Why There Is No Unconstrued Reality Beneath What Appears
Up to this point, the argument has moved by disciplined subtraction. We have removed time as a container, process as an explanation of actuality, and totality as a legitimate ontological ambition. We have treated relativity not as physics to be interpreted, but as a constraint on what ontology may coherently claim.
What remains now requires a further step — one that allows the scaffolding of physics to recede entirely. If instantiation is non‑processual and perspectival, then phenomena must be ontologically primary. There is no deeper, unconstrued layer of reality beneath what appears, waiting to be revealed once our descriptions improve.
This is not an epistemic claim about what we can know. It is an ontological claim about what there is.
1. The Myth of the Unconstrued Substrate
A powerful metaphysical reflex insists that appearances must be grounded in something more real than themselves: a substrate, a noumenal layer, a world “in itself” that exists independently of how it is instantiated.
This reflex survives even in ostensibly anti‑realist positions. Whether the underlying reality is described as matter, information, structure, or law, the assumption remains the same: phenomena are secondary, derivative, or incomplete manifestations of a deeper actuality.
But this picture cannot survive the ontology of the cut.
If actuality is enacted perspectivally, then there is no sense to be made of a fully actual reality that exists prior to instantiation. To posit such a reality is to reintroduce totality under another name. It is to imagine a world that is already complete, with phenomena reduced to mere access points.
2. Phenomena as First‑Order Actuality
A phenomenon is not an appearance of something more real. It is an instance of actuality itself.
This does not mean that phenomena are unstructured, arbitrary, or unconstrained. On the contrary, they are always shaped by systems — physical, logical, biological, semiotic — that define fields of possible instantiation. But those systems do not sit behind phenomena as hidden engines. They are theories of possible phenomena, not repositories of actual ones.
To say that phenomena are first‑order is to say that there is no ontological remainder left over once they are accounted for. Nothing is missing. Nothing waits behind the scenes to be uncovered.
What exists, exists as instantiated.
3. Construal Is Constitutive, Not Representational
At this point, the language of construal becomes unavoidable.
To construe is not to represent a pre‑existing reality from a particular angle. It is to participate in the enactment of a phenomenon as what it is. Construal is not an interpretive overlay added to bare facts; it is part of the condition under which facts appear at all.
This claim is often resisted because it is mistaken for subjectivism. But construal, in this sense, does not belong to subjects. It belongs to instantiation. Phenomena are always phenomena as something — temporally ordered, spatially extended, functionally articulated. There is no raw datum beneath this articulation.
The cut marks the point at which construal becomes constitutive.
4. Why Representation Comes Later
Representation is real, but it is secondary.
Languages, models, theories, and descriptions represent phenomena. They operate on already‑instantiated worlds. Their success or failure depends on how well they coordinate with what appears.
But representation cannot ground ontology. It presupposes phenomena to be represented. Any attempt to explain actuality by appeal to representation reverses this dependency and ends in regress.
Phenomenon first is not a slogan. It is a refusal to explain existence by reference to abstractions that already require it.
5. Against Both Naïve Realism and Constructivism
Placing phenomena first avoids two familiar dead ends.
Naïve realism treats phenomena as windows onto a fully formed reality that exists independently of instantiation. Constructivism treats phenomena as projections or fabrications imposed on an otherwise indeterminate world.
Both positions assume that actuality lies elsewhere.
The ontology of the cut rejects this assumption. There is no pre‑phenomenal reality waiting to be revealed, and no subject‑centred fabrication replacing it. There are only instantiated worlds, enacted perspectivally, constrained by systems but never exhausted by them.
6. Generalising Beyond Physics
At this point, physics can step aside.
The claim that phenomena are first‑order does not depend on spacetime, observers, or measurements. It applies equally to logical truths, biological processes, social practices, and meaning‑making. In every case, systems specify possibilities; instantiation produces actuality; phenomena are what result.
This is why the ontology of the cut generalises so readily. It is not a metaphysics of matter or time, but a theory of what it takes for anything to be the case.
7. Looking Ahead
If phenomena are first‑order and systems never exhaust their possible instances, then closure is impossible in principle. No ontology can complete itself. No description can finish the world.
In the next post, we will address this consequence directly by arguing that systems are best understood as theories of possible instances, and that incompleteness is not a defect but an ontological requirement.
For now, the essential point is this:
There is no deeper reality beneath what appears.What appears is what is.
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