Creative Adapting in a
World of Inter-Becoming
Life-Giving Wisdom from Classical Chinese Philosophy
as prompted by the creative work of Mercedes Valmisa
Creative Adapting in a
1. All things act.
Agency is not confined to human beings. It is at work throughout the world—in animals, plants, ecosystems, and even in what we call “inanimate” things. To recognize this is to see that we live within a field of active presences, each contributing in its own way to the unfolding of reality.
2. We can—and should—live with uncertainty.
The world is not fixed or fully knowable in advance. Wisdom lies not in control, but in responsiveness—in learning how to move with what cannot be predicted.
3. Reality is changing all the time.
There are no static substances, only ongoing processes. Everything is in motion, unfolding moment by moment. To live well is to attune ourselves to this ceaseless transformation.
4. All action is collaborative.
No act is ever purely individual. Every deed arises from a field of relationships—human and nonhuman, social and ecological. We act with and through one another.
5. We are all gerunds: how we live is who we are.
We are not fixed identities but ongoing activities—becoming, relating, responding. Our being is inseparable from our feeling and our doing.
6. If we respond to immediate situations with wisdom and kindness, there is hope for the planet.
Hope does not depend on controlling the future. It arises from how we participate in the present—moment by moment, situation by situation—within the web of life we share.
About Mercedes Valmisa
Mercedes Valmisa is a contemporary philosopher specializing in classical Chinese philosophy, especially early Daoist and Confucian thought. She is an associate professor of philosophy at Gettysburg College, where she teaches and writes on action, agency, and relationality. The five take-home points are take-home points drawn from listening to Valmisa being interviewed about her books All Things Act and Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action, and reading her superlative Aeon essay, “In Classical Chinese Philosophy, All Actions Are Collective.” If you want a quick and accessible entry point for classroom use, the essay is an excellent place to begin.
Living with Uncertainty
"There is no standardized model to decide on the actions that will bring success to our endeavors. One must learn to live in the all-embracing uncertainty and openness represented by the dao"
- Mercedes Valmisa
Collaborative Action
What if I told you that there’s no such thing as an individual action? That every time you eat, walk up the stairs or read a book, you are not the sole agent behind what you are doing, but are engaged in a process of co-creation – as much acted-upon as acting?
To grasp what I mean here, imagine riding a horse. While I can effortlessly distinguish between myself and a horse, I’m aware that neither I nor the horse alone can produce the action of riding. Riding emerges as a kind of co-action between myself and others, and these others are not limited to the horse: they extend towards the particularities of the terrain, the open space that affords movement, the training that the horse and I have undertaken together, the bridle and saddle, and even the food we have ingested to give us energy. All these agencies and many more collaborate to produce the event of riding.
- Mercedes Valmisa
We are all Gerunds
Mercedes Valmisa's Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action uses the canonical texts themselves to make her cogently argued corrective on persisting interpretive studies, studies that would begin from foundational individualism as an uncritical and yet highly problematic assumption. In this Chinese version of philosophy of action that is grounded in an irreducibly relational notion of both agency and action, everything that persons do, including the construction of their own identities, is the outcome of their relations with others. This gerundive conception of persons who are always 'adapting' and thus making affordances in their doings and undergoings gives full register to the reflexivity and interpenetration of agency, requiring as it does a sociology of efficacious action.
― Roger T. Ames, Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Peking University
If we live Adaptively, there is hope for the world.
Adapting is an open-ended model of relational efficacious action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers that I consider particularly well-suited to deal with the unfinished, entangled, and unpredictable character of life. It's well-suited because Classical Chinese philosophers intended for it to address problems of efficacy that are related to entanglement and change-to the realization that we are interdependent entities in constant transformation, who change (respond, resonate, become) along with the changing conditions of the world that constitutes us as human. (At least) from a pragmatist position, and despite the décalage in spacetime from Classical China to our age, adapting remains a privileged proposal to conceptualize and practice agency in our contemporary situations. This is due to the ontological and epistemological assumptions in which adapting is grounded, much as the model of action itself, having the potential to deliver the conditions to produce more adjusted, harmonious, sustainable, and happy relations for life forms on this planet.
