05 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Neuroscience

1 Relational Networks: Structure through Interaction

Modern neuroscience reveals the brain not as a collection of isolated modules but as a dynamic relational network, where structure and function emerge through interaction. Neural connectivity, plasticity, and signalling patterns are not static; they are continuously shaped by experience, context, and the interplay of multiple systems.

From a relational ontology perspective, this is profoundly anticipatory. Neural networks do not carry intrinsic, pre-determined functions. Instead, they actualise potentials through relational cuts: patterns of interaction that define nodes, pathways, and functional alignments within a broader field of possibilities. Each firing, each pathway, exists only in the context of the network as a whole, and in relation to the organism’s ongoing engagement with its environment.

This relational perspective aligns with echoes we have already traced in myth, philosophy, and physics. Just as symbolic narratives instantiate collective possibilities, and quantum events emerge through relational alignment, the brain stages biological actualisations of relational potential. Its structure is contingent, its function emergent, and its coherence distributed across interacting neural groups.

Neuroscience, read relationally, thus shows that cognition, perception, and behaviour are not properties of isolated units. They are enacted phenomena — contingent, contextually actualised, and dynamically co-constituted. Reality, at the neural level, is a network of relations, a living web in which the actual emerges continuously through interaction.

2 Contingency, Degeneracy, and Potentiality

A hallmark of neural organisation is degeneracy: multiple, structurally distinct circuits can realise the same function. Coupled with plasticity, this ensures that neural outcomes are contingent, flexible, and context-dependent. There is no fixed mapping between structure and behaviour; each actualisation is a relational event, contingent on the network’s current state and prior history.

From a relational ontology perspective, this underscores a core principle: potentialities are staged, not predetermined. Like myths enacting symbolic possibilities, or quantum events actualised through relational alignment, neural systems instantiate outcomes within a field of possibilities. Degeneracy and contingency make the system resilient, adaptable, and responsive.

This also highlights the co-constitutive nature of neural function. Different pathways do not merely substitute for one another; they shape, enable, and constrain one another’s activity. The system is a web of potentialities, where every actualisation is a cut — a relational alignment within the network that both emerges from and informs future patterns.

Neuroscience thus reveals reality at the neural level as profoundly relational: identity, function, and behaviour are contingent, perspectival, and distributed. Degeneracy and contingency are not imperfections; they are the very means by which the brain actualises potential across a relationally structured field, echoing the same relational principles evident in myth, philosophy, and physics.

3 Reflexivity and Reentrant Loops

A defining feature of neural organisation is reentrant signalling: continuous, bidirectional loops connecting distributed neural groups. These loops are not merely feedback mechanisms; they are dynamic, reflexive alignments that coordinate activity across the brain, enabling coherence, integration, and adaptive function.

From a relational ontology perspective, reentrant loops exemplify reflexive co-constitution. Each neural group’s activity is meaningful only in relation to the activity of others. Identity, function, and outcome are distributed phenomena, emerging from relational interactions rather than residing within isolated units.

This mirrors relational patterns observed in other domains. Just as myths stage symbolic possibilities against a collective horizon, and quantum phenomena actualise only through relational alignment, reentrant loops show that neural function is contingent, context-dependent, and relationally enacted. Local activity shapes global patterns, and global constraints influence local dynamics — a continuous, reciprocal orchestration of potentialities.

Neuroscience, read relationally, thus demonstrates that the brain is not a mechanistic assembly of modules but a reflexive relational cosmos. Neural processes are active, participatory, and relationally constituted; each moment of actualisation is a cut within a field of co-constituted possibilities, echoing the same ontological principles found in symbolic, conceptual, and physical domains.

4 Experience as Relational Construal

Neuroscience increasingly reveals that experience is not a passive reception of stimuli, but an active, relational construction. Perception, cognition, and action emerge through the interaction of neural networks, the body, and the environment. Each moment of experience is actualised relationally, contingent on prior history, current state, and ongoing interaction.

From a relational ontology perspective, this positions experience as a construal rather than a property of isolated neurons or brain regions. Reality, as lived and perceived, emerges from the dynamic alignment of multiple potentials within distributed networks. Just as myths enact possibilities for collective alignment, and quantum phenomena actualise contingent outcomes through relational cuts, neural systems instantiate lived reality through continuous relational phasing.

Degeneracy, plasticity, and reentry ensure that no two experiences are ever identical. Each neural actualisation is a relational event, simultaneously shaped by prior constraints and open to novel possibilities. Cognition and perception are thus contingent, perspectival, and co-constituted, revealing the brain as an embodied relational field.

Reading neuroscience relationally, we see that the brain stages experience as a participatory experiment in relational potential. Identity, meaning, and action are not fixed; they are emergent phenomena, continuously actualised through the interplay of neural, bodily, and environmental relations.

