Chapter 1: The Texture of Being

What is real?

The Question That Won't Go Away

A child asks: "Why is there anything at all?"

You've heard this question, maybe asked it yourself. At five or six, staring at the ceiling before sleep, the thought arrives unbidden: Why isn't there just... nothing? The question feels vertiginous, almost dangerous, like leaning too far over a railing. Then morning comes, there's breakfast to eat, and the question fades.

But it doesn't disappear. It just goes underground. And for some people—the ones we call philosophers—it keeps surfacing, demanding attention, refusing to be dismissed.

This is the question of metaphysics: What is real? What exists, fundamentally? Is the world we experience the world as it truly is, or is there something beneath or behind appearances that we're missing?

These might seem like abstract puzzles, the kind of thing you think about in graduate seminars but not real life. They're not. Your answer to "what is real?" shapes everything else. If you think ultimate reality is material particles bouncing off each other, you'll live differently than if you think it's consciousness dreaming the world into being. If you think the self is a permanent thing, you'll hold on differently than if you think it's a pattern in constant flux. If you think the cosmos is a machine, you'll treat it differently than if you think it's alive.

Metaphysics isn't a preliminary to living. It is how you live, whether you've examined it or not.

The Greek Beginning: Being and Becoming

Let's start where Western philosophy starts, with two Greeks who disagreed about almost everything—and whose disagreement still shapes how we think.

Parmenides: Nothing Changes

Parmenides of Elea (born around 515 BCE) is the strangest of the early Greek philosophers. He wrote in verse, presenting his philosophy as a revelation from a goddess. And his central claim seems to contradict everything our senses tell us.

What is, is. What is not, is not.

This sounds like a tautology, but Parmenides draws out its implications ruthlessly. If something exists, it can't come from nothing (nothing can't produce something). It can't go into nothing (something can't become nothing). It can't change (change would require becoming what it is not, but what is not cannot be). It can't move (movement requires empty space for things to move into, but empty space is nothing, and nothing isn't).

Therefore: reality is one, unchanging, eternal, motionless. The Many we perceive—trees, rocks, people, clouds—are illusion. Change is illusion. Time is illusion. Only the One truly exists.

This seems insane. Obviously things change. Obviously there's movement. You were a child, now you're not; the sun rises, then sets; your coffee was hot, now it's cold.

But here's what Parmenides understood: our senses might be deceiving us. The world of appearance might not be the world as it truly is. And if you follow reason—pure reason, regardless of what your eyes report—you arrive at conclusions that contradict experience. So much the worse for experience.

You don't have to agree with Parmenides to feel the force of his question: How do you know that your experience reveals reality? What if reality is fundamentally different from how it appears?

Heraclitus: Everything Flows

Now meet his opposite.

Heraclitus of Ephesus (flourished around 500 BCE) was called "the Obscure" even by ancient standards. He wrote in riddling aphorisms that resist systematic interpretation. But one theme is unmistakable:

You cannot step into the same river twice.

Actually, one of his followers went further: you can't step into the same river once, because by the time you're in, both you and the river have changed.

For Heraclitus, change isn't illusion—it's the fundamental reality. Everything flows (panta rhei, as later thinkers summarized his view). What looks stable is actually a dynamic equilibrium, like a flame that maintains its shape only by constantly consuming and being consumed. "Fire lives the death of air, and air lives the death of fire; water lives the death of earth, earth that of water."

The unity that exists, for Heraclitus, is not Parmenides' static One but a unity of opposites in tension. Day and night, hot and cold, life and death—each implies and requires its opposite. Reality is strife, the constant war of contraries that produces the world we experience. And this strife isn't chaos; it's ordered by the logos, a principle of rational structure that Heraclitus thought most people were too asleep to perceive.

The difference that matters: Parmenides looked at change and called it illusion, seeking the unchanging beneath appearances. Heraclitus looked at stability and called that illusion, finding flux all the way down. Both agreed that appearances deceive. They disagreed about what's really there.

The Fork in the Road

This is the fork that shaped Western metaphysics. Do you seek what persists beneath change, or do you embrace change as fundamental?

Later Greeks tried to synthesize. Plato sided largely with Parmenides: the physical world changes, but it's a shadow of a higher realm of eternal Forms. Aristotle, his student, brought Forms down to earth—embodied in particular things, unfolding through intelligible change. Between them, they established the dominant Western framework: substance metaphysics. Reality consists of things with essential properties. Change happens, but there's something that persists through change, something that has properties while remaining itself.

It's such a natural way to think that it's hard to see it as one choice among others. But it is. Other traditions took different paths.

The Indian Variation: Levels of Reality

Travel east to find philosophers grappling with the same questions—but from different angles, arriving at different maps.