-- Mercedes Valmisa in introducing video on Adapting below
Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action
Mercedes Valmisa
"If you are from the West, it is likely that you normally assume that you are a subject who relates to objects and other subjects through actions that spring purely from your own intentions and will. Chinese philosophers, however, show how mistaken this conception of action is.
Philosophy of action in Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the Western philosophical narrative. While the latter usually assumes we are discrete individual subjects with the ability to act or to effect change, Classical Chinese philosophers theorize that human life is embedded in endless networks of relationships with other entities, phenomena, and socio-material contexts. These relations are primary to the constitution of the person, and hence acting within an early Chinese context is interacting and co-acting along with others, human or nonhuman.
This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers, one which attempts to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency-what Mercedes Valmisa calls "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin) As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires heightened self- and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response. These capacities allow the agent to “co-raise” courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems.
Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to cope with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines. Valmisa exemplifies how to build meaningful philosophical theories without treating individual books or putative authors as locations of stable intellectual positions, opening brand-new topics in Chinese and comparative philosophy."
Philosophy of action in Classical China is radically different from its counterpart in the Western philosophical narrative. While the latter usually assumes we are discrete individual subjects with the ability to act or to effect change, Classical Chinese philosophers theorize that human life is embedded in endless networks of relationships with other entities, phenomena, and socio-material contexts. These relations are primary to the constitution of the person, and hence acting within an early Chinese context is interacting and co-acting along with others, human or nonhuman.
This book is the first monograph dedicated to the exploration and rigorous reconstruction of an extraordinary strategy for efficacious relational action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers, one which attempts to account for the interdependent and embedded character of human agency-what Mercedes Valmisa calls "adapting" or "adaptive agency" (yin) As opposed to more unilateral approaches to action conceptualized in the Classical Chinese corpus, such as forceful and prescriptive agency, adapting requires heightened self- and other-awareness, equanimity, flexibility, creativity, and response. These capacities allow the agent to “co-raise” courses of action ad hoc: unique and temporary solutions to specific, non-permanent, and non-generalizable life problems.
Adapting is one of the world's oldest philosophies of action, and yet it is shockingly new for contemporary audiences, who will find in it an unlikely source of inspiration to cope with our current global problems. This book explores the core conception of adapting both on autochthonous terms and by cross-cultural comparison, drawing on the European and Analytic philosophical traditions as well as on scholarship from other disciplines. Valmisa exemplifies how to build meaningful philosophical theories without treating individual books or putative authors as locations of stable intellectual positions, opening brand-new topics in Chinese and comparative philosophy."
Interview with Mercedes Valmisa about Adapting
provided by New Books Network
interviewer: Jessica Zu
All Things Act
Mercedes Valmisa
"In All Things Act, Mercedes Valmisa argues that there is no such thing as an individual action and that all actions are constituted and performed by a diverse array of entities. Examining the collective character of action, this book rejects the view of agency as a capacity--especially one limited to humans--and redefines agency as an umbrella term for the concrete sociomaterial processes that emerge from the collaborative efforts of multiple entities acting together.
Agency is not the faculty of an individual entity or self; it is always the function of a network or assembly of actors. The book also considers the significant role of nonhuman actors in these processes--things without intentions, will, or even awareness. This relational and collective approach shifts the focus away from mental states, emphasizing instead how humans and nonhumans alike participate in, contribute to, and shape the unfolding of events.
This expanded conception of agency draws on Classical Chinese philosophy, analytic metaphysics on powers and emergence, scientific literature on self-organization, and insights from sociology, anthropology, and art to co-create a groundbreaking framework for understanding agency, with profound sociopolitical implications for contemporary life.
