Being as Stabilization
of Becoming

For Heidegger, the question of the meaning of being is the question that Western metaphysics deferred for centuries.¹ Behind every object we point to, every entity we name, there is an implicit ontological decision: the decision to treat what we perceive as a thing with properties, as a substance that persists through time and can be identified, bounded, and studied in itself. That decision structures Western thought so pervasively that it is rarely recognized as a decision at all. The biology of development, quantum field theory, physiology, psychiatry, and the oldest traditions of thought we possess each point — from their own distinct epistemic instruments — toward a different conclusion: what there is at every level of organization we know is process before substance, becoming before being, and what we call things are transitory stabilizations of that becoming, produced and dissolved by the becoming itself without cease.

Modern science arrived at that same structure by an unexpected path, dissolving one by one the intuitions that the mainstream of thought had considered immovable. Classical physics had built a universe of objects with definite properties: the particle has position, has velocity, has mass, is in the sense that classical physics gave to that verb. That universe was the universe of being — entities with attributes interacting according to deterministic laws, where the present state contains without remainder the future state for whoever knows the initial conditions with sufficient precision. Quantum mechanics dissolved that picture. The consequence took decades to fully assimilate: in the Copenhagen interpretation — the most influential reading of quantum mechanics — the definite state of a particle does not exist before measurement. Measurement does not reveal a pre-existing state but produces it, and what is there before any measurement is a probability distribution that expresses not the observer's ignorance but the complete description of the real.⁸⁹ That claim is ontological before it is epistemological: it says there is no prior state to know, that determination emerges from the process of interaction and precedes all observation.

Quantum field theory went further still. The quantum vacuum — the lowest energy state of a field — is not nothing, not the absence of process: it is a substrate of irreducible fluctuations where potentialities actualize and dissolve without rest, without any of them being the fundamental state of the field. What we call particles are local and transitory excitations of that field — stabilizations that emerge from fluctuations and dissolve back into the process from which they emerged. Matter is not the starting point of the physical universe: it is one of its stabilizations, the one the process produced under certain conditions and that persists while those conditions hold. The observable universe began as a phase transition in that field, a symmetry breaking that introduced a minimal difference — one part in a billion advantage of matter over antimatter. A perfectly symmetric universe would have neutralized itself in the instant of its beginning: matter and antimatter would have annihilated each other without remainder. The minimal asymmetry was the condition for anything to persist, for becoming to continue producing differences. The imperfection was not a defect of the phase transition: it was its opening toward complexity.

From that opening arose everything that exists, but not instantaneously or linearly. The first atomic nuclei — hydrogen, helium, traces of lithium — formed in the first minutes of the universe, when temperatures were high enough for protons and neutrons to fuse. The rest of the elements had to wait for the interior of stars. A star is a dynamic balance between gravity collapsing toward the center and radiation pressure pushing outward, sustained for millions of years at the cost of continuous nuclear fusion in the core. In that process, simple atoms fuse into more complex ones — carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, iron — releasing the energy that sustains the balance. When a star exhausts that fuel, the balance gives way: gravity collapses the core in a fraction of a second and the released energy disperses the outer layers into interstellar space in an explosion that for days can outshine the entire galaxy containing it. Those atoms travel. They accumulate in gas clouds. The clouds contract under their own gravity and form new stars, with planetary systems, with conditions that in at least one case — and presumably in many more — allowed chemistry to organize in ways the universe had never produced before. The carbon in every living cell was forged in the core of a star that no longer exists, and the history of that process is inscribed in the structure of the atom before any organism incorporated it. What we call matter is not the starting point of the universe: it is the sediment of its history, the stabilization becoming produced after billions of years of work.

Contemporary theoretical physics carries that argument further still. For centuries spacetime was the given stage — the neutral, immutable backdrop on which processes occur, prior to all physics and external to all dynamics. Einstein's general relativity¹⁰ modified that picture by showing that the geometry of spacetime is not fixed but curves in the presence of mass and energy, that the stage itself responds to what it contains. But even within that framework spacetime remained the substrate: deformable, yes, but prior to the processes that deform it. Theoretical physics of the last decades suggests that spacetime is not the substrate from which physics emerges but the result of more elementary processes that require neither space nor time to exist.

Mark Van Raamsdonk¹¹ argued in 2010 — drawing on the AdS/CFT correspondence that Juan Maldacena¹² had established a decade earlier — that the geometric connectivity of spacetime is a consequence of quantum entanglement among its constituent degrees of freedom. When entanglement between two regions is eliminated, the spacetime connecting them disconnects: geometry does not precede quantum relations but emerges from them. The AdS/CFT correspondence — the mathematical equivalence between a gravitational theory in a volume and a quantum theory without gravity at its boundary — implies that all the richness of spacetime geometry, including gravity, is an emergent property of something that has neither space nor time in its fundamental description. Carlo Rovelli,¹³ working within loop quantum gravity, reached the same conclusion by a different path: spacetime is not continuous but woven from relations among discrete quantum events, with no pre-existing background on which those events occur. There is no empty space waiting to be occupied: there are relations among processes, and space is the geometry those relations produce. Lee Smolin¹⁴ extended that argument toward a broader consequence: the properties of objects are not intrinsic but relational, emerging from interactions rather than preceding them — there are no properties without process, no geometry without relation. These results are formally valid in the context of anti-de Sitter spaces; their application to the observable universe — whose cosmological constant is positive — remains undemonstrated.

