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The metaphysics that this self-understanding implies, and that process philosophy therefore properly includes, is in every sense anti-dualistic, being in one sense monistic, in another sense a qualified pluralism. It is monistic in the sense that it recognizes but one transcendental concept, or one set of such concepts, in which anything that is concrete and singular can and must be described. Thus, for process metaphysics, there are not many kinds, but only one kind, of ultimate subjects of predication; and no difference between anyone such ultimate subject and any other amounts to an absolute difference in kind, whether it be a merely finite difference between one and another part of reality or even the infinite difference between the all-inclusive whole of reality and any of its included parts. Even the integral whole of reality as something concrete and singular is so in literally the same sense in which this must be said of anything that is more than a mere abstraction or an aggregate. This is why the transcendental concept for process metaphysics is precisely "process," in the sense that to be anything concretely and singularly real is to be either an event or an individual – -- either an instance of becoming or an ordered sequence of such instances, each of which is an emergent unity of real, internal relatedness to all the things that have already become in the past – -- together with, of course, everything that they, in tum, necessarily presuppose – -- which then gives itself along with all of them to all the other such emergent unities that are yet to become in the future.

And yet if process metaphysics is in this way attributively monistic, it is at the same time substantively pluralistic, albeit in a qualified sense. It is pluralistic insofar as it recognizes not one but many ultimate subjects of predication. Although anything concrete and singular is either an instance of becoming or an individual sequence of such
instances, all of ultimately the same kind as any other, there are any number of these instances, each an emergent unity of real, internal relatedness ontologically distinct from all the others. Above all, there is the unique ontological distinction between, on the one hand, the self and all others as all mere parts of reality and, on the other hand, the all inclusive whole of reality. Even as each fragmentary becoming is ontologically distinct from every other, so each of them severally and all of them together are ontologically distinct from the integral becoming of the whole. And yet the distinction between part and whole is unique; and for this reason, the pluralism of process metaphysics, real as it certainly is, is also qualified. Although "part" and "whole" are indeed correlative concepts in that each necessarily implies the other, the symmetry between their two referents presupposes an even more fundamental asymmetry between them. For while there could not be an integral becoming of the whole without the fragmentary becomings of the parts, any more than there could be the fragmentary becomings of the parts without the integral becoming of the whole, what the whole as such necessarily implies is not these parts or those, since all of its parts, unlike itself, are merely contingent rather than necessary, but only some parts or other – or, alternatively, that the intensional class of parts have at least some members and so not be a null or empty class. On the other hand, what each and every fragmentary becoming necessarily implies is not merely some whole or other (since the idea of more than one whole of reality is patently incoherent and absurd), but rather the one and only necessarily existing whole – -- the one integral becoming of which all fragmentary becomings are contingently occurring or existing parts and but for which none of them would be possible either in principle or in fact, or have any abiding significance.

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