If our actions are not simply the product of individual intentional selves but are instead constituted through dynamic interactions with a vibrant array of nonhuman actors, we are invited--and compelled--to rethink our identities, intentions, powers, emotions, responsibilities, institutions, policies, and values in ways that are less individualistic and more relational and interdependent."
Agency is not the faculty of an individual entity or self; it is always the function of a network or assembly of actors. The book also considers the significant role of nonhuman actors in these processes--things without intentions, will, or even awareness. This relational and collective approach shifts the focus away from mental states, emphasizing instead how humans and nonhumans alike participate in, contribute to, and shape the unfolding of events.
This expanded conception of agency draws on Classical Chinese philosophy, analytic metaphysics on powers and emergence, scientific literature on self-organization, and insights from sociology, anthropology, and art to co-create a groundbreaking framework for understanding agency, with profound sociopolitical implications for contemporary life.
If our actions are not simply the product of individual intentional selves but are instead constituted through dynamic interactions with a vibrant array of nonhuman actors, we are invited--and compelled--to rethink our identities, intentions, powers, emotions, responsibilities, institutions, policies, and values in ways that are less individualistic and more relational and interdependent."
Interview with Mercedes Valmisa
about All Things Act
provided by New Books Network
interviewer: Jessica Zu
Whitehead and Chinese Philosophy: The Spontaneity and (Potential) Harmony of Entangled Becoming
What has the world to learn from classical Chinese philosophy?
Classical Chinese philosophers can help us “address problems of efficacy that are related to entanglement and change—to the realization that we are interdependent entities in constant transformation, who change (respond, resonate, become) along with the changing conditions of the world that constitute us as human.”
This way of thinking can “help deliver the conditions to produce more adjusted, harmonious, sustainable, and happy relations for life forms on this planet.” So writes Mercedes Valmisa in introducing a video lecture on her book Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action.
Her work, in this book and also in All Things Act, invites us to consider at least eight ideas that can nourish an outlook on life—not only for those knowledgeable of and interested in Chinese philosophy in an academic way, but for all who seek to make their way through the polycrises of our time into a more humane and sustainable future. The eight ideas are:
As it happens, these ideas are deeply resonant with process philosophy as influenced by Alfred North Whitehead—but in ways that also deepen, stretch, and in some respects correct more Eurocentric interpretations of his thought.
In standard Western readings, Whitehead’s philosophy is often framed around the becoming of individual actual occasions: the many becoming one in a moment of concrescence. While this insight is indispensable, it can subtly reinforce the idea that agency is primarily centered in discrete subjects—even if those subjects are momentary and relational. By contrast, the vision articulated by Valmisa places greater emphasis on the field-like, distributed, and co-constitutive character of action itself.
From this perspective, the “many” that become one do not simply provide data for a unifying subject; they remain active as ongoing forces within the event. Their exertion of causal efficacy is their agency, and that agency is not gathered up and localized but continues to circulate within the process. What emerges, then, is less a model of centered concrescence and more a model of entangled co-becoming, in which agency is irreducibly plural and never fully owned by any single entity.
Classical Chinese philosophers can help us “address problems of efficacy that are related to entanglement and change—to the realization that we are interdependent entities in constant transformation, who change (respond, resonate, become) along with the changing conditions of the world that constitute us as human.”
This way of thinking can “help deliver the conditions to produce more adjusted, harmonious, sustainable, and happy relations for life forms on this planet.” So writes Mercedes Valmisa in introducing a video lecture on her book Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action.
Her work, in this book and also in All Things Act, invites us to consider at least eight ideas that can nourish an outlook on life—not only for those knowledgeable of and interested in Chinese philosophy in an academic way, but for all who seek to make their way through the polycrises of our time into a more humane and sustainable future. The eight ideas are:
- All things act.
Agency is everywhere at work—moving through objects, environments, and living beings alike. - Agency is distributed.
What we call an action is never the product of a single agent, but the outcome of multiple, entangled forces. - Things have efficacy.
