5 — Collapse as Compulsion: The Ontological Panic Behind Reductionism

Reductionism often presents itself as a virtue: clarity, parsimony, cleanliness. The world is messy; reductionism tidies it up. It speaks the language of rigour, but functions more like an anxiety disorder: too many relations, too much permeability—quick, collapse it to something manageable.

In relational ontology, reductionism is not merely false; it is diagnostically revealing. It discloses a discipline’s fear of relation, its impulse to turn fluid potential into inert substance. This impulse operates along three intertwined compulsions:

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1. The Compulsion to Pre-Decide Relevance

Reductionism begins by assuming that only a subset of relations count, and the rest should be treated as noise. This is not parsimony; it is epistemic triage performed before the phenomenon has even been construed. The system is told in advance which relations it is allowed to actualise.

This pre-decision functions as a kind of ontological policing:

“Stay in your lane. Don’t complicate the model.”

But relevance in a relational ontology is not a property of things. It’s a function of perspective; a cut; a construal. Reductionism freezes this cut and treats it as inherent. It takes a perspectival convenience and promotes it to ontology.

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2. The Compulsion to Locate Causality Inside Objects

Reductionism must locate causes somewhere. Its preferred move: bury them inside entities as hidden motors, properties, or mechanisms.

This is the classic misreading of systems as aggregates.

For relational ontology, causality is an emergent pattern in the relational weave—an actualisation of potential under a particular construal. But reductionism reads the event backwards, internalising the effect:

“The behaviour came from inside the component.”

This is ontology as ventriloquism: the relation speaks, but the entity’s mouth moves.

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3. The Compulsion to Treat Limits as Boundaries

Reductionism confuses limits with edges.

Limits are capacities: the envelope of potential actualisations the system can undergo.

Boundaries are geometric fantasies: crisp frontiers where the “real stuff” allegedly stops.

By collapsing limits into boundaries, reductionism invents isolation where none exists. Systems are treated as sealed containers instead of participation nodes. This is what allows reductionism to pretend that:

• a mind can be fully explained by neurons,

• a society by individual psychology,

• a text by its grammar,

• a phenomenon by its parts,

• an instance by its system.

The reductionist boundary is a prophylactic against complexity—an ontological mask.

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What Reductionism Reveals

Reductionism survives not because it explains well, but because it comforts. It offers a world that can be known by cutting it into stable chunks. It offers certainty in exchange for relational amputation.

From a relational stance, the deepest problem with reductionism is not its errors but its ontology of fear:

• fear of emergence,

• fear of indeterminacy,

• fear of perspectival accountability,

• fear that meaning is not in things but in the cuts we make.

To reject reductionism is not to embrace holism; holism is just reductionism scaled up. To reject reductionism is to refuse the conversion of relation into substance.

Reductionism is not a mistake—it is a mood.