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# The Philosophy Behind Taking Connectedness Seriously
- URL: https://www.msobocinski.org/the-philosophy-behind-taking-connectedness-seriously/
- Published: 2026-08-22T14:00:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-22T14:00:58.000Z
- Description: Before something is one thing or many things, what is it? A deep dive into Aristotle, Whitehead, and Buber on potential, relation, and becoming.
- Author: Michael Sobocinski
- Tags: interconnectedness, philosophy, process philosophy, Ideas, Martin Buber, Aristotle, Whitehead

*Before something is one thing or many things, what is it? A deep dive into Aristotle, Whitehead, and Buber on potential, relation, and becoming.*

If you read the first piece in this series, you know where it started: sitting inside with the windows shut because the air outside wasn't safe to breathe, watching a war grind on and a democracy fray, and feeling like these were symptoms of one thing rather than four unrelated emergencies. That piece made a claim and moved on, on purpose — connectedness isn't a value we choose; it's a fact about what's real. This piece is where I try to hold that claim up to the light.

Fair warning: this one goes more slowly and further back — all the way to Aristotle. If the first post was the diagnosis, this is where I show my work.

## The Question Underneath the Question

Here's what kept nagging me while writing the first piece. I wanted to say something like "there's a potential that becomes unity or multiplicity depending on how it's encountered" — but I kept catching myself reaching for physics to make that sound rigorous (energy, mass-energy equivalence, quantum talk). Every time I did, a sharper voice in my head asked: what gives physics final authority over what's ontologically basic? Why should measurability be the ultimate test of what's real?

That's a fair question, and it deserves a real answer rather than a workaround. Instead of borrowing physics' prestige, I looked for where philosophy itself has addressed this exact problem: what is something before it's determinately one thing or many? Three answers turned out to matter, from three very different centuries, and none of them were built to agree with each other. That disagreement is where the real insight lives.

## Aristotle's Old Word for "Not Yet"

Start about 2,400 years ago. Aristotle distinguished dynamis — potency, capacity, what something can become — and energeia — actuality, being-at-work, what something is actually doing. An acorn has the dynamis to become an oak; it becomes an oak only through energeia — the actual process of growing, given soil, water, and time.

The interesting question, the one philosophers still debate, is what that potency is before it's actualized. One reading — a real, contested position in the literature, not settled consensus — holds that a capacity like this has no hidden, already-determinate content. It's not a tiny oak folded up inside the acorn, waiting to be found. It's genuinely open and becomes determinate only in the process of becoming actual. Other serious philosophers push back hard on this, arguing that Aristotle's capacities are more robust than that even before they act — that a capacity is already a definite thing, just not yet exercised.

I don't think anyone will fully resolve this dispute, including me. But the first reading is the one that matches what I was reaching for with "energy": something that's real, not nothing, but not yet sorted into a determinate shape — not one thing, not many things, just not yet decided.

## Whitehead's Answer: Neither One Nor Many, But Prior to Both

Jump about 2,300 years forward. Alfred North Whitehead built an entire metaphysics — process philosophy — around the idea that reality isn't made of static things that occasionally relate to each other. It's made of events of becoming, each arising from its relation to everything that came before it. His most quotable line captures the whole thing in one breath: reality unfolds as the many become one, and are increased by one.

What I find most useful about Whitehead isn't any single doctrine — it's where he places "creativity" in his system. For Whitehead, creativity isn't a property some things have and others don't. It's the ultimate category, prior to any individual thing, even to the distinction between "one" and "many." It's not a unified substance that later differentiates (that would just relocate the problem, not solve it), nor is it a bare plurality with nothing holding it together. It's the condition under which unity and multiplicity both become possible.

That's close — very close — to what I was trying to say by reaching for "energy." Creativity, in Whitehead's sense, is neither one nor many. It's what one and many come from.

## Where I Have to Stop Myself From Overclaiming

Here's the honest complication, and it matters enough that I want to slow down for it rather than rush past. It would be tempting to say Whitehead's creativity is just Aristotle's potency, updated for the twentieth century — same insight, later vocabulary. That's not quite true, and saying so would be the kind of comforting oversimplification I try to catch myself making.

Aristotle's dynamis always belongs to something — a particular acorn's capacity to become a particular oak. It's the potency of a substance. Whitehead's creativity is deliberately not that. It isn't the potency of any particular thing; it belongs to no substance at all. It's the impersonal, universal condition underlying the becoming of everything there is. One serious scholar has argued that Whitehead's system and Aristotle's are ultimately unreconcilable, despite sharing much vocabulary about activity and becoming.

My understanding is that Whitehead's creativity is a radical generalization of Aristotle's potency — potency cut loose from any particular substance and made into the ground of becoming itself — not a straight continuation of the same idea. That's a real difference, not a technicality, and I'd rather name it than smooth it into a tidier story than the actual philosophy supports.

## Buber's Between, and a Critique Worth Keeping

The third piece is closer to home for readers of this blog: Martin Buber. You already know his basic move — the world isn't one thing encountered two ways; it's two entirely different worlds, the I-It world of objects and the I-Thou world of genuine meeting. What I want to add here is a sharper reading of Buber's key term, the Between (das Zwischen) — the space, if you can even call it that, where an I and a Thou meet.

The philosopher Michael Theunissen wrote the essay that's still considered the classic treatment of this, and his reading is more interesting than a simple gloss would suggest. Theunissen argues Buber intends something radical: the Between isn't a bridge connecting two people who already, separately, fully exist. It's the very reality in and through which the I and the Thou become what they are. Not two shores and a bridge — the condition under which there are shores at all.

