When Reality Became Relational

We have become accustomed to thinking of reality as a collection of things. Each thing exists in its own right, possessing properties that determine what it is. Relations connect these things, but do not constitute them. The world, on this view, is assembled from independently existing entities.

What if this is the wrong way to begin?

In his recent interview in Nature, physicist Carlo Rovelli questions the ambition to discover an ultimate description of reality. Physics, he argues, is a fabulous enterprise, but understanding fundamental physical processes does not tell us everything about the phenomena that interest us. Greater generality does not necessarily provide greater understanding.

His argument invites a more fundamental question. What if reality is not best understood as a collection of things that subsequently enter into relations, but as a world in which things become what they are through their relations?

Consider the Moon. Its velocity is not an intrinsic property that it possesses independently of everything else. It has one velocity relative to Earth and another relative to the Sun. Neither description requires a human observer. The relation is not something added to an otherwise complete description of the Moon. It is constitutive of the property being described.

This is familiar physics. But the implications extend beyond the particular properties that physics investigates.

A living organism does not exist independently of its environment. Its metabolism, development and continued existence depend on relationships with other organisms and with the physical conditions in which it lives. The environment is not merely a setting in which an already constituted organism happens to operate. It participates in the conditions of the organism's existence.

Nor does the organism simply reproduce an environment that remains unchanged. Its activities alter the conditions in which it and other organisms subsequently exist.

The relationship is constitutive in both directions.

The same principle applies to the social world. A person becomes a social participant through relationships with others. Those relationships are not merely connections between individuals who are already socially constituted. They participate in making individuals what they are.

Language provides a particularly striking example.

A word does not possess its meaning independently of the linguistic system in which it occurs. Its meaning depends on its relationships with other meanings, and on the possibilities provided by the system as a whole. A particular instance of language draws on this meaning potential, but it also occurs in a particular social situation, where relationships between participants contribute to what the instance means.

Meaning is not simply attached to an independently existing event. It emerges through the relationships that make the event meaningful.

These examples involve different kinds of organisation. Physical relations, biological relations, social relations and semiotic relations are not interchangeable. A physical interaction is not a social relationship, and a linguistic meaning is not a physical property.

Yet each involves something that the conception of independently existing things tends to obscure: the conditions of existence are relational.

This does not mean that everything depends on everything else in an undifferentiated way. Relations are specific. They have particular consequences for the entities and processes involved. Some relationships are constitutive of a particular kind of existence; others are incidental. Understanding the difference requires attending to the organisation of the relationships themselves.

Nor does relational constitution mean that things are unreal. It means that their existence cannot be adequately understood by abstracting them from the relationships through which they become what they are.

Rovelli's question about ultimate reality therefore takes on a different significance. Perhaps the difficulty is not simply that we have yet to discover the ultimate description of reality. Perhaps the expectation of such a description rests on an assumption about what reality consists of.

If things become what they are through their relations, then there is no reason to expect a description of isolated entities to provide the foundation for understanding everything else. Nor does describing the most general physical relationships necessarily explain the particular forms of organisation that emerge through biological, social and semiotic processes.

The world is not less real because it is relational. It is more than a collection of independently constituted things.

And perhaps understanding reality begins not by asking what things are in themselves, but by asking how they become what they are.