Coda: Neuroscience as Relational Experiment

Across modern neuroscience, the brain emerges as a dynamic, relationally structured system. Neural networks, reentrant loops, plasticity, and degeneracy are not mere mechanisms; they are expressions of relational actualisation. Each moment of neural activity is a cut within a field of co-constituted possibilities, actualising potentialities through interaction, alignment, and reflexive feedback.

Experience, perception, and action do not reside in isolated neurones or modules. They are contingent, perspectival, and emergent, arising from the relational interplay of distributed neural groups, the body, and environment. The brain, in effect, stages reality as a participatory relational experiment, echoing patterns we have traced in myth, philosophy, and physics.

Reading neuroscience relationally transforms our understanding of mind and embodiment. It is not a mechanistic catalogue of functions, nor a search for fixed modules; it is a science of relational emergence, where cognition, action, and experience are continually staged, tested, and actualised within networks of potential.

In this light, neuroscience provides a living, biological counterpart to the relational principles seen in symbolic, conceptual, and physical domains: reality unfolds through relational cuts, reflexive alignment, and contingent phasing, whether in neural activity, symbolic systems, conceptual thought, or the cosmos itself.

04 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Science

1 Reality as Relationally Cut

In classical physics, entities were assumed to exist independently, with properties intrinsic and absolute. Early quantum mechanics, however, forced a radical shift: reality could no longer be taken as a collection of isolated substances.

Erwin Schrödinger observed that “subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.” Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity reinforced this: a quantum system does not possess definite properties in isolation; its properties are defined only in relation to the experimental context. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle made this relationality explicit: position and momentum cannot simultaneously be pinned down, not because of observational weakness, but because relational constraints fundamentally shape what can be known.

From a relational ontology perspective, these insights are striking anticipations. Quantum phenomena are not pre-existing “things-in-themselves”; they are cuts in potentiality, actualised through interaction, measurement, and context. Each experiment instantiates a horizon of possible outcomes; the “particle” emerges as a relational node within that horizon.

This echoes the moves we traced in myth and philosophy. Just as heroic cycles or philosophical frameworks instantiate relational cuts, quantum experiments show that reality itself — at its most fundamental level — is structured through relations, not substances. No unconstrued phenomenon exists; entities appear only in perspectival alignment with other entities, observers, and the horizon of possibility.

Quantum mechanics, therefore, is not just a scientific theory. It is a formal, empirical echo of relational ontology: a recognition that being is not a collection of pre-existing things but a pattern of relations actualised through interaction. Reality is cut, aligned, and staged — a relational cosmos in miniature, revealed through experiment.

2 Observer, System, and Reflexivity

Quantum mechanics not only disrupts the notion of isolated entities; it also challenges the strict separation between observer and observed. The very act of measurement entwines them, producing outcomes that exist only in the relational interplay.

John Archibald Wheeler captured this with his notion of the “participatory universe”: observation is not a passive reflection but a co-constitutive act. Reality is not fully determined prior to observation; it is shaped, in part, by the relational engagement of the observer, the system, and the experimental context.

This reflexivity mirrors patterns we have already seen in myth and philosophy. Just as heroic acts stage individuation against the collective horizon, or philosophical arguments instantiate relational distinctions, quantum experiments stage reality itself through relational alignment. The observer is not external; they are a node in the web of potentiality, participating in the very cut that makes phenomena manifest.

From a relational ontology perspective, the lesson is clear: entities and events are not given; they are actualised through interaction, alignment, and reflexive participation. Measurement is a symbolic act in the scientific register — a way the relational cosmos makes itself intelligible.

Science, like myth and philosophy, anticipates the relational principle: reality is constituted through relations, and the boundaries between perceiver and perceived, part and whole, are perspectival, not absolute. The universe, in this view, is a participatory field of being, continually aligned through reflexive cuts.

3 Contingency and Probabilistic Horizons

Quantum mechanics reveals that reality is not strictly deterministic. Instead, it unfolds across probabilistic horizons, where potential outcomes are actualised only through relational interaction. Schrödinger’s and Heisenberg’s insights show that the future is open, constrained by relational configurations rather than absolute laws.

This contingency parallels what we observed in myth and philosophy. Just as myths stage provisional symbolic orders — where tricksters, cycles, and heroes unfold unpredictably — quantum events remain contingent until the relational cut of measurement occurs. The universe, at its core, is not a collection of predetermined absolutes, but a field of potentiality, awaiting actualisation through context, interaction, and alignment.

