What If Relations Are More Fundamental Than Things?

Thesis

A thing may not be fully intelligible apart from its interactions, the information available about it, and the history through which it became what it is. This is a question for realism, not a license to make reality arbitrary.

The object in the room

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Begin with a cup on a table. It has a shape, a mass, a material, and a location. Ordinary language makes this easy: the cup seems to be one thing, and its relations to hands, tables, drinkers, and rooms seem to be additional facts about it. First there is the object; then there are its connections.

That picture is not foolish. It is a useful achievement of perception and practice. A stable object remains identifiable while lighting changes, while it moves from one shelf to another, and even while some of its atoms are exchanged with the environment. Engineering, law, and daily life all need ways to track things through change. The intuition that things have properties of their own is therefore not a superstition to be discarded.

Yet the intuition can become a metaphysics: the view that reality is ultimately made of self-sufficient substances, each carrying an inventory of intrinsic properties, with relations added afterward. The question of this essay is whether that order is warranted. Perhaps relations do not merely describe what things do once they exist. Perhaps they help constitute what a thing is, while still being constrained by a world that is not made up by our descriptions.

Substance, and the pressure of relation

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In the classical philosophical picture, a substance is something that exists in its own right. Aristotle’s substances are subjects of predication: this horse is brown, this tree is tall. Qualities can change while the subject persists. The picture explains why we distinguish a thing from what happens to it.

But even an ordinary object carries dependencies that its grammar conceals. A cup is a cup partly because it can contain liquid, withstand handling, and participate in practices of drinking. These are not merely subjective associations. They involve its geometry, material strength, temperature tolerance, and the physical regularities in which those properties have consequences. Remove every possible interaction and it becomes difficult to say what would remain of the cup’s identity beyond a bare label.

This does not prove that relations are metaphysically prior. It does show why the issue is not settled by pointing at an object. A property can be called intrinsic in one explanatory context and relational in another. Mass, for example, is treated as a parameter of a physical system, yet what we measure depends on interactions, standards, and a theory connecting observations to quantities. The sensible lesson is not that every distinction collapses, but that distinctions have work to do and limits to respect.

Leibniz and the view from somewhere

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz offers an early and unusually precise provocation. His monads are not bits of matter arranged like tiny marbles. They are centers of perception, each expressing the universe from a particular point of view. A monad’s identity is tied to its complete concept: what it is includes its relations and history. Leibniz still speaks of individual substances, but individuality is no longer separability from every connection.

Leibniz’s account is not a modern scientific theory, and there is no need to import its theology or its pre-established harmony into contemporary physics. Its lasting value here is methodological. It asks us to consider that a perspective is not an accidental window placed in front of an already complete world. What can be expressed from a position, and how that position differs from others, may belong to the identity of the thing doing the expressing.

There is also a warning in Leibniz. If every entity is defined by a total relation to everything else, explanation can become impossibly global. A useful relational account must identify which dependencies matter for a given question, at what scale, and according to which laws. “Everything is connected” is not yet an explanation. It becomes one only when the relevant connections can be specified, tested, or fruitfully interpreted.

From things to structure

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Modern structural realism gives the relational intuition a different and more scientific form. Its central thought is that successful theories may preserve information about the structure of the world even when their pictures of what the world is made of change. The shift from one theory to another can replace entities and mechanisms while retaining relations among observable quantities. On this view, relations are not just a convenient language laid over hidden furniture; they may be what our best theories most reliably latch onto.

The argument is strongest as an account of continuity in science, not as a declaration that objects do not exist. The history of science contains both genuine theoretical continuity and substantial conceptual replacement. Structural realists therefore face a serious question: how much structure survives, and in what sense? Mathematical similarity alone does not establish that nature possesses a structure independent of our practices. Nor does theory change show that all talk of entities is dispensable.

A modest structural realism says that knowledge is often more secure about patterns of dependence than about the ultimate nature of the relata in those patterns. That modesty matters. Structure is constrained by measurements, intervention, predictive success, and the resistance of the world to our preferences. The realist wager is that these constraints are tracking something, even if our ontologies remain revisable.

Becoming before the finished thing

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Process philosophy presses the question from another direction. In Alfred North Whitehead’s vocabulary, the basic ingredients of reality are occasions of experience and becoming rather than inert substances that merely undergo external change. A present event inherits from a past and contributes to a future. Its identity is therefore historical: what it is depends in part on how it comes to be and on what it can make possible next.

One need not accept Whitehead’s full metaphysical system to notice the force of this alternative. A person, a language, a storm, or an institution is not well captured by a snapshot. Each persists through organized activity, memory, exchange, and transformation. The thing-like noun compresses a process stable enough to track. It can mislead when it encourages us to mistake temporary organization for absolute independence.

