Foreclosures of Possibility: 2 Existence as Error: Physics and the Lost Potential of Being

If philosophy compressed relation into substance, physics enshrined it as existence. Where once reality was a relational field of potential, it became a ledger: what is, what is not. What remained in between — the flux, the indeterminate, the generative — was treated as noise, as abstraction, as mathematical convenience.

The measure of all things

Classical mechanics took the Cartesian legacy and operationalised it. Matter was extended substance, moving in pre-defined space and time. To measure was to know. To know was to exist. The universe became a machine, and the machine’s parts had existence; what did not register as a measurable entity was suspended, almost erased, from the ledger of reality.

The focus on existence was not merely methodological — it was ontological. It assumed that being is binary: something exists or it does not. Possibility, which had once hovered between relation and substance, was demoted to probability — a shadow of potential rather than a force in its own right.

Quantum hints, classical traps

Quantum mechanics initially challenged this obsession. Superposition, entanglement, uncertainty — all gestured toward a reality of relational potential rather than fixed existence. Yet the very language of the field betrayed it: wavefunction, particle, measurement, collapse. The relational became legible only when forced into a binary frame of actual versus not actual. Existence became the gatekeeper of being; probability became its penitentiary.

The tyranny of actuality

This obsession with existence has profound consequences. By prioritising what is over what could be, physics — and by extension, science at large — has inherited the same closure that philosophy once imposed. The realm of possibility is not just ignored; it is actively compressed, quantified, and disciplined.

We now live in a world in which the measurable dominates discourse, policy, and imagination. Existence has become a conceptual law of nature, rather than a condition of relational emergence. Possibility is reduced to the statistical, the computational, the observable.

The relational remainder

Yet the relational remainder persists. Indeterminacy, context-dependence, and relational coherence continue to leak through every formalism. They remind us that existence is never absolute, that the ledger is always incomplete, and that the universe retains a capacity for becoming beyond measurement.

If philosophy built the cage, physics installed the locks. But possibility — the persistent relational field — is not so easily contained. Its emergence waits in the interstices, in the superposed states, in the unsaid, in the unmeasured.

The next post might explore how these reductions are mirrored in knowledge systems themselves: how method, measurement, and ideology converge to systematically foreclose relational potential in social as well as physical domains.