The Cut That Makes Meaning: 5 Phenomena, Not Objects

In the previous post, we saw that exclusion is not loss: each instance foregrounds one articulation of a system, leaving other possibilities unrealised but intact. Foregrounding and backgrounding are not moral acts, nor are they destructive. They are the structural conditions under which intelligibility arises.

This insight sets the stage for a deeper clarification: if instantiation is perspectival and exclusion is generative, then the reality we encounter is phenomenal, not objectual.

Much of our thinking about the world relies on the assumption that phenomena are underlain by objects: that what is experienced is a mask for some deeper, enduring thing. The “thing-in-itself” becomes the guarantor of appearance; meaning, we are told, refers to reality behind the veil. But this assumption is incompatible with the logic of the cut.

A phenomenon is a first-order meaning, not a hidden entity waiting to be discovered. It does not emerge from a pre-existing object; it is made intelligible by the cut. To perceive a melody, to read a word, to experience a sensation, is not to apprehend an object. It is to encounter a determinate configuration of possibility under a cut.

Objects, when they appear in discourse or thought, are metaphenomena: second-order constructions that abstract from phenomena. They are not primary. What we call an “object” is a regularity inferred across multiple instances, a pattern imposed retrospectively on experience. The cut, the instantiation, and the foregrounded phenomenon are prior.

This is why no phenomenon exists unconstrued. There is no world of raw data, no uninterpreted “thing” behind perception, no pure signal waiting for interpretation. Phenomena are always already intelligible configurations; they are already the result of distinction. The world-as-thing is a convenient fiction, not an ontological given.

Seeing the world as phenomenal rather than objectual has profound consequences:

1. Meaning is immediate, not representational.
   Phenomena are not about something else; they are what appears under a cut. The sense of “aboutness” emerges only in higher-order reflection, not in first-order experience.

2. The seeming solidity of objects is perspectival.
   An object appears stable because multiple cuts across time and space consistently foreground similar articulations of the system. Stability is an effect of repeated instantiation, not a property of an underlying entity.

3. Intelligibility depends on relational structure, not substance.
   A phenomenon is coherent because it emerges from the relations of a system, not because it corresponds to a thing. The cut articulates structure, not substance.

4. Phenomena carry their own exclusions.
   Every phenomenon appears against the unrealised possibilities of the system. Objects obscure this relational architecture; phenomena illuminate it.

By clarifying that the world we experience is phenomenal, not objectual, we remove a common source of metaphysical confusion. We no longer need to ask how the world “really is” behind appearances. The world as experienced is intelligible only through the cuts that articulate it. There is no deeper layer to reveal, only further distinctions to make.

This understanding also prepares us for the final post of this sequence. If phenomena are first-order meanings, and if the cut is the condition of their intelligibility, then attempts to deny the cut, or to imagine a world without exclusion, are conceptually incoherent. Meaning is never optional; it is never separable from articulation. The last post will make this unavoidable principle explicit.

For now, the central claim is clear:

We do not encounter objects; we encounter phenomena. And phenomena are first-order meanings articulated by the cut.