But Theunissen doesn't stop here. His essay's title is "Buber's negative ontology of the Between" — and his real argument is that Buber never quite delivers positive philosophical content about what the Between actually is. Buber can tell you everything the Between is not — not subject, not object, not something occurring in space and time — but Theunissen argues that the positive characterization never fully arrives. It's an ontology built entirely out of negations.

I want to sit with that critique for a moment, because I think it's right and because it changes what kind of claim I can honestly make. Buber's Between, taken alone, doesn't give me solid ground to stand on. What gives it ground — what I think actually answers Theunissen's challenge, even though Theunissen wasn't in conversation with either of these — is that Aristotle's potency and Whitehead's creativity are independently reaching toward something with the same shape, from completely different starting points and across completely different centuries. One critique, on its own, is a real problem. Three independent lines of thought converging on the same structure is something else.

## Why Convergence Is the Actual Argument, Not Proof

I want to be precise about the claim I'm making, because it's easy to overclaim without noticing. I am not saying Aristotle proves Whitehead, that Whitehead confirms Buber, or that all three are secretly saying the same thing in different words. They aren't. Aristotle's potency belongs to a substance; Whitehead's explicitly doesn't. Buber's Between is a phenomenology of encounter; Whitehead's actual occasions constitute a full metaphysical system; Aristotle predates the whole modern relational-versus-substance debate by two thousand years. These are genuinely different projects, and I'd be doing exactly what I criticized in the first post — borrowing authority I haven't earned — if I flattened them into agreement for the sake of a cleaner paragraph.

Here's what I can say instead: three thinkers, working in isolation from one another across twenty-four centuries, independently arrived at some version of the same structure — a reality that is neither simply one nor simply many prior to encounter, becoming determinate only through relation. That's not proof. It's convergence, and convergence from independent directions is genuinely interesting evidence, even if it isn't a demonstration.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because I think intellectual honesty requires it: as far as I can tell, nobody has actually built the specific bridge I'm suggesting here — connecting Aristotle's potency and Whitehead's creativity to Buber's Between, and linking all three to the developmental psychology (Basseches) and neurobiology (Siegel) this blog and the book behind it draw on elsewhere. That combination appears to be mine, not something I'm reporting from settled scholarship. I want you to know that distinction, because it changes how much weight the claim should carry. This isn't a discovery. It's a synthesis, offered for what it's worth and open to being wrong.

## My Take

Once all the qualifications are laid out, I think "potential" — read as Aristotle's genuinely open dynamis, Whitehead's substance-free creativity, or the wordless something Buber's Between gestures toward without ever fully naming — is a better answer to "what is real, underneath the four crises I named in the first post" than either pure unity or pure multiplicity. Not because any one philosopher proves it, but because when three people, centuries apart and working on totally different problems, each bump into the same shape, that shape is probably worth taking seriously.

And here's why it isn't just an abstraction but something with serious implications for daily life: if what's real, beneath everything, is potential-for-relation rather than separate things that occasionally touch, then separateness was never the ground floor. It was always one possibility among many, not the foundation. That's the philosophical spine behind the plainer claim I made in the first post. The crises aren't separate because reality was never built from separate pieces to begin with.

## Go Deeper

- **Process and Reality** by Alfred North Whitehead — the source of "the many become one, and are increased by one"; genuinely difficult, but the difficulty is part of the point.
- **"All Real Living Is Meeting"** (Aeon) — a shorter, well-regarded on-ramp to Buber's I-Thou before tackling the book itself.
- **I and Thou** by Martin Buber — short, strange, and worth reading slowly; this piece only scratches the surface of what the Between means for Buber.
- **The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber** by Michael Theunissen — the fuller treatment behind the critique discussed above; fair warning, it's a dense academic text and genuinely hard to track down (I spent real effort trying).

## References

- Anna Marmodoro, "Potentiality in Aristotle's Metaphysics," in *Handbook of Potentiality*, ed. Kristina Engelhard and Michael Quante (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018), 15–43 — the "pure power" reading of Aristotelian potency drawn on here.
- Charlotte Witt, *Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) — the contrary, more realist reading of Aristotelian capacities, acknowledged as a live alternative rather than used as this piece's primary reading.
- Jonathan Beere, *Doing and Being: An Interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics Theta* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) — a second source for that same realist counter-reading.
- Alfred North Whitehead, *Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology*, corrected ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978 \[1929\]) — source of the "many become one" formula and the category of creativity; specific page not pinpointed here, flagged for follow-up verification.
- Ross L. Stein, "A Metaphysical Analysis of Chemical Change: Toward a Reconciliation of Whiteheadian Process Metaphysics and Aristotelian-Scholastic Substance Metaphysics," *Process Studies* (2024) — source for the "unreconcilable" critique.
- David L. Schindler, "Creativity as Ultimate: Reflections on Actuality in Whitehead, Aristotle, and Aquinas," *International Philosophical Quarterly* 13 (1973): 161–71 — comparative treatment of Aristotle and Whitehead on creativity/actuality.
- Michael Theunissen, "Bubers negative Ontologie des Zwischen," *Philosophisches Jahrbuch* 71, no. 2 (1964): 319–330 — the essay this piece's Buber section draws on directly, read via a full translation of the original.
- Martin Buber, *I and Thou*, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937) — general grounding for the I-Thou/I-It framework; no direct quotation used.

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*This is the second piece in a short series on taking connectedness seriously as ontology, not just sentiment. The first, ["It's Time to Take Connectedness (Ontologically) Seriously,"](https://www.msobocinski.org/) makes the case in plainer terms. A third piece, on why this gets culturally resisted, is still to come.*