It is striking that the most obvious instances of process are disasters. We rarely perceive flux in its gentle sustainment. The air moves, the cells divide, the world remakes itself continually — but these motions go unseen, unnoticed. What we see are the catastrophes: the building falling, the body failing, the sudden rupture. Process manifests as accident, as collapse. When flux comes to presence, it often comes as violence.
Little wonder, then, that we are suspicious of it. The closer a thing comes to looking solid, unmoving, eternal, the more we like it. We exalt monuments, we conserve institutions, we worship permanence. We train our eyes to see stability, to rest in it, to forget the ceaseless perishing underneath. Process is lived as background — and when it comes to the foreground, it terrifies.
Death is the concentrated emblem of this repression. To die is to undergo the pure proof of flux: the body, the identity, the story, all dissolving. Our culture displaces death, hides it, or aestheticizes it, precisely because it is unbearable as the clearest testimony to becoming. Death and process mirror one another in this way: each is denied, and in their denial the fantasy of permanence is secured.
Perhaps this explains why process philosophy is a late discovery in the Western canon. From Plato to Descartes, metaphysics served the desire for stability: being over becoming, substance over relation, eternal forms over time’s decay. Only with the cracks of modernity — Darwin’s evolution, industrial flux, entropy, relativity — did a new thinking become possible. The repression faltered, the monuments looked less eternal, and thinkers like Bergson and Whitehead could say what had always been true: everything is process.
But here lies the difficulty. Even now, process is hard to think. Our intellectual habits echo our psychic needs. We cling to the stable idea, the fixed identity, the substance that endures. To think flux as primary is to unlearn this orientation. It requires dwelling in what is usually unbearable: that every moment perishes as it arises, that every thing is fragile, that death is the very horizon of life.
This does not strip process philosophy of value. On the contrary, it intensifies it. Process thought is not just another ontology. It is a kind of counter-repressive labour. It asks us to affirm what we are disposed to flee. It forces us to look at disaster, decay, death — and to find there not only terror but also creativity. Becoming destroys, but it also makes. Flux is catastrophe, but it is also genesis.
In pneuminous terms, we could say that the accretions manifest as reinforcements of stable reality, the ideal forms present exactly this. Process needs incorporating into pneuminous theory. The fantasy of stability is not to be abolished; it too is part of the flux. To think process is to see that even our denials belong to it. The repression of process itself is a mode of becoming.
The lateness of process philosophy, its difficulty, and its power, all come from the same root: it confronts us with what we most want not to see. To affirm process is to affirm the impermanence of everything we value. Yet in that very affirmation something new becomes possible — a thinking that no longer clings to monuments, but lives in the trembling of their foundations.
Centre For Experimental Ontology 