Foreclosures of Possibility: 1 The Compression of Relation: How Philosophy Invented Substance

If the becoming of possibility is the story of expansion — of relational openness — then the history of philosophy has too often been the story of contraction. Each canonical “clarification” of being has been, in its way, a tightening: a decision to reduce relation to something it is not, to treat the field of potential as a collection of things.

What we inherit as ontology is, largely, a record of these compressions.

From relation to form

Plato’s gesture is the first great foreclosure. In the name of intelligibility, he lifted meaning out of relation and fixed it in the realm of Forms — pure, eternal, and indifferent to context. The world became a shadowplay of the real, and the play itself ceased to matter. The messy, evolving, relational field of experience was demoted to the status of appearance. The possible was already over: perfection had already happened elsewhere.

From form to substance

Aristotle’s correction only deepened the closure. By grounding being in substance — that which exists in itself and not in another — he made relation derivative, a property of what is already there. Potential became the servant of actuality. The question “what is it made of?” replaced “how does it come to be?” Ontology became chemistry before chemistry existed.

This single turn — the elevation of substance over relation — encoded a metaphysical grammar that would structure the next two millennia: things first, connections later.

The self as the final compression

Descartes perfected the art. Having inherited the machinery of substance, he divided it into two: res cogitans and res extensa, the thinking thing and the extended thing. The cut between mind and world became the new condition of knowledge, and with it came the modern self — a compressed perspective masquerading as the ground of reality.

The relational field collapsed inward, folded into the point of view that claims to stand outside it. Knowledge became disconnection, sanctified.

The cost of intelligibility

Each of these moves was made in the name of clarity, yet each achieved clarity by subtraction. To make sense of the world, we learned to shrink it. The price of coherence was potential itself: the unbounded relational play that gives rise to being.

Philosophy did not so much explain reality as stabilise it — building conceptual dams across the flow of possibility, converting motion into monument.

The relational remainder

And yet relation has never gone away. It persists as the remainder each system cannot quite account for: the excess, the dependency, the context that leaks through. It is what forces every ontology, eventually, to evolve — because no compression, however elegant, can fully contain what it tries to reduce.

Perhaps the becoming of possibility begins again here: in the recognition that relation is not what happens between substances, but what precedes their invention.

From Substance to Existence

Once relation had been compressed into substance, the next move was almost inevitable: substance had to exist.

What began as a conceptual convenience hardened into an ontological claim. “To be” meant “to be something.” The verb became a noun. Existence was no longer the open condition of becoming, but a certificate of actuality — a metaphysical passport stamped approved.

Physics inherited this grammar wholesale. Even when it broke matter into energy, wave, or probability, it could not abandon the question: what exists? Every equation was made to answer it, as if potential itself must apply for permission to be.

And so the field that once shimmered with indeterminacy was forced back into inventory. Relation survived only as interaction, possibility as measurement, becoming as the aftermath of observation.

The next post traces this story — how physics, having touched the relational depth of the real, turned away from it. How the language of existence became the final veil drawn across the face of possibility.