Formed in Relation
Relational History, Embodied Order, and the Origins of Moral Perception
Prelude
There is a man in a small Australian city who drives for Uber. He is from Iraq. More than a decade ago, his entire family was killed in the war. Only he made it to Australia.
Every day, he wipes down his car.
Not casually. Not from generic fastidiousness. He wipes it with the kind of care that makes the act feel less like maintenance than fidelity. He once said that his mother used to keep the house so clean that even a loose thread on the carpet would not remain there for long. Now he cleans his car in the same spirit: attentively, carefully, almost ritually.
What is this act?
Is it memory? Habit? Grief? Or is it something harder to name: a way in which a relationship continues to exist in the body long after the person herself is gone?
The earlier essays in this sequence treated the container of the self as a necessary condition. They asked what moral perception is, and how it appears under crisis. This essay turns to the prior question: how is such a condition formed at all?
That question is not only developmental. It is already ethical. If ethical life depends on another's reality being able to enter one's own, then the formation of the container is the earliest ground of ethical possibility. Before judgment, before principle, before responsibility, there must be a structure capable of receiving what comes from outside. The work of this essay concerns that structure—how it is built, how it is broken.
I. A Methodological Gap
The issue, then, is not simply where moral concepts come from, but what kind of formed being can bear them at all. The earlier essays each had a distinct task. Chapter 1 examined the structure of moral perception itself: why permeability to the concrete other offers a more accurate account of moral capacity than value-detection or principle-application (Vale 2026, chap. 1). Chapter 2 examined the threshold of crisis: why action can occur within seconds, and why such speed reveals that formation must precede the moment of danger (Vale 2026, chap. 2).
Both relied on the concept of a container: a sufficiently formed self capable of receiving another's reality without disintegration (Vale 2026, chap. 1). But both treated that container as given. They asked how it functions, not how it is built.
This was not an error. It was the natural division of labor within the argument. Yet it left one question largely untouched: what is the container, materially and historically speaking? Under what conditions does it form? What shapes can it take under different relational and historical pressures?
The Iraqi driver's story matters because it does not merely illustrate grief. It provides a concrete answer to this question—an answer that forces the concept of the container itself to be rethought. His mother is dead, and yet her order still lives in his hands. His family is gone, and yet they remain present, not as remembered ideas but as capacities. If that is true, then the container is constituted by relational sediment—built from the inside by others who are no longer there.
The task of this essay is therefore to rewrite container-formation: as the sedimented product of relational history, embodied practice, and bodily memory.
II. The Materiality of the Container
The container is a sedimented overlap of relational history, practical history, and bodily history—formed between persons, not within an isolated individual.
What a person can bear, how they remain open without collapse, what kinds of reality they can admit without disintegrating—these things do not arise from nowhere. They are built through repeated participation in specific forms of relation and practice, until those forms cease to appear as external and instead become the person's way of inhabiting the world.
1. Relational History
What is internalized in formative relationships is, most concretely, the repeated structure of relation itself: who responded, under what conditions, in what manner, with what degree of steadiness, warmth, calm, withdrawal, repair, or neglect.
Over time, these repeated structures become anticipatory forms. They shape not only what one expects from others, but how one organizes one's own relation to the world. A person repeatedly met with calm under pressure will come to inhabit difficulty differently from one repeatedly met with panic or abandonment. The relational pattern becomes a lived structure.
2. Practical History
This structure is transmitted less through explicit instruction than through shared embodied order.
People are formed not only by what they are told, but by what they repeatedly do with others: cleaning, eating, repairing, waiting, enduring, restoring order after disruption, facing small frustrations together. These are not morally neutral repetitions. They are the medium in which the self is slowly trained into particular ways of bearing reality.
Bourdieu is useful here, not as an authority to be displayed, but as a clarifying lens. Habitus names the way repeated practices sink beneath conscious rule and become bodily disposition: not memory of instruction, but a practical feel for how one moves, perceives, and responds (Bourdieu 1977; 1990). The Iraqi driver does not smile at others because he remembers a principle about kindness. If his sister lives on in his smile, then kindness has become part of the body's acquired style of being with others.
3. Bodily History
The deepest result of this sedimentation is not belief, but bodily habitation.
Merleau-Ponty helps clarify this point. The body is not merely an instrument of consciousness waiting for the mind to assign meaning. It is the first field in which the world is organized (Merleau-Ponty 2012). The driver's act of cleaning the car goes deeper than recollection performed through movement. His body dwells in the world according to the order his mother once enacted around him. He does not first think of her and then imitate her. Her way of restoring order has already become one of the body's available ways of being.
This is why the gesture is so dense. It is not representation. It is continuation.
4. Practice as Site
MacIntyre adds a final lens. Moral capacities do not arise first inside private consciousness and then get applied outward. They are formed in practices: shared activities with internal standards, repeated over time, within a form of life (MacIntyre 1981). The container is therefore not a private possession. It is the embodied remainder of having participated in such practices with others.
