When Possibility Ends: Preface: Relativity, Actuality, and the Work of Keeping Possibility Open

This short series grows directly out of the ongoing project of The Becoming of Possibility. It is not an excursion into philosophy of physics for its own sake, nor an attempt to adjudicate technical disputes within relativity theory. Its concern is ontological discipline: how possibility, actuality, and instantiation are being handled — and mishandled — at the foundations of contemporary thought.

Across earlier series on instantiation, meaning, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, a recurring theme has emerged: structured systems do not exhaust their possible instances, and actuality cannot be assigned wholesale without doing conceptual damage. Whether the system in question is a formal language, a mathematical theory, or a physical law, the same temptation appears — to treat the space of possibility as if it were already complete.

The block universe is one of the clearest and most consequential expressions of this temptation.

In physics, it appears as the reification of spacetime structure into a completed ontology. In logic, it appears as the fantasy of total formal closure. In theories of meaning, it appears as the idea that all meanings are already “there”, waiting to be decoded. In each case, the same error is at work: the collapse of the distinction between system and instance, between potential and actual, between structure and event.

This series approaches the block universe as a case study in that error.

The first post shows how a lawful representational structure — the spacetime manifold — is quietly transformed into a completed totality, marking the point at which possibility is declared exhausted. The second post argues that this move depends on refusing the ontological cost of instantiation: the fact that actuality is always perspectival, achieved through a cut, and never given in advance. The third post returns to relativity itself, showing that its de-privileging of frames does not license a view from nowhere, but instead demands precisely the perspectival discipline that the block universe denies.

Read this way, the stakes extend well beyond time and physics. What is at issue is whether becoming is treated as an optional add-on — something to be explained away once the equations are written down — or as the ontological name for the fact that possibility is never already complete.

Gödel’s theorem mattered not because it introduced incompleteness into mathematics, but because it made explicit what was always the case: no formal system can close itself by its own means. Meaning mattered not because it floated free of structure, but because it could not be reduced to structure alone. Instantiation mattered not because it happened in time, but because it marked the irreducible difference between a space of possibilities and an actual event.

This series argues that relativity belongs in that same lineage.

Properly understood, relativity does not abolish becoming. It abolishes privilege. It does not deliver a completed universe. It denies us the comfort of totality. And in doing so, it leaves possibility — and the work of keeping it open — exactly where it has always been: at the heart of what it means for anything to be actual at all.

What follows, then, is not a defence of time against physics, but a defence of ontological clarity against premature closure.