Defining Relation in Generative Relational Being: A Position Paper

Generative relational being places relation at its centre and has so far left the concept open. This paper supplies a working definition: a relation is the constraint through which generation unfolds in history. Existing understandings of relation, as interaction, as background structure, as difference, as tie, and as correlation, are each stated at an instant, where a framework concerned with historical generation requires a concept answerable to succession. The definition's historical clause carries the weight, since the constraint is borne and revised by the very process it constrains, which separates the proposal from structuralism. The paper argues that unconstrained succession fails to be maximal generation, since where succession is free nothing accumulates, and it answers the objection that a relation is a coupling and not only a constraint. A taxonomy on two axes follows, the domain of the relata and the mode of bearing, with some forty instances assigned across four modes. Relations borne by a single party are the decisive case, since relations whose counterpart does not exist are relations in the full sense here, while the interaction and tie readings must deny them the name.