For most of Western metaphysics, the foundational unit of reality is supposed to be a thing—a self-sufficient lump of being that exists on its own terms, bearing properties, entering relations, and persisting through change. This is the core commitment of substance ontology: the world is built out of independently existing entities.
But the moment you look closely, the whole programme collapses.
The “stand-alone thing” cannot do the work it’s supposed to do. In fact, the concept can’t even get off the ground without invoking the very relational architecture substance ontology denies.
Let’s make the fractures explicit.
1. Individuation Requires Relation
A substance is meant to be a fully self-grounding unit.
But what makes this unit distinct from that one?
You cannot individuate a thing
without reference to boundaries, contrasts, contexts, differentiations—
all of which are relational cuts.
The “self-contained entity” only becomes identifiable through the structured relational field it allegedly does not need.
A thing cannot be itself
without not being something else.
And that “else” is a relational articulation.
Substance ontology begins by asserting independence,
and ends by relying on the relational ground it refuses to acknowledge.
2. Interaction Is Impossible Without Relation
Substances are supposed to interact—cause, influence, affect.
But interaction is a relation between instances.
If relations are secondary or derivative, then so is interaction.
But if interaction is derivative, causation collapses.
And without causation, substances have no way to do anything at all.
The supposed “independent entities” become inert monads—
not by philosophical design, but by logical consequence.
Substance metaphysics wants objects that can interact
but won’t accept the relationality that makes interaction possible.
That contradiction is fatal.
3. Change Cannot Be Explained Internally
A substance is meant to persist through time while undergoing change.
But change is only intelligible as a difference across temporal perspectives.
The moment of “before” and the moment of “after” relate.
If you deny the primacy of relation, you cannot account for change.
You can only assert it as a brute fact and hope no one asks how it works.
A non-relational framework can have either:
but not change that is both real and intelligible.
4. Category Formation Depends on Relational Structure
Even the categories that substance ontology uses—
property, attribute, essence, accident, thing—
all depend on differentiations within a system.
But a system is itself relational potential.
The categories presuppose a structured possibility space in which distinctions matter, and in which entities are construed as types of something.
You cannot get categories out of independent items.
You can only get them out of relational organisation.
Substance ontology smuggles in relationality at the level of concept formation,
even while denying it at the level of ontology.
5. The Punchline: The Independent Entity Isn’t Independent
Once you trace the logic all the way down, the result is unavoidable:
A “stand-alone thing” only exists by presupposing the relational architecture that lets it be identifiable, interact, change, and be classified.
The ontology of independence depends on the ontology of relation.
Relation is the ground; substance is the artefact.
Substance ontology sets out to secure a metaphysics of things.
Instead, it exposes why things cannot be metaphysically primary at all.
Under relational pressure, its foundations dissolve—
not slowly, not subtly, but at the first hinge.
The so-called “independent substance” was never independent.
It was a placeholder for relation all along.
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