CONCEPT
Individuation (Simondon's Framework)
The ongoing process by which metastable systems resolve their internal tensions by producing new structures — and Simondon's answer to the question Western philosophy had been asking backwards for two thousand years.
The entire Western tradition, from Plato to Descartes to the present, has treated individuals as primary realities and then asked how they came to be. The question is always framed in the past tense: how did this individual come into existence? Simondon called this the principle of individuation and argued it puts the cart before the horse. The tradition assumes the individual in order to explain individuation. What is needed, he insisted, is the reverse: begin with the process of individuation and understand the individual as a partial, temporary, never-completed result. Individuation is how metastable systems resolve tensions by producing new structures — crystals precipitating from supersaturated solutions, organisms developing from embryos, minds emerging from biological organisms, collectives forming from the transindividual resonance of pre-individual potentials. The process never terminates.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Simondon's most radical claim is that the individual is never a completed substance. A human being is not an entity that exists first