Beyond Survival-Based Cognition: A Minimal Definition of Generative and Relational Existence

This paper proposes a minimal ontological definition of generative and relational existence as the necessary condition for moving beyond survival-based civilization. Building on the core proposition that rational advancement alone cannot overcome animalistic survival cognition as long as life is understood as a collection of separated entities, the paper clarifies what constitutes a genuinely different mode of existence. Rather than presenting a comprehensive metaphysical system, it deliberately restricts itself to a minimal framework capable of distinguishing one cognitive stage of civilization from another. The paper argues that generative and relational existence is characterized by processual identity, constitutive relations, and emergent meaning. Within this framework, survival reflexes such as fight, flight, and freeze do not disappear but lose their role as organizing principles of social order. The paper emphasizes that this ontological shift does not imply harmony, moral idealism, or the elimination of conflict, but a transformation in how tension, irreversibility, and relational pressure are understood. This paper is the first theoretical expansion of the overview DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.18193256 “Rationality Without Transition: Why Advanced Civilizations Remain Trapped in an Animalistic Mode of Survival” and provides a minimal ontological definition of generative and relational existence as the necessary condition for moving beyond survival-based civilization.