If you read the first part of this series, you know it began with me sitting indoors, windows closed because the air outside was unsafe, watching a war continue and democracy weaken. It felt like these were all signs of one bigger problem, not just separate crises. That first piece made the claim without stopping to defend it. Connectedness isn't just a value we pick; it's a fact about reality.

This piece takes a slower look at that claim, and it goes further back, starting with Aristotle. If the first post was the diagnosis, this is where I make the case.

The Question Underneath the Question

While writing the first piece, I kept coming back to a question. I wanted to say, "there's a potential that becomes unity or multiplicity depending on how it's encountered," and I kept reaching for physics to make that sound rigorous: energy, mass-energy equivalence, quantum talk. Each time, I wondered why physics should have the final say about what's most basic in reality. Why should something have to be measurable to be considered real?

That's a fair question, and it deserves a real answer. So instead of borrowing physics' prestige, I looked at how philosophy has tackled the problem: what is something before it settles into being one thing or many? Three answers turned out to matter: one from ancient Greece, and two from the early twentieth century, written within a few years of each other. They don't agree with each other, and the places where they disagree turned out to teach me the most.

An Acorn, and What It Already Has

Aristotle draws a distinction between being something potentially and being it actually. In Charlotte Witt's account of Metaphysics Book IX, potentiality stands to actuality "as an ability is to its active exercise, and as an incomplete substance is to a complete substance." Think of an acorn. It is potentially an oak; it becomes one only by growing, given soil, water, and time.

On Witt's reading, an unused power is still real. Aristotle defended exactly that against the Megarians, who, as he describes them, held that a power exists only while it is being exercised. And, in her words, "what it is possible for a substance to do in the future is anchored in its present powers." The potential is not floating free. It is the potential of something.

Two more points from Witt matter for what follows. The first is about matter. Aristotle, as Witt quotes him, says that "matter is potentially because it can come into the form." For a living thing, the growing thing itself plays that role: the developing substance "counts as matter in relation to the complete, or mature, substance." On that reading, the acorn counts as the oak's matter. The second point is that potential, for Aristotle, never stands alone. Witt puts it plainly: "every dunamis is or exists for the sake of an actuality." And actuality comes first: for Aristotle, "actuality is prior to potentiality in time, in definition, and in being."

Keep both points in mind. Whitehead is about to go back to Aristotle's matter.

Whitehead's Three Ultimate Words

Alfred North Whitehead published Process and Reality in 1929, and it builds a whole metaphysics on events of becoming rather than on things. At the foundation of it all is what he calls the Category of the Ultimate, and he lists three notions together there: "creativity," "many," and "one." He ties them to each other: "The term 'many' presupposes the term 'one,' and the term 'one' presupposes the term 'many,'" and creativity is "that ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively." A few lines on comes the line the whole book seems built to say: "The many become one, and are increased by one."

Two sentences later comes the one I find most useful. Whitehead says this Category of the Ultimate "replaces Aristotle's category of 'primary substance.'" He is not throwing Aristotle out, as we'll see in a moment. But here he takes the seat Aristotle gave to individual things and hands it to a process.

So what is creativity if it isn't a thing? Whitehead is very clear on this point: it is not actual in itself. It is only actual in its instances, and "apart from these accidents is devoid of actuality." Then he goes back to Aristotle, and to the very thing Witt says carries potential. "'Creativity' is another rendering of the Aristotelian 'matter,' and of the modern 'neutral stuff,'" he writes. It "is without a character of its own in exactly the same sense in which the Aristotelian 'matter' is without a character of its own." It "cannot be characterized, because all characters are more special than itself."

That is close to what I was reaching for with "energy": something real, and not nothing, that has not yet taken any particular shape.

Where I Have to Stop Myself From Overclaiming

Here's the real difficulty. It would be easy to say that Whitehead's creativity simply is Aristotle's potential in newer vocabulary. Whitehead himself invites the comparison, since he names Aristotle's matter. But his own wording shows three places where the two part ways.