So-called “inanimate” objects (corpuscular societies, in Whiteheadian terms) participate in agency through their causal power. - Adaptivity is the heart of wise action.
Flourishing lies in responsive attunement to shifting conditions, not rigid control. - No act is ever solitary.
Every deed is a convergence—a shared becoming shaped by many influences at once. - All things are gerunds.
Reality is not made of static substances but of ongoing activities—flows of becoming. - Persons are gerunds, too.
We are not fixed selves but evolving processes—moments of becoming within wider relational fields. - Harmony is an achievement, not a given.
Sustainable and life-giving relations emerge through ongoing adjustment within a dynamic, changing world.
As it happens, these ideas are deeply resonant with process philosophy as influenced by Alfred North Whitehead—but in ways that also deepen, stretch, and in some respects correct more Eurocentric interpretations of his thought.
In standard Western readings, Whitehead’s philosophy is often framed around the becoming of individual actual occasions: the many becoming one in a moment of concrescence. While this insight is indispensable, it can subtly reinforce the idea that agency is primarily centered in discrete subjects—even if those subjects are momentary and relational. By contrast, the vision articulated by Valmisa places greater emphasis on the field-like, distributed, and co-constitutive character of action itself.
From this perspective, the “many” that become one do not simply provide data for a unifying subject; they remain active as ongoing forces within the event. Their exertion of causal efficacy is their agency, and that agency is not gathered up and localized but continues to circulate within the process. What emerges, then, is less a model of centered concrescence and more a model of entangled co-becoming, in which agency is irreducibly plural and never fully owned by any single entity.
Whitehead and Chinese Philosophy: Beyond the Myth of the Isolated Act
The Modern Western Picture of Agency
In much of modern Western thought, agency is imagined as beginning within an individual. A person forms an intention, exercises will, and then acts upon the world. Even when shaped by social and environmental conditions, the individual remains the primary locus of action—the origin from which influence flows outward.
A Relational Alternative: Distributed Agency
Mercedes Valmisa, former President of the Association of Chinese Philosophers in America (2024-2025) and author of All Things Act (2025) and Adapting: A Chinese Philosophy of Action (2021), challenges this assumption at its root. Drawing on classical Chinese philosophy—especially Daoist texts such as the Zhuangzi and Laozi—as well as contemporary metaphysical reflection shaped by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, she proposes a different vision: agency is not located in a single individual but distributed across a field of relations.
Notably, she does not develop this view in conversation with Alfred North Whitehead; the resonance with process philosophy emerges indirectly, as a point of comparison rather than influence. What we call an “action” is not the product of one agent alone, but the outcome of multiple agencies—human and nonhuman—interacting in complex and often unseen ways.
The Myth of the Isolated Act
From this perspective, there is no such thing as an isolated individual act. Every human action depends upon, and is partially constituted by, a host of contributing factors: bodily processes, social influences, material conditions, environmental contexts, and the agencies of other living beings. The act of writing a sentence, for example, is not simply “my” action. It involves neural activity shaped by past experience, the affordances of language, the presence of a writing instrument or keyboard, the cultural world that gives meaning to words, and even the wider ecological conditions that sustain my life. What appears as a single act is, in fact, a coordinated event arising from a multiplicity of agents.
Rereading Whitehead: The Many Within the One
This insight invites a fresh reading of Whitehead’s famous formulation that, at every moment of experience, “the many become one and are increased by one.” In Process and Reality, Whitehead describes each actual occasion of experience as a moment of concrescence in which many influences are gathered into a unified experience. This unification includes a moment of decision—a subjective aim that shapes how the many are integrated.
I interpret Valmisa’s point to be that that the “many” do not simply disappear into the “one.” Rather, the agencies of the many remain active within the event itself. The decision of an actual entity is not an isolated act of self-determination, but a response that is deeply shaped by the distributed agencies that constitute it. Agency, in this sense, lies not only in the one that becomes, but in the many that are becoming within it. What we call a decision is better understood as the coordination of multiple forces, not the assertion of a solitary will.