Relational ontology reads this as a profound anticipation: every cut, every instantiation, is provisional. Outcomes are perspectival, emerging only relative to the relational configuration of systems, observers, and experimental contexts. Reality is not fixed; it is continually re-phased and re-aligned, echoing the same openness that myth and philosophy explored symbolically and conceptually.

In this light, quantum mechanics is more than a formal theory. It is a demonstration of relational principles in the physical world: contingency, relational alignment, and perspectival instantiation are not metaphors, but ontological facts. The universe, like the symbolic and conceptual realms, is constituted through relational processes, dynamically structured yet open-ended.

4 Non-substantiality and Entanglement

Quantum mechanics forces us to reconsider the very notion of what exists. Particles are not self-contained, independently substantial entities. Instead, they are nodes in relational webs, defined by interactions, correlations, and entanglements. Schrödinger’s thought experiments and Bell’s theorem highlight that the properties of one particle are inseparable from the states of others, even across vast distances.

This anticipates the insight we encountered in myth’s Net of Indra: each phenomenon reflects and is reflected by all others, forming an infinite web of interdependent relations. In relational terms, nothing exists in isolation; every entity is co-constituted through interaction, alignment, and relational phasing.

The classical idea of substance is abandoned. Identity is not intrinsic; it is relational and contingent. Entanglement shows that reality is fundamentally a network of correlations, where being itself is distributed, perspectival, and co-constituted.

From the relational ontology perspective, quantum mechanics echoes the moves already present in myth and philosophy: the world is not a static assemblage of independent things but a dynamic web of relations, where every cut, every measurement, every event participates in shaping the field of potential. Being is relational, and meaning emerges from these patterns of co-constitution.

5 Reflexive Cosmos: Cycles and Constraints

Quantum mechanics, and the broader sciences it inspired, show that reality is not only relational but also reflexive and patterned. Decoherence, feedback loops, and emergent phenomena demonstrate that relational interactions generate higher-order structures: patterns that persist, evolve, and influence subsequent interactions.

These processes echo what we have seen in myth and philosophy. Just as myths organise cycles of symbolic phasing, and philosophical thought traces reflexive alignment within collective horizons, science reveals that the cosmos enacts its own self-organising relationality. Patterns emerge, but only through contingent, recursive processes; nothing is fixed in isolation.

The universe is a web of co-constituted relations, continually aligning, adjusting, and actualising potential. Feedback loops ensure that local interactions influence the global field, just as global constraints shape local phenomena. This reflexivity, operative at multiple scales, anticipates the relational insight that reality is both dynamic and structured, open-ended yet patterned.

In short, science, like myth and philosophy, enacts an experimental construal of reality: a staged, contingent, and relational cosmos. It anticipates relational ontology in formal, empirical terms, showing that the laws, entities, and phenomena we study are not pre-given absolutes but emergent expressions of relational processes.

Coda: Science as Relational Experiment

Taken together, the insights of quantum mechanics and systems science reveal a striking pattern: reality is relationally cut, reflexive, contingent, and co-constituted. Entities and events do not exist independently; they emerge only through interaction, alignment, and relational structuring.

Just as myths stage symbolic experiments in collective possibility, and philosophy stages conceptual experiments in relational construal, science stages empirical experiments in relational being. Schrödinger, Bohr, Heisenberg, Wheeler, and modern systems thinkers show that what we call “particles,” “laws,” or “emergent phenomena” are not pre-existing absolutes. They are effects of relational alignment, actualised through interaction and contextual configuration.

Science, in this view, is a structured exploration of relational potential. Measurement, modelling, and observation are not passive reflections; they are participatory acts, enacting, probing, and realigning relational cuts in reality. Contingency, reflexivity, and interdependence are not limitations but ontological facts, fundamental to the way the universe manifests.

Reading science relationally uncovers an echo across domains: myth, philosophy, and physics all gesture toward the same ontological insight. Reality is not a collection of isolated substances or pre-given truths; it is a web of interconnections, a field of potential actualised through interaction, perspective, and alignment.

Science, like story and thought, thus becomes a practice of relational attunement: an ongoing experiment in the continual making, staging, and understanding of worlds.

03 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Philosophy

1 Being as Relation, not Substance

Philosophy often begins with the question: what is real? Traditionally, answers have centred on substance — what endures behind change, the hidden “stuff” of the world. Yet, in certain strands of thought, reality is anticipated not as substance but as relation.

Heraclitus declared, “Everything flows,” highlighting that the world is defined by change and interaction, not by static entities. Parmenides emphasised unity, but not as atomistic being — rather as the interdependent whole of existence. Even Plato, in his theory of Forms, hints that reality is structured not merely as objects but as patterns of relation — the forms acquire meaning through participation and interconnection.

Much later, process philosophy, especially in Whitehead, explicitly rejected substance as primary. Entities are “actual occasions,” constituted through their relations, events, and interactions. Being is not a static thing but a network of relations in continual flux.

