The Inclination of Reality: Potential as Readiness: Afterword — The Inclination Turn

“The universe leans before it moves.”

Across the relational ontology, potential has always named the systemic order of reality — the theory of the instance, the metaphenomenal horizon from which construal cuts the phenomenal into coherence.

Yet until now, potential has been described largely in structural terms — as possibility, as field, as theory. What the present series introduces is the missing dynamic dimension: the inclination of potential, its readiness to actualise.

This shift — the Inclination Turn — restores motion to the metaphenomenal. It reframes potential not as a static repertoire of what could be, but as an active leaning toward coherence, a readiness already underway.

With this move, the ontology becomes kinetic.

Potential ceases to be a map of possibility and becomes the posture of reality itself — a field whose systemic asymmetries make neutrality impossible and becoming inevitable.

It also reveals the deep continuity between the physical, the semiotic, and the social. Each is an expression of the same ontological grammar: the leaning of potential toward construal, the readiness of the real to mean.

This is the point at which the relational ontology fully closes its circle:

• System as structured potential, now understood as readiness.

• Instance as the cut through inclination into coherence.

• Construal as the reflexive alignment of that readiness within the field itself.

Reality, in this view, is neither deterministic nor indeterminate.

It is inclined.