Ontology has not been superseded as the philosophical Zeitgeist through refutation. Rather, it has been worn down by conceptual saturation and by a gradual erosion of its explanatory power in the face of phenomena that consistently overflow its classical categories.
Its persistent presence in contemporary thought should therefore not be mistaken for theoretical vitality. More often it reflects the inertia of a long intellectual tradition. Ontology still operates as the tacit grammar of philosophical inquiry. Even when philosophers claim to have moved beyond it, it quietly organizes the very questions they ask and sets the boundaries of what can be meaningfully thought.
We continue, for example, to debate modes of being, levels of reality, criteria of existence, or kinds of entities—as though the principal task of philosophy were to classify correctly what exists. Yet the more fundamental difficulty lies elsewhere: in the framework that makes such questions appear self-evident in the first place.
To think the real under the figure of the entity—that which exists in itself, endowed with its own identity and determinable independently of any constitutive relation—remains the primordial gesture of Western metaphysics, seldom thematized and only occasionally challenged (Aristotle, ca. 4th century BCE/1999).
This gesture is not merely a historical accident or a conceptual relic. It expresses a deep structural orientation within Western ontological thinking. Since Aristotle, ontology has largely been organized around the logical priority of ontological independence.
In the strong metaphysical sense, to be means not to depend constitutively upon anything else in order to be what one is. Relation, change, and temporality are consequently subordinated to this priority. Even when philosophers address them directly, they tend to appear only as secondary determinations of something that remains fundamentally identical to itself.
Change, in this framework, affects contingencies but not substance. Relations connect terms already constituted. Time functions as a neutral container in which entities that already are undergo modification. The result is a metaphysical image of reality that is essentially quiescent: becoming appears as a deviation to be controlled rather than as a constitutive dimension of the real.
The classical notion of substance expresses this architecture with particular clarity. Substance is not merely that which persists through change; it is that whose being is not in another. Its independence is not empirical but formal, and it establishes the very criterion of reality.
For this reason, classical ontology struggles to conceive becoming as an original dimension of the real. When change becomes radical, it is interpreted not as transformation but as generation and corruption: one substance ceases to be and another takes its place.
In such a framework, genuine movement never affects what truly is.
The remarkable resilience of this schema can be seen in many contemporary reformulations. The language may shift—from substance to objects, property-bearers, or basic individuals—but the underlying logic of ontological independence often remains intact.
The growing crisis of this model arises not only from internal philosophical critique but also from the increasing difficulty of accounting for phenomena that systematically challenge the primacy of substantial identity.
Modern science describes a world marked by inseparable interactions, non-linear dynamics, emergent patterns, irreversible historicity, and pervasive contextual dependence. Within such a picture, the notion of entities fully determined prior to their relations becomes increasingly difficult to sustain.
Reality appears instead as a dynamic web of co-constitutive processes. Identity does not precede relation; it emerges from it, always provisionally, as a functional stabilization within a broader field of interactions.
One of the most influential philosophical responses to this situation has been process philosophy. In the work of Alfred North Whitehead, the shift from substance to event represents a profound inversion of metaphysical priorities: there are not things that change, but processes that achieve varying degrees of stability (Whitehead, 1929/1979).
Yet even this inversion does not necessarily overcome ontology altogether. Whitehead’s “actual entities,” though conceived as events, still possess a robust ontological status that makes them the ultimate units of reality. Process, in this sense, becomes ontologized; it functionally occupies the position once held by substance.
The critique of substantialism is radical, but the demand for an ultimate foundation persists.
This tension runs through much of contemporary process philosophy. As Nicholas Rescher (1996) observes, many metaphysics of process replace being with becoming while preserving the explanatory structure of ultimate grounding.
The issue, then, is not simply which term—being or becoming—we privilege. The deeper issue is the persistence of the ontological question itself: the search for that which exists in the most fundamental sense.
