In much of cosmology, we are trained to ask: what came first? The “first event,” the “uncaused cause,” the Big Bang as literal genesis—these are the questions that dominate our imagination. Yet each of them assumes a metaphysical framework that relational ontology rejects:
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That time exists as a background through which events unfold.
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That causation is a chain linking past to future.
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That “firstness” is a property of something that exists prior to all else.
These assumptions are not mistakes in physics; they are misprojections of representational thinking onto the relational potential of the cosmos.
The first event, when considered without these assumptions, is not temporal, nor is it causal in the usual sense. It is a retrospective perspectival cut: the conceptual anchor we impose on a network of potentials to make it intelligible. The “beginning” emerges not from matter or energy, but from the conditions under which relational potentials can be distinguished and articulated.
Asking what came first is therefore a question about our own construal practices, not about reality. The first event is a feature of perspective, a necessity of intelligibility rather than a property of the universe itself.
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