Bourdieu names the sedimentation. Merleau-Ponty names the bodily mode of its existence. MacIntyre names the social site in which it is formed. Together they support one claim: the container is built in relation, through repeated embodied order, until relation becomes capacity.
III. Two Formative Configurations: Integration and Inheritance
If the container is made of relational sediment, then its formation can take more than one shape.
1. A Shared Premise
There is no such thing as a morally permeable self that is not built by others.
The difference between one form of container and another is not the difference between autonomous formation and relational dependence. Both are relational. Both are mediated through the internalization of others. Both emerge from history rather than from pure self-grounding.
The real difference lies elsewhere: in how those internalized relations are integrated, how visible they remain in experience, how flexibly they can be drawn upon, and how much their stability depends on continued fidelity to particular internal figures.
2. Integrated Internalization
In stable, continuous, and repairable relations, internalized others are gradually metabolized into the lower layers of the self's structure. They do not disappear; they become transparent. They no longer present themselves as identifiable names or faces, but as the way the subject handles reality.
In this form, permeability feels nearly direct. The subject does not typically experience, "This person reminds me of someone," but simply, "I see this person." The historical mediations that made such seeing possible remain active, but they no longer leave visible seams in the moment of experience.
This is what I mean by integrated permeability. Its apparent directness is not the absence of mediation. It is mediation so deeply absorbed that the structure built by others is now lived as the subject's own way of encountering the world. The builders disappear into the building.
3. Inherited Repair
There is, however, another form.
When formative relationships are violently interrupted—by war, death, displacement, or catastrophic loss—the process of integration may be cut short. Yet internalization does not begin from zero. Some of the relational work has already been done. Under extreme conditions, subjects may rearrange what has already been sedimented in order to maintain structural continuity.
This is what the Iraqi driver's story reveals. His dead sister remains as his capacity for kindness. His dead father remains as his capacity for calm under difficulty. His dead mother remains as his capacity for order. These are not metaphors. They describe a genuine mode of psychic and bodily continuity in which internalized others remain visibly linked to specific forms of action.
Permeability here does not feel direct in the same way. It is accompanied by internal resonance. The arrival of an external other activates an already present relational channel. A stranger's need may awaken not only response to the stranger, but a living echo of someone already carried within.
This is what I mean by resonance-mediated permeability. It is a creative repair after the material conditions for further integration have been broken. What had already been built is preserved and rearranged in order to prevent collapse. The creativity lies precisely here: the subject does not merely preserve the past unchanged, but translates a received relational form into a new field of action. What was once the mother's way of caring for a household becomes the son's way of caring for a vehicle, a livelihood, a world. The movement is not simple repetition. It is a transformation from being cared for into carrying care forward.
4. Difference Without Hierarchy
The difference between these two forms is not whether others are internalized. In both cases, they are. The difference lies in degree of integration, phenomenal transparency, flexibility, and loyalty load.
Here a reversal appears. Integrated permeability feels more fluid and immediate. Yet because its formative mediations have become transparent, the subject may have weaker narrative access to the origins of his or her own moral capacities. One simply "sees the person," without knowing very clearly who taught one to see that way.
Resonance-mediated permeability, by contrast, carries visible inner echoes. It may therefore appear less pure to an uncareful observer. Yet the subject may possess a clearer knowledge of who built these capacities. The visibility of resonance produces stronger genealogical self-understanding.
Phenomenal transparency, in other words, is not equivalent to self-knowledge. It may conceal it.
These are two organizational shapes of the same underlying mechanism: relational internalization. In many actual subjects, both may coexist. What differs is not whether others have been taken in, but how what has been taken in has been integrated, preserved, and made available for future response.
IV. The Directionality of Permeability
Moral perception has a direction, and that direction is historically shaped.
1. Against the Myth of Uniform Capacity
The ability to perceive another's reality bears the shape of its formation. If it is built through particular histories of relation, practice, and bodily sedimentation, then certain forms of vulnerability, certain tones of need, certain situations of disorder or exposure, will cross the threshold more readily than others.
This directionality precedes prejudice. It is the natural projection of formation.
2. Two Forms of Directionality
In resonance-mediated permeability, this directionality is relatively visible. The internal resonance network has its own contour. Certain external others can activate it; others cannot. A stranger in one kind of exposed situation may awaken a powerful channel of response because he or she enters through a route already charged by internalized relational history. Another equally real stranger may not produce the same effect, not because the subject has actively closed the boundary, but because the internal network has a specific shape.
Integrated permeability has directionality too, but its shape is harder for the subject to perceive. Because the mediating history has become transparent, the subject experiences the response as direct. Yet that directness is itself historically formed. The self may therefore be less aware of the specific contours of its responsiveness precisely because those contours no longer appear as resonance.