From a relational ontology perspective, these anticipations are profound. Being is not first substance, then relation; being is relation. Entities exist only in perspectival alignment with other entities and potentialities. Reality is cut, instantiated, and sustained through relational structuring.

Philosophy’s early and modern anticipations thus echo the core moves of relational ontology: the world is not an assembly of independent things, but a patterned constellation of interdependencies. Substance is never ultimate; relation is constitutive. Being is always already relational.

2 Knowledge as Construal

If being is relational, then so too is knowledge. Philosophy has long anticipated that we do not encounter “raw” reality, but only reality as it is construed through relational frameworks.

Kant made this explicit: phenomena are always mediated by the structures of cognition. We do not know things-in-themselves; we know them as they appear through the organising patterns of the mind. Husserl extended this insight with intentionality: consciousness is never a passive mirror of reality but an active constitutor of objects, always relationally directed.

From a relational ontology perspective, these moves anticipate the principle that meaning is not a property of things themselves, but of their instantiation in a network of potential and perspective. Knowledge is not merely representation; it is a perspectival cut, a symbolic alignment between the knower and the known.

Even contemporary philosophy of science echoes this: observations, models, and measurements are constrained by the conditions of the system and the observer. Knowledge emerges not in isolation but in the relational interplay of observer, observed, and horizon of possibility.

Thus philosophy anticipates what relational ontology insists upon: phenomena are always construed, and reality as we engage it is inseparable from the relational conditions of its instantiation. Knowing is not uncovering an independent world; it is participating in the alignment of relational potential.

3 Individuation and the Social Horizon

If being is relational and knowledge is construed, then the self itself is never isolated. Philosophy has repeatedly anticipated that individuation emerges only in relation to a collective horizon.

Hegel’s notion of recognition (Anerkennung) makes this explicit: the self achieves selfhood through acknowledgment by others. Identity is not a private possession but a relational phasing, realised in the interplay of self and social whole. Dewey and pragmatist thinkers echo this: meaning, action, and value emerge through coordinated engagement within communities, not from isolated reasoning.

From a relational ontology perspective, these insights prefigure a core principle: individuation is perspectival. The individual is a node in a network of collective potential. Personal growth, ethical responsibility, and social agency are phased through the alignment of individual and collective horizons.

This reading dissolves the classical dichotomy of individual versus society. The self does not precede relation, nor is it subordinated to the group. It is a perspectival articulation along the cline between collective and individual potential, continually staged and re-staged.

Myth anticipates this relational phasing in heroic cycles; philosophy anticipates it conceptually. In both, individuation is never a solipsistic unfolding, but a symbolic or conceptual alignment within the larger field of relational being.

4 Contingency and the Limits of Absolutes

Philosophy, like myth, often anticipates the insight that order, law, and meaning are contingent rather than absolute.

Nietzsche argued that values, morality, and “truths” are perspectival constructions, arising from historical, cultural, and relational conditions. There are no eternal moral absolutes; each system of value is provisional and context-dependent. Derrida extended this critique to the very structures of language and thought, showing that any system of meaning is contingent, always open to reinterpretation, inversion, or deconstruction.

From a relational ontology perspective, these philosophical moves prefigure the trickster logic of myth: every order is a cut, but no cut is final. Horizons of meaning, once established, are never impermeable; they remain open to revision, disruption, and realignment. Contingency is not weakness — it is the ontological fact of relational being.

This insight resonates with relational ontology’s core principles: systems are perspectival, alignments are provisional, and reality is always open to re-cutting. Philosophy anticipates this through the conceptual recognition that absolutes are always contingent, and that understanding, being, and value emerge only in context and relation.

5 Reflexivity, Cycles, and the Web of Being

Philosophy, in certain traditions, has anticipated the deeply relational and reflexive character of reality.

Eastern philosophies such as Madhyamaka Buddhism, Daoism, and Huayan thought emphasise interdependence, non-substantiality, and infinite mutual reflection. The Huayan Net of Indra, for example, imagines each phenomenon reflecting all others, producing an infinite web of relationality — a cosmos without discrete, self-contained entities.

Western thinkers, too, have anticipated these insights. Cybernetics, autopoiesis, and systems theory treat entities as nodes in self-organising, feedback-rich networks. Knowledge, meaning, and being are sustained only through reflexive interaction; nothing exists in isolation.

From a relational ontology perspective, these ideas anticipate the insight that reality is co-constituted across scales: events, entities, and meanings emerge through ongoing alignment, reflection, and relational phasing. There is no final cut, no static cosmos; all is dynamically interdependent.

