Einstein: The Demand for the World Without the Cut: Relational Ontology and the Dream of an Unmediated Real

Einstein’s relationship to quantum mechanics is not—despite popular caricature—a simple conservatism or nostalgia for classical physics. His complaint was ontological. What quantum theory denied him was not determinism but a world that exists independently of any construal. He wanted phenomena without perspective, facts without the cut, reality without the relational condition of meaning.

To place Einstein inside the relational ontology is to watch his most cherished intuition unravel: he believed the universe must have a determinate structure of facts, even if hidden, even if unknowable. But in our model, nothing is determinate without the perspectival cut. There is no world “as it really is” behind the phenomena—not because the world is foggy, but because the very notion of “behind” is a misconstrual of potential as substance.

Let’s proceed cleanly.

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1. Einstein’s Ontological Premise: The World Must Be Already Fully Actual

Einstein’s metaphysics rests on one conviction:

The universe has a definite set of actual facts, independent of any act of observing.

This is not merely realism; it is a demand for complete actuality.

But relational ontology refuses this entirely:

• A system is structured potential, not a catalogue of actual facts.

• An instance (an event) is the perspectival actualisation of that potential.

• No phenomenon exists without the cut—the construal that makes it a phenomenon.

Einstein’s universe is permanently actual.

In our ontology, actuality is a relational achievement, not a background state.

Where Einstein demands “the real state of affairs,” relational ontology replies:

“There is no such thing as a state of affairs outside a construal.”

This is the ontological tension that defines the whole dispute.

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2. Hidden Variables: The Attempt to Restore the System as Substance

Einstein’s commitment to “elements of reality” leads inevitably to hidden variables:

if quantum states do not encode determinate facts, then something else must.

But in our framework, hidden variables are ontologically incoherent.

They attempt to treat system-theoretic potential as if it were a pre-instantiated actual state.

This collapses:

• system into instance

• potential into fact

• possibility into substance

• theory into phenomenon

The system is not hiding facts from us.

It is not the kind of thing that contains facts.

Hidden variables presuppose that undecidedness is merely epistemic.

Relational ontology says: undecidedness is ontological—a feature of potential itself.

Einstein was looking for the world without potential.

But without potential there is no world—only a static archive.

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3. The EPR Argument: A Protest Against Relational Individuation

Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen famously argued that if quantum mechanics is complete, then distant systems cannot have independent realities. For Einstein, this was absurd—he took individuality to be an intrinsic property.

But in the relational ontology:

• Individuation is a cline from collective potential to distinct perspectives.

• There is no intrinsic individuality “in itself.”

• The cut that individuates systems is perspectival, not metaphysical.

Thus EPR reveals not a flaw in quantum mechanics, but a flaw in Einstein’s construal of individuation.

He assumes:

• Individuals first

• Relations second

Our ontology asserts the opposite:

• Relations first

• Individuals as perspectival differentiations within relational potential

Einstein’s discomfort with nonlocality is not a scientific objection—it’s a refusal of relational individuation.

He wants particles that are already individuals before any cut.

But in our ontology, that is impossible.

The “individual particle” is an instantiated perspective, never a substrate.

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4. The Relational Response to Spooky Action

Einstein famously rejected quantum nonlocality as “spooky.”

But recall:

Spookiness arises only if one assumes facts are stored in each particle before the event.

Relational ontology says:

• There are no facts “stored” anywhere.

• There is only structured potential, relationally organised.

• Entanglement is not “instantaneous influence” but a single system of potential actualised at different perspectival cuts.

The “spookiness” dissolves once one abandons the myth of pre-existing facts.

Einstein’s discomfort was a failure to accept perspectival actualisation as fundamental.

He wanted a world that was already actual.

Quantum theory gives him a world that is always becoming actual.

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5. Einstein’s Deeper Insight: The World Must Be Intelligible

Einstein wasn’t being stubborn; he was being faithful to a core philosophical intuition:

the world must exhibit sufficient structural order to be thinkable.

Relational ontology agrees—just not with his solution.

He looked for hidden structures of fact.

We look for structured potential whose construal makes phenomena possible.

He sought completeness of actual states.

We offer coherence of potentials and cuts.

He hoped for substance underlying appearances.

We recognise theory and construal jointly actualising experience.

His instinct for intelligibility is right.

His model of how intelligibility emerges is not.

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6. Einstein’s Place in the Relational Sequence

Seen alongside Schrödinger:

• Schrödinger mistakenly substantialised the wave.

• Einstein mistakenly substantialised the hidden facts.

Both sought the world without the cut.

Both rejected the notion that actuality is perspectival.

Both treated potential as a deficiency rather than a mode of being.

But where Schrödinger imagined a continuous substance,

Einstein imagined discrete but hidden actualities.

They disagree in physics;

they align in ontology.

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Conclusion: Einstein Wanted Certainty; Quantum Reality Offers Relation

Einstein’s tragedy is not that he was wrong, but that he chose the wrong layer of description. He imagined:

• the system as a hidden actuality
  rather than

• the system as structured potential

He wanted the event to reveal a pre-existing fact.

But events do not reveal—they instantiate.

He wanted the phenomenon to mirror the world.

But phenomena are world, perspectivally cut.

He wanted the universe to be a static book.

Quantum mechanics gives us an open grammar.

Relational ontology makes explicit what Einstein could not accept:

Reality is not what exists behind experience.

Reality is what becomes through construal.