From Emergentist to Relational: A Confession

Before relational ontology, I thought I had found a home in emergentism and systems thinking.

They promised a world that was alive, interconnected, intelligible without being atomised. I loved the idea:

• higher-order properties “emerging” from interactions,

• systems with feedback and boundaries,

• complexity that could be mapped, measured, predicted.

It felt sophisticated, rigorous.

And yet, the satisfaction always carried a whisper of frustration. Something was off:

• Why did emergentism always smuggle in levels and hierarchies?

• Why did “systems” insist on being things rather than perspectives on relations?

• Why did the parts/whole distinction keep reasserting itself, even when I knew the phenomenon was irreducibly relational?

I was in love with the promise of coherence, but not with the architecture it imposed.

Then relational ontology arrived. And everything shifted.

• Emergence isn’t a property of parts stacked into wholes; it’s an effect of relational actualisation.

• Systems aren’t entities; they are cuts through structured potential, a way of seeing, not a thing that exists independent of perspective.

• Complexity isn’t built; it is enacted; stability and identity are not given, they are maintained across relational constraints.

Suddenly, the old frameworks didn’t just feel incomplete—they felt like modes of misreading.

Not wrong in practice, but structurally misleading if taken as ontology.

The shift is subtle, almost mischievous:

• I still care about emergence.

• I still think in systems.

• I still delight in patterns.

But now I see them through the lens of relation, not substance; as effects, not things; as cuts, not floors.

The emergentist self is still there, like a friend waving from the past.

But relational ontology is no longer a lens—it’s the ground from which lenses themselves arise.

And that changes everything.