Philosophy, like myth, gestures toward this relational horizon. In thought, as in story, reflexivity, cycles, and infinite relationality are recognised as constitutive of being. Knowledge, action, and existence are never self-contained but always enacted within the web of being.

Coda: Philosophy as Experimental Construal

Taken together, these philosophical anticipations form a striking pattern: reality is relational, knowledge is perspectival, individuation emerges within collective horizons, orders are contingent, and being is reflexively constituted.

Just as myths stage relational experiments symbolically, philosophy stages them conceptually. Heraclitus’ flux, Kant’s mediation, Hegel’s recognition, Nietzsche’s perspectivism, Derrida’s deconstruction, and the Net of Indra all explore, in different registers, the same insight: there is no unconstrued phenomenon. Being, knowing, and meaning are always instantiated through relational cuts, alignments, and phasings.

Philosophy, therefore, is not only a search for timeless truths; it is an ongoing experiment in relational construal. Concepts are cuts, arguments are alignments, theories are reflexive projections. Each philosophical system constitutes a horizon within which reality is made intelligible — always provisional, contingent, and interdependent.

Reading philosophy in this way reveals an echo of relational ontology across time and tradition. It is a reminder that the questions we pose, the distinctions we draw, and the patterns we discern are themselves part of the unfolding web of being. Philosophy, like myth, invites us to construe anew, to re-align, and to participate in the continual making of worlds.

02 October 2025

Echoes of Relational Ontology in Myth

1 Creation as Cut

When myth turns to creation, it rarely describes a smooth, linear unfolding. Instead, creation is staged as a cut.

In Genesis, “Let there be light” is not a chronological step in a physical process — it is a division: light from darkness, order from chaos, world from void. In the Enuma Elish, Marduk slays Tiamat and cuts her body into heavens and earth. In Māori cosmogony, Rangi and Papa — Sky and Earth — are separated by their children, and the world becomes possible through their parting. Again and again, the world is not “made” but divided, named, separated.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate a crucial insight: creation is not an absolute beginning in time, but a perspectival cut in potential. Systems, as we understand them, are structured possibilities. Instantiation is not the gradual accumulation of substance, but the sudden construal of relation — the drawing of a line that makes inside and outside, self and other, earth and sky.

This is why creation myths often begin with chaos, undifferentiated night, or primal waters. These are not failed attempts at proto-science. They are symbolic construals of uncut potential. What follows is always the cut: the division of one into two, the naming that distinguishes, the separation that instantiates.

Creation myths thus encode, in symbolic form, the insight that being arises from differentiation. Reality is not first substance, then relation; it is relation from the start. Without the cut, there is no cosmos, no world, no possibility of meaning.

Seen this way, myth anticipates relational ontology’s own insistence: there is no unconstrued phenomenon, no reality independent of cut. To be is to be distinguished within a horizon of possibility.

Creation, in myth, is not the origin of matter but the staging of meaningful cosmos. It is the symbolic alignment of a collective to a world that has become cut, named, and oriented.

2 Cosmos as Reflexive Projection

Once creation is cut, myth turns to cosmos: the world not as brute matter but as an ordered horizon.

In many traditions, the cosmos is not an external reality to be observed; it is a mirror, a projection, a symbolic alignment between collective life and the wider whole. Among the Navajo, the stars are placed in the sky through a tale of order and disorder, their pattern reflecting principles of balance that also govern human life. In ancient Egypt, the cosmic order of Ma’at was simultaneously the structure of the heavens and the basis of justice. In Polynesian voyaging traditions, the sea is not just geography but a patterned cosmos, oriented through stars, swells, and ancestral guidance.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate the insight that cosmos is reflexively construed. The stars are not merely “out there”: they are aligned with the collective, staging a horizon of meaning and possibility. Cosmos is not discovered but constituted. It functions as a symbolic mirror through which collectives experience themselves as part of a larger whole.

In this way, myth resists the division between inner and outer. What Campbell framed as archetype, we can instead read as reflexive projection: the alignment of collective construal with the patterns of the world. Cosmos is the collective turned inside-out, a world whose shape is the shape of symbolic life itself.

To call the cosmos reflexive is not to deny its materiality, but to foreground how it becomes meaningful. Every constellation, every seasonal cycle, every sacred mountain or river is not simply “there”: it is construed as part of a symbolic horizon, binding the collective into alignment with the world.

Thus myth anticipates another of relational ontology’s core moves: reality is not independent of construal. The cosmos is not simply a background against which life unfolds; it is the symbolic horizon through which life takes shape.

3 Individuation as Relational Phasing

Myth does not only align cosmos and collective. It also stages the place of the individual. But here again, individuation is not construed as autonomy in the modern sense. It is always relational.