Shankara and the Snake-Rope

Imagine walking at dusk. You see a snake on the path and freeze in terror. Then someone brings a lamp, and you realize: it was a rope all along. The snake was never there. Your experience was real (you really felt fear), but what you experienced wasn't.

This is Shankara's (traditionally dated c. 788-820 CE) famous example, and it opens up something that Western philosophy mostly avoided: the possibility that there are levels of reality, and that what seems most real might be, from a higher perspective, like mistaking a rope for a snake.

Shankara was the great systematizer of Advaita ("nondual") Vedanta, one of the most influential schools of Indian philosophy. His claim: ultimate reality is Brahman—pure consciousness, infinite, unchanging, without qualities or distinctions. The world of multiplicity we experience—trees, people, thoughts, time—is maya, often translated as "illusion" but better understood as a kind of superimposition, like seeing a snake where there's actually a rope.

This isn't quite Parmenides, though the resonance is striking. For Parmenides, the Many is simply false; only the One exists. For Shankara, the Many has a kind of reality—vyavaharika, conventional or practical reality. The world works. Karma operates. Your actions have consequences. But this practical reality isn't ultimate reality (paramarthika). From the highest perspective, there is only Brahman, and what we took to be individual selves (jiva) are actually identical with Brahman—like individual waves that are, from another view, just the ocean.

Western philosophy mostly didn't make this move: the idea that reality could be layered, that something could be real at one level and illusory at another, and that spiritual practice could be a way of shifting levels—waking up from the rope-snake confusion to see what's really there.

The Buddhist Challenge

But Shankara had opponents—most notably, the Buddhists, who denied there was any unchanging reality at all.

The Buddha's teaching of anicca (impermanence) goes further than Heraclitus. Not only do things change; there's no thing that changes. What we call a "self" is actually a stream of momentary mental and physical events, arising and passing away with nothing persisting beneath. What we call a "chair" is a conventional label for a pattern of phenomena. All the way down, there's just process—no substance, no essence, no permanent being.

Nagarjuna (c. 150-250 CE), the great Buddhist philosopher, pushed this further with his doctrine of śūnyatā—emptiness. Everything is "empty" of inherent existence. Not that nothing exists, but that nothing exists independently, from its own side, with its own essence. Everything is interdependently arisen: this exists because that exists; when that ceases, this ceases.

A table exists, but only dependently—on the wood, the carpenter, the concept of "table," the needs it serves. The wood exists, but only dependently—on the tree, the soil, the water, the sun. Follow the dependencies out and you find no stopping point, no fundamental thing that just exists on its own. Reality is a web of interdependence with no independent nodes.

This is radical. It denies exactly what substance metaphysics assumes: that there are basic things with intrinsic properties. For Nagarjuna, "thingness" is a conceptual overlay we project onto a flowing, interdependent process. It's useful—we need to think in terms of things to navigate the world—but it's not how reality actually is.

And here's the therapeutic point that's easy to miss: this isn't just abstract theory. Clinging to the idea that things have permanent, independent existence—especially the thing called "me"—is the root of suffering. See through the illusion of inherent existence, and suffering loosens its grip. Metaphysics, for the Buddhists, is medicine.

The Chinese Contribution: Process, Not Thing

Now travel further east, to thinkers who started somewhere different and arrived at a metaphysics that resonates with process thinking—but from indigenous Chinese concepts that don't map cleanly onto Western categories.

Zhuangzi and the Transformation of Things

Zhuangzi (c. 369-286 BCE) is the wild man of Chinese philosophy—playful, paradoxical, allergic to systems. His book, the Zhuangzi, is full of fables, jokes, and arguments that undermine the very idea of philosophical argument. But beneath the play is a serious metaphysical vision.

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou.

This isn't just skepticism about knowledge. It's pointing at something about the nature of reality: the boundaries we draw—between self and other, between dreaming and waking, between butterfly and philosopher—are not built into the nature of things. They're perspectives, useful for some purposes, misleading for others. Reality itself is what Zhuangzi calls "the transformation of things"—a continuous process of change in which no fixed categories adequately capture what's happening.

The key concept from the broader Daoist tradition is Dao—often translated as "the Way," but that barely touches it. The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao, says the Daodejing. Dao is not a thing, not a substance, not even a principle that things follow. It's more like the generative process by which things arise and pass away, the flow of reality before it gets carved up into categories.

Qi: The Stuff That Flows

Chinese metaphysics doesn't have a strong substance/attribute distinction, and one reason is the concept of qi—sometimes translated as "vital energy," "life force," or "material force," but really untranslatable. Qi is what everything is made of, but it's not a static stuff. It's dynamic, flowing, constantly transforming. Dense qi becomes rock; refined qi becomes thought. But these are not different substances—they're different modalities of the same flowing reality.

The Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200 CE) developed this into a sophisticated cosmology. Reality consists of li (principle, pattern) and qi (material force). Li provides the patterns that structure reality; qi is the dynamic stuff that actualizes those patterns. But li and qi are not separate—they're always together, aspects of one process rather than two things interacting.

Here's the difference from Western metaphysics: there's no mind-body problem in classical Chinese thought because there's no sharp distinction between mind and body to begin with. Both are qi, differently configured. There's no problem of how eternal forms connect to changing matter because li is always already in qi. The questions that tormented Western philosophers—how does the soul interact with the body? how do universals relate to particulars? how does change happen to unchanging substance?—mostly don't arise, because the conceptual framework doesn't generate them.

This is one of the most valuable things about encountering different philosophical traditions: they show you that the questions you thought were inevitable are actually artifacts of a particular way of carving up reality. Different cuts, different problems.

Being-as-Relation: African and Indigenous Thought

Now we turn to traditions where the relational, processual thinking we've glimpsed in Chinese philosophy becomes even more central—where the question "what is real?" receives an answer that challenges the very way Western philosophy frames it.

Ubuntu Ontology: Being-With

Ubuntu—a Nguni Bantu term meaning roughly "humanity toward others"—is often discussed as an ethical claim: "I am because we are." But Ubuntu isn't just ethics; it's a claim about what exists and how.

In much African traditional thought, reality is fundamentally relational. A thing is not first itself and then in relationships—its relationships constitute what it is. A person is not an individual who then joins a community—the community participates in constituting the person. "I am because we are" is not a metaphor. It's metaphysics.

The Rwandan philosopher Alexis Kagame analyzed the categories of Bantu metaphysics and found something striking: where Western thought (following Aristotle) uses substance as the primary category, Bantu thought uses force. Reality consists not of things but of forces in dynamic interrelation. A rock is not a static object but a node of force that interacts with other forces. A person is a concentration of vital force connected to the forces of ancestors, community, and nature.

This has implications. If reality is force-in-relation, then what we call individual things are patterns in a larger dynamic web. Their boundaries are real but not ultimate. And the relationships between them—often expressed through ritual, through proper naming, through respecting hierarchy of force—are not just social conventions. They're participating in the structure of reality.

Animate Cosmos: Indigenous Thought

Many Indigenous traditions worldwide share something that Western philosophy has largely abandoned: the sense of a cosmos that is alive, responsive, ensouled.

This isn't animism in the dismissive nineteenth-century sense—"primitive" people who don't know the difference between living and non-living. It's a different metaphysics. If you start from relationship rather than substance, if you understand reality as dynamic process rather than static stuff, if you take seriously the experience of communication and reciprocity with what moderns call "nature," you arrive at a cosmos where the line between person and non-person, living and non-living, is drawn differently—or not drawn at all.

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005), the Standing Rock Sioux scholar, articulated an Indigenous metaphysics that emphasizes place, relationship, and ongoing experience over the abstract categories of Western thought. Knowledge isn't extracted from a passive world by a detached observer. It emerges from relationship with a world that has its own agency, its own voice, its own interests.

The implications for how you treat "nature" are obvious. If the land is not a resource but a relative, if rivers and mountains have standing, if the cosmos is a community you belong to rather than an object you use—everything changes. Metaphysics, again, isn't abstract. It's how you live.

Modern Resonance: Quantum Strangeness and Process Philosophy

Here's something curious: some of the most radical developments in modern Western thought have moved toward the relational, processual metaphysics that other traditions developed long ago.

Whitehead: Reality as Process

Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a mathematician and logician who, late in his career, developed one of the most ambitious metaphysical systems of the twentieth century—and it reads, in places, like he'd been studying Zhuangzi and Nagarjuna.

For Whitehead, the fundamental units of reality aren't substances but "actual occasions"—momentary experiences that arise, achieve a particular character, and perish. Reality is not stuff that endures through time but a succession of events, each of which takes up the past and creates something new. Process is primary; substance is derivative. What we call enduring things (rocks, people, institutions) are really patterns of becoming—societies of actual occasions with a common character.

And here's the move that echoes Buddhist interdependence: each actual occasion includes within itself references to the rest of reality. Nothing exists in isolation. Every event is what it is because of how it relates to everything else. Whitehead called this "prehension"—the way each occasion grasps and includes aspects of other occasions.

Whitehead was aware of the resonances with Buddhism and Chinese thought. He saw his process philosophy as an alternative to the substance metaphysics that had dominated Western philosophy since the Greeks—and he thought the alternative was necessary because modern physics had undermined the old framework.

