Individuation is usually treated as a generative concept. It is assumed to explain how entities come to be: how the world differentiates itself into discrete things, agents, organisms, objects, or selves. On this view, individuation is a process that produces order. Individuals are what emerge when individuation succeeds.
This series begins from a different diagnosis.
The claim is not that there are no stable phenomena. There clearly are. Nor is it that persistence, identity, or coherence are illusory. They are not. The claim is more precise, and more unsettling: individuation has never explained those phenomena. It has only redescribed them once they were already in place.
To see this, we need to reverse a habit of explanation that is so familiar it often goes unnoticed.
The usual explanatory order
The standard picture runs roughly as follows:
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The world contains potential.
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Individuation acts on that potential.
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Discrete entities emerge.
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Stability and identity are consequences of those entities.
On this picture, individuation is an operation that precedes order. It is what carves the world into units, which then persist, interact, and combine.
This picture feels intuitive because it mirrors how we speak: this thing, that individual, those agents. But its intuitive appeal hides a logical problem. When we look closely at how individuation is actually identified, it turns out never to appear at the beginning of explanation.
It always appears at the end.
Where individuation is actually located
In practice, individuation is inferred only after a particular configuration has already stabilised. Something holds together across variation. Something recurs. Something behaves coherently under a given perspective. Only then do we say: there is an individual here.
This matters, because it means that individuation is not observed as a process. It is ascribed as a description.
What we actually encounter is:
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a cut that differentiates possibilities,
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a perspectival construal that selects a mode of coherence,
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a local stabilisation that holds long enough to be tracked.
Individuation enters only afterward, as a way of talking about that stabilisation.
The arrow of explanation is therefore inverted. Stability does not result from individuation. Individuation is a name given to stability once it has already occurred.
Cuts, not individuals
The operative move that produces differentiation is not individuation but the cut.
A cut is not a physical division, a boundary, or a temporal event. It is a perspectival actualisation: a distinction drawn within a field of potential that brings some relations into coherence while excluding others. A cut does not create things; it conditions what can count as stable within a given construal.
Once a cut has been made, certain patterns may stabilise. Some of those stabilisations persist across further cuts. Others dissolve. Some can be redescribed, tracked, and coordinated. When that happens, we often reach for the language of individuals.
But nothing new has been added to the ontology at that point. The work has already been done.
Individuation, in this light, is not an operation that produces entities. It is a retrospective reading of what a cut has already made stable.
Why this illusion persists
If individuation is explanatorily redundant, why does it persist so stubbornly?
Because it performs a crucial rhetorical function. It allows us to compress complex relational stabilisations into manageable units. It gives us nouns where there are really patterns. It offers apparent solidity where there is only constrained coherence.
Most importantly, it reassures us that stability has a cause.
Individuation feels like an explanation because it sits at exactly the point where explanation is desired: after order has appeared, but before its contingency is confronted. By naming a stabilisation an “individual,” we give ourselves permission to stop asking how that stabilisation was produced, under what constraints, and from which possibilities it might have been otherwise.
This is not a mistake in reasoning so much as a habit of closure.
What this series will and will not do
This series will not argue that individuals do not exist. That claim is both easy to dismiss and beside the point.
What it will argue is narrower and stronger:
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Individuation is not ontologically primitive.
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Individuation does not explain stability.
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Individuation is inferred after cuts and construals have already done their work.
Across the following posts, we will examine what happens when this diagnosis is taken seriously. We will see why collectives are not aggregates, why identity does not require boundaries, why counting presupposes what it claims to measure, and why the autonomous individual functions more as a myth than a foundation.
For now, it is enough to hold onto one inversion:
Once that inversion is in place, the rest follows with surprising inevitability.
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