Why Did Simondon Argue That Individuals Are Processes, Not Products?

When a resume requests 'a summary of who you are,' it implies that your being can be compressed into bullet points. Simondon would call that a category error. 7 min read.

The West has inherited a metaphysics of substance from Aristotle and Descartes: things have essences, and those essences define what they are. Human beings, in this tradition, possess a fixed nature—rationality, soul, or a stable set of traits. Gilbert Simondon's entire project in L'individuation is to invert this priority. The individual is not a substance with properties; it is a process with phases. Being is not a state; it is a doing.

For Simondon, the verb 'to be' is better rendered as 'to individuate.' A being never reaches a settling point where it can be said to have 'become' once and for all. The individuation operation continues as long as the being remains alive and in contact with its milieu. Even physical systems, like crystals, achieve a provisional equilibrium, but that equilibrium is only a pause in a larger thermodynamic narrative. Living beings are far more dramatic: they maintain themselves through ongoing metabolic exchange, always drawing on the pre-individual potential that remains undeployed.

Heraclitus saw it long before Simondon: you cannot step into the same river twice, because the river and the stepper are both in flux. The productivization of identity in modern culture is a desperate denial of this ancient insight.

This has profound consequences for how we understand personal identity, mental health, and ethics. If I am a process rather than a fixed thing, then the pathologies of modernity—burnout, identity crisis, the constant fear of 'not being enough'—appear in a different light. They are not failures to conform to an ideal self; they are the inevitable pains of an ongoing individuation that has been pathologically constrained. The pressure to become a 'finished product' causes what Simondon might call a 'defect of individuation': a freezing of becoming into a false static state.

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The Ethical Shift

Ethics, in a processual framework, no longer concerns judging a stable character. It concerns cultivating conditions for open individuation—for oneself and for others. Institutions, technologies, and social norms are to be evaluated not by whether they maximize utility, but by whether they enable or disable the ongoing process of becoming. Simondon's philosophy is thus inherently ecological and relational, inviting a dynamic, non-dogmatic approach to moral life.