Einstein and the Refusal of the Cut: A Relational Reassessment

Albert Einstein’s relationship to quantum mechanics is often summarised by a single line about dice. But the source of his discomfort runs deeper than statistical laws or indeterminism. What Einstein rejected—consistently, eloquently, and with increasing frustration—was the idea that phenomena could exhaust reality. He refused to accept that the world becomes determinate only through the conditions of observation. He could not allow that meaning enters the world through construal.

This is why his objections take the form they do. The EPR argument insists that physical properties must exist prior to and independent of their measurement. His correspondence with Bohr returns repeatedly to the same demand: that a complete physical theory must describe “the real state of affairs” of a system. His discomfort with complementarity arises not from confusion but from conviction: he believed that physics must represent the world, not co-actualise it.

Seen through the lens of relational ontology, Einstein becomes the clearest—and most necessary—counterpoint to this entire series.

Where Bohm, Wheeler, Heisenberg, Bohr, and even Born (in his own way) accepted that quantum theory had revealed something about the relation between system and phenomenon, Einstein held the line for a representational realism in which construal plays no ontological role. He wanted a world where properties are possessed, not construed.

But relational ontology exposes the impossibility of this demand.

Properties belong to instances, and instances arise only through a perspectival cut made within a system of potential. The system is not a hidden substrate containing determinate values; it is the structured space of possible construals. A particle does not possess position or momentum behind the scenes: those are ways of construing an event within different grammatical alignments of meaning potential.

Einstein’s longing for an unconstrued reality—“the real state of affairs”—is thus a longing for what the relational model shows cannot exist. There is no thing that possesses all properties at once, waiting patiently behind the cut. There is only the theory of possible instances and the phenomenon that becomes actual through construal. To demand a deeper “complete” state is to demand the instance without the cut, the event without the standpoint, the description without the conditions of description.

Viewed in this way, the EPR paradox becomes almost pedagogical. It reveals—precisely through Einstein’s own reasoning—the impossibility of attributing determinate, observer-independent properties to a system without collapsing system and instance together. It shows that trying to treat the system as if it were an instance leads to contradictions that no theory, hidden-variable or otherwise, can resolve.

Einstein’s critique inadvertently illuminates the very structure he resisted:

that meaning is relational and perspectival, not representational.

The quantum formalism does not describe incomplete information about a complete reality. It describes the structural potential from which phenomena can be actualised. The so-called “incompleteness” of quantum mechanics is not a limitation of the theory but a limitation of the representational metaphysics Einstein attempted to impose on it.

This makes Einstein indispensable to the relational story—not as an outlier, but as the figure whose resistance clarifies what is at stake. His refusal of the cut draws the cut in sharp relief. His insistence on determinate underlying states tells us exactly why quantum mechanics cannot be interpreted representationally. His search for completeness exposes the impossibility of completeness in a world where phenomena are perspectival construals.

In the end, Einstein was right that something profound had been revealed.

He simply could not accept that what had been revealed was the constitutive role of construal itself.