Selfhood Beyond Relational and Anti-Relational Ontologies

Abstract Traditional philosophy marginalized individuality, and contemporary anti-metaphysical ontologies, despite opposing classical metaphysics, continue to struggle to account for it. In relational ontologies, individuality dissolves into impersonal processes of entanglement, whereas in Object-Oriented Ontology it is preserved through withdrawal yet becomes ontologically insulated, unable to explain how an individual becomes operative within the movement of the world. This double difficulty arises from reducing thinking to representation and excluding selfhood, the dimension in which individuality is lived and enacted as one’s own. This paper argues that individuality can be most adequately understood when selfhood is clarified as a generative enactment of thinking structured by activity, first-person perspective, ontological distance, and spontaneity. The self can then be understood as, while already situated in the world, bringing about a non-coincidence with itself in which it holds possibilities open, thereby allowing change to enter into the world. From this standpoint, the account remains in dialogue with contemporary ontologies while moving beyond their shared impasse, articulating individuality without dissolving it into relational process or confining it within anti-relational autonomy.