These proposals are speculative in the technical sense: they have robust mathematical support but still lack direct experimental confirmation. What they offer is not an established fact but the direction toward which contemporary theoretical physics points, and that direction demands naming something: not only is matter a transitory stabilization of becoming, but the very space in which that matter moves is an emergent stabilization. Becoming does not occur in spacetime — spacetime occurs in becoming. Process ontology is not a claim about what happens inside the universe: it is a claim about what the universe is before there is an 'inside'.

That the physical universe is process before substance is a consequence of physics. That the living is process before substance required an additional step that biology was slow to take, trapped for decades in a metaphor that was not neutral: the metaphor of the program. DNA as a program specifying the organism, the genome as a blueprint containing the information needed to build the final form — that metaphor made inheritance intelligible but carried an enormous ontological cost, implying that form pre-exists process in some sense, that the adult organism is contained in the zygote as coded instruction ready to execute. Alan Turing²³ published in 1952 a mathematical analysis that undermined that metaphor from its foundations. Turing asked how an initially homogeneous system — a mass of cells with no perceptible differences among them — produces stable, reproducible spatial patterns without those patterns being encoded in any component of the system. The answer was that two substances diffusing at different speeds and reacting with each other according to simple local rules are sufficient to spontaneously break homogeneity and generate periodic structures: stripes, spots, gradients, complex geometries that emerge from the interaction dynamics and from no prior instruction. The mechanism requires only that the conditions of reaction and diffusion cross certain thresholds, and symmetry breaking does the rest. Alfred Gierer and Hans Meinhardt²⁴ formalized that mechanism in 1972 with the rigor needed to derive experimental predictions: local activation, long-range inhibition, two coupled processes whose ratio of speeds and ranges determines what geometry emerges from the initial disequilibrium. The same pair of equations describes the pigmentation of the pufferfish skin, the distribution of hair follicles, the branching of mammary ducts during development, the formation of digits in the vertebrate limb — structures that share a dynamic mechanism whose geometric consequences are independent of the material implementing it. Form resides in the dynamics, and dynamics is process before structure.

D'Arcy Thompson had reached the same conclusion half a century earlier from physics and geometry. In On Growth and Form (1917)²⁵ he argued that the forms of organisms are the result of physical forces acting on materials with specific mechanical properties: the jellyfish has the form it has because that is the equilibrium form of an elastic membrane under the forces acting on it in water, the nautilus shell grows according to a logarithmic spiral because it is the only geometry that allows growth without change of shape, trabecular bone organizes along the lines of tension and compression acting on it during the organism's life. Biology sought causes in evolutionary history and inheritance when it should also have sought causes in the process acting now, on that material, under those physical conditions — not as an alternative to evolution but as the dimension of process that evolution iteratively modifies without fixing entirely. Conrad Waddington¹⁹ gave that idea formal rigor: the epigenetic landscape, the image of a surface with valleys and bifurcations through which development navigates, is the model of how a process with its own geometry channels possible trajectories without exhausting any of them. The creoda — the preferred path, the deepest valley — is the trajectory the process takes when conditions are usual, from which it can deviate when perturbation exceeds the threshold, to return to the same valley or find another. The genome modulates the parameters of the dynamic process producing form — makes some valleys deeper, others more accessible, tilts the landscape in certain directions — and developmental conditions determine what trajectory the process follows in that landscape.

Scott Gilbert, working in evolutionary developmental biology — the field known as evo-devo — showed that the genes controlling development are preserved with notable fidelity across lineages that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago: the same gene Pax6 controls eye formation in the fly and in the vertebrate²⁶²⁷, though the eyes of both are anatomically irreducible to each other. What evolution modified was not the gene but when and where it is expressed, in what cellular context it acts, with what other processes it interacts. Form is the result of regulating the developmental process, and evolution operates mainly on that regulation — on the when and where — rather than on the components themselves. Mary Jane West-Eberhard²⁸ formulated this with the concept of phenotypic plasticity: the same genotype produces profoundly different phenotypes depending on developmental conditions, which inverts the usual causal direction. Form is not determined by the gene — the developmental process produces form from what the gene makes possible, and that production depends on conditions the gene does not control. Form is always the result of the interaction between the available repertoire and the conditions that determine which part of that repertoire is deployed, and both are process before structure. The living, from this reading, is the process that maintains itself by producing the conditions of its own continuation — an active stabilization of becoming that requires continuous work and transforms when conditions demand it.

