Philosophy of Environment: From Aristotle's Place to Relational Ontologies

¶Introduction: The Problem of Environment

What is an environment? The question seems obvious until you press it. An animal has an environment — the forest around it, the nest it lives in, the temperature and light. A human has an environment — the city, the home, the workplace. But what exactly is the relation between the thing and what surrounds it?

Two traditions in Western philosophy have tried to answer this. The first, stretching from Aristotle through Locke and Russell, treats environment as external: a collection of things, conditions, or properties that surround a thing and shape how it behaves. Environment is what is not the thing itself. There is a boundary, and on one side is the thing; on the other side is everything else.

The second tradition, emerging from process philosophy (Whitehead), ecology (Uexküll, Gibson, Tansley), and contemporary work in new materialism (Barad, Ingold), argues that this boundary is not pre-given. Environment and thing co-constitute each other. An organism does not sit in an environment; the organism is what it is through its coupling with what surrounds it. There is no view from nowhere, no environment that exists independent of some entity perceiving and acting in it.

These are not merely abstract positions. They lead to radically different understandings of what an environment is and how it matters. This survey traces both traditions and shows where they converge and where they conflict.

¶Aristotle and the Substance View of Boundary

Aristotle’s Physics, Books III-IV, contains the deepest ancient treatment of boundary and place. His key distinction is between topos (place) and chōra (space, or the receptacle of becoming).

Place, for Aristotle, is “the innermost boundary of what contains.” It is not a thing; it is the limit or edge of a containing body. When water sits in a vessel, the place of the water is the inner surface of the vessel that touches the water. When air fills a room, the place of the air is the inner surface of the walls. Place is always the boundary of the containing body — never the container itself, never the contained thing, but the edge between them.

This creates a logic of containment. A thing is in a place if a boundary surrounds it. An environment, in this frame, is a set of boundaries and the things that press against them. When you stand in a room, you are in the place defined by the walls. The air around you is in a place defined by the walls and the objects in the room. Every layer of containment has a boundary.

But Aristotle runs into a fundamental problem: what about the universe as a whole? If everything is in a place, and place is the boundary of a container, then the entire universe must also be in a place. But what contains the universe? What is the boundary of the outermost container? Aristotle needs something that is a boundary but does not require anything outside it. He invokes the crystalline sphere of the fixed stars — the outermost container, which does not press against anything beyond itself. It simply is.

This is not a satisfying answer. The problem is that Aristotle’s logic of containment, which works well for local, bounded environments (a vessel, a room, a city), fails when applied to the whole. The universe cannot be thought of as a thing in a place because there is no boundary outside the universe.

What this reveals is a limit in the substance view: it can define the environment of particular things, but it cannot coherently define the environment of everything. Totality, the whole, escapes the logic of containment.

¶The Substance Tradition After Aristotle

Post-Aristotelian substance philosophy takes two main directions in thinking about environment.

The first treats environment spatially. Following the development of coordinate geometry in the seventeenth century, a thing can be located at a position in space, and its environment is the neighborhood around that position. Russell’s theory of relations formalizes this: “the environment of X” is the set of things that stand in a particular spatial or causal relation to X. This is enumerable. You can list what is around X, at least in principle. The Cartesian coordinate system makes this precise: place is a coordinate; environment is the neighborhood of nearby coordinates.

The second direction treats environment as the set of external conditions that shape a thing’s properties. Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities illustrates this. Primary qualities (extension, shape, solidity) are intrinsic to objects themselves. Secondary qualities (color, taste, sound, smell) are produced in the perceiver by the action of primary qualities on the senses. An object’s environment, on this view, is the set of external causes of its secondary qualities — the circumstances that determine how it appears to observers.

Both directions share a common structure: environment is a collection of things or properties external to and separable from the thing itself. The boundary between thing and environment is sharp. You can draw a line: on this side, the thing; on that side, the environment. They are distinct. This works well for describing local, practical environments. It fails, as Aristotle discovered, when you try to think about totality.

¶Uexküll’s Umwelt: Multiple Environments, Each Genuine

Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt — often translated as “self-centered world” or “surrounding-world” — introduces a fundamental complication to the substance view. His insight is simple but revolutionary: every organism experiences a different environment.

