(Post 32 in “Reflexive Matter: Relational Ontology and the Physics of Meaning”)
Freedom is often posed as a problem: either we are free and must explain how, or we are not and must accept determinism. But both sides assume a metaphysics of the subject: that agency lies inside an individual who either does or does not transcend causal constraint.
In relational ontology, this dichotomy dissolves. Freedom is neither metaphysical liberation nor mechanical illusion. It is:
The openness of a system to rephase itself.
Freedom Is Not Uncaused
Relational cuts never arise in a vacuum. Every construal is situated within:
A semiotic system (what construals are systemically possible);
A symbolic history (what construals have been actualised);
A phase of alignment (how construals are constrained by others).
There is no absolute spontaneity. But neither is there mechanical necessity.
A system may shift phase — not by escaping causality, but by modulating which constraints are activated, and how. This shift is freedom.
To be free is not to act without constraint, but to play within constraint — to construe otherwise.
Rephasing the Possible
Freedom becomes visible not in isolated acts, but in the inflection of a trajectory:
A collective reframes its narrative.
A speaker redrafts their relation to what has been said.
A tradition construes itself anew through inherited forms.
Each act of rephasing shifts what counts as possible. This is not the exercise of will in the face of resistance, but the emergence of a new potential within the reflexive field.
Freedom is not a capacity possessed by a subject. It is the event of possibility surfacing through symbolic alignment.
Neither Free Nor Determined — But Reflexive
From this view, we are not free beings who occasionally confront determination. We are reflexive matter: systems capable of symbolically phasing their own constraints.
What appears as “freedom” is the system seeing itself differently — a construal that cuts through past alignments and opens a new direction.
Thus, to be free is:
To rephase the system from within.
To symbolise what was not yet visible.
To align a cut that realigns the field.
No will required. No determinism escaped. Just the emergence of the possible in the flux of the actual.
With freedom reconceived as reflexive potential, the ground is now prepared for a deeper rethinking of matter itself — not as the inert ground of being, but as the condition of construal.
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