1. Against Temporal Production
If system is structured potential and instance is its narrowing, then instantiation cannot be understood as a temporal act of production.
The common image is this: first there is potential, then something happens, and an instance comes into being.
But this image quietly reinstates substance. It treats potential as a kind of latent material, and instantiation as an event that transforms it into actuality.
Within a framework of structured potential, this model no longer holds.
Rather, system and instance are two poles of a single relation, differentiated perspectivally.
Instantiation is the cut that renders potential as event.
2. The Nature of the Cut
A cut is not a slice through material. It is a shift in orientation.
Viewed from the pole of potential, we see organised openness — a structured range of possible selections.
Viewed from the pole of instance, we see a particular configuration actualised.
Nothing has been added to the world.
What changes is the perspective from which the organisation is apprehended.
3. Phenomenon and Construal
This has consequences for how we understand experience.
If instantiation is perspectival, then phenomenon cannot be something that exists prior to construal. There is no unconstrued layer waiting to be accessed. Phenomenon is first-order meaning — experience as organised through selection.
Construal does not decorate reality.
It constitutes it.
To say this is not to deny materiality. It is to refuse the separation between a pre-given substrate and the meanings through which it is encountered.
What appears is always already structured.
And that structure is not imposed upon chaos; it is the patterned openness of potential itself.
4. Implications for Individuation
If instantiation is perspectival, then any apparent entity — including what we call an individual — must be understood as a relatively stable configuration of actualised potential.
But stability, in this account, cannot be absolute.
Because potential remains.
The system is not exhausted by any instance. The field of possibility persists beyond each cut.
An “individual” would therefore have to be understood not as a substance, nor as a product of temporal generation, but as a particular mode of sustained narrowing within structured potential.
We are not yet in a position to define this precisely.
But one thing is now clear:
Individuation cannot mean emergence from outside the field.
It must mean a patterned continuity of actualisation within it.
No comments:
Post a Comment