Psychiatry and psychology built their central models between the late nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, in the same period in which classical physics was yielding to quantum mechanics and biology was beginning to discover that form emerges from process. Thinking about the human psyche remained for decades anchored in an ontology of structures, instances, and states — a vocabulary that captured something real but captured it as though it were substance when it was process. Seen from today, several central authors of that tradition had the intuition of becoming and found in their own conceptual instruments the limits of that formalization.

Sigmund Freud³³ was the one who carried with greatest systematicity the idea that what determines psychic life is the history that produced the present state. The symptom is the stabilization of something that occurred earlier — the form the process took when conditions demanded it and that persists though conditions have changed. The drive — Trieb — is a continuous pressure, a process that does not rest and that seeks satisfaction without ever finding it definitively. The psychic apparatus is at every moment the sediment of its own experiences: what the subject is now is inseparable from what the process has had to do until now to continue. That intuition is process ontology in its pure state. The conceptual instrument available was, by contrast, that of nineteenth-century physics: energies that accumulate in structures that contain them and discharge when pressure exceeds the threshold. The metaphor was hydraulic — substances flowing between vessels — and that metaphor imposed its logic on the intuition: the unconscious became a place, repression became a force pushing contents from one compartment to another, the ego became an instance with boundaries. The intuition of process was formalized with the vocabulary of substance, and that tension was never resolved in Freud's work.

Carl Gustav Jung³⁴ carried that tension to its most visible point: he developed simultaneously two ideas belonging to opposing ontologies. Individuation — the process of becoming what one is, a becoming that unfolds across an entire life without a predefined final state — is process ontology carried into psychic development: the psyche produces itself in the course of its own history, becomes what it becomes through what it traverses. The collective unconscious, by contrast, rests on a radically different ontology: archetypes are universal and eternal structures that pre-exist the individual and that the individual process merely actualizes — forms that becoming recognizes but does not produce. The two ideas coexist in Jung without resolution, and that coexistence points to something he felt without being able to fully articulate: the ontological decision between being and becoming has concrete and irreducible clinical consequences. If the collective unconscious is fixed structure, the clinic is recognition of archetypes that were already there; if the psyche is a process of individuation, the clinic is accompaniment of a becoming whose destination is open.

Jean Piaget³⁵ found in cognitive development the same dynamics that Turing,²³ Gierer-Meinhardt²⁴ and Waddington¹⁹ had found in morphogenesis and embryonic development. The child constructs the world through the interaction between current schemas and the perturbations the environment produces: assimilation incorporates the new into available schemas, accommodation modifies schemas when perturbation overwhelms them. Knowledge is the process, and the process continuously modifies the conditions of its own advance — the schemas the process produces are the conditions of the next process, the landscape changes with the journey. Intelligence becomes in the act of constructing its relationship with the world, and that construction never ends because the world the process produces always exceeds the schemas with which it was constructed.

Winnicott³⁶ saw that the process of self-constitution occurs in the space between the child and whoever holds it. The self that emerges carries inscribed within it the history of how that space was held or failed. Pathology is a configuration the process adopted when the environment could not sustain its unfolding: a stabilization that was the viable response in that moment and that persists as the only form available when the conditions of holding were insufficient.

Sullivan³⁷ radicalized that same intuition from interpersonal psychiatry: personality is a recurrent pattern that emerges in interaction with others and can only be observed and understood in that relational context. Character, traits, dispositions are regularities of the interactional process, forms that becoming takes in certain relational contexts and that reorganize when those contexts change. The psychic process is from the beginning a process between — between organisms, between histories, between becomings that mutually modify each other — and the unit of analysis that takes the isolated individual loses exactly what it needs to see.

Binswanger³⁸ and Minkowski³⁹ arrived from phenomenological psychiatry at the dimension all previous approaches had brushed without naming directly: temporality as the constitutive structure of psychic experience. Binswanger showed that the various forms of psychopathology are above all modifications of the temporal structure of existence — melancholy is time stopped, mania is time accelerated to the point of losing continuity, schizophrenia is the fragmentation of the temporality that makes it possible for experience to have narrative coherence. Minkowski described the élan vital — the vital impulse toward the future — as the constitutive dimension of healthy experience, and its loss as the core of the schizophrenic experience: the inability to inhabit time as a process open toward what comes, the collapse of becoming into a present without horizon. Pathology from that reading is a pathology of becoming before it is a pathology of state: an alteration in the way the temporal process unfolds, stops, fragments, or closes in on itself.

What these authors share across conceptual frameworks so different from one another is the recognition that psychic life is process before structure, history before state, becoming before being. Freud was trapped in the hydraulic metaphor, Jung in the unresolved tension between individuation and archetype, Piaget in the epistemic individual without relational history or bodily anchorage, Winnicott and Sullivan in clinical descriptions of high penetration without mathematical formalization, Binswanger and Minkowski in a phenomenology that described with precision what it could not measure. The intuition was present from the beginning. The instrument to formalize it came later.