The Reflexive Field: Readiness and the Grammar of Becoming: 3 Reflexive Differentiation: Readiness as Ontological Grammar

If potential is readiness, then readiness itself is structured — not a formless capacity, but an organised openness. To call this structure a grammar is to insist that becoming is not arbitrary. It is governed by patterns of relational differentiation that constrain how readiness can unfold.

In a systemic-functional sense, a grammar does not determine what must be said but organises what can be meant. Likewise, ontological grammar does not determine what must occur but shapes what can become. Readiness, then, is grammatical in the sense that it organises systemic differentiations — distinctions that make certain alignments possible while precluding others.

This implies that potential is not a homogenous field. It is a structured multiplicity, internally articulated through the relational dependencies of readiness itself. Each configuration of readiness enacts a reflexive differentiation: a distinction within the system that both constrains and enables further readiness.

This reflexivity is crucial. Readiness is not directed outward toward an external world of becoming; it differentiates inwardly, generating new relational fields through its own internal alignments. To be ready is to be poised within a network of potential differences that define what responsiveness can mean. The system, in its readiness, is always differentiating itself from itself.

In this view, the world is not composed of discrete systems preadapted to interaction. Rather, systems are differentiations within a single reflexive field of readiness — partial construals of an underlying grammar of potential. Actualisation is a perspectival cut through this grammar, not an external realisation of an independent order.

We might say, then, that reality is not stratified by levels of being but inflected by modes of readiness. Each system instantiates a distinct ontological mood — a particular calibration of openness, a grammar of possible alignments. The evolution of complexity, seen through this lens, is the progressive differentiation of readiness itself: the grammar of becoming learning to articulate new clauses of possibility.