The Mythos of Possibility: 1 Before the First Cut: Possibility Without Form

There is a temptation, whenever we speak of beginnings, to reach immediately for a scene.

A darkness. A void. A chaos. A plenitude. A silence waiting to be broken.

These images are familiar because they are already worlded. They presuppose a space in which something might appear, a perspective from which absence could be noticed, a contrast between what is and what is not. Even the most austere philosophical origin stories—being and nothingness, potentiality and actuality—quietly assume a vantage point from which such oppositions can be drawn.

This series begins earlier than that.

Not earlier in time—there is no time yet—but earlier in orientation.

What is at stake here is not the origin of the universe, or of meaning, or of experience, but the conditions under which any of those could become available at all. The aim is not explanation, but opening: reopening the space of possibility that tends to be prematurely closed by stories that mistake their own cuts for necessities.

Possibility Is Not Nothing

The first mistake to avoid is treating possibility as absence.

Possibility is not what remains when nothing has yet happened. It is not an empty container awaiting content, nor a vague indeterminacy out of which determinate things later emerge. To think of possibility this way is already to have smuggled in the logic of actualisation: a sequence in which something becomes real by filling a prior lack.

But possibility, as it will be used throughout this series, is not lack.

It is structured potential.

Not structure imposed from outside, and not a catalogue of future states, but an internally differentiated field of what could be taken up, held, or cut in different ways. Possibility is relational through and through: it consists not of elements, but of tensions, affordances, and constraints that only make sense with respect to one another.

There is no inventory of possibles waiting in the wings. There is only the way potential holds together—precariously, asymmetrically—before any particular perspective has been taken on it.

No World Yet

At this point, it is important to resist another reflex: the urge to imagine a world in which this possibility resides.

There is no space yet, no background, no environment. There is nothing in which possibility is located. To place it somewhere would already be to have performed a cut—distinguishing inside from outside, here from there.

Equally, there is no subject standing over against this possibility, no observer awaiting an object. Subject and object arise together, or not at all. To posit one without the other is to project the grammar of a later world back onto what precedes it.

This is why the familiar question—what was there before the world?—cannot be answered here. It cannot even be asked without distorting what it seeks to name.

Before the first cut, there is no world to be before.

Against Creation Stories

Creation stories, whether mythic, philosophical, or scientific, perform an invaluable cultural function. They orient us. They stabilise meaning. They make inhabitable what would otherwise be overwhelming.

But they do so by closing possibility.

Even the most minimal creation story introduces a decisive asymmetry: a moment when what could be becomes what is. A transition from indeterminacy to determination. From potential to actuality. From chaos to order.

The problem is not that these stories are false. It is that they forget themselves as stories.

They present their cut as inevitable, their orientation as necessary, their way of holding possibility as the only way it ever could have been held. In doing so, they transform structured openness into historical destiny.

This series does not offer an alternative creation story.

It refuses creation altogether—not because nothing ever happens, but because the language of creation already presupposes the very distinctions it claims to explain.

Possibility Without Sequence

If there is no time yet, how can we speak at all?

Only by treating what follows not as a sequence of events, but as a sequence of perspectives.

Nothing here comes into being in the ordinary sense. Instead, possibility is taken up, cut, and held in different ways. What later appears as temporal emergence is, at this level, a shift in how potential is oriented and constrained.

This matters because it blocks a familiar misreading: that this account describes a process unfolding from simplicity to complexity, from formlessness to form. That picture belongs to a world that has already been stabilised.

Here, there is no progression—only differentiation.

The Necessity of the Cut

To speak of possibility at all is already to risk closure.

Any articulation, however careful, introduces distinctions. It draws lines. It makes some relations salient and others recessive. This is not a failure of language, nor a limitation to be overcome. It is the condition of intelligibility itself.

The point is not to avoid cuts.

It is to remember that they are cuts.

What follows in this series will explore different ways in which possibility is cut into worlds, meanings, symbols, explanations, and habits. But before any of that can happen, it must be clear that the cut is not an event that occurs in time. It is a perspectival differentiation: a way of holding structured potential such that something like a phenomenon can appear.

Before that differentiation, there is nothing hidden, nothing waiting, nothing mysterious.

There is simply possibility without form.

Standing at the Threshold

This first post does not conclude anything.

It does not establish foundations, define terms exhaustively, or secure a vantage point from which everything else can be derived. To do so would already betray its task.

Instead, it asks the reader to linger—briefly—at a threshold that is usually passed over as quickly as possible. A threshold not between nothing and something, but between different ways of holding what is possible.

In the next post, we will examine what happens when that threshold is crossed—not as a moment in time, but as the first perspectival cut. Not the birth of a world, but the differentiation through which worlds become thinkable at all.

For now, it is enough to remain here, where there is no world yet to inhabit—and no need to rush toward one.