Relational Thinking in the History of Philosophy: From Leibniz to Whitehead

The idea that reality is constituted by relations rather than things is not new. Long before quantum entanglement or curved spacetime, philosophers challenged the notion that the universe is built from self-contained substances. In this post, we trace key milestones in the philosophical lineage of relational ontology—and show how they anticipate modern problems in physics.

---

1. Leibniz: No Substance Without Relation

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) rejected Newton’s notion of absolute space and time. In his metaphysics:

• Monads (the fundamental units of reality) do not interact through causal collisions.

• Instead, each monad expresses a relational perspective on the entire universe.

• Space and time are not containers, but orders of relations among phenomena.

“Space is nothing else but an order of co-existences, and time an order of successions.”

Leibniz’s view foreshadows both relational spacetime and observer-dependent descriptions in modern physics.

---

2. Hegel and the Logic of Relation

G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831) saw being and becoming as mutually entangled:

• Identity is not self-sufficient; it is constituted through dialectical relations with what it is not.

• Reality is a process of self-differentiation, not a collection of stable essences.

• Even logical categories (e.g. quality, quantity, measure) are internally dynamic and relationally defined.

This emphasis on relational unfolding parallels the relational field view of quantum systems evolving under constraint.

---

3. Whitehead: The World as Process

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) offered the most explicit metaphysical system grounded in relation:

• Reality consists not of substances but of occasions of experience—momentary events of becoming.

• Each occasion inherits from prior ones and contributes to future ones: a relational lineage.

• Objects are abstractions from processes, not foundational units.

Whitehead’s process philosophy dissolves the substance/event dualism and resonates deeply with quantum ontology, especially in interpretations that stress contextual emergence and temporal becoming.

---

4. Relational Threads in Eastern Philosophy

It’s also worth noting that Buddhist and Daoist traditions emphasise:

• Dependent origination: nothing exists independently; all things co-arise through conditions.

• Emptiness: entities are empty of inherent self-nature, defined instead by their relations.

• Flux and impermanence: stability is provisional, not ultimate.

These traditions offer conceptual resources for moving beyond entity-based metaphysics and cultivating a fluid, systemic view of reality.

---

Closing

The philosophical groundwork for relational ontology is rich and diverse. Rather than a recent innovation, it represents a long-standing countercurrent to Western substance thinking—one that modern physics increasingly corroborates, even if it has yet to embrace it fully.

In the next post, we’ll turn to models—and ask: What does it mean to model a relational world? Can mathematical systems and simulations capture processes without reintroducing entities?