Many Actions Within a Single Act
This shift suggests that there are always many actions occurring simultaneously within what we ordinarily describe as a single act. A human deed is not a singular occurrence but a convergence—a moment in which numerous processes, influences, and agencies come together in a provisional unity. The individual is not the sole author of the act, but a participant in a wider field of activity.
Societies and Distributed Power
Such a view also expands how we think about collective entities. Whitehead speaks of “societies” of actual entities—structured groupings that exhibit continuity over time. These can include ecosystems, institutions, and communities. Valmisa’s account encourages us to take seriously the idea that such societies can be understood as acting—not in the sense of possessing a single conscious intention, but in the sense that they exercise real, distributed power. Networks, aggregates, and systems influence outcomes in ways that cannot be reduced to individual decisions. Their agency is emergent, relational, and irreducibly plural.
Chinese Philosophy and Non-Coercive Action
The question then becomes: How do we act in the world. Here Valmisa’s engagement with early Chinese thought is illuminating. In traditions associated with Zhuangzi and Laozi, action is not understood as the imposition of will by an isolated subject. Rather, it is a matter of responsive participation within a larger field of forces. The ideal of wu wei—often translated as “non-coercive action”—points to a mode of activity that arises from attunement rather than control. Effectiveness comes not from dominating the field, but from moving within it in a way that harmonizes with its dynamics.
Seen in this light, agency is fundamentally ecological. It belongs to the interplay of relationships rather than to a single center. Human beings are not independent agents acting upon a passive world, but participants in ongoing processes of becoming—processes that include other people, other species, and the earth itself.
The Agency of Things
Additionally, Valmisa offers still one more challenge to Eurocentric process thinking. She proposes that “things”—that is, objects in the world which we perceive as lacking in subjectivity, such as bronze vases, saddles, and sidewalks—are agents, too. Her point is not that they have conscious intentions, but that they have power to make things happen.
In a Whiteheadian context, these “things” are corpuscular societies. This means that they are enduring patterns of activity composed of many momentary occasions of experience, whose coordinated repetition gives rise to the appearance of stable objects, and whose inherited forms exert real causal efficacy in the ongoing becoming of the world—their exertion of causal efficacy is their agency.
Deepening and Correcting Whiteheadian Process Thought
For process philosophy in the Whiteheadian tradition, this perspective is both a deepening and a correction. It deepens the tradition by highlighting the richness of relationality already present in Whitehead’s thought. And it corrects certain tendencies to locate agency too narrowly within the individual subject. The subjective aim remains important, but it is no longer the sole or even primary locus of agency. It is itself an expression of a wider field of distributed activity.
The result is a more expansive vision of action and responsibility. We remain responsible for what we do, but our responsibility is understood relationally rather than in isolation. Our actions are always co-actions—events in which we participate along with many others, human and nonhuman alike.
In this way, Valmisa’s notion of distributed agency invites us to see ourselves not as solitary actors, but as participants in a living, dynamic, and interconnected web of activity—a world in which the many are always at work within the one, and in which every act is, in truth, a shared becoming.
A Lecture on Adapting
by Mercedes Valmisa
Adapting is an open-ended model of relational efficacious action devised by Classical Chinese philosophers that I consider particularly well-suited to deal with the unfinished, entangled, and unpredictable character of life. It's well-suited because Classical Chinese philosophers intended for it to address problems of efficacy that are related to entanglement and change-to the realization that we are interdependent entities in constant transformation, who change (respond, resonate, become) along with the changing conditions of the world that constitutes us as human. (At least) from a pragmatist position, and despite the décalage in spacetime from Classical China to our age, adapting remains a privileged proposal to conceptualize and practice agency in our contemporary situations. This is due to the ontological and epistemological assumptions in which adapting is grounded, much as the model of action itself, having the potential to deliver the conditions to produce more adjusted, harmonious, sustainable, and happy relations for life forms on this planet.