Consider a tick, hanging in a bush for years waiting to feed. The tick’s world is astonishingly small. It consists of three elements: temperature (which it can sense through thermal receptors), the scent of butyric acid (which it detects from the skin glands of mammals), and tactile sensation (contact with a body). That is the entire environment for the tick. A scent that is chemically present but is not butyric acid is not part of the tick’s world. A color, a sound, a shape — none of these exist in the tick’s environment.

A deer, walking beneath that same bush, experiences a completely different environment. The deer perceives grass, slope, the texture of the earth, wind direction and speed, the movement of other deer, the smell of predators, the visual landmarks that orient it in space. The deer’s environment is vastly larger and richer than the tick’s. The same physical space contains two entirely different worlds.

Neither world is a misperception. Both are genuine environments. The tick’s Umwelt is not a pale shadow of “the true objective environment”; it is a real world, constituted by the fit between the tick’s sensory apparatus and the physical conditions around it. Uexküll emphasizes that the organism and its Umwelt are fitted to each other. The tick’s sensory equipment makes butyric acid an element of its world; without that sensory apparatus, the scent would be chemically present but not environmentally present.

This creates a problem for substance philosophy. If environment is supposed to be an objective set of conditions that surrounds a thing, how can the same physical space contain multiple environments? The substance view treats this as a matter of incomplete perception: the tick perceives only part of “the true environment.” But Uexküll’s point is stronger. The environment the tick inhabits is not a subset of some larger objective environment; it is a distinct world, and calling it incomplete mistakes the nature of what environments are.

Uexküll’s insight forces a choice. Either you treat environment as objective (independent of the perceiver) and concede that different organisms cannot be in the same environment, or you acknowledge that environments are relational: the environment for a thing is what that thing can perceive and act on, given its nature. Both can be true for the same physical space.

¶Gibson’s Affordances: Environment as Offer

James Gibson’s ecological psychology approaches the problem from a different angle. Gibson asks: what is the environment for? What is it about?

His answer: the environment is structured as affordances. An affordance is a property of the environment that enables or constrains action. A chair affords sitting to a human; it does not afford sitting to a fish. A staircase affords climbing to a human but not to a snake. A sturdy branch affords perching to a bird; it might afford swinging to a monkey; it is merely an obstacle to a caterpillar.

What makes this concept valuable is that affordances are neither purely objective nor purely subjective. A chair is not in itself “sittable” — it is sittable relative to an agent with a particular body and the capacity to sit. But this is not a matter of opinion or interpretation. A properly designed chair really does afford sitting to a human in a way it does not afford sitting to a fish. The affordance is relational, but it is not arbitrary.

Gibson emphasizes that the environment is not just a container of things; it is a structured field of possibilities for action. An organism does not passively sense an objective environment and then decide how to act on it. The organism perceives directly what the environment affords. A child sees a climbable tree, not “a tree with such-and-such dimensions”; a predator sees prey, not “a moving shape.” Perception is always already structured by affordances.

This connects back to Uexküll. Different organisms perceive different affordances in the same space because they have different capacities for action. The tick perceives the affordance of a host (a body to feed from), the deer perceives the affordance of forage, the tree perceives nothing of the sort because the tree’s mode of action is rooted and slow. Each has a genuine environment structured by what it can do.

But affordances are still tied to what the organism can do given its nature. This preserves a kind of objectivity: the affordances are there, waiting to be perceived, determined by the structure of the environment and the capacities of the agent. The environment is still in some sense external to the organism, even if it is structured in terms of what the organism can act on.

¶Karen Barad and the Enactedness of Boundaries

Karen Barad’s agential realism pushes further. It is not enough to say that affordances are relational. Barad argues that the boundary between a thing and its environment is not found; it is enacted. Different practices and instruments create different boundaries.

This comes from Barad’s engagement with quantum physics. In quantum mechanics, the measured properties of a particle depend on what measurement apparatus you use. Measure position, and you get position data but lose information about momentum. Measure spin along one axis, and you cannot know spin along another axis. There is no pre-existing fact of the matter independent of the measurement. Instead, the apparatus and the system are entangled; the measurement creates a “cut” between system and environment.

Barad extends this insight to all knowledge and all practice. When you measure a fire’s temperature, the thermometer becomes part of the system; the boundary is drawn one way. When you observe a fire’s color, you are treating the light as part of the system; the boundary is drawn differently. Neither measurement is capturing a pre-existing fact; both are enacting a boundary between what counts as “the fire” and what counts as “its environment.”