First, he changes what matter is like. Creativity "is divested of the notion of passive receptivity"; it is "the pure notion of the activity." Aristotle's matter waits to receive a form. Whitehead's creativity is the activity itself.

Second, he mostly keeps the word "potential" for other things. The eternal objects, which he also calls "Forms of Definiteness," are "the pure potentials of the universe."

Third, on where potential lives, he sides with Aristotle. "The general Aristotelian principle is maintained," he writes, "that, apart from things that are actual, there is nothing." Potentiality, too, "must be somewhere," and for Whitehead somewhere means some actual entity. What he replaces is Aristotle's ultimate category, primary substance, not Aristotle's view that potential belongs to what is actual.

The larger systems may not fit together either. Ross Stein compares Whitehead's process metaphysics with the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition of substance metaphysics, testing both against the concrete case of chemical change. He concludes that they "have fundamental metaphysical differences that do not permit a reconciliation." He grants that both "describe nature as dynamical and relational." And rather than leave it there, he ends by asking for a new way to speak about what is real, "not as substances or processes, but a way that subsumes both." I find that more honest than pretending one system can absorb the other.

A Philosophy Built Out of Negations

The third answer is familiar to readers of this blog: Martin Buber. I and Thou opens with this line: "To man the world is twofold, in accordance with his twofold attitude." Michael Theunissen draws the first lesson from that opening: for Buber, Thou and It "are not separate regions of being." Anything can be Thou and anything can be It, though not both at once. Theunissen adds that this is only where the book starts. As it goes on, Theunissen argues, Buber does set a world of Thou over against a world of It.

The term I want to look at more closely is the Between (das Zwischen), the place, if place is even the word, where an I and a Thou meet. Theunissen's 1964 essay, "Buber's Negative Ontology of the Between," examines it closely. The Between, he writes, is nothing in the I, nothing in its act, and nothing in its object. In a phrase he takes from Buber, it is meant to be "the primordially simple fact of the encounter." That fact is not put together from what the partners are or do; it first lets the partners emerge from it. In my own terms: not two shores joined by a bridge, but the condition under which there are shores at all.

Then Theunissen turns. Buber, too, he argues, "arrives only at a negative ontology of the Between." Part of the reason is that Buber describes the I-Thou almost entirely by contrasting it with the I-It. But above all, Theunissen says, Buber's path starts from a model that fits only the I-It, the model of a subject aiming at an object, and the path itself consists mainly in taking that model apart. So the Between is reached by saying what it is not: not inside anyone's subjectivity, not an object. The Thou it opens onto is not slotted into the order of space and time.

Buber does give the Between positive names. Theunissen notes that he calls it reality itself, or "Being" itself, and that this naming is what makes his philosophy an ontology of the Between at all. But that ontology, Theunissen argues, "remains negative, because it can show being only by annihilating what it is not." Buber's thought then moves on to what Theunissen calls a quasi-theology of the Between. There the negativity both peaks, as thought breaks out of concepts into images, and is lifted, as Buber speaks directly out of faith. Even then, Theunissen says, the positivity is theology's, not ontology's.

I think that critique is right, and it does change what I can honestly claim. The sentence just before it in the essay softens it, though, and I don't want to skip past it. Theunissen says that grasping this simple fact "has, one may say without exaggeration, nowhere really been achieved to this day," and that it remains an open question whether the failure belongs to philosophers or marks "a limit of philosophy in principle."

What the Three Share, and What They Don't

I want to be precise about the claim I'm making, because it's easy to overstate it without realizing that you are doing so. These are not three independent witnesses who happened to agree. Whitehead wrote with Aristotle in view, naming him as he went, and set out to replace Aristotle's central category. He ties creativity to Aristotle's matter but strips it of passivity, and he keeps the word "potential" for something else. Buber's Between comes from an account of encounter that, Theunissen says, begins in an experience of faith; Whitehead's creativity comes from a full cosmology. Flattening them into one message would do exactly what I criticized in the first post: borrowing authority I haven't earned.

