Introduction: The Gravitational Pull Inward
Across the previous posts, we have examined traits, dispositions, stored meanings, and internal representations. Each appeared, in its own way, to offer explanation. Each promised sufficiency. Each brought inquiry to rest.
What remains to be explained is not another inner construct, but a deeper question:
Why does explanation keep falling inward at all?
Why does “inside the individual” exert such gravitational force as an explanatory endpoint?
1. Boundedness as Ontological Comfort
Individuals appear as bounded entities. They have edges, continuity, and apparent persistence over time. In contrast, relations are diffuse, distributed, and temporally unstable.
Explanations gravitate toward bounded entities because they offer ontological comfort:
causes seem locatable,
responsibility seems assignable,
explanation seems containable.
Interiority offers a place for explanation to stop.
2. The Mistaken Transfer of Stability
Relational patterns can be stable — sometimes remarkably so. But stability of pattern is quietly transferred into stability of essence.
What is in fact:
sustained by coordination,
reproduced through normativity,
maintained by environmental regularities,
is redescribed as something carried inside the individual.
This transfer hardens regularity into inevitability and makes relational phenomena appear self-contained.
3. Interiorisation as Compression of Time and Relation
Relational phenomena unfold over time. They depend on histories of interaction, ongoing adjustment, and contextual uptake. Interiorisation collapses this temporal spread into a present possession:
the trait is there,
the belief is held,
the representation exists.
Time disappears. Relation disappears. Explanation feels complete because complexity has been compressed, not because it has been understood.
4. Agency Without Exposure
Interior causes preserve a familiar image of agency. Individuals appear to act from within themselves rather than through exposure to relations.
This is reassuring:
it avoids vulnerability to context,
it limits the reach of responsibility,
it preserves autonomy as insulation.
But agency preserved in this way becomes ontologically thin. It explains action by withdrawal rather than by engagement.
5. Where the Blind Spots Appear
When explanation settles inside the individual, certain questions become unintelligible:
How are meanings coordinated?
How do norms acquire force?
How do patterns persist without necessity?
How does variation remain possible?
These are not marginal questions. They are the very questions inner causes were meant to answer.
Conclusion: Closure Achieved Too Early
“Inside the individual” becomes a closure site because it offers boundedness, stability, and agency in a single location. It satisfies explanatory instincts while quietly displacing the work of relation.
The problem is not that inner causes are false. It is that they are asked to do ontological work they cannot do.
In the final post of this series, we will step back and recognise the pattern as a whole, preparing the ground for the next series, where biology will appear — not as a villain, but as another powerful host for the same explanatory reflex.
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