What if the world is not made of things, but of processes—and what if nothing within that process stands as maker or made?
For much of human thought, reality has been described as a collection of discrete, independent substances. In that view, things exist first, and relations follow. Causes produce effects. Makers create what is made.
Yet an alternative tradition represented by Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead and stretching back to figures like Nagarjuna and Dharmakirti, points elsewhere: toward a world in which no such primacy holds.
In a process-based ontology, nothing stands outside the process to produce it, and nothing within it exists independently as a final product.
What we call "things" are not outputs of a deeper mechanism, nor building blocks from which it is assembled. Rather, all appearances—objects, agents, thoughts, structures—arise together as constrained expressions of a single, ongoing dynamic. They are co-emergent, not sequential; relational, not constructed.
This removes the intuition of pride in making, as well as the passivity of being made. There is no fundamental distinction between creator and creation, subject and object, origin and result. These are stabilized perspectives within the process itself—useful, but not primary.
What exists instead is a continuous field of differentiation and integration, within which temporary coherences appear as if they were separate entities.
From this view, solidity is not a property but an achievement: a momentary stabilization of relations. A human, a machine, a word, or a thought does not "possess" identity in itself; it maintains a pattern long enough to be recognized as such. The same applies to meaning.