3. Integration Is Not Universality
This point is crucial, because otherwise the old and false hierarchy returns.
Integrated permeability is not more universal merely because it feels less mediated. Its directionality is simply less visible. Its limits may therefore be harder to detect and harder to correct. The subject may believe he or she responds simply to "the person as such," while remaining relatively blind to the historical shape that makes some forms of concrete particularity more immediately available than others.
Resonance-mediated permeability has a different limitation. Its directionality is more apparent; it may therefore be easier to narrate, reflect upon, and deliberately widen. But it may also remain more tightly bound to specific internal figures and thus more constrained in where it opens most readily.
Both forms are historically shaped. Both contain structural limits. Every form of sight is built in history, and the shape of that history affects who becomes perceptually available. But visibility matters morally. A limit that can be seen can be questioned and widened. A limit that feels like directness may be the harder one to overcome.
V. The Concrete Content of Ontological Violence
Chapter 1 named ontological violence as a harm deeper than suffering or deprivation: violence directed at the subject's capacity to become a being capable of moral perception (Vale 2026, chap. 1). The present framework allows that claim to be made concrete.
If the container is formed through repeated relational and embodied order, then ontological violence consists in severing the repetitions that would have sedimented into capacity.
Displacement severs place-bound practices of order and continuity. Family rupture severs the earliest formation of resonance networks. Extreme poverty makes the repetition necessary for relational sedimentation difficult or impossible to sustain. Chronic isolation deprives the subject of a practice community in which capacities might be formed and renewed. Failure of care networks in childhood means there is no one present for those earliest building gestures through which the container begins to take shape.
Ontological violence, then, goes deeper than damaged feeling. It severs the repeated relational patterns through which a person might have become someone able to bear, regulate, and receive reality.
The existence of inherited repair proves two things at once. First, human beings possess astonishing powers of reorganization after devastation. Second, such reorganization bears the marks of interruption. Repair does not erase the cut. A repaired container may be strong, but its strength often carries the signature of what was broken: more fixed correspondences, heavier loyalty burdens, sharper directional sensitivities, silences where resonance does not easily arise.
That fact ought to change the tone in which resilience is invoked. It is not a moral ornament. It is often the visible trace of interrupted formation made barely livable.
VI. The Political Task in Concrete Form
Chapter 2 concluded that the political task is to sustain forms of relational community in which moral perception can emerge (Vale 2026, chap. 2). That remains true. But it can now be stated more concretely.
The political task is to sustain the social conditions under which repeated relational embodied practice is possible.
This task has two forms.
One is formative: to preserve the conditions under which relational repetition can sediment into capacity in the first place. This means stable dwelling, because order cannot sediment where daily life is perpetually dislocated. It means a childhood not abandoned to isolation, because the earliest resonance networks must be formed somewhere. It means communal practices in which participation can be sustained over time, so that capacities are shaped in common activity rather than left to privatized improvisation.
The other is reparative: to preserve the conditions under which already internalized relations can continue to organize life after loss. The Iraqi driver does not need "new connection" in the abstract. He needs a world in which what his mother built into him can still be lived.
This is why cultural forms that allow grief to take time matter so much. Inherited repair cannot be completed under efficiency pressure. If inherited repair is a real form of container-maintenance, then a society that demands immediate normalization after catastrophic loss is not merely impatient. It is actively interrupting the possibility that already internalized relational work might be rearranged into a livable structure. It blocks not only mourning, but the reconstitution of capacity.
Politics, then, is about whether the rhythms of life are stable enough, shared enough, and durable enough for relation to sediment into capacity—and whether what has already been sedimented can continue to live after rupture.
Conclusion
The driver wipes down his car.
That is where this essay began, and it should end there.
We now know what that gesture is. It is not merely memory. Not merely grief. Not merely routine. It is the continued existence of a dead person in the order she once built into another body. His mother remains, not as image alone, but as a way of restoring cleanliness, proportion, and care. His sister remains as kindness. His father remains as composure. The dead have not simply been remembered. They have been inherited as capacities.
It is something quieter than tragedy and more difficult than heroism: a demonstration that human beings remain formable in and through relation, even under conditions of devastating interruption. And because that is true, the destruction of those formative conditions must be named more precisely than it usually is.
What war, exile, poverty, and isolation cut off is not only life in the immediate sense. They cut off those repeated relational practices that would otherwise have sedimented into capacity—those rhythms, gestures, shared orders, and forms of accompaniment through which someone might one day become able, in three seconds, to see another concrete human being and respond.
That account must be rendered more exactly. And the obligation to preserve the conditions of such repetition—to treat them not as soft background goods but as serious political necessities—must be taken far more seriously than it usually is.
References
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
Vale, Vulpes. 2026. Seeing This Person: Moral Perception and the Conditions of Its Possibility. Unpublished manuscript.