The Inclination of Reality: Potential as Readiness: 2 The Tendency to Actualise

If readiness is the posture of potential, then tendency is its motion. Readiness leans; tendency follows the lean — not as a force pushing from behind, but as a relational openness drawing the system toward construal.

Potential, in this sense, is not a store of energy or a catalogue of options. It is a structured inclination: the world’s way of being slightly off balance, perpetually poised toward coherence. Actualisation does not arrive to complete potential; it arises as the satisfaction of its tension.

We might say that every system is already tilted — leaning into its own horizon of construal. This is not a teleology, for there is no prefigured end; nor is it determinism, for nothing is fixed in advance. It is simply that potential, by existing as readiness, cannot not incline. The field is never neutral.

This tendency to actualise is what gives the relational field its dynamism. It is why instantiation is not an external event but a perspectival shift within the system’s own readiness. To actualise is to realign inclination as coherence — to move from the metaphenomenal leaning of the possible to the phenomenal stability of the event.

In human terms, this is the difference between knowing what could be and feeling the pull of what is about to be. Readiness is potential’s grammar; tendency is its rhythm.

To misread potential as probability is to strip it of its inclination — to treat the living tension of readiness as mere statistical abstraction. But to restore its leaning is to understand that actualisation is not an outcome but a resolution of posture.

Potential is always in the act of leaning toward itself.

Actuality is what happens when that leaning holds long enough to mean.