Rheology proposes a different point of departure.
It does not offer a new ontology, nor even an ontology of process. Instead, it calls for a reorientation of metaphysical inquiry that abandons the primacy of the entity in favor of an investigation of reality as effective dynamism.
From a rheological perspective, reality is not composed of entities but of flows, tensions, transitions, and modulations that give rise to relative stabilizations. There are no primary terms that later enter into relations; rather, relations themselves, when stabilized, produce terms that can be provisionally identified.
Relation is therefore not an external accident but the constitutive principle of the real.
This position resonates strongly with Xavier Zubiri’s notion of respectivity, understood as the formal character of the real as such (Zubiri, 1972 and 2004). Rheology, however, radicalizes this insight by shifting emphasis from structure to structuration. Respectivity is not merely a system of co-determining features; it is an ongoing process of articulation in which the determinations themselves are transformed.
Such a dynamic perspective opens a productive dialogue with Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s critique of identity as a primary philosophical category converges with the rheological claim that identity is not a principle but an effect. Difference does not derive from identity; rather, identities emerge from differential processes that never achieve final closure (Deleuze, 1968/1995).
Rheology nonetheless avoids transforming difference into a new metaphysical absolute. It does not propose a “being of difference” or an ontology of pure becoming. Instead, it offers a careful description of differential dynamics that produce relatively stable configurations without eliminating the variability that sustains them.
Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation provides a decisive conceptual resource in this regard. For Simondon, the individual is not a primordial datum but the provisional outcome of a process of individuation that never exhausts itself in its product.
Every individual retains a pre-individual dimension that exceeds it and keeps it open to further transformation (Simondon, 1964/2005). Rheology extends this insight by treating every entity as a node of temporal coherence within a wider dynamic field.
There are no absolute individuals—only varying degrees of individuation. Identity must therefore be understood as a dynamic function of operative stabilization.
This conceptual shift also transforms our understanding of time. Time is no longer conceived as an external container in which processes occur. Rather, it becomes the very expression of real dynamism itself.
There are not processes in time; there is the temporalization of reality.
This intuition—already present in Henri Bergson’s critique of the spatialization of time (Bergson, 1907/1998)—implies a profound rethinking of causality. Cause and effect are not discrete events but differentiated moments within a continuous dynamic that modulates itself internally.
From this standpoint, emergence ceases to be an ontological puzzle. It becomes a rheological phenomenon. What emerges is not the ex nihilo appearance of new entities but the stabilization of new dynamic patterns within an ongoing field of processes.
Rheology thus offers a way to integrate complexity without fragmenting reality into ontologically heterogeneous levels. There are no irreducible strata of being—only dynamics operating at different scales, speeds, and degrees of stability, all interacting within a continuous field.
The epistemological implications are equally significant. If reality is fundamentally dynamic and relational, knowledge cannot consist in the apprehension of static essences.
To know is to intervene within the flow of the real: to introduce operative distinctions, to construct functional models, and to evaluate their capacity to integrate effectively within complex dynamics.
Truth, in this sense, is not measured by correspondence with an immutable substance. It is measured by operational coherence and explanatory fertility within historically situated contexts.
The overcoming of ontology therefore does not entail abandoning metaphysics. Rather, it calls for its transformation—its sublimation, in the deepest Jungian sense. One might equally describe this shift as a form of metanoic universalism grounded in that archetypal “textbook” of humanity: myth.
By relinquishing the entity as its fundamental category, rheology frees metaphysical reflection from a conceptual inheritance that no longer corresponds to the demands of contemporary knowledge.
Where ontology sought rest, rheology embraces movement. And here foundations were once pursued, it analyzes dynamics.
Where identities were asserted, it examines processes of individuation that remain perpetually provisional. In this quiet yet decisive displacement lies the outline of a profound transformation in contemporary metaphysics—one whose systematic elaboration remains unfinished, but whose theoretical necessity becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.