Quantum Questions

Whitehead thought modern physics had undermined the old framework. He was right, though the implications remain disputed.

At the quantum level, particles don't have definite positions until observed. They exist in "superpositions" of possible states. What does this mean for "what is real"? Physicists disagree. Some say reality is fundamentally indeterminate; others posit infinitely many branching universes; still others say "shut up and calculate"—metaphysics is meaningless.

But one thing is clear: the common-sense picture of reality as little solid things bouncing around doesn't survive contact with actual physics. Relational, processual, irreducibly strange—the fundamental level doesn't look like naïve materialism predicted. This doesn't prove any particular tradition right. But it suggests the substance metaphysics built into Western common-sense might be empirically inadequate. The process thinkers and the Buddhist philosophers may have been closer to the mark.

What Kind of Question Is This?

So: what is real?

By now you might be frustrated. We've toured Greek arguments, Indian systems, Chinese cosmologies, African force-metaphysics, Indigenous relationality, and modern process thought—and we haven't settled anything. You still don't know whether Parmenides was right, or Heraclitus, or the Buddhists, or the Ubuntu thinkers, or any of them.

Good. That frustration is the beginning of philosophical honesty.

Here's something the tour should have revealed: the question "what is real?" is not one question but several, and the traditions answer different questions differently.

Is there something that doesn't change? Parmenides and Shankara think so; Heraclitus and the Buddhists think not. This is a real disagreement—but notice it depends on what counts as "change" and what counts as "something."

Are there fundamental building blocks—substances—out of which everything is made? The Greek-Western tradition often assumes so; the Chinese, African, and Indigenous traditions tend to think in terms of process, force, and relation instead. This might be a deep disagreement about reality, or it might be a difference in conceptual frameworks that carve reality differently.

What's the relationship between appearance and reality? Everyone agrees that appearances can deceive. The disagreements are about how deep the deception goes and what's on the other side. For Plato, there's a higher realm of Forms. For Shankara, there's Brahman beneath the maya. For the Buddhists, there's... just emptiness, just the interdependent arising, all the way down.

Does reality include subjects, or only objects? Western metaphysics has struggled with consciousness—where does it fit in a world of substances and properties? Many other traditions don't have this problem because they never separated mind from world so sharply.

Here's what I've come to think—and I offer it as an invitation, not a conclusion: the question "what is real?" is less like a problem to be solved and more like a territory to be explored. Different traditions have mapped it differently because they started from different places, asked different sub-questions, and had different purposes. The Greek tradition wanted to explain change and stability; the Indian tradition wanted liberation from suffering; the Chinese tradition wanted harmonious living; the African and Indigenous traditions wanted right relationship with a living world.

These aren't just different theories about the same thing. They're different orientations to reality, and each reveals something the others might miss.

What's real? Here's a minimal answer almost everyone can accept: something exists, and it's the kind of something that gives rise to this conversation—to beings that can wonder about being, to minds that can question their own place in reality. Whatever is real, it's the sort of thing that produces philosophers.

Beyond that, I'd suggest holding the question open. Not because it doesn't matter—it matters enormously—but because the question is larger than any single answer. Each tradition we've visited has illuminated some aspect of the mystery. The process thinkers remind us that change is real and substance might be a convenient fiction. The substance thinkers remind us that there's pattern and persistence, not just flux. The relational thinkers remind us that nothing exists in isolation. The mystics remind us that the deepest reality might not be capturable in concepts at all.

This isn't relativism—the claim that any answer is as good as any other. Some metaphysical views are more coherent, more comprehensive, more adequate to experience than others. It's an invitation to keep asking, keep exploring, keep letting the question deepen.

You're still here—reading, thinking, wondering. That wondering is itself part of what's real. Start there.

Going Deeper

Primary Source: Zhuangzi: The Essential Writings, translated by Brook Ziporyn (Hackett). This is the funniest, wildest, most paradoxical philosophical text you'll ever read—and it's doing serious metaphysics through stories about butterflies, wheelwrights, and useless trees. Ziporyn's translation captures the playfulness while making the philosophy accessible. Start anywhere; it's not linear.

Accessible Secondary: Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead—no, just kidding, that book is notoriously difficult. Try Adventures of Ideas instead, also by Whitehead (Free Press), which presents his process philosophy in more accessible form, connecting metaphysics to history, civilization, and human experience. Or, for an even gentler entry, The Lure of Divine Love by John Cobb Jr., which explains Whitehead's ideas in plain language.

Unexpected Entry: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed). Kimmerer is a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and her book weaves Indigenous knowledge with Western science in a way that's also doing metaphysics—asking what it means to live in a world that is alive, responsive, gift-giving. It will change how you experience walking outside.