Relation Without Totality: 1 Why “the World” Is Not an Ontological Starting Point

There is a word that does an extraordinary amount of unexamined work in ontology and physics alike.

That word is “the world.”

We speak of the world as if it were given:

a completed domain, already there, waiting to be described.

We ask what the world is made of, how it began, whether it is finite or infinite, whether it can be unified under a final theory.

But this confidence is misplaced.

“The world” is not an ontological starting point.

It is a retrospective abstraction.

And once that is seen clearly, a great many familiar problems dissolve — including the persistent fantasy of totality.

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The Hidden Assumption

To begin with “the world” is already to assume:

• a single, unified domain

• exhaustively specifiable in principle

• independent of perspective

• describable without remainder

None of these assumptions are innocent.

They smuggle completion in at the very first step.

This is why debates about the “Theory of Everything” so often feel stalled: the aspiration to totality is not a conclusion of reasoning, but a premise disguised as ambition.

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What Physics Actually Gives Us

It is tempting to think that physics forces us to begin with the world as a whole. In fact, it does the opposite.

Relativity refuses any privileged global frame.

Quantum theory refuses global states without cuts.

Field theories refuse final layers in favour of scalable frameworks.

What physics delivers, again and again, is not a picture of the world, but constraints on what can be instantiated from within particular perspectives.

Physics does not describe the universe as a completed object.

It disciplines what counts as a valid description from somewhere.

The mistake is not in physics.

It is in the ontological story we insist on telling afterwards.

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World-Talk as a Category Mistake

“The world” is often treated as if it were:

• the largest object

• the sum of all objects

• the container of all events

• the domain of all truths

But sums, containers, and domains are already second-order constructs. They presuppose distinctions, boundaries, and relevance.

Nothing in experience — and nothing in theory — presents itself as the world.

What presents itself are phenomena:

structured appearances, constrained events, instantiated relations.

“The world” is a name we give to the imagined closure of those phenomena.

That closure never occurs.

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Ontology Without a World

If we do not begin with the world, what do we begin with?

Not with being-in-general.

Not with total existence.

Not with “everything.”

We begin with:

• systems understood as theories of possible instances

• relations prior to inventories

• cuts that make phenomena intelligible

• constraints that shape what can appear

Ontology, on this view, is not the study of what there is in total.

It is the discipline of articulating how anything can count at all.

Completion is not postponed.

It is refused.

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Why This Matters

Once we stop treating the world as a given whole:

• The demand for a final theory loses its grip

• Explanation separates cleanly from inventory

• Incompleteness becomes a requirement, not a failure

• Perspective becomes constitutive without becoming relativism

Most importantly, ontology becomes possible again — not as a catalog of reality, but as a navigation of structured possibility.

The world does not come first.

Relation does.

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Where We’re Going Next

In the posts that follow, we will develop this refusal systematically:

• Why relation must be ontologically prior to relata

• How systems generate possibility without closure

• Why instantiation is perspectival rather than temporal

• How meaning emerges as constraint, not correspondence

For now, the cut is simple:

There is no finished world waiting to be described.

There are only relations, constraints, and the ongoing becoming of possibility.

And that, finally, is where ontology must begin.