Here “relation” includes temporal dependence, not only simultaneous contact. A seed is intelligible through a developmental history; a promise through a social practice; a cell through networks of regulation and exchange. These examples do not establish one universal metaphysics. They show that the question of what something is often cannot be separated from the question of what it is for, what made it possible, and what it can affect.

Physics without a cosmic metaphor

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Physics makes the issue both sharper and more difficult. In relational approaches to quantum mechanics, a physical state is described relative to an interaction between systems rather than as a single, observer-independent catalogue of properties waiting to be read off. The formalism tracks what one system can say about another after an interaction. This is a proposal about the interpretation of quantum theory, not a license to equate consciousness with measurement or to turn uncertainty into spiritual omnipresence.

The word “observer” is especially treacherous here. In the relevant physical usage, an observer can be a system that interacts and records a result; it need not be a human mind. Relationality therefore does not mean that reality is invented by opinion. Different systems can have different accounts relative to their interactions, while those accounts remain answerable to the theory and to constraints imposed when systems meet.

Other parts of physics also make context difficult to ignore. In general relativity, spacetime geometry is dynamic and tied to matter and energy through field equations. In gauge theories, some mathematically distinct descriptions represent the same physical situation, which encourages care about what counts as observable structure. These facts support a philosophical caution, not a single metaphysical verdict. Physics may reveal that the world is less like a collection of independently labeled objects than classical intuition suggests; it does not by itself tell us whether relations are the ultimate furniture of reality.

Realism after independence

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The natural objection is that relational language sounds subjective. If every property is “relative to” something, has the world dissolved into viewpoints? It has not, provided relationality is understood as structured dependence rather than personal projection. A traffic light’s color for a driver depends on illumination, physiology, and position, but not on a driver’s free choice. A measured quantity can be interaction-dependent while still being constrained by reproducible procedures and laws.

The same distinction matters beyond physics. A person’s role in a family, laboratory, or city is relational, but those roles are not whatever anyone declares them to be. They are stabilized by histories, expectations, institutions, bodies, and consequences. Relations can be real in a way that is neither intrinsic nor merely mental. They can fail, endure, and be discovered rather than chosen.

A relational realism would therefore keep three commitments in view. There is a world not made by description. Access to that world is always situated in interactions and practices. And what persists through those interactions can be real even when it is not independent of them. The commitments pull against one another productively: realism prevents relation from becoming anything-goes subjectivism, while relation prevents realism from imagining a view from nowhere.

A question to live with

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If relations are more fundamental than things, the point is not to replace every noun with a web or to deny the practical reality of objects. It is to revise the order of attention. Before asking what a thing is in isolation, we might ask what interactions let it persist, what information distinguishes it from alternatives, and what history gives its present form a claim to continuity. Sometimes the answer will restore a robust object. Sometimes it will reveal a process, a role, or a pattern whose boundaries are conditional but not arbitrary.

This shift has an ethical echo, though it should not be confused with a scientific result. It can make visible the dependencies hidden by individualistic descriptions: the infrastructures behind autonomy, the labor behind institutions, and the environments that sustain organisms. Such an echo is an interpretation and a possible practical consequence, not evidence for the metaphysics. Careful thinking keeps these levels distinct.

The manifesto, then, is deliberately a question. What if a thing is never less real because it is related, but more intelligible through the relations that make its identity possible? And if our best accounts always begin from somewhere, can we learn to describe a shared world without pretending that any single perspective exhausts it?

Open research directions

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Several live questions keep relational metaphysics from becoming a finished doctrine. In quantum foundations, researchers still disagree about which parts of a quantum state represent physical structure, information, or a rule for betting. Relational quantum mechanics, epistemic approaches, Everettian theories, and collapse models make different commitments while often recovering the same laboratory predictions. A useful next step is not to announce a winner from vocabulary alone, but to identify which proposed principles can produce new tests or sharper no-go results.

Parallel questions remain in the philosophy of science: how much structure survives theory change, whether dispositions can explain stable objects without reducing every property to a relation, and which dependencies are explanatory rather than merely redescriptive. The evidence supports treating objects as robust patterns and relations as constrained dependencies; it does not settle whether either category is metaphysically fundamental.

Sources & references

Supporting/contextual references, not claim-level proof.

1. Aristotle — CategoriesIn The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Princeton University Press, 1984.
2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz — MonadologyIn Philosophical Papers and Letters: A Selection, 2nd ed., translated by Leroy E. Loemker, D. Reidel, 1976.
3. Alfred North Whitehead — Process and RealityAn Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, 1978.
4. John Worrall — Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?Dialectica 43(1–2), 99–124, 1989.Publisher link
5. Carlo Rovelli — Relational Quantum MechanicsInternational Journal of Theoretical Physics 35, 1637–1678, 1996.Publisher link
6. Albert Einstein — On the Electrodynamics of Moving BodiesAnnalen der Physik 17, 891–921, 1905.Publisher link