The Becoming of Possibility continues to trace how relational thought displaces the metaphysics of depth—the ancient habit of imagining truth as something hidden beneath appearance. Few modern thinkers felt the tension of that impulse more keenly than David Bohm, whose distinction between the implicate and explicate orders offered a vision of reality as internally related, dynamically whole. His vocabulary of enfoldment and unfoldment sought to restore continuity where modern physics had produced fragmentation. Yet even in its generosity, Bohm’s model remained tethered to the very logic it tried to transcend: a logic of expression, of an inner realm projecting itself outward into form.
Seen through the lens of relational ontology, Bohm’s intuition can be reframed—not as a metaphysics of depth but as an early gesture toward a reflexive ontology of construal. What he called the implicate order may be read as the structured potential of relation itself, while the explicate order becomes a perspectival actualisation of that potential. In place of expression and unfolding, we find construal and actualisation: a shift not of content but of ontological grammar.
1. The System as Potential, Not Hidden Whole
Where Bohm posits a deeper order underlying appearances, relational ontology begins with structured potential—a system understood as a theory of possible instances. There is no hidden reality waiting to be revealed; there is only a network of relational possibility awaiting construal. The “implicate” becomes not a metaphysical substrate but a theory of possible alignments, abstracted from within meaning itself.
2. Actualisation as Perspectival Cut
What Bohm calls unfoldment is, in relational terms, a perspectival actualisation—a cut within relational potential that brings a particular construal into being. The “explicate order” is not the appearance of something deeper; it is the actuality of a construal. Every phenomenon is already an instance of relational potential, a particular way of cutting the field of possibility.
3. Construal over Expression
Bohm’s model presumes expression: the explicate expresses the implicate. The relational model replaces expression with construal. Nothing is expressed from a prior realm; rather, something is construed within the same relational space. The relation between orders is not causal or hierarchical but reflexive—each construal both depends upon and redefines the theory that makes it possible.
4. From Enfoldment to Reflexive Alignment
If we translate Bohm’s terms:
| Bohm | Relational Ontology |
|---|---|
| Implicate order | System as structured potential (theory of possible construals) |
| Explicate order | Instance as perspectival actualisation (first-order meaning) |
| Holomovement | Reflexive alignment—the dynamic interplay of construals across orders |
| Enfoldment / Unfoldment | Shifts of construal: re-cutting the relational field |
The holomovement thus becomes not the flux of a hidden energy but the reflexive movement of construal itself—the continual re-alignment of relational potential as meaning is actualised and re-theorised.
5. The Residue of Representation
Bohm’s vision remains powerful because it recognises that separateness is a construal effect. Yet his metaphysics still hides a representational cut: the explicate represents the implicate, which remains “realer” beneath it. Relational ontology dissolves that remainder. There is no “behind,” only within—no enfolded totality awaiting revelation, only the recursive activity of construal within the one relational field of meaning.
6. Reality as Reflexive
From this vantage, Bohm’s implicate/explicate pair can be read not as two levels of being but as two orders of construal—first-order phenomena and second-order metaphenomena, each defined in relation to the other. The movement between them is not temporal unfolding but reflexive re-cutting: reality understanding itself through the shifting of its own relational boundaries.
What Bohm glimpsed as the implicate order may thus be re-seen as the systemic potential of meaning—not a hidden universe behind appearances, but the very capacity of relation to generate new alignments of itself.
In the end, the world does not unfold from a deeper order; it is continually re-cut within the relational field of possibility. Enfoldment is not spatial, nor temporal—it is reflexive. The whole does not express itself through the part; the part construes the whole anew.
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