Time, like being, is not given but construed.
It is not the container in which possibility unfolds, but one of the forms through which possibility appears to itself as unfolding.
In a relational ontology, temporality is not a background dimension; it is a modality of construal — a way in which potential differentiates and aligns with itself across cuts.
To say that something “happens in time” is already to have construed it as sequence, as before and after.
But sequence is only one way possibility arranges its own movement.
What we call “time” is the perspectival patterning of that movement as it actualises.
1. From Duration to Relation
Conventional metaphysics treats time as duration — a linear measure of persistence.
Even when reinterpreted as subjective flow (Bergson) or relativistic manifold (Einstein), time remains something through which events pass.
Relationally, by contrast, time is not what events pass through; it is how relation itself passes into event.
Each instantiation — each cut from potential to actual — draws a temporal boundary: the world distinguishing now from not-yet.
Time is that boundary felt from within.
It is not an axis of movement but the sensation of construal becoming aware of its own incompletion.
2. The Phase Space of Becoming
In this sense, temporality is phase-like, not linear.
Each relational configuration carries within it a horizon of virtual alignment — trajectories that may be actualised.
The “future” is not ahead; it is folded within the present as structured potential.
The “past” is not behind; it is that which has been aligned, the residue of coherence already achieved.
Time, then, is not succession but resonance between virtual and actual.
Becoming is a phase relation: potential vibrating against its own partial articulation.
Moments are not points on a line but nodes in a rhythmic topology — pulses of coherence echoing across scales.
3. Construal as Temporal Cut
Every construal is a temporal act: a selection that brings a particular alignment into focus, suspending others in latency.
To construe is to carve a “now” — not as a slice of duration but as a perspectival aperture through which possibility views itself.
In human semiosis, this takes linguistic form: tense, aspect, and modality are not reflections of time but construals of temporal relation.
They are how language temporalises possibility — how it brings the dynamics of potential and actual into grammatical play.
Thus, temporality is already semiotic before it is physical.
The sense of time is the sense of construal’s own movement through alignment.
4. The Recursion of the Moment
The present, in a relational ontology, is not a point but a recursion:
each “now” enfolds the potentials that constitute it, and each potential refracts into a new horizon of “not-yet.”
The moment is not what happens, but the happening of happening — the reflexive loop in which the world construes itself as event.
This recursive temporality allows meaning to layer, accumulate, and return.
We experience it as rhythm, memory, anticipation — each a different mode of coherence across recursive cuts.
To remember is to align with a previous construal; to anticipate is to align with a virtual one.
Both are relational acts, not movements of a subject through external time.
5. Temporality as Ethical Resonance
If temporality is the felt tension between potential and actual, then ethics becomes temporal too.
To act well is to sense when a construal moves too soon or too late — when it forecloses possibility before coherence has had time to form, or when it lingers after coherence has dissolved.
Ethical attunement is temporal attunement: knowing how to let a relation ripen, when to cut, when to hold.
In this rhythm, responsibility is not obligation but timing — the art of moving with possibility rather than against it.
Time thus becomes the pulse of relational ethics: the shared heartbeat of coherence becoming.
6. Time as Reflexive Alignment
Ultimately, temporality is how possibility experiences its own becoming.
It is not what limits the world, but what expresses its reflexivity.
Time is the world’s way of keeping track of its own alignments — the echo of potential against actual, reverberating through the relational field.
To sense that is to dwell in a different temporality: not the measured time of succession, but the living time of alignment — time that expands, contracts, and folds in correspondence with meaning’s own movement.
Next: The Coherence of Becoming
Topology mapped the spatial field of relation; temporality revealed its pulse.
What follows is coherence itself — not as consistency or stability, but as the holding-together of difference in motion.
If time is the rhythm of becoming, coherence is its melody: the form through which possibility recognises itself across transformations.
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