Title: Process-relational theory primer « immanence
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Process-relational theory primer
What is process-relational thought?
Bibliographic starting points
Process-relational theory on this blog
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Content: on how things become rather than what they are, on emergence rather than structure. According to this understanding, the world is dynamic and always in process. As Søren Brier puts it, describing the ontology of C. S. Peirce, reality is a spontaneously dynamic “hyper-complexity of living feeling with the tendency to form habits.” That is to say that reality is emergent, evolutionary, and creative –- a view that, not coincidentally, finds much resonance with twentieth-century developments in physics and biology including quantum mechanics, ecology, and chaos and complexity theories. This reality is constituted, at its core, not by objects, permanent structures, material substances, cognitive representations, or Platonic ideas or essences, but by relational encounters and events. The term “process-relational” is most closely associated with the metaphysics developed by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and Whitehead’s influence on contemporary process-relational thought is undeniable. But so are the influences of others mentioned including, especially in recent thinking, the ideas of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and C. S. Peirce. All of these philosophers (though less frequently Deleuze) are sometimes included in the broader category of “process philosophers,” but this term alone does not adequately capture the centrality of relations in process-relational ontology. Similarly, the term “relationalism,” frequently understood to be opposed to various kinds of atomism, individualism, “essentialism,” and to recent “object-oriented” philosophies (such as those of Graham Harman and Levi Bryant, “speculative realists” frequently discussed on this blog), fails to adequately emphasize the processual nature of any and all relations. “ Process-relationalism” is thus intended to highlight the temporal dynamism, emergent relational systematicity, and inherently creative openness of a living universe composed of interactive events characterized by some measure of perception, responsiveness, “mind,” or subjectivity (or subjectivation).