How instantiation structures relevance without observers, hierarchies, or totality
If relevance is constitutive rather than pragmatic, and if equal reality cannot explain appearance, then a further question becomes unavoidable:
How does salience arise at all, without privileging observers, perspectives, or frames?
The answer does not lie in attention, interest, or selection. It lies in instantiation as cut.
1. Why salience cannot be added later
Standard accounts treat salience as something introduced after the world is already there:
a subject attends
a practice foregrounds
a context filters
But this assumes a pre-existing totality from which salience can be extracted.
Once totality is refused, this picture collapses. There is no finished field awaiting selection, no complete inventory awaiting relevance.
Salience must therefore arise with appearance, not after it.
That means relevance cannot be psychological, epistemic, or pragmatic in origin. It must be ontological.
2. Instantiation is not a process
To say that instantiation generates salience is often misunderstood as a temporal claim: first there is a system, then something happens, and finally a phenomenon appears.
This is a mistake.
Instantiation is not a process unfolding in time. It is a perspectival cut.
A system is not a container of entities but a structured field of possible instances. An instance is not a thing extracted from that field but a way the field is made available.
The cut is the shift from possibility to phenomenon — not by addition, but by construal.
3. How cuts generate relevance
A cut does not select from a totality. It differentiates a field.
In doing so, it generates:
foreground and background
figure and ground
relevance and irrelevance
These distinctions are not imposed from outside. They are the internal articulation of the system as instantiated.
Relevance, then, is not what a subject finds salient. It is what the cut makes count.
Without the cut, there is no relevance because there is no phenomenon. With the cut, salience is unavoidable.
4. No observers, no hierarchies
This account does not privilege observers.
Observers are themselves phenomena — already relevance-structured. They do not generate salience; they inhabit it.
Nor does this account introduce hierarchy. Relevance is not rank. It does not say that some beings matter more than others in an absolute sense.
It says only that within an instantiated field, not everything can count equally — because counting itself is a product of the cut.
5. Relevance without totality
Because instantiation is perspectival rather than exhaustive, relevance is always partial.
This is not a defect. It is the condition of intelligibility.
A phenomenon that included everything would distinguish nothing. A phenomenon that distinguishes necessarily renders some possibilities irrelevant.
Irrelevance is not exclusion from being. It is the shadow cast by appearance.
6. From salience to phenomenon
We can now say more precisely what a phenomenon is:
A phenomenon is a relevance-structured construal of a system of possibilities.
Nothing appears except under relevance. Nothing is relevant except by instantiation. Nothing instantiates without cutting.
This is why relevance is not optional and why totality is incoherent.
7. What follows
If cuts generate salience, then relevance is not accidental — but neither is it final.
Every instantiation opens some possibilities and closes others. Every phenomenon is therefore incomplete by necessity.
This brings us to the next question:
Why does a phenomenon appear as this rather than that?
Answering that requires returning to phenomenon itself — not as an object, but as first-order meaning.
In the next post, we will deepen Phenomenon First, showing how appearance, meaning, and relevance converge without collapsing into value or psychology.
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