Otters, urchins, kelp: remove one and it is not the same forest with a gap.
Relationality
That things are constituted by their relations rather than possessing their natures independently and then entering into them.
- Theme
- Being and reality
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- c. 150
In plain terms
The default picture is that things exist first and get related afterwards. There are people, and then there are friendships; there are organisms, and then there are ecosystems.
Relationality reverses the order. On this view what something is, is already a matter of how it stands to other things - and taking it out of those relations does not isolate it for inspection, it changes what it is. A word out of a language is not a word. A parent with no child is not a parent.
The claim is easy to state and hard to hold consistently, because most of our vocabulary is built the other way. It is not the modest observation that everything is connected. It is that connection goes all the way down and there is no independently constituted thing beneath it.
As a philosopher would put it
Formally the issue is whether relations are internal or external. An external relation leaves its terms unchanged; an internal relation is one a term could not lack without ceasing to be what it is. Relational ontologies hold that the fundamental relations are internal.
Nāgārjuna's argument is the most rigorous ancient statement: dependent origination entails the absence of svabhāva, since what arises through conditions has no nature of its own, and this is pressed through motion, causation, the self and every category the opponent offers.
Whitehead's process metaphysics makes prehension - the taking-account of other occasions - constitutive of what an actual occasion is. Ubuntu philosophy makes personhood relational: a person is a person through other persons, which is a claim about what a person is and not advice about being sociable. Feminist care ethics and the ecological sciences arrive at similar structures from their own directions, and Hegel's dialectic of recognition supplies the European version, in which self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged by another.
Where you meet it
Sea otters were hunted to near-extinction along the North Pacific coast by the early twentieth century. Where they disappeared, sea urchin populations rose, the urchins grazed out the kelp, and the kelp forests were replaced by barren rock - a change visible from the air and stable for decades.
Where otters returned, the sequence reversed. The kelp came back, and with it the fish, the invertebrates and the carbon the forest holds. James Estes and John Palmisano documented the contrast in 1974 by comparing islands with otters to islands without.
What the case shows is not that things affect each other, which nobody doubted. It is that the kelp forest is not a place that happens to contain otters. Remove them and there is no kelp forest with a gap in it; there is a different system. The otter is not an inhabitant of the forest. It is part of what makes the forest that.
What is actually disputed
Whether relations can be fundamental.
The standard objection is that relations require terms: if a is constituted by its relation to b, and b likewise by a, nothing has been constituted at all and the account is circular. Something must be there to be related, and a structure with no things in it is not a structure.
The reply, in both the Madhyamaka and the process versions, is that this assumes precisely what is at issue - that constitution must bottom out in something independent - and that the demand is a habit of grammar rather than a finding. Structural realism in the philosophy of science has arrived at the same impasse independently: physics increasingly describes relations without describing relata, and whether that means the relata are unknown or that there are none is exactly the open question.
Commonly confused with
- everything is connected That is a claim about causal reach and nobody disputes it. This is a claim about constitution - that the relations make the things, not merely reach them.
- social construction Social construction is about categories and institutions. Relational ontology is a claim about what anything is, otters and electrons included.
Defined against
Philosophers
- Nagarjuna Dependent origination, argued through every category
- Alfred North Whitehead Prehension as constitutive of what an occasion is
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Self-consciousness as existing only in recognition
- Achille Mbembe Relational personhood in African political thought
- Vasubandhu The Yogācāra route to the same denial of independent things
Works
- Mulamadhyamakakarika The most rigorous ancient statement
- The Phenomenology of Spirit Recognition, and the self that requires another
- African Religions and Philosophy Personhood as constituted by community
- Bantu Philosophy The text that opened the argument, and drew the criticism
- In a Different Voice Relationship as the moral starting point rather than the rule
Schools
- Madhyamaka Buddhism Where the position is argued in most detail
- Process Philosophy The twentieth-century metaphysics of it
- Ubuntu Philosophy Personhood through other persons
- Yogacara Buddhism The same denial reached differently
- Akan Moral Philosophy An African relational account of the person
Related concepts
Dependent origination c. 450 BC · Śūnyatā c. 150 · Substance c. 330 BC · Ubuntu 1969 · Intersubjectivity 1913
Nāgārjuna gives the position its most rigorous ancient form around 150 CE; the term itself is modern and enters English philosophy through African, feminist and process writing in the twentieth century.