Initiation rituals, heroic cycles, shamanic journeys: these myths place the individual in trial or transition. The novice undergoes ordeals, the hero departs, suffers, and returns, the shaman descends into other worlds. Yet in every case, individuation is only complete when it is reintegrated into the collective. The initiate becomes an adult for the community. The hero returns with gifts of knowledge, power, or renewal for the people. The shaman’s journey heals not themselves, but the social whole.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate individuation as phasing. The individual is not a unit that precedes relation; they are a cut within collective potential. Individuation is a perspectival articulation along a cline between the shared horizon and the particular node.

The mythic hero is not an archetype of inner psyche, but a symbolic construal of this phasing. Their journey dramatises how individual potential is actualised only through relation to collective possibility. To individuate is to take up a place in the web, not to stand outside it.

This explains why myth so often insists on ordeal, trial, or death before transformation. Individuation is not a simple flowering of inner essence, but a restructuring of relational alignment. The ordeal symbolises the re-cutting of possibility, the shift of perspective that allows a new constellation of self and collective to emerge.

In this way, myth again anticipates relational ontology’s move: there is no individual outside relation, no self without collective alignment. Individuation is the reflexive phasing of the whole through the part.

4 Trickster and the Contingency of Cuts

If creation myths stage the cut, and heroic cycles show individuation as relational phasing, then trickster tales reveal another truth: the cut is never final.

Tricksters appear across traditions: Loki in Norse tales, Coyote and Raven in Native American stories, Eshu in Yoruba cosmology. They deceive, disrupt, invert, and play. They mock the gods, steal fire, blur boundaries, turn order into chaos and chaos into unexpected renewal.

From a relational ontology perspective, trickster figures anticipate the insight that symbolic orders are contingent. No cosmos, no law, no meaning-system is absolute. Every cut that instantiates an horizon of order is open to inversion, disruption, or re-cutting.

Trickster shows that systems are perspectival. Where the gods impose structure, the trickster reveals fissures. Where norms stabilise, the trickster exposes arbitrariness. Where horizons seem fixed, the trickster reminds us they are only ever symbolic alignments — provisional, not eternal.

This is why trickster stories oscillate between comedy and danger. They carry both the joy of freedom and the risk of collapse. The trickster destabilises order, but also makes renewal possible. By revealing contingency, trickster opens the space for re-alignment.

In this sense, trickster is myth’s anticipation of ontology’s critical move: that reality is not a closed system of absolutes, but an ongoing construal, always susceptible to being cut again.

What Campbell might call archetype, we instead read as a symbolic dramatisation of the ontological fact of contingency. Trickster is not an eternal form, but a reflexive reminder: no cosmos is final, no meaning immune to play.

5 Reflexive Cycles of Renewal

If trickster reminds us that no cut is final, many myths go further: they portray the cosmos itself as cyclically dissolving and reforming.

Seasonal myths stage this rhythm through the death and rebirth of deities — Persephone descending into the underworld, Osiris dismembered and restored, Inanna passing through death’s gates and returning renewed. Cosmic myths stage even larger cycles: Hindu traditions speak of kalpas, vast spans of creation and dissolution; Norse myth anticipates Ragnarök, the world’s destruction and its rebirth from the sea.

These cycles are not mistakes of “primitive science.” They are symbolic construals of a deeper ontological truth: reality is not static, but reflexive. Horizons of meaning are constituted, dissolve, and must be constituted again. Cosmos is not once-and-for-all but ongoing, a patterned renewal of collective alignment.

From a relational ontology perspective, these myths anticipate the insight that construal is never finished. To live in a symbolic cosmos is to live within cycles of renewal, where meanings and worlds must be re-cut, re-aligned, and re-staged. Death and rebirth are not only biological or seasonal facts; they symbolise the reflexivity of being itself.

This is why myth so often insists on ritual repetition. Festivals, sacrifices, and commemorations are not simply commemorative. They are re-instantiations of cosmos, symbolic acts of keeping the horizon alive. Renewal is not automatic; it requires reflexive participation.

In this way, myths of cyclic renewal stage one of relational ontology’s deepest insights: reality is constituted through ongoing reflexive alignment. What is cut must be cut again. What is aligned must be re-aligned. The cosmos is never finished; it is always in the making.

6 The Net of Indra

Among the most striking anticipations of relational ontology comes from the Buddhist and Hindu image of the Net of Indra.

The image is simple but profound: an infinite net stretches across the cosmos, and at each intersection rests a jewel. Each jewel reflects every other jewel, and in each reflection the whole net is mirrored again. Nothing exists in isolation; everything is constituted in relation to everything else.

From a relational ontology perspective, this mythic image is astonishingly prescient. Reality here is not composed of independent substances but of relations. Each node exists only through its reflexive entanglement with all others. To perceive one jewel is to perceive the entire net, since each reflection contains the whole.

