Introduction
Time and space are often treated as the most fundamental features of reality — the very scaffolding on which everything else is built. Yet within a relational ontology, they appear differently: not as external containers, but as horizons of construal. Time is not a flowing river outside events, nor space a stage beneath them. Rather, both are perspectival cuts we make in the relational unfolding of process itself. This three-part arc explores how time and space can be re-read through this lens: as conditions of coherence that emerge in construal, not as independent entities that constrain it.
Time and Process: A Relational Ontology Distinction
One of the most persistent confusions in both philosophy and science is the conflation of time with process. We often hear that processes "take place in time," as if time were a container, a backdrop, or even a flowing substance in which events happen. Relational ontology allows us to cut more carefully, and in doing so, to clarify how time and process are distinct yet mutually implicated.
Process as Phenomenon
A process is a first-order phenomenon: a construed event that unfolds. When I speak, when a bird flies, when a river flows — each is a process. Processes are not merely "things that happen in time." They are themselves instances of meaning: construals of unfolding potential.
A process is perspectival: it is the cut we make from the structured potential of a system into an instance. In this sense, every process is already complete in itself.
Time as Coherence
Time, by contrast, is not itself a process. It is a second-order relation: the coherence that emerges when processes are aligned in construal.
We can only speak of "time" when we construe processes in relation to one another:
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The ticking of a clock and the growth of a plant.
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The rhythm of footsteps and the beat of a drum.
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The orbit of the Earth and the unfolding of a life.
In each case, time is not an independent medium but the relation of coherence we establish between processes. It is our way of aligning one unfolding with another, of making them commensurable.
The Perspectival Cut
It is tempting to think that a single process "unfolds in time." But this is an effect of perspective. What we call "time passing" within a process is nothing more than the process itself unfolding. "Time" enters only when we align that unfolding with others: when the speech aligns with the heartbeat, or the river's current with the rising sun.
Time, then, is not a hidden dimension or substrate; it is the reflexive alignment of construals.
Examples
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Music: A melody is a process. "Time" is how we construe its coherence with rhythm, harmony, and memory — the alignment of one unfolding with others.
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Conversation: An utterance is a process. Time enters when we construe turns of talk in relation, aligning responses with questions, silences with pauses.
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Planetary orbits: The Earth’s orbit is a process. "A year" is the coherence we construe between this process and others — planting, harvesting, birth, death.
Distinction in Summary
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Process = an unfolding instance, a phenomenon.
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Time = the coherence of processes, a reflexive alignment.
This distinction allows us to reframe a host of confusions. Instead of asking "how do processes unfold in time?" we ask "how does time emerge as the coherence of processes?" The cut is subtle, but once made, it changes everything.
Relational Ontology: Space vs Relation
If time is not process, then neither is space relation. Both distinctions matter, because they prevent us from collapsing experience into the very coordinates we use to orient it.
Relation is construal, not extension
In relational ontology, a relation is the cut that brings two or more processes into coherence. It is not an external tether between already-given objects, but a perspectival alignment — the way one construal is brought into phase with another. A relation is meaning, not a backdrop.
Space is the horizon of possible extension
Space, by contrast, is the perspectival potential for alignment — the capacity for processes to be construed as co-existing, co-extensive, or ordered alongside one another. To construe a “space” is to cut out a horizon within which relations can be drawn. It is not the relations themselves, but the condition in which relations can be actualised.
The danger of conflation
When space is treated as if it were relation, we end up with a flattened ontology: relations become reified as coordinates, and meaning is displaced into geometry. This is the fate of much of physics, where “interaction” is described as if it were mere placement within space, rather than the constitutive construal that space itself presupposes.
Relational contrast
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Relation: the actual cut, the constitutive alignment of processes.
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Space: the potential horizon within which such cuts can be construed.
Space is not relation any more than time is process. Each is a perspectival horizon; each is cut into coherence by construal.
Time and Space as Horizons of Construal
In relational ontology, time and space are not themselves processes or relations. They are horizons of construal.
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Time is the perspectival horizon within which processes can be cut as unfolding.
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Space is the perspectival horizon within which processes can be cut as extending.
Neither is reducible to what it seems to contain:
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Process is not time, though processes are construed as unfolding within it.
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Relation is not space, though relations are construed as extending across it.
This distinction preserves the integrity of construal: horizons and cuts are not the same. Horizons open the field of possibility; cuts actualise coherence within it.
Time and space are thus not containers of reality but conditions of meaning — perspectival apertures through which reality comes to be construed at all.
Conclusion
By reframing time and space as horizons of construal, we move away from the metaphysics of containers and toward an ontology of relation. Space becomes the alignment of processes into coexistence; time becomes the phasing of processes into succession. Neither is prior to events: both are abstractions from within the fabric of process, and both are sustained only in and through construal. In this way, what physics puzzles over as absolute or relative, curved or expanding, becomes legible as the reflexive work of meaning itself. Time and space are not what constrain us; they are what we construe in order to orient ourselves within an ever-unfolding field of possibility.
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