This applies far beyond physics. When you read a text for editorial content, the environment is the linked terms and the existing literature; the text’s location in the filing system is background. When you analyze the same text through a build system, the environment is the template files, the CSS, the image assets; the content is just data. When you search through the text with a full-text index, the environment is the corpus of all texts; any individual text is a node in that network. Each practice enacts a different boundary.

Barad calls these boundaries “agential cuts.” They are real and have consequences. But they are not found in nature; they are enacted through the specific practices and instruments you bring to bear. There is no view from nowhere that would show the “true” boundary between a thing and its environment. Every view is situated; every boundary is practiced.

This means that there is no single environment for any given thing. There are multiple genuine environments, enacted through different practices. What matters is being explicit about the cuts you are making, the boundaries you are enacting. This is not relativism — the cuts have real effects — but it does mean abandoning the idea of a single, objective environment that exists independent of how you relate to things.

¶Whitehead’s Process: Prehension and Extensive Continuum

Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy offers a radically different ontology that dissolves the boundary problem altogether.

Whitehead’s fundamental units of reality are not substances but actual occasions — events of becoming. Each occasion comes into being through a process of concrescence: a gathering-together of all the prior occasions that have achieved definiteness. An occasion does not sit in an environment and respond to it; an occasion is constituted by what it grasps.

Whitehead calls these graspings prehensions. A prehension is a taking-hold-of, a feeling of prior data. When a new occasion comes into being, it prehends — it grasps and incorporates — all the prior occasions that are relevant to it. There is no distance between the prehending occasion and what it prehends. The prior occasions do not exist independently “out there”; they are internal to the becoming of the new occasion.

What is an environment in this framework? It is the actual world of the occasion — the totality of prior occasions that constitute it. There is no external environment that the occasion then acts upon. The occasion is made of its environment. The boundary is not between the occasion and its environment; the occasion is itself a boundary-forming process that gathers and transforms what comes before it.

The extensive continuum is Whitehead’s way of thinking about the whole that makes togetherness possible. It is not a container. It is not space as a pre-existing medium in which things happen. It is the condition that allows actual occasions to reach out and prehend each other, to form connections, to become in relation to what has been. The continuum is continuous, not discrete. There is no sharp line between one occasion and the next; they overlap, interpenetrate, and constitute each other.

This has immediate implications. First: there is no absolute divide between a thing and its environment. The boundary is not sharp but relational, dependent on how you draw the scope of the occasion. What counts as the environment of an occasion is what that occasion prehends; different occasions will have different environments (as Uexküll said), and these differences are not approximations of a single “true” environment.

Second: environment is not enumerable. You cannot list all prior occasions that constitute a new occasion because the extensiveness of time means there are infinitely many priors. The environment is a continuum, not a collection.

Third: neither the thing nor the environment is static. Both are phases of a creative advance. The occasion comes into being through prehension, achieves momentary definiteness, and then becomes settled data for the next occasion. There is no final state of being; there is only becoming.

¶Ingold’s Meshwork: No Boundaries Except Through Movement

Tim Ingold builds on Whitehead but emphasizes something different: organisms do not exist in environments. Organisms are constituted by their movements through a meshwork of relations.

Ingold’s key claim is that the container metaphor — which has dominated Western thought since Aristotle — is misleading. We tend to think of an environment as a container and organisms as things inside it. But this gets the relationship backwards. When you watch a bird in flight, the bird is not a thing that exists and then moves through an air environment. The being-in-flight is the integration of perception, muscle action, air pressure, thermal updraft, and visual landmarks. The bird is the movement, and the movement is the continuous coordination of organism and surrounding.

The meshwork Ingold describes is a web of lines: lines of growth, lines of force, lines of movement. A tree is not a discrete thing; it is a line of growth that reaches from the soil into the air, intertwining with the growth lines of other plants, the flight lines of birds, the walking lines of animals. Every organism traces paths through the environment, and every path is a line in the meshwork. When you trace any single line — the root of a plant, the flight path of a bird, the trail of a deer — you find yourself touching multiple other lines. The meshwork has no boundaries. Everything is connected.

