One of the quiet assumptions that structures almost all philosophical discussion of experience is that experience is of things.
We see objects. We hear sounds. We feel sensations. Experience, on this view, is a kind of internal theatre in which items appear before a perceiving subject. Even when this picture is criticised, it is rarely abandoned. The cast may change — sense data, representations, neural activations — but the grammar remains stubbornly noun‑based.
This post is an attempt to suspend that grammar.
Not to deny experience, and not to impoverish it, but to ask a prior question: what if experience does not begin with objects at all?
Why Objects Feel Unavoidable
It is not hard to see why object‑talk feels inevitable. Language strongly predisposes us toward it. Nouns are easy to point to; verbs and relations are not. “A chair” is simpler to name than “the ongoing patterned availability of sitting‑support under these bodily orientations.”
But the pressure is not merely linguistic. Objects promise stability. They allow us to say that something persists, that it is the same thing across time, that different observers are encountering one and the same entity. Objecthood reassures us that experience has a firm backbone.
The trouble is that this reassurance comes at a cost. Once objects are taken as primary, experience becomes derivative: a subjective encounter with something already fully formed. And from there, familiar problems proliferate — perception versus reality, appearance versus truth, internal versus external.
What follows is an attempt to see whether these problems arise not because experience is mysterious, but because objects were installed too early.
A Small Phenomenological Shift
Consider a simple case: listening to a melody.
What do you experience first?
Not individual notes, one by one, as discrete auditory objects. What you experience is a movement: tension and release, anticipation and resolution. A note only counts as a note within this unfolding relational field. Isolated from it, it is no longer recognisable as music at all.
Or consider watching a shadow move across a wall. Is the shadow an object? It has no fixed boundary, no persistence independent of changing light, surface, and position. Yet the experience is perfectly coherent — even vivid.
Or consider the feeling that “something is off” in a room before you can say what it is. No object announces itself. What is present is a configuration, a pattern of relations among people, gestures, silences, expectations.
In each case, experience is not built from objects upward. Objects, where they appear at all, arrive late — as stabilisations within an already meaningful field.
From Things to Relations
The ontology developed on this blog begins from a simple but radical shift: the foundational unit is not the thing, but the relation.
More precisely, experience is treated as a construal of relational processes. What appears are not items, but ways of going on — patterns of change, coordination, contrast, and constraint. Objects are not denied; they are secondary achievements within these patterns.
This aligns with a key insight from systemic functional linguistics: meaning is immanent in process, not added on afterward. A clause does not describe a finished world; it enacts a configuration of relations. Likewise, experience does not first receive a world of objects and then interpret it; it is already structured as relational activity.
Once this is seen, the primacy of objects begins to look like a convenience rather than a necessity.
Stability Without Substance
At this point, a familiar worry arises: without objects, how does anything remain stable?
The answer is: through repeatable relational patterns.
A chair is not experienced as stable because it possesses an inner essence called “chairness.” It is stable because the relations that matter — between body, gravity, posture, surface, social practice — reliably re‑actualise across situations. When those relations fail (the chair collapses, is too hot to touch, is placed on a steep slope), the “object” fails with them.
Stability, on this view, is not a metaphysical given but a practical achievement. And experience tracks that achievement directly, without needing to posit a thing that stands behind it.
What Becomes Visible
When objects are no longer treated as foundational, experience does not dissolve into chaos. On the contrary, several features become easier to see:
Change is primary, not a disturbance of stasis.
Context matters constitutively, not as background decoration.
Ambiguity is structural, not a failure of perception.
Learning is re‑patterning, not acquiring better representations.
Most importantly, the gap between experience and reality does not need to be bridged — because it was never opened.
Experience is not a view of the world. It is one of the ways the world takes shape.
Not a Denial, but a Re‑ordering
Nothing in this account requires us to stop talking about objects altogether. What it requires is a re‑ordering of explanatory priority.
Once this is accepted, many familiar philosophical puzzles lose their grip — not because they have been answered, but because the assumptions that made them urgent no longer apply.
In the next post, we will extend this shift from experience to action, and ask what becomes of agency when we stop treating agents as inner objects that push the world around.
For now, it is enough to notice this much:
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