The Net of Indra thus dissolves the idea of an unconstrued phenomenon. There is no jewel that exists outside of relation, no being that is self-sufficient. Everything is cut, aligned, and constituted within the relational whole.

In mythic terms, the net stages the insight that cosmos is not a hierarchy of absolutes but a reflexive web. In ontological terms, it anticipates our insistence that meaning and reality are co-constitutive, that construal always scales through relational alignment, and that the part and the whole are perspectival, not separate.

What modern metaphysics strains to articulate in abstractions, the Net of Indra gives us in a single shimmering image: reality as infinite reflexivity, relation all the way down.

Coda: Myth as Ontological Experiment

What, then, do these myths reveal?

Creation myths show that being emerges through cut. Cosmological myths show the reflexive projection of collective horizons. Heroic cycles show individuation as relational phasing. Trickster tales reveal the contingency of symbolic orders. Renewal cycles dramatise the reflexivity of worlds dissolving and reforming. And the Net of Indra offers a dazzling image of infinite relationality.

Taken together, these are not primitive attempts at science. They are experimental ontologies. Myths are not naïve explanations of nature; they are symbolic construals of possibility. They test, stage, and explore what it means to live in a world constituted by relation.

Seen through the lens of relational ontology, myth is not a failed epistemology but an archive of insight. It anticipates, in symbolic form, many of the moves we now make philosophically: that there is no unconstrued phenomenon, that instantiation is a cut in potential, that cosmos is reflexive, that individuation is perspectival, that every order is contingent, and that reality itself is relational all the way down.

This is why myths endure. They do not only tell stories; they hold open ontological horizons. They invite us to construe again, to re-align, to imagine new worlds.

Myth, then, is not the dream of an unconscious psyche, nor the failed hypothesis of an early science. It is an experiment in being. And in its shimmering cuts, cycles, and nets, it continues to anticipate the relational insight: reality is always already construed, and meaning is the way the world comes to be.

01 October 2025

Rethinking Myth Relationally: From Function to Horizon

The Functions of Myth Reframed: A Relational Ontology

Joseph Campbell suggested that mythology has four core functions: mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, and sociological. Each, in his telling, expresses a timeless role of myth in the psychic and cultural life of humanity.

But Campbell’s functions rely on an archetypal ontology: they presuppose a universal psyche, whose needs for awe, order, guidance, and structure are timeless and given. In this frame, myths become symbolic tools for eternal psychic functions.

Relational ontology makes a different cut. It resists the idea of universal psychic functions and treats myths instead as semiotic operations: symbolic construals that transform value into meaning-of-meaning and phase collective life. What Campbell names as four functions can be reframed as four relational operations:

Symbolising Alterity (reframing the mystical) — constraining the inassimilable through symbolic projection.
Projecting a Reflexive World (reframing the cosmological) — weaving value and meaning into a cosmos reflexively sustained by the collective.
Phasing Individuation (reframing the pedagogical) — aligning life-course transitions within symbolic horizons of the collective.
Synchronising the Collective (reframing the sociological) — binding orientations, practices, and institutions into symbolic unity.

In what follows, we will reread Campbell’s four functions through this relational lens. Myth is not the servant of universal psychic needs; it is the symbolic technology of collective life, staging horizons of possibility, binding individuals to worlds, and weaving worlds into collectives.

1 Symbolising Alterity (Reframing the Mystical)

Campbell’s first function of mythology is the mystical: to awaken awe before the mystery of being. In his telling, myths serve as reminders of a transcendent order beyond comprehension, stirring reverence for life’s unfathomable ground.

From a relational ontology perspective, however, this mystical function is not about awakening a pre-given psychic response. It is about symbolising alterity — giving semiotic form to what cannot otherwise be assimilated.

Every collective confronts what exceeds its grasp: death, catastrophe, the infinite, the unknown. These are not simply external “mysteries,” but relational limits where construal breaks down. Myth does not reveal these mysteries; it contains them by projecting them into symbolic horizons — gods, spirits, primordial forces.

In this sense, myth’s so-called mystical function is really a semiotic operation of constraint. It takes intensities that bypass perception — terror, awe, ecstasy — and anchors them in symbolic form. The storm becomes the anger of the sky-god; death becomes the journey to an underworld. These projections do not explain alterity but make it inhabitable.

The point is not reverence before mystery but the symbolic domestication of alterity. Myth gives a community the means to live with what it cannot master, to align around the inassimilable without collapsing into disorientation.

Thus the mystical reframed: not universal awe, but the symbolic construal of limits. Myth does not open the psyche to eternal mystery; it stabilises a collective against what it cannot otherwise endure.

