If the previous post asked us to linger before any world appears, this one asks us to confront a paradox.
For worlds do appear.
Phenomena occur. Differences take hold. Something becomes available rather than everything remaining equally possible. Yet if we look for the moment when this happens—the first event, the decisive break—we find nothing we can point to without already standing inside a world that presupposes it.
The cut that matters most never happened.
Not because nothing changed, but because what changed was not in time.
Why the First Event Cannot Be Found
Origin stories tempt us to imagine a dramatic transition: a before and an after, a silent field suddenly disturbed. Even when stripped of mythic imagery, this logic persists in philosophical and scientific guises. We speak of emergence, of symmetry breaking, of transitions from potential to actual.
But each of these accounts quietly assumes what it seeks to explain.
To identify an event is already to have a temporal frame within which events can be distinguished. To mark a transition is already to have a contrast between states. To say that something emerged is already to occupy a perspective from which that emergence is visible.
The first cut cannot be located because location itself is one of its effects.
Instantiation as Perspective, Not Process
To avoid this trap, we must abandon the idea that instantiation is a process unfolding in time.
Instantiation is a perspectival differentiation.
Nothing is added to possibility, and nothing is removed from it. What changes is how structured potential is held. A particular orientation takes shape—one that renders some relations salient, others recessive, and still others inaccessible.
From within that orientation, phenomena appear. From outside it—if such a phrase even makes sense—they do not.
This is why instantiation should not be imagined as the gradual filling-in of an empty form, nor as the realisation of a pre-existing blueprint. There is no blueprint, and there is no waiting matter. There is only the taking-up of possibility from somewhere rather than everywhere at once.
The Asymmetry of the Cut
Every cut introduces asymmetry.
Before the cut, possibility is structured but not oriented. After the cut—from the perspective of the cut—there is a here rather than a there, a this rather than a that, a foreground and a background.
Crucially, this asymmetry is not imposed from outside. It is not the result of a force, an agent, or a decision. Nor is it a value judgement. It is simply what it means to hold possibility from a perspective at all.
Perspective is not something that arrives later, once a world is in place. It is the condition under which anything like a world can appear.
No Temporal Before and After
Because the cut is perspectival, it does not divide time into a before and an after.
From within a stabilised world, it will always seem as though there must have been a moment when things were otherwise. But this impression is retrospective. It is generated by the very orientation that makes a world appear coherent and continuous.
At the level we are tracing here, there is no temporal sequence—only different ways of being available.
What looks like history from within a world is, from this vantage, a series of reorientations of possibility: shifts in what can appear, what can be said, and what can be taken for granted.
The Myth of the Decisive Moment
Cultures love decisive moments.
The first word. The first law. The first measurement. The first observation. These moments are celebrated because they anchor meaning. They give us a place to stand.
But anchoring is also a form of forgetting.
By locating the cut in a moment, we convert a perspectival condition into an event. We tell ourselves that the world is the way it is because something happened, rather than because possibility is being held in a particular way.
This myth of the decisive moment is powerful precisely because it relieves us of responsibility for the ongoing maintenance of orientation. If the cut already happened, then all that follows can be treated as necessity.
Holding the Cut Open
To say that the cut never happened is not to deny differentiation. It is to refuse to let differentiation harden into destiny.
Every world depends on a way of holding possibility that could, in principle, be held otherwise. This does not mean that worlds are arbitrary, nor that they can be reshaped at will. Constraints are real. Regularities matter. Habits take hold.
But none of these exhaust possibility.
To remember the cut as perspectival rather than historical is to keep open the thought that what appears necessary may, under a different orientation, become contingent—and that what seems impossible may never have been ruled out at all.
From Cut to Phenomenon
With the cut, something finally becomes available: the phenomenon.
Not yet symbols, not yet explanations, not yet worlds of objects and laws—but construed experience itself. The appearance of something rather than an undifferentiated openness.
The next post will take up this emergence—not as the arrival of meaning systems, but as the first order of meaning itself. Meaning without symbols. Experience without a world fully in place.
For now, it is enough to recognise that the most decisive differentiation we rely on was never an event we could witness.
It is the perspective from which witnessing becomes possible at all.
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