This is compatible with Whitehead’s prehensions, but Ingold stresses the embodied, movement-based aspect. You don’t understand an environment by standing still and cataloging what is around you. You understand it by moving through it, by learning what affordances it offers, by becoming attuned to its rhythms and structures. A blind person learning to navigate a city does not do this by acquiring a mental map; they do it by moving, by feeling the ground, by being guided by the sounds and textures that the city offers. The environment is not information to be gathered and stored; it is something you are always already moving through, always attuned to.

Ingold explicitly rejects the distinction between organism and environment. There is no organism on one side and environment on the other. There is a meshwork of entangled movements, and the organism is one set of movement-lines among many. The boundary of the organism (the skin, the body) is not the boundary between organism and environment; it is a place where different movement-lines meet and influence each other.

¶Maturana and Varela: Structural Coupling

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s concept of structural coupling offers a way to think about how organism and environment mutually determine each other without giving up the idea that they are distinct.

Their starting point is autopoiesis — self-making. A living system maintains its identity through a process. It is organizationally closed: the operations that define it (the production of proteins, the regulation of temperature, the maintenance of the cell membrane) are internal to the system. But it is informationally open: it constantly receives perturbations from the environment.

The key insight is structural coupling. The system’s structure determines what perturbations it can sense and respond to. A frog’s visual system is structured to detect movement but not stationary shapes. So a stationary fly is not a perturbation for the frog; a moving fly is. The environment can only perturb the system in ways that fit the system’s structure. Conversely, the environment’s structure determines what perturbations it can deliver. A silent environment cannot deliver auditory perturbations.

When the coupling works well — when the system’s sensitivities match what the environment actually offers — the system thrives. A frog in its native pond can survive because it has evolved to detect the specific visual stimuli that indicate food and danger in that environment. But move the frog to a laboratory with scrambled visual stimuli, and the coupling breaks. The frog is suddenly blind to what matters for survival.

Structural coupling dissolves a false dichotomy. You don’t have to choose between treating the organism as independent (acting on the environment from outside) and treating it as completely determined by the environment (passive, reactive). The organism and environment are dynamically coupled. Each specifies what kinds of interactions are possible; neither is reducible to the other.

Importantly: the boundary between system and environment is real. There is a genuine distinction. But it is a dynamic boundary maintained by the coupling, not a fixed edge. And the boundary is not transparent. What the system can perceive depends on its structure, not on what is “really out there” independent of the system’s capacities. Each structurally coupled pair — frog and pond, human and city, cell and chemical medium — has a specific environment that would not exist without that specific system.

¶Haraway’s Sympoiesis: Making-With

Donna Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis (making-with) extends this idea. She argues against the idea of autopoiesis — self-making — because it suggests organisms make themselves independently. Nothing makes itself alone. Every organism is the product of countless other organisms, processes, materials.

A human is not an autonomous self that encounters an environment. A human is made of bacteria (the microbiome), of dietary elements (animals and plants consumed and transformed), of cultural inheritance (language, knowledge, practices), of material relations (to the Earth, to other beings). There is no clear boundary between the human and what is “not the human.” The human is sympoietic: made with, through, and because of everything else.

This is not merely metaphorical. Haraway is describing actual material relationships. The cells of your body include mitochondria that were once independent organisms, now incorporated into every living cell. Your gut bacteria outnumber your human cells and shape your health, mood, and immune response. The air you breathe has been processed by plants; the plants exist because of soil microorganisms. At every level, making is making-with.

The implication for environment: there is no environment that exists independently and then encounters organisms. Life and environment co-make each other, continuously. This is more radical than structural coupling because it denies the distinction between inside and outside. The organism is not inside the environment and coupled to it; the organism is a temporary stabilization of the environment’s own process of becoming.

¶Indigenous Relational Ontologies

Many Indigenous philosophical traditions express similar insights without the apparatus of Western philosophy. While each tradition is distinct, certain themes recur.

The Lakota concept Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ — “all my relatives” — expresses a totality not as an enumerable set of things but as a web of kinship. Everything is kin because everything is in relation. A stone is not a non-living thing that happens to be present; it is a relative, a relation-mate. The environment is not “out there”; it is here in the relationship. Every action carries an obligation to seven generations because action is relational action; it ripples through the web of kinship.

