Relation Without Totality: 2 Relation Before Relata (Without Metaphysical Mysticism)

To say that relation comes before relata is, in contemporary philosophy, almost guaranteed to trigger suspicion.

It sounds mystical.

Or anti-realist.

Or like a sleight of hand in which solid things dissolve into vague “networks” or “processes.”

None of that is required here.

The claim is not that relations float freely without anything related.

It is that relata are not ontologically given prior to the relations that make them count as anything at all.

This is a disciplined claim — not an extravagant one.

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The Relata-First Intuition

The intuition that relata must come first feels obvious:

Surely there must be things before they can be related.

But this intuition rests on an unexamined assumption:

that “things” are self-identifying, self-contained units whose identity is fixed independently of context.

Physics, experience, and ontology all undermine this assumption.

What counts as a thing — a particle, a system, an object, an event — varies with:

• scale,

• perspective,

• constraints,

• and the distinctions drawn by a particular cut.

Relata are not discovered pre-packaged.

They are stabilised through relations.

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Relation Is Not Glue

One reason “relation-first” talk invites mysticism is that relation is often imagined as a kind of glue: something added after the fact to connect already-formed entities.

That is not the sense in which relation is primary here.

Relation is not an extra ingredient.

It is the structural condition under which anything can be identified as a relatum at all.

Without relational constraints:

• nothing persists,

• nothing contrasts,

• nothing counts as this rather than that.

Relation is not what links things.

It is what makes things intelligible as things.

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Systems Without Substrates

This is where the notion of system becomes crucial.

A system is not a container of entities.

It is a theory of possible instances — a structured space of constraints that determines:

• what can appear,

• how it can vary,

• and how distinctions are maintained.

Within such a system, relata are positions in a relational structure, not metaphysical atoms.

They do not pre-exist the system.

They are actualised within it.

This is why attempts to ground ontology in ultimate constituents always fail: constituents presuppose the very relational structure they are meant to explain.

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Why This Is Not Anti-Realism

To deny relata-first ontology is not to deny reality.

On the contrary, it is to take reality seriously enough to refuse fictitious foundations.

Reality resists arbitrary decomposition.

It appears only under constraints.

What is real is:

• the stability of relations,

• the repeatability of constraints,

• the reliability of patterns across instantiations.

Relata are real — but they are real-as-instantiated, not real-as-primitive.

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The Quiet Lesson of Physics (Again)

Relativity does not begin with objects and then relate them.

It begins with relational structure (spacetime relations) from which object-properties are derived.

Quantum theory does not assign intrinsic properties and then connect them.

It specifies relational constraints under which outcomes can be instantiated.

Field theories do not start with particles.

Particles emerge as excitations relative to a field framework.

Physics does not abolish objects.

It disciplines their status.

Ontology should learn the same lesson.

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Relation Without Totality

Crucially, relation-first ontology does not smuggle totality back in.

Relations do not form a completed network.

There is no “web of all relations.”

Relations are always local to systems, constrained by cuts, instantiated perspectivally.

This is why relation-first ontology does not collapse into holism.

There is no Whole waiting in the background.

There are only structured possibilities, selectively actualised.

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What Comes Next

Once relation is placed before relata, several consequences follow immediately:

• Systems must be understood as generative, not descriptive

• Instantiation cannot be a process unfolding in time, but a perspectival shift

• Meaning cannot be correspondence with a pre-given world, but constraint-sensitive emergence

These are not add-ons.

They are structural implications.

Next, we turn to the hinge on which all of this moves:

Post 3 — Systems as Structured Possibility (Not Containers of Being)

That is where relation, possibility, and ontology finally lock together.