Western philosophy has been dominated for two millennia by a substance ontology: the view that the world is fundamentally composed of discrete, self-subsisting entities — atoms, souls, substances, objects — whose relations are secondary to their intrinsic natures.
Living Value Theory requires a different starting point. Its fundamental commitment is to a relational ontology: the view that relations are primary, and that what we call substances or entities are better understood as relatively stable patterns within a field of relations.
This is not a merely technical philosophical point. It has direct consequences for how we understand value, agency, and social life. If entities are constituted by their relations, then value — which is always relational — cannot be a property of things but must be understood as a feature of the relational field itself.