Here is what I can say. Take Whitehead's sentence about creativity and place it alongside Theunissen's assessment of Buber. Whitehead says creativity "cannot be characterized, because all characters are more special than itself." Theunissen says Buber's ontology can show the Between only by negating what it is not. Their reasons differ. For Whitehead, creativity escapes description because it is more general than any description. For Theunissen, Buber's account stays negative mainly because Buber starts from the I-It model and has to dismantle it. My reading, and it is mine, is that the two difficulties may still point to one thing. If what's most basic is something not yet sorted into any particular shape, then every positive description will be too specific for it, and negation may be the most accurate language available. On that reading, Buber's negative ontology isn't only a gap in his argument. It may be part of what you'd expect if you were trying to describe the ground of relation from within it.

That's not proof. It's a convergence I find worth taking seriously, and I'm presenting it as a synthesis rather than as a finding.

One more thing worth saying plainly. Whitehead himself links creativity to Aristotle's matter. And Buber and Whitehead have been read together before, in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, a 1967 volume to which Buber wrote replies. There the philosopher Charles Hartshorne wrote that "Buber has no metaphysics; Buber is one of the greatest of metaphysicians," and found the same thoughts "also in Whitehead." He granted that "it is my own doctrines which I have succeeded in reading into Buber." Buber turned the reading down: "The metaphysics that he presents me as my own I cannot acknowledge." In the same volume, Maurice Friedman argued that because the philosophy of dialogue will not fit God into any conceptual system, it "precludes, therefore, even the most creative and organic of process philosophies." So this is contested ground, and Buber himself stood on one side of it.

What I haven't found is anyone who brings Buber's Between into the pairing of creativity and matter in this way, and then links all three to the developmental psychology (Basseches) and neurobiology (Siegel) this blog and the book behind it draw on elsewhere. As far as I can tell, the combination is mine, not something I'm reporting from settled scholarship. That should change how much weight you give it. It's open to being wrong.

My Take

The question I started with was what reality is before it settles into one thing or many. My answer is something like potential: something real that hasn't yet taken any particular shape. The closest thing Whitehead offers is creativity, which he says is "without a character of its own." He mostly keeps the word "potential" for other things, though he does describe creativity, taken in one abstraction, as "boundless, abstract possibility." It is also close to what Buber was reaching for with the Between, which, as Theunissen argues, Buber's philosophy could show only by saying what it isn't. Neither of them proves my answer. But a philosopher building a cosmology and a philosopher describing the meeting of I and Thou each reached something that resists positive description: by Whitehead's own account in one case, and by Theunissen's reading in the other. Their reasons differ, and I think the resemblance is still worth noticing.

Here's why it matters outside a philosophy seminar. 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 possible shape among many. That's the philosophical spine behind the plainer claim 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, and the short Category of the Ultimate section in Part I is the place to start.
  • I and Thou by Martin Buber, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith: 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: a book-length study of social ontology with a long treatment of Buber; a dense academic text.

References

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner Classics, 2000.

Schilpp, Paul Arthur, and Maurice Friedman, eds. The Philosophy of Martin Buber. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967. Includes Charles Hartshorne, "Martin Buber's Metaphysics," 49–68; Maurice Friedman, "The Bases of Buber's Ethics," 171–200; and Buber's "Replies to My Critics."

Stein, Ross L. "A Metaphysical Analysis of Chemical Change: Towards a Reconciliation of Whiteheadian Process Metaphysics and Aristotelian-Scholastic Substance Metaphysics." Accepted for publication in Process Studies (2024).

Theunissen, Michael. "Bubers negative Ontologie des Zwischen." Philosophisches Jahrbuch 71 (1964): 319–330. Quotations translated from the German.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected ed. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Witt, Charlotte. Ways of Being: Potentiality and Actuality in Aristotle's Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Revised October 2026: the sections on Aristotle and Whitehead were rebuilt from the primary texts, and the account of Buber's opening line was corrected. A further revision on October 17 corrected how Whitehead relates creativity to Aristotle's matter and potential, and how Theunissen describes Buber's negative ontology, and added the 1967 debate over reading Buber through Whitehead.

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 Seriously," makes the case in plainer terms.