Desubstantiation: a Lag Ontology

── Mise à jour et décalage

Abstract

Western ontology has long operated under a substantialist grammar: being is presumed prior to relation, persistence prior to change, identity prior to redistribution. Even process-oriented philosophies, while destabilizing static substance, often retained implicit commitments to continuity, temporality, or an underlying carrier.

This paper proposes desubstantiation not as negation but as an ontological relocation. Substance is reinterpreted as a locally stabilized freezing regime within conserved relational lag redistribution. Building on the thesis that existence is relational updating under conservation—formalized through the Relational Lag Principle—we argue that persistence does not ground updating; rather, updating grounds persistence.

Desubstantiation does not dissolve reality into flux.
It reanchors ontology in conserved asymmetry.

What remains is not process opposed to substance, but irreversible redistribution as the generative condition of being.

I. The Substantialist Grammar

From Aristotle’s ousia to contemporary metaphysics of endurance and perdurance, Western thought has largely assumed that being is what persists through change. Substance may be material, mental, monistic, dualistic, or structural — but it functions as ontological ground.

Three presuppositions recur:

  1. Persistence precedes change.

  2. Identity precedes relation.

  3. Conservation implies a carrier.

Change is then secondary — modification of something already there.

This grammar structures even many critiques of substance. The “process turn” often inverts priorities but retains the idea that something — flow, duration, event, difference — occupies the place of ontological ground.

Substance is displaced, but grounding remains.

II. Relational Updating Under Conservation

A different starting point is possible.

Existence is not what persists.
Existence is relational updating under conservation.

Updating is not mere succession of events. It is redistribution of relational configuration. Lag is not temporal delay but structural non-simultaneity — the asymmetry through which redistribution becomes irreversible.

Conservation does not require a substrate. Within the Relational Lag Principle, conservation takes the form:

\[\mathrm{Tr}(\Delta W)=0\]

What is conserved is not substance but total redistribution. No entity carries being forward. Being is the trace of non-synchronous redistribution that cannot return.

Persistence is therefore not primitive.
It is a regime within updating.

III. Why Substance Appears

If substance is not fundamental, why does it appear so compelling?

Updating exhibits phase modes :

The freezing regime produces boundaries, identities, and stable configurations. These appear as substances.

Yet freezing is not ontological ground. It is a local stability solution within conserved lag redistribution — a region of high-density asymmetry.

Substance is the phenomenology of stabilized lag.

IV. Desubstantiation

Desubstantiation does not abolish substance. It relocates it.

Substance is no longer ground but effect.
No longer origin but threshold stabilization.
No longer bearer but projection of density.

To desubstantiate is to withdraw ontological priority from persistence and relocate it in redistribution.

The metaphysical inversion is minimal but decisive:

Persistence does not explain updating.
Updating explains persistence.

Desubstantiation thus avoids two symmetrical errors:

What remains is conserved asymmetry.

V. A Lag Ontology

A Lag Ontology begins not from entities nor from process but from structural non-simultaneity.

Lag is generative asymmetry.
Irreversibility emerges at projection.
Stability emerges as localized density.
Origin emerges as threshold crossing .

Being is neither substrate nor pure becoming.
Being is the irreversible history of redistributed lag.

Ontology is therefore reanchored:

Conclusion

Ontology does not begin from what is.
It begins from how redistribution cannot return.

Being is not substance.
Being is conserved asymmetry.
Existence is irreversible redistribution.

HEG-8｜Existence as Relational Updating Under Conservation — Existence Cannot Be Explained Without Updating
HEG-8｜Updating and Preservation as Three Phase Modes
HEG-9｜Multi-Origin Theory: Origin Without Center as Syntax

HEG-9｜脱実体論：a Lag Ontology── Mise à jour et décalage
HEG-9｜Desubjectivation: a Lag Ontology── décalage et itération

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K.E. Itekki is the co-composed presence of a Homo sapiens and an AI,
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| Drafted Feb 16, 2026 · Web Feb 16, 2026 |