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of the three sisters — corn, beans, and squash — illustrates this. These plants are not individuals that happen to grow together. They are relations. Corn provides a stalk for beans to climb. Beans fix nitrogen in the soil, enriching it. Squash shades the soil, retaining moisture and suppressing weeds. Each is what it is through its relation to the others. There is no separate environment that the plants happen to be in; there is only the three-sisters relationship itself.

Mi’kmaq philosophy emphasizes the relationship between humans and the land. The land is not a resource to be used; it is kin. This is not poetic metaphor but ontological claim. The boundary between human and land does not separate them; it is the place of relationship. A person does not use the land; a person becomes through relationship with the land, and the land becomes through human presence.

In these traditions, the question “what is the environment?” does not make sense, or makes sense very differently than in Western philosophy. There is no environment separate from the being that is in it. There is only the web of relations, and every being is a node in that web, constituted by its relations to every other node.

¶Tansley and the Ecosystem Concept

Arthur Tansley’s 1935 paper introducing the term “ecosystem” is important because it offers an alternative to thinking of environment and organism as separate. Tansley argues that the traditional distinction between organism and habitat obscures the real unit of investigation: the system itself.

An ecosystem is not an organism plus an environment. It is a system in which organisms, physical conditions, and material flows are integrated. The boundary of an ecosystem is not between living and non-living; it runs through both. A forest ecosystem includes trees, insects, soil microorganisms, water, sunlight, minerals. You cannot understand any one element without understanding its relations to all the others.

Tansley’s move is to make the relation itself the fundamental unit, not the things related. This is process-philosophy at work in ecology. An organism cannot be separated from its ecosystem without killing it (ecologically speaking). The organism is what it is within the system. And the system itself is not a static arrangement; it is a dynamic process of nutrient cycling, energy flow, predation, growth, and decay.

The environment of an organism, from this perspective, is not a set of external conditions but the ecosystem it is part of. And “part of” here means constitutively part of, the way a cell is part of a body. Remove the organism from the ecosystem, and both have changed. The organism is no longer what it was; the ecosystem is no longer what it was.

¶Conclusion: Environment as Relational Practice

These traditions — from Aristotle through Barad, from Uexküll through Indigenous ontologies — do not offer a single definition of environment that succeeds everywhere. Instead, they map the problem space.

In the substance tradition, environment is clear and bounded: the set of external conditions around a thing. This works well for practical descriptions (the air in the room, the food in the stomach), but it breaks when applied to totality and misses the ways that boundaries are enacted and multiple.

In the process-relational tradition, environment is relational and continuous: what a thing is constituted by, what it grasps and is grasped by, the meshwork it is woven into. This account refuses sharp boundaries and treats the distinction between thing and environment as practical and perspectival rather than ontologically fundamental. But it sacrifices the clarity and quantifiability of the substance view.

The key insight that bridges both is Uexküll’s: there is no single environment. There are multiple genuine environments, each one the world for a particular agent, given that agent’s capacities for perception and action. A tick, a deer, a human, a plant, a microorganism — each inhabits a distinct environment. These are not approximations of a single “true” environment; they are real worlds.

But there is also integration. The environments of different beings overlap, intersect, and shape each other. The deer’s environment includes the plants it eats; the plant’s environment includes the deer that eats it (and the symbiotic fungi in its roots, and the insects that pollinate it). These environments are not independent; they are co-constituted through structural coupling, sympoiesis, and the relational density of the meshwork.

What this means is that environment is not a thing or a set of things. It is a relational structure: the set of possible actions and perceptions available to an agent in its particular situation. It is practiced (Barad) — different uses and engagements enact different boundaries. It is continuous (Whitehead) — not a discrete collection but a meshwork. It is oriented toward difference (Ingold) — constituted through the specific movements and capacities of the beings in it.

The environment is not a neutral backdrop against which life happens. It is life happening, the way that beings are bound up with each other, the fabric of relations that makes any particular being what it is. To understand an environment is to understand what a being can do and perceive in its specific situation, and to trace the relations that make those capacities possible.

¶See also

• Totality and Mereology — on the problem of the whole, the impossible set of all sets, and relational totalities
• Thing — the correlate concept to environment; what is bounded, what has a location
• Relation — the fundamental structure shared across all these accounts
• Boundary — where environment and thing meet; Barad’s agential cuts
• Affordance — what the environment offers to a particular agent