(You’re Importing the Wrong Categories)
There is a predictable mistake some readers will make when encountering a relational ontology: they will assume it is a form of idealism. The reasoning goes like this:
“If you say reality is relationally construed, you must mean the mind is creating the world.”
Let’s state this plainly:
To call it idealism is to mistake the map for the terrain and the terrain for the old terrain you already believe in.
1. No Mind–Matter Split, No Idealism
Idealism (in any of its classical forms) still assumes:
a mind
that holds or generates
representations
“in” an interior mental space
which construct or determine the world.
Our ontology denies every one of these commitments.
It offers, instead:
circulating potentials, perspectival cuts, and actualisations that emerge through structured relational dynamics.
Nothing here is “mental.”
2. Construal ≠ Mental Projection
A second confusion: the assumption that construal is a kind of psychological act — a mind imposing form on raw reality.
a perspectival cut,
an emergent alignment in potential,
a structured way a system actualises an event within its relational lattice.
To treat it as “mental projection” is simply to import the very model of mind already rejected.
3. Relational Actualisation Is Not “Ideas Making Reality”
potentials
relations
systems
perspectival cuts
and constraints
co-produce actual events.
This is ontogenetic, not mental.
4. You Cannot Square a Relational Ontology Inside a Representational Worldview
If someone approaches this ontology and tries to place it on the familiar philosophical map (“Is this idealism or materialism?”), they will necessarily misread it.
Because the map they are using was drawn by:
realists
representationalists
reductionists
dualists
and 19th-century metaphysicians
who assumed that the universe naturally divides into mind and matter.
Our ontology begins elsewhere entirely:
with potential, relation, construal, actualisation, and perspectival emergence.
5. What Relational Ontology Is (in Minimal Terms)
For the reader who wants the cleanest possible formulation:
Reality is structured potential, not inert substance.
Events are actualisations of potential through relational cuts.
Construal is perspectival, not psychological.
Systems and instances co-constitute each other.
Meaning and reality are inseparable at the level of event, not because mind creates the world, but because there is no non-construed event.
This is process-relational realism, not idealism.
6. If You Think This Is Idealism, You Are Still Thinking Inside the Old Grid
And that’s the point of this post.
When you accuse a relational ontology of idealism, you reveal that you still believe:
in minds as containers
in worlds as objects
in representations as mirrors
in subject–object dualism
in interiority as metaphysical ground
Your refutation lands on a strawman of your own making.
The Work of This Series
In the posts that follow, we will continue clarifying the most common misreadings:
internal vs external
subjective vs objective
knowledge vs world
psychology vs construal
constructionism vs relational actualisation
explanation vs reduction
and the entire habit of translating relational categories into representational ones.
Each post will recut the misunderstanding at its hinge.
But this is the crucial opening move:
Relational ontology is not idealism because it does not share the metaphysical architecture that makes idealism possible.
If you import that architecture in order to classify it, you have already misread it.
No comments:
Post a Comment