2 Projecting a Reflexive World (Reframing the Cosmological)

Campbell’s second function of mythology is the cosmological: to explain the structure and order of the universe. For him, myths provide a symbolic map of the cosmos, situating human life within a grand design.

Relational ontology reframes this. Myths are not proto-scientific explanations of an objective universe. They are acts of world-making: symbolic projections that generate a cosmos reflexively structured by the collective.

A cosmos, in this sense, is not the physical universe but a horizon of meaning. Mountains become ancestors, rivers become life-givers, stars become guides. Myths weave these elements together into a symbolic whole where natural cycles, social orders, and existential orientations are inseparable.

This is not explanation but projection: the cosmos appears to precede the collective, yet is constituted through its symbolic practices. The order of the world is reflexive — it reflects and sustains the order of the collective itself.

Thus, when a people tells of creation, they are not accounting for physical origins; they are articulating the relational architecture within which they live. The world is narrated into being, and that narration aligns collective existence.

Reframed this way, the cosmological function is not about explaining the universe, but about projecting a reflexive world. Myth generates a cosmos that feels given and necessary, but is in fact the symbolic articulation of collective construal.

3 Phasing Individuation (Reframing the Pedagogical)

Campbell’s third function of mythology is the pedagogical: to guide individuals through the stages of life, from birth to death. Myths, he suggests, provide symbolic models for navigating universal thresholds of existence.

From a relational ontology standpoint, individuation is not a solitary psychic process. It is always phased within the horizon of the collective. Myth provides not universal life-stages, but symbolic patterns through which a community aligns individual becoming with collective being.

Birth is not just a biological event; it is ritually phased into kinship, lineage, and belonging. Puberty is not merely biological change; it is semioticised through initiation, binding a young person into new roles and responsibilities. Death is not raw cessation; it is framed as passage, transformation, or ancestral return, situating the loss within a symbolic cosmos.

These are not timeless, archetypal stages. They are collective construals of individuation, ensuring that each life course is tethered to the symbolic fabric of the whole. The pedagogical is thus really a semiotic phasing: myths provide architectures of becoming that keep the individual and collective aligned.

Reframed this way, the pedagogical function is not about instructing a universal human journey. It is about phasing individuation into symbolic synchrony with the collective horizon. Myth does not teach individuals what they must universally do; it symbolically situates their becoming in relation to their world.

4 Synchronising the Collective (Reframing the Sociological)

Campbell’s fourth function of mythology is the sociological: to support and validate a given social order, prescribing norms and legitimating institutions. In this view, myth operates as a kind of ideological charter, stabilising the status quo.

From a relational ontology perspective, this framing is too static. Myth does not simply endorse or enforce order; it provides the symbolic infrastructure through which collective life is synchronised.

Myths are the semiotic architectures that align values, roles, and institutions within a reflexive cosmos. They bind different spheres of life — kinship, economy, ritual, governance — into a coherent symbolic pattern. What might appear as mere justification is in fact a process of symbolic synchronisation, ensuring that individual action, social role, and cosmic order resonate together.

Importantly, myth also allows for transformation. By shifting symbolic patterns, myths can recalibrate collective synchrony, enabling new orders of life to emerge. This is why myths often appear both conservative and revolutionary: they stabilise alignment, but they also provide the symbolic means to shift it.

Reframed this way, the sociological function is not about legitimating a fixed order. It is about synchronising the collective — sustaining alignment across scales of existence and providing a symbolic horizon through which change can be navigated.

Coda: From Functions to Reflexive Horizons

Campbell’s schema of four mythological functions — mystical, cosmological, pedagogical, sociological — remains influential because it gestures toward the breadth of myth’s role. But reframed through relational ontology, we can see that what appears as four separate functions are in fact four horizons of reflexive construal.

The mystical is not about private awe before transcendence, but about attuning collective construal to the openness of possibility itself.
The cosmological is not an attempt to explain the universe, but a means of projecting a reflexive world that holds together the collective’s symbolic life.
The pedagogical is not the charting of universal life-stages, but the phasing of individuation so that becoming remains aligned with the collective horizon.
The sociological is not static justification of order, but the synchronisation of collective life across roles, institutions, and symbolic structures.

Seen this way, myth is not a collection of stories that decorate human life, nor is it a proto-scientific attempt at explanation. It is the symbolic scaffolding through which life is oriented, synchronised, and projected into cosmos. Myth is not about gods above or instincts below; it is about the reflexive infrastructures of meaning that bind value, being, and world into coherence.

Thus, instead of “functions of mythology,” we might better speak of horizons of symbolic reflexivity. Myth does not explain, command, or instruct; it enables collective life to construe itself, to phase its becoming, and to project its cosmos.