ontogenesis

Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion

Editorial synthesis · provisional

Definition

Ontogenesis is the becoming through which beings take form, rather than a process happening to substances already complete. In the Simondonian register it names being’s capacity to resolve incompatibility by dividing into phases, producing an individual with its milieu and leaving further potential. The corpus also uses the ordinary developmental sense for an individual organism; this restricted sense must remain distinct from its broader philosophical extension.

Explanation

Simondon’s reproduced passage explicitly contrasts individual development, such as the genesis of an organism relative to its species, with the fuller sense of being’s becoming. The stronger usage makes becoming a dimension of being, not a container into which a ready-made being is placed. The proposal preserves the quotation’s named voice and conceptual scope.

The process resolves a structured metastable field rather than creating being from nothing or imposing a finished external form on passive matter. Its result is an individual–milieu coupling and a changed field of further possibilities. The crystal example illustrates this explanatory priority without making every biological or social formation physically identical with crystallization.

The art essay’s use for individual life history remains a narrower biological register. Later formulations apply the philosophical account across domains while insisting on different mechanisms and conditions. The proposed senses therefore retain development and ontological form-taking without substituting one for the other or treating a quantum comparison as proof of Simondon’s whole philosophy.

Scope and attribution

Retain both warranted registers and the quoted Simondonian extension.

AB — The Actual Book

Cross-domain application preserves distinct mechanisms.

Occurrence locators: 22, 23, 146; Epigraph: 139.

PB — The Possible Book

Ontogenesis names individual development and life story in the earlier body-memory essay.

Occurrence locators: 117; Epigraph: 114; Reproduced historical essay: 194.

RB1 — The Real Book, Volume I: The Possible Is Real

The Simondon quotation expressly broadens the term to being’s own becoming.

Occurrence locators: 16, 17, 19, 20, 27, 28, 40, 59, 60, 92, 100, 101, 106, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 118, 140.

RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations

Source-verified occurrence; see the printed-page references below.

Occurrence locators: 4, 5, 11, 19, 23, 31, 62, 315.

Background used in the editorial explanation

Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.