Absolutisation

One of the most seductive claims in contemporary physics is that “nothing is external to spacetime.” Within the framework of general relativity, this appears almost undeniable: every event, particle, or wave is said to occur in or as spacetime. The model leaves no outside, no beyond, no vantage point from which spacetime could be observed as a whole.

The rhetorical force of this claim is powerful. It suggests completion: an all-encompassing system that exhausts the possibilities of reality. But this is precisely where the danger lies. To take representational closure as ontological closure is to mistake the boundaries of a theory for the boundaries of being.

From a relational ontology, we must resist this absolutisation. Every model of reality is perspectival — a symbolic cut through possibility, not the totality of what is. Relativity offers a remarkable construal of the cosmos, but it is still a construal. To say “nothing is external to spacetime” is to efface the very act of construal that generates spacetime as a category in the first place. It confuses the map with the terrain, the symbolic architecture with the ontological ground.

The problem with absolutisation is not just philosophical neatness; it has practical consequences. Once a system is taken as final, its internal categories harden into essences. The question is no longer “how does this construal organise meaning?” but “what is reality made of?” — as if reality were waiting to be unwrapped like a package. This forecloses the possibility of new symbolic architectures that might reframe the very terms of inquiry.

Against absolutisation, we must hold fast to the principle of perspectival openness: every scientific system is a way of structuring potential, not a mirror of what is. There is no final vantage point, no theory that abolishes the cut. The strength of science lies not in offering totalising accounts, but in generating symbolic frames that can be re-aligned, re-cut, and re-construed.

To rephrase the claim: nothing is external to spacetime — within the construal of general relativity. This is a powerful and generative insight. But it is not the last word. It is only one instance of the symbolic reflexivity through which we make sense of reality, and in that sense, it is not closure but opening: a cut that enables other cuts, a frame that prepares the ground for its own re-framing.