To use the relational ontology is to enter a world that no longer begins from things.
The primary fact is relation — not as connection between pre-existing entities, but as the movement through which anything becomes discernible at all.
Once that movement is felt, thought itself changes texture.
Meaning is no longer what symbols refer to, but what construals actualise.
Reality is not what is represented, but what becomes in and through alignment.
What, then, becomes possible in such a world?
1. Thinking without Foundations
First, it becomes possible to think without foundations — to reason without needing a final ground beneath the movement of meaning.
In relational terms, stability does not come from anchoring, but from coherence through relation.
A concept holds not because it rests on something more basic, but because it aligns across multiple construals.
Knowledge becomes a topology of mutual constraint rather than a pyramid of premises.
This frees thought from the metaphysical compulsion to seek the “real” behind appearances.
There is no hidden substrate waiting to be uncovered — only deeper levels of alignment waiting to be enacted.
Truth, then, becomes a measure of relational adequacy: the degree to which a construal sustains coherence across its own cuts.
2. Knowing as Participation
Second, it becomes possible to know as participation.
If construal is constitutive of reality, then knowing is not a detached act of representation but a moment of the world knowing itself through you.
The “observer” and the “observed” are not separate terms; they are two perspectives on the same relational event.
This changes what it means to do theory.
Theory becomes performative, not propositional — a way of entering into relation with possibility.
Each act of theorising is an experiment in alignment: an attempt to feel how the world might construe itself differently through this cut rather than that one.
To know, then, is to be known by the world — to feel one’s construals resonating with the potential they articulate.
3. Critique as Re-alignment
Third, the ontology reconfigures critique.
In representational models, critique exposes error: a failure to correspond to reality.
In relational models, critique re-aligns construals: it exposes incoherences in how relations are cut and coordinated.
To critique a theory is not to refute its claims, but to trace where its cuts foreclose possibility — where its construals overdetermine what could become.
Critique thus becomes an act of ontological repair: reopening the space of potential that rigid construals have prematurely closed.
This is a deeply creative form of critique — one that restores movement where certainty has congealed.
4. Creation as Re-entrance
Fourth, using the ontology makes creation possible in a new sense.
If reality itself is the construal of potential, then creation is not invention ex nihilo but re-entrance into potential.
Every creative act — artistic, scientific, linguistic — becomes a way of re-cutting the world, of offering new alignments through which possibility may actualise differently.
The relational ontology thus transforms creativity from expression to navigation: the skilled traversal of the relational field.
To create is to discover the pathways along which new coherence can emerge.
5. Ethics without Essence
Finally, it becomes possible to think ethics without essence.
When beings are understood as relational events rather than substances, moral worth cannot depend on intrinsic properties.
Ethics becomes a question of how one aligns, not what one is.
An act is “good” to the extent that it sustains and extends coherence across relations — that it enables more of the world to become.
Responsibility, then, is not obedience to rules but sensitivity to resonance: the capacity to feel when a construal amplifies or constrains the becoming of possibility.
Such an ethics is not imposed from above; it is immanent to relation itself.
Possibility Becoming Reflexive
Using the relational ontology thus opens a new reflexive space: possibility becoming aware of itself as possibility.
When you use it, you do not merely think about relation — you enact it.
You participate in the world’s self-articulation, its continual negotiation between potential and event.
The ontology becomes the mirror through which the world sees itself as becoming.
And through that mirror, you glimpse yourself not as a knower of things, but as a momentary alignment in the world’s own attempt to know.
Next: The World that Thinks through Us
If the first post traced the conditions of use, and this one explored the consequences of use, the next may follow the spiral further:
What does it mean to say that the world itself thinks — that construal is not merely human, but a cosmic mode of self-articulation?
How does possibility continue becoming through the systems that sustain meaning at scale?
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