absence of process.
Persistence is a form of process.
This is one of the deepest consequences of making process ontological.
The alternative to substance is not instability.
It is organised continuity.
What we call a thing may be a pattern that manages, for a time, to reproduce itself through change.
Its identity is therefore neither absolute permanence nor mere succession.
It is persistence through transformation.
The Individual Returns
This also allows us to revisit the problem raised earlier by substance.
If things are processes, are individuals simply illusions?
Not at all.
The individual becomes something more interesting.
An individual is a process capable of maintaining a distinctive organisation across changing circumstances.
Consider an organism.
Its matter changes. Its internal states change. Its environment changes. Its relations with other organisms change.
And yet something persists.
That persistence is real.
But it is not the persistence of an unchanged substance hidden beneath the changes. It is the persistence of an organisation that continuously renews itself through its relations with its environment.
The boundary of the organism is therefore not simply a wall separating it from everything else.
It is part of the process by which the organism maintains itself.
The organism remains itself because it does not remain materially identical.
Its identity is an achievement.
This gives us a more precise way of thinking about individuality.
The individual is neither an absolutely independent substance nor merely an undifferentiated part of a larger whole.
It is a relatively autonomous process within a field of other processes.
Its autonomy is something it does.
Process and Relation Become Indistinguishable
At this point, process and relation begin to converge.
A process is not simply something that occurs in a network of relations.
The relations are part of what the process is.
And the process continually modifies those relations.
This gives us a recursive pattern:
relations make processes possible → processes transform relations → transformed relations alter subsequent possibilities → new processes emerge
There is no obvious place to insert an independently existing thing at the beginning.
Yet there are still relatively stable things at every stage.
The ontology is therefore neither atomistic nor holistic.
It is relationally processual.
Things are real, but their reality is something that happens.
Structures are real, but their persistence is something that happens.
Individuals are real, but their individuality is something that happens.
Even boundaries are real, but they are maintained through processes of differentiation and exchange.
Reality is not less structured because process is fundamental.
Rather, structure itself becomes something that must be explained.
The Novelty of Becoming
There is another consequence.
If process is genuinely ontological, then novelty cannot be treated as a superficial feature of our ignorance.
Something new can actually happen.
This does not mean that anything can happen.
Processes are constrained by what has already become.
A seed cannot become just anything. An organism inherits a history. A social institution carries accumulated structures. A physical system has conditions within which its future trajectories are possible.
But constraint is not determination.
The present inherits a field of possibilities without possessing a single inevitable future.
That distinction matters.
A process can be historically constrained without being predetermined.
And because what happens alters the conditions of what can happen next, novelty is capable of accumulating.
One possibility becomes actual.
Its actualisation changes the relational structure.
That changed structure affords new possibilities.
Some of those become actual.
And so on.
Possibility can therefore become productive.
The future is not simply a space of alternatives that already exist independently of history.
It is partly generated by the history of what has become.
From Substance to Process
Seen this way, the philosophical movement we have been following acquires a new shape.
Aristotle gave substance a privileged place because something had to persist through change if change was to be intelligible.
Spinoza loosened the connection between individuality and independent substance.
Hegel showed how difference and relation can generate transformations.
Kant and phenomenology brought the observer into the conditions of experience.
Structural thinkers showed how relations can become relatively persistent systems.
And now process philosophy asks whether those structures themselves can be understood as achievements of becoming.
The sequence is not a line of intellectual descent.
Bergson did not simply complete Spinoza. Whitehead did not simply solve Hegel. Each thinker opened a different region of conceptual possibility.
But together they help make a particular question available:
What if existence is not fundamentally something that happens before relations, but something that emerges through the continuation of relations?
That question changes almost everything.
It changes what a thing is.
It changes what identity is.
It changes what a boundary is.
It changes what persistence is.
And it changes what possibility means.
A World Made of Becomings
Once process becomes ontological, we can no longer imagine the world as a collection of things that occasionally interact.
We have to imagine a world in which things are relatively enduring patterns within a continuing history of interaction.
The tree is a process.
The forest is a process.
The organism is a process.
The ecosystem is a process.
The language is a process.
The institution is a process.
The person is a process.
And none of these processes is isolated from the others.
They overlap, interfere, sustain, constrain and transform one another.
What appears to us as a world of things may therefore be better understood as a world of persisting patterns of becoming.
But there is still a question.
If everything we have called a thing is constituted through relations and processes, then what exactly is the world in which those relations occur?
We have been tempted throughout this genealogy to imagine a world first, and relations within it afterwards.
Perhaps that distinction is no longer available.
Perhaps the world itself is not the container within which relations take place.
Perhaps the world is what emerges from their ongoing articulation.
And if so, the next step is not merely to ask what processes make things possible.
It is to ask whether there is any meaningful sense in which there could be a world outside relation at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment