Existence as Generativity: Toward an Ortropic Ontology

An ontology of process must explain how determinate beings persist and how their persistence can alter the conditions of further existence. This paper defends a recursive process ontology of persisting organized beings. Its central distinction separates individual persistence, organizational succession, and transformative generation: continuing an individual, transmitting organization into a successor, and changing the means through which subsequent organization can arise. A worked case of a maintained compartment distinguishes gradual replacement, reconstruction after dissolution, and branching inheritance. The case supports a constitutive account of organized continuation without reducing identity to resemblance, causal ancestry, or future usefulness. Ortropy identifies the realized organization and historical relations involved; its value lies in keeping these different continuities together without treating them as one achievement. The argument develops process and individuation traditions while answering the objection that a process account merely relocates the determinate capacities required by substance ontology. It accepts such capacities as constituents of organized activity, but rejects an inference from their reality to the explanatory priority of an independently constituted bearer. The resulting account connects persistence with the formation of new generative conditions, while distinguishing situated novelty from expanded logical possibility. Life and inquiry exemplify ways in which nature can reorganize its own means of continuation, without making complexity a destiny or productivity a measure of worth. The manuscript and accompanying documentation are licensed under CC BY 4.0. Correspondence: [email protected].