In process philosophy, process names the fundamental character of reality: becoming rather than being, change rather than persistence, relation rather than substance. To say that reality is processual is not merely to say that things change — which even substance metaphysics acknowledges — but that becoming is ontologically prior to being: entities are achievements of processes, not substrates that undergo processes.
This reversal has consequences across philosophy. If process is primary, then identity is not a given but a pattern maintained through ongoing activity. A river is not a thing that flows but a flowing that we identify as a river. An organism is not a substance that metabolizes but a metabolizing that we identify as an organism. This perspective dissolves the problem of how static substances can enter into dynamic relations, because there are no static substances — there are only processes at various scales of stability.
Alfred North Whitehead’s actual occasions provide the formal account: each occasion is a process of concrescence that begins with the prehension of prior occasions and concludes with the achievement of a novel, determinate unity. The process is the reality; the achieved result is already past, available as data for future processes but no longer becoming.
Related terms
- Event — the unit of process
- Actual occasion — Whitehead’s formal analysis
- Concrescence — the process of becoming determinate
- Substance metaphysics — what the primacy of process replaces