Audience: readers who have completed the societies and endurance lesson.
Learning goal: connect process philosophy to relational ontology and to the broader concerns of this research program.
The preceding lessons have built up Whitehead’s system from its elements: actual occasions as the basic units, prehension as the basic relational act, concrescence as the process of self-constitution, creativity as the principle of novelty, and societies as the explanation of endurance. The common thread is that relations are constitutive: an occasion is what its prehensions make it, a society is what its pattern of inheritance makes it, and apart from these relations, neither is anything.
This is relational ontology: the position that relations are ontologically prior to entities. Process philosophy is the most developed Western metaphysical system in which this claim is worked out systematically. But it is not the only tradition that arrives at this position. Many Indigenous philosophical traditions — including the Lakota epistemologies that ground this research program — understand beings as constituted through relations, responsibilities, and processes of reciprocal becoming.
The convergence is significant but must be stated carefully. Process philosophy and Indigenous relational ontologies arise from different traditions, address different concerns, and occupy different political positions. Whitehead wrote as a Cambridge mathematician constructing an alternative metaphysics; Indigenous thinkers speak from lived traditions of relation to land, kin, and more-than-human beings. The structural parallel — both hold that relations constitute beings, that experience pervades reality, and that substance thinking distorts what it describes — supports the claim that relational ontology is not a philosophical novelty but a widely attested understanding of reality that Western substance metaphysics has obscured.
Process philosophy also provides conceptual vocabulary that connects to the mathematical formalisms of this research program. Prehension — the constitution of entities through relational acts — is what the semiotic universe formalizes algebraically. Concrescence — the achievement of determinate structure from open potentiality — is what closure operators model. Societies — patterns sustained by ongoing inheritance — are what the dynamical framework describes. The philosophical concepts and the mathematical structures are not identical, but they illuminate one another.
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness names the diagnostic that ties these threads together. Wherever abstractions are mistaken for concrete realities — the individual for the relation, the substance for the process, the commodity for the ecosystem — process philosophy identifies an error that relational ontology corrects and that the mathematical formalism makes precise.
Check for understanding: Why is the convergence between process philosophy and